For countless generations, storytellers have described life as a metaphorical Journey beginning with the mystery of our birth and ending with the mystery of our death. In between these two great mysteries, we encounter all manner of experience which we weave into an ever-unfolding narrative, adding new chapters to what always remains an imperfect and unfinished account of our travels.
One reason the image of the Journey is so time-honored and universal in its appeal is its ability to evoke in us a sense of the never-ending process by which we humans evolve over the course of a lifetime. Yet another reason for the popularity of the Journey as a metaphor for life is that there are so many varieties of journeys that one can tell stories about, from vision quests out into the wilderness to pilgrimages undertaken to far-away holy places; from voyages of discovery to the edge of the unknown to flights of imagination into realms we can only dream of.
Of all the versions of the Journey we can encounter in stories, however, I think the most powerful, most evocative one is that of the Quest. The Quest is a special kind of Journey in search of something uniquely powerful, magical, mysterious, difficult and often dangerous to seek, and, above all, profoundly precious. Perhaps this is why the metaphor of the quest is uniquely suited to symbolize the human search for that which is greater, higher, and deeper than our everyday consciousness. The treasure we seek to find on our quest can take many forms and be called by many names: wisdom, enlightenment, spirit, essence, harmony, unconditional love, and God, to name but a few.
Among the greatest of quest stories is the tale of the Mesopotamian king named Gilgamesh. The oldest recorded epic, this story was first written down at least 4,000 years ago in what is today known as Iraq. When he is first introduced to us, Gilgamesh is an egotistical, despotic young ruler of a major city. Early on in the story, he finds himself confronting a strange newcomer named Enkidu, an opponent send by the gods to challenge the brash, arrogance of the young king. After a period of fierce struggle between the two men, they establish a deep and passionate friendship. Later, driven by boredom and the desire for fame, the two young companions mercilessly kill a giant who had been set by the gods to protect a sacred forest. As a punishment for this sacrilege, it is decreed that Enkidu must perish and Gilgamesh is forced to watch, completely powerless for the first time in his life, as his friend grew weaker and weaker and then died.
Bitterly grieving the loss of his dearest companion and haunted by the knowledge that death would someday overtake him, too, Gilgamesh finds his life now bereft of meaning. In the deepest of sorrow, Gilgamesh goes in search of some way to overcome the power of death. Finally, after a long and harrowing journey, Gilgamesh encounters a wise old man who tells him of a one-of-a-kind plant that lives at the bottom of a very deep lake. That plant, he is told, when eaten, will make the king immortal. After even more perilous adventures, Gilgamesh finds the lake and nearly drowns retrieving the plant. Exhausted, he falls asleep and, before he can complete his mission, a serpent — that ancient symbol of eternal life — comes and eats the magical plant.
When Gilgamesh awakens and realizes his loss, he bitterly weeps and then, weary, resigned, and wiser, makes the long journey home. There, finally free of any false hope of immortality, the king finally embraces the ordinary pleasures of being alive. Having found a sense of humility, he also stops abusing his power and becomes the most exemplary ruler his people had ever known, serving as the model for wise and just kingship for generations of rulers after his death. For us today, the myth of Gilgamesh remains a timeless and universal story about the quest for wisdom in the face of suffering, loss, and the inevitability of death. From this ancient tale, we learn that there is no life without death, no love without loss, and no death or loss without the possibility of healing, growth, and transformation.
Clearly there are a variety of deep and profound spiritual lessons woven into quest stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh if only we might understand them deeply enough. Indeed, the reason tales of great spiritual quests continue to be retold, some of them for thousands of years, is their capacity to inspire us to engage in spiritual quests of our own. Which leads me wonder about this idea of life as a spiritual quest.
For starters, we need to bear in mind the close relationship between the word “quest” and the word “question,” for both are derived from the Latin word for “to seek” or “to ask.” Sam Keen, a noted philosopher and spiritual seeker, writes “I have come to believe that ‘the Quest’ is a metaphor for our willingness to live and wrestle with the perennial questions that underlie the answers that religions offer.” Not a supporter of the conventional, dogma-bound, approaches to spiritual seeking offered by many religions, Keen advocates that each of us take personal responsibility for the process of questing and questioning in spiritual matters.
With that thought in mind, I’d like to conclude this posting by imagining what it might mean to live our lives as an ongoing spiritual quest. To begin with, it would mean tempering all of our spiritual beliefs with a good deal of doubt and skepticism, as well as an active curiosity about beliefs that differ from and even conflict with our own. We’d also embrace the reality that all answers to spiritual questions are inherently tentative, provisional, incomplete, and riddled with even more perplexing questions than those we’ve already attempted to answer.
Even so, we’d always be willing to go deeper in our searching, to never be satisfied with simple answers to complex spiritual questions. As a result, we’d approach the great mysteries of human existence — love, joy, compassion, conflict, suffering, death — with less certainty and more humility. In addition, our faithfulness to the quest would encourage us to value multiple modes of spiritual inquiry: the rational as well as the non-rational; the scientific and well as the poetic; the mundane as well as the mystical.
Most of all, if we truly experienced life as a never-ending, ever-deepening quest for spiritual awareness, we’d increasingly be conscious of a number of great spiritual truths. For starters, we’d be ever more mindful of how intricate, fragile, and profoundly interdependent the web of life really is and, consequently, be more cognizant of our role in sustaining that delicate balance. In addition, we’d steadily deepen the awareness that our egoic sense of separateness is an illusion and that, in reality, we truly are responsible for each other’s wellbeing. We’d also increasingly recognize that our own suffering is intrinsically a reflection of the suffering of all beings and, as a result, would behave with greater compassion towards our fellow creatures. And finally, we’d be ever more conscious of the infinite cosmic mystery of which our lives are an integral part, leading, in turn, to a growing recognition that opportunities for both mind-blowing wonder and profoundest awe exist all around us all the time.