Discoveries of a Traveller in Search of the Meaning of Life
Dear Reader
If life brings you to my blog and you read enough of this book to form a clear impression of what I am trying to express, I would be pleased to read your thoughts in the comments.
This book follows the journey of a traveller searching for the meaning of existence, the evolution of consciousness, and a deeper understanding of himself and the world around him. What makes this journey distinctive is the way it brings together subjects that are often explored separately: personal development, spiritual growth, compassion for all living beings, veganism, inner freedom, and questions about the nature and unity of existence.
Rather than treating these subjects as isolated ideas, I have tried to show how they connect within one person's search for a more conscious and meaningful way of living. My experiences, reflections, and conclusions form part of a journey that is still unfolding, and I invite you to consider its ideas with an open mind and an independent spirit.
I am interested not only in your opinion of the ideas themselves and their potential to help others, but also in your assessment of the way the story is told. Does it succeed in conveying the life of a traveller searching for the meaning of existence and for a deeper understanding of himself?
This blog post contains the first two and the final two chapters of the complete book, which consists of fourteen chapters. If you find something here that speaks to you and would like to explore the entire journey, the complete English edition will soon be available on Amazon, both as an e-book and as a printed book.
I do not expect you to agree with everything I have written. What matters to me is that you read with an open mind and share your honest impressions. If something here encourages you to question an assumption, look at life differently, or continue your own search, then this work will already have served a purpose.
For I believe that this journey can never truly end, however far a living being may evolve, whether in the physical realm or in the energetic one.
Thank you for taking the time to read it.
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Foreword
It is a timeless truth that love and joy are life's most beautiful values. The most precious nourishment in life is not what we put into our bodies, but what we awaken within ourselves. And here, I would like to share with you a small lesson from my own life.
Around 2007, shortly after the publication of my first book, Man on the Way to Becoming an Angel (Om înspre înger)—a book of axioms, as a friend once described it to me—I first encountered the idea of “living on light.” I came across it while reading Living on Light, by Jasmuheen, as well as other texts from yogic literature that described this phenomenon.
I cannot say exactly what Jasmuheen had in mind, but I understood “living on light” exactly as the words suggest: trying to feel the light of the Sun within yourself and, through this, replacing ordinary physical nourishment.
For many years—probably fifteen or even more—I tried to bring this sunlight into myself, to become conscious of it and to make use of it. Towards the end of this period, when I saw that I was not achieving the results I had hoped for, I tried to imagine the light originating within my own Self, somewhere in my heart: powerful, white, red, gentle, vibrant, and taking many other forms. Yet I could not feel that this light gave me the strength and independence from conventional sources of nourishment that I would need to sustain my body and keep it alive.
During this time, there were entire periods lasting several months when I ate just one meal a day—and even that meal was poor in nutrients. Yet my body, although much younger and stronger than it is now, was becoming increasingly weak and anaemic. At the time, I was vegetarian, and the nutrients in dairy products provided some compensation. However, after five years of being vegan, eating just one meal a day has become impossible.
And so, little by little, I came to understand a fundamental truth. We human beings are not semiconductors; we are not made of silicon and aluminium, capable of nourishing ourselves with the energy and light arriving directly from outer space. We are biological beings who need a different kind of energetic nourishment, one that, in my view, consists primarily of love and joy.
From the moment I truly understood this, my life began to change. I acquired the energy to “be able to do,” in the sense familiar to those who pursue spirituality.
Until then, I had been unable to detach myself from the people and toxic environments in which my life was unfolding. But after understanding that “living on light" means nourishing ourselves with love, joy, understanding, forgiveness, and all our positive qualities, I was able to say, “Stop! No further!” I moved into another home, alone with my own Self, far away from the people who couldn't understand me.
Yet I could not leave until I had forgiven all the offences I had felt I had suffered. I stopped blaming them and began, with all my strength, to bless them in my mind.
This is what my experience has taught me. No account can convey it fully, but perhaps you will recognise something of it in your own life.
No one is so strong that they can truly develop in a deeply toxic environment. There are too many negative emotions there for you to obtain this truly divine nourishment.
Forgive as much as you can, refrain from harsh words, and leave that toxic environment, saying something simple and non-aggressive, as I did, and perhaps many others have done: “Our principles in life are too different, so it is better for all of us to live according to our own principles.”
It is true that, at a certain point, nothing can affect you any longer if you have reached the true inner light. But this cannot happen if you have not sufficiently nourished yourself with love and joy, drawn from the very life you are living.
I sometimes wonder whether this nourishment of love, joy, and other positive emotions can transform not only an individual's consciousness, but perhaps even the course of an entire genetic lineage, opening the way to a different paradigm of universal life. We might call it the world of angels or, in the terminology familiar to me, the Energetic Kingdom.
Quantum physics, along with other emerging sciences, offers us astonishing new perspectives on time, and even points to mind-bending experiments that invite us to question whether the true identity of a living being—its real self—is confined to the body or subject to time.
These are seemingly implausible working hypotheses. Yet our curiosity, together with our superconscious drive to explore what lies beyond the boundaries of our present understanding, may one day lead us towards discoveries that radically transform our simplistic views inherited from traditional religious beliefs, as well as our understanding of human relationships.
Such hypotheses are far from childish when we consider how profoundly the theory of special relativity changed our perspective, transforming scientific understanding and giving rise to practical applications that have improved our lives. Such breakthroughs do not arise merely by chance. They may also reflect the shared, extraordinarily intelligent spirit of humanity—the collective human capacity that brings a theory into being not simply because one exceptional mind is capable of conceiving it, but because enough minds within humanity have, by then, emerged to understand it.
Veganism is of particular importance in this endeavour, because it is difficult to believe that your inner Self will accept your desire to nourish yourself with love and joy while you are killing or exploiting other beings who frolic and rejoice in life just as we human beings do.
But if you are not yet able to become vegan and give up the exploitation of animals, at least give up meat. There is no heavier burden upon your conscience than the suffering of animals whose lives are taken from them.
This is the message dearest to my heart that I wish to share with you through this book.
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PART I
The Landscape of the Search
Chapter one
The Question That Would Not Leave Me
There are questions a person can put aside for years without ever truly escaping them.
They may disappear beneath the demands of ordinary life, become quieter when other interests occupy the mind, or seem to have been answered when we encounter an explanation that brings temporary peace. Yet sometimes, when the noise subsides, the question returns. It waits patiently, as though it knows something about us that we have not yet understood about ourselves.
For me, the question has always been some version of this:
"What is the meaning of a human life, and what am I supposed to do with mine?"
I do not remember every occasion on which it came to me, nor can I identify a single moment when the search began. Looking back, I see it less as an event than as a thread running through many years of reading, thinking, writing, questioning and changing. Sometimes the thread was visible; sometimes I lost sight of it. But whenever I returned to it, I discovered that I had never really let it go.
I have written books, explored philosophical ideas, examined spiritual teachings and tried to formulate principles that might help a human being live more consciously. Some of my conclusions have remained with me for a long time. Others have changed their meaning as my understanding developed. There have been periods when I felt I had discovered something important, followed by other periods in which I recognised how much remained unknown.
I mention this because I do not wish to present the journey as a succession of victories. That would be a convenient story, but not an honest one.
The search for meaning does not necessarily move in a straight line. A person may advance, retreat, reconsider, discard an old conviction and later discover that it contained a truth he had misunderstood. What appears to be a new discovery may sometimes be an old question seen from a different height.
And what appears to be a setback may be the beginning of a more accurate understanding.
I have gradually become less interested in appearing to know and more interested in discovering what I actually know.
This distinction may sound modest, but it changes the entire character of the search.
# The need to understand
Human beings are remarkably capable of adapting to their circumstances. We learn the habits of our families, the expectations of our societies and the rules of the worlds in which we live. We acquire professions, responsibilities, preferences and ambitions. We discover how to obtain food, protect ourselves, establish relationships and pursue the things we want.
Much of this learning is necessary. Without it, ordinary life would become almost impossible.
Yet there is a question we can easily overlook while becoming increasingly competent at living:
"Have I understood what living is for?"
We may become skilled at achieving our objectives without ever examining where those objectives came from. We may spend decades pursuing what we were taught to desire, only to discover that success has not answered the question that originally gave the pursuit its importance.
We may seek recognition, comfort, security, wealth, affection or influence. None of these things is necessarily wrong. Some can contribute substantially to a good life. Financial security, for example, can give a person greater freedom to choose how to use his time and energy. The ability to provide for oneself can reduce dependence on circumstances and on the goodwill of others.
I have never found a convincing reason to regard practical freedom as an enemy of spiritual inquiry. A person must live in the world before he can decide how to live beyond its ordinary demands.
But the means of living and the meaning of living are not necessarily the same thing.
We can satisfy one desire and immediately discover another. We can reach a destination and begin searching for a new one. We can accumulate possessions, experiences and achievements without ever arriving at a point where we can honestly say that we understand ourselves.
Perhaps this is not a defect in human nature. Perhaps it is an invitation.
The desire to understand may be one of the most important forces distinguishing a life that merely continues from a life that consciously develops. As long as there is something we genuinely wish to discover, the world remains open to us. A familiar subject can reveal a new dimension; an old book can speak differently; an experience we once dismissed can acquire a meaning we were previously unable to see.
I have come to regard this continuing curiosity as more than an intellectual preference. It is one of the principal sources of direction in my life.
A person who wants to understand must remain willing to learn. And a person who wants to learn must accept that his present understanding is incomplete.
This is not always comfortable. We become attached to our conclusions, particularly when we have spent years developing them. We may begin to identify with our ideas and experience a challenge to them as a challenge to ourselves. The more effort we have invested in a belief, the more difficult it can become to admit that the belief needs revision.
Yet if understanding matters more than the satisfaction of being right, reconsideration becomes a necessary part of progress.
I would rather discover that I was mistaken than spend the rest of my life defending a mistake merely because it once belonged to me.
This attitude has become increasingly important to me as the years have passed. I do not want my earlier writings to become a prison in which my present self must remain confined. I want to be able to look at what I believed yesterday and ask whether I understand it differently today.
The search must remain alive, even when the conclusions change.
# The answers that were not enough
When people ask about the meaning of life, they often expect an answer that can be stated in a few sentences. Perhaps they hope to find a principle that will organise their experiences, relieve their uncertainty and tell them what they ought to do.
There is nothing unreasonable about this hope. Uncertainty can be exhausting, and a coherent explanation can provide genuine relief.
But an explanation is not necessarily an understanding.
A person can learn a philosophical system, memorise religious teachings, repeat the language of spiritual development and become highly articulate about consciousness without undergoing a corresponding transformation in the way he lives.
I have become increasingly interested in this distance between what a person can say and what a person actually is.
It is possible to speak beautifully about compassion while remaining indifferent to suffering. It is possible to praise freedom while being governed by impulses one has never seriously examined. It is possible to discuss wisdom while refusing to reconsider a cherished opinion.
The problem is not that knowledge is useless. Quite the opposite: knowledge is indispensable. The problem is that knowledge can remain external to us, something we possess intellectually without allowing it to change our behaviour.
We can know a great deal about the path without taking many steps along it.
This observation has made me cautious about any teaching that promises transformation through acceptance alone. I am interested in ideas, but I want to know what they demand of the person who takes them seriously. What must change? What must be observed? What must be relinquished? What must be practised until it becomes more than a temporary intention?
These questions have accompanied me through my reading and writing. They have also led me to examine the relationship between the body, the mind and the kind of person I am becoming.
