THE TRUTH SEEKER
We, Homo sapiens, ought rather to be named Homo questor—not Man the Knower, but Man the Seeker.
As the least predetermined, most unfinished of animals, we possess the greatest potential to shape our own motives and courses of life.
Obviously, we share the same constraints of mortality with other species, being subject to injury, illness and death, like them; but our scale of needs rises above food, shelter and sex into ranges emotional, intellectual and spiritual, beyond what less complex species appear to recognize.
Our highest need—never an issue for those below us—is for meaning and purpose. Not content merely to sleep and feed like beasts, human beings innately seek for higher satisfactions, yearn to understand why we exist and what we are good for, a yearning that fires our infinite aspirations.
For many, their purposive impulse is satisfied by religion or ideology, a systematic scheme designed to answer the fundamental questions of meaning and purpose we feel compelled to ask, the “ultimate questions” that transcend what our ever-more sophisticated sciences address empirically.
While science gratifies much of our seeking and questing for knowledge, our urge for ultimate purpose and meaning draws us beyond the physical toward metaphysical and esoteric realms of speculation, imagination and invention—beyond proof and toward conviction.
Above all, we yearn to be convinced, subdued by certainty, convicted by an unshakable sense of Truth: THIS IS SO.
As the least predetermined, most unfinished of animals, we possess the greatest potential to shape our own motives and courses of life.
Obviously, we share the same constraints of mortality with other species, being subject to injury, illness and death, like them; but our scale of needs rises above food, shelter and sex into ranges emotional, intellectual and spiritual, beyond what less complex species appear to recognize.
Our highest need—never an issue for those below us—is for meaning and purpose. Not content merely to sleep and feed like beasts, human beings innately seek for higher satisfactions, yearn to understand why we exist and what we are good for, a yearning that fires our infinite aspirations.
For many, their purposive impulse is satisfied by religion or ideology, a systematic scheme designed to answer the fundamental questions of meaning and purpose we feel compelled to ask, the “ultimate questions” that transcend what our ever-more sophisticated sciences address empirically.
While science gratifies much of our seeking and questing for knowledge, our urge for ultimate purpose and meaning draws us beyond the physical toward metaphysical and esoteric realms of speculation, imagination and invention—beyond proof and toward conviction.
Above all, we yearn to be convinced, subdued by certainty, convicted by an unshakable sense of Truth: THIS IS SO.
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