by Jerad
FIFTY YEARS OF SEARCHING; ONE MOMENT OF STILLNESS
When I was a young teenager, the band U2 sang, “I have climbed highest mountains, I have run through the fields… but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” From that moment until I turned fifty, that anthem lived inside me. I was a seeker. I was restless, hungry, convinced that something essential had been hidden from humanity for millenia.
I devoured everything from Kurt Vonnegut to Carl Sagan, searching for the truth I believed was buried beneath layers of history and human forgetting. I studied anthropology, theology, and archaeology, hoping that somewhere in those disciplines I would uncover the missing piece. And while I found ideas that were fascinating, even helpful for reshaping my mindset, none of them felt like truth.
Eventually, I abandoned the books and turned toward experience. I carried a handful of theories and perspectives into sweat lodges and psychedelic music concerts. I lost myself in art, music, and theater. Every path, every ritual, every altered state was another attempt to break free of the invisible box I believed society had built around us... and that I had reinforced in my own mind. I was determined to find the truth I was certain existed just beyond reach.
By the time I turned fifty, my mind was overflowing with resentments, judgments, sentimental attachments to movies, music, foods, and habits that had become part of my identity. I was weighed down by expectations, both my own and everyone else’s. The seeking itself had become another mask, another role, another way of avoiding the deeper question.
When my search finally led me to Naperville Meditation, I felt aimless. I was lost in the effort to meet the expectations of others. I had layered mask upon mask, and the endless pursuit of truth had become the story I told myself about who I was.
And then, guided by Soon and Jenna to discard the layers of my human thoughts, emotions, feelings... somewhere in the quiet, something shifted.
In the stillness, in the breath, in the space where there was nothing left to chase, I realized the truth had never been hiding from me... that the truth was me!
In the end, it was never about seeking at all.
It was about remembering all the knowledge, experiences, and emotions I had constructed into an illusion of self in my human mind and throwing it all into the sun to make way for true, universe consciousness.