Curiosity Is Great but It Comes With Its Own Set of Obstacles
How far will you go to find what you seek?
I’ve been stuck in a battle from a young age. The most important and powerful battle we will face in life is internal. An ageless battle between your lower self and the higher.
Curiosity has never been a trait I had to learn or develop. It was innate and part of my being. It’s a skill that a Sagittarius is born with. I picture it as a set of arrows carried by an archer. Each arrow intends to hit a target, each target is different, each aim considers the target.
The fascination to learn all things is daunting. Curiosity is an invisible force that lies deep within ourselves. A feeling that nothing can come between you and the knowledge you need to gain. Curious minds can understand this.
What is there so much to learn is not the right question to ask. The right one is, what is there not to learn?
Experimenting
Life has an ocean of mysteries that man explored with little progress. Our time here is insignificant when compared to the vastness of space and time. If you consider what historians tell us about our time here, even if we are older than 200,000 years.
What is that compared to the infinite scale of all things?
A curious mind engages in the search for knowledge that transcends any notion or subject. The end goal is, of course, wisdom. Wisdom comes from knowledge and knowledge comes from practice.
Children are the best teachers of curiosity. It’s the only thing that drives them to do things. Their energy is infectious and tiring for adults. All they want to do is explore and understand the world.
If you never tell a child that touching an open flame will burn their skin, they will grow up never knowing. Until one day they burn themselves. A lesson learnt the hard way.
If you tell a child that a naked wire will electrocute them, they will avoid it.
These examples are irrelevant, but for argument sake, they prove the point.
Who’s to say what’s true and what isn’t unless you try it yourself?
If you go from here and apply this to any idea, say, humans can live on Mars. A debate begins.
Experts from both sides will have arguments and to some extent, both have parts of the truth. The only sure way to know if that’s a possibility is to go and try it. This is when we turn this idea into knowledge. Wisdom will grow from perfecting that knowledge. There is no way around it.
If taking shortcuts was the way to wisdom, then we would be living in a time of wise men and that isn’t the case. We have shortcuts for everything nowadays but let’s be honest, how many of them work?
Obstacles
We can all agree that having a curious mind gives you the will to achieve. At the same time, like all valuable things, it comes at a price.
That price is mental. It can cripple you with the amount of information we have today. When you challenge yourself to learn different things, it’s hard to focus on one task.
At any day, I am thinking about so many things that I find it hard to focus on each of them. It pushes my anxiety through the roof. Regardless of how calm I seem to the outside world, fireworks are going on in my head. This feeling gets worse when you start to realize how connected everything is.
To top that off, each avenue has its own language.
A scientific essay talks in the language of science. Complicated words, vague and often misunderstood even by their own writers. It’s a world of assumption and guesswork. I read somewhere that science has more descriptions than explanations. I found it hard to argue with that.
History riddles us with dates, names and places. Instead of learning it with stories, we give attention to insignificant details. So what if I’m a few years off, who cares? The story and its lessons are all that matters. Stories from experiences through different perceptions. Isn’t the past the stories that brought us here? The future, the stories we create right now? That’s all we are to each other. Storytellers living our own stories through the ages.
Then we put History into categories, mythology and reality. Who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t? None of us was alive during most of those times. The information we are working with is a fraction of what was going on. We are always comparing things to our present. I find that a banal exercise that further distorts the truth.
Philosophy is one of my favourites. The intellectual side of things comes with its own language barriers. How can something seem so complicated, also be so simple and beautiful? We struggle reading philosophical texts because they weigh heavy on our minds. They make us ponder on the simplest questions about life. What is life anyway? What am I? Aren’t we all living different versions of the same story? How can questions asked 2,000 years ago, still be relevant today? Have we been asking the wrong questions, or accepting the wrong answers?
Then you could dive into the more complex topics. Esoteric studies, mysticism, theosophy and spirituality. A world that veils itself in symbols. Hints here and there forming a picture in your mind. These subjects are the most diverse you could encounter. Further on, you realize that the vastness of their wisdom hides in smallness. Allegories, fables and symbols that unlock doors that will lead you to truths. Isn’t that how the divine works? Hidden in plain sight, seen yet unseen?
The irony is that all you need to find these doors lies within yourself. A map to creation, an extension of all that exists. A universe within the universe. Then you wonder, how can one mind understand creation itself? Aren’t we all bits and pieces of one, universal mind?
Then your anxiety creeps in and you can’t find the start of your journey. One day, you see it, follow it and boom. There it was hiding all this time.
Winning the battle
Being quiet means death to your soul. We don’t ask questions because we’re afraid of how others will perceive us. There are never any wrong questions. Richard Feynman said it best:
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
There is nothing out of reach, nothing we can’t understand and nothing we can’t do. Fear keeps us hidden in the dark. The only way you can overcome your own darkness is to tackle it head-on. You will reach a point where you are not afraid of your lower self. You embrace it as part of yourself. The part that keeps you from asking questions and from following your path. It exists within you for the sake of teaching you. We call them mistakes and we have to make a lot of them to learn. But if we don’t make them, we never will.
What if curiosity never killed the cat, but rescued it?