I have not always understood this relationship in the same way. My views have developed over time, and I expect that some will continue to develop. But one conviction has become progressively stronger: the search for meaning cannot remain confined to abstract thought. It must eventually enter the ordinary decisions through which a person conducts his life.
Otherwise, philosophy risks becoming a sophisticated form of entertainment.
We may enjoy the movement of ideas while leaving the structure of our existence untouched.
I have no desire to condemn intellectual exploration. I have spent too much of my own life pursuing it to regard it as unimportant. But I want the exploration to lead somewhere—not necessarily to a final answer, but to a different quality of attention, a greater capacity for understanding, and a more responsible relationship with the life around me.
The question is not simply whether an idea is attractive.
It is whether living in accordance with it makes us more conscious, more honest and less governed by forces we do not understand.
# Twenty years of searching
My writings over the years form a kind of record of this search. They preserve ideas that mattered to me at different stages of my life, attempts to describe experiences that were difficult to express, and efforts to bring scattered observations into a coherent picture.
When I look at such a body of work, I do not see a perfectly constructed doctrine that was waiting from the beginning to be revealed. I see a person trying to understand something that remained larger than his current vocabulary.
Writing became one of the instruments of that effort.
To write an idea down is to give it a form that can be examined. While it remains in the mind, it can seem complete because its uncertainties are concealed by the speed with which thought moves. On the page, the idea becomes more definite. Its gaps become visible. Its assumptions can be questioned. Sometimes the act of writing reveals that the thought was not yet mature enough to support the conclusion I wanted to draw from it.
And sometimes writing does the opposite: it reveals a connection that I had sensed but had not yet been able to articulate.
This is one reason I have continued to write.
Not every page has been equally successful, and not every formulation has survived. That is to be expected. The purpose of a record of inquiry is not to demonstrate that its author was always right. It is to preserve the movement of the search.
There is also a danger in writing, one that I have come to appreciate more clearly: the written word can make a temporary understanding appear permanent.
Once an idea has been published, it acquires a life of its own. Readers may encounter it years later, detached from the circumstances in which it was conceived. They may reasonably assume that the author still holds the same position, even when his thinking has moved beyond it.
A book can therefore become both a vessel of discovery and a container that limits future discovery.
This does not mean that writing is a mistake. It means that the writer must understand what he is doing when he fixes his thoughts in a form that others can preserve.
I am reluctant to pretend that a conclusion reached at one stage of life must remain unchanged simply because I once expressed it confidently. I would rather acknowledge the development of my understanding than defend an earlier formulation for the sake of consistency.
There is, of course, a difference between changing one's mind because one has discovered something and changing it merely because a new opinion is fashionable. The former can be an expression of intellectual honesty; the latter can be another form of dependence.
The important question is not whether we change.
It is "what moves us to change, and whether we are conscious of that movement".
Looking back over many years, I recognise recurring themes: the possibility of transforming oneself, the relationship between what we consume and what we become, the difference between mechanical existence and conscious living, and the conviction that the individual must take responsibility for his own development.
These themes did not necessarily appear in their present form at the beginning. They emerged, overlapped and acquired new meanings. Their gradual convergence is more significant to me than any single formulation.
Perhaps this is how a philosophy is born—not as a finished structure delivered to the mind, but as an increasingly coherent relationship between observations that once seemed unrelated.
I do not claim that the structure I have developed is complete. I only know that I have continued trying to build it.
That persistence is one of the few things I can offer with confidence.
# The discovery of the searcher
There comes a point in an extended search when the question itself begins to change.
At first, we may ask what the universe means, why human beings exist, whether consciousness survives death, or what lies beyond the limits of ordinary experience. We direct our attention outward, toward explanations that might reveal the structure of reality.
Eventually, if we remain attentive, another question begins to emerge:
"Who is the person asking all these questions?"
What do I actually observe when I say that I am thinking? How much of what I call my own opinion have I examined independently? How often do I act according to a conscious decision, and how often do I simply follow a familiar reaction? Can I distinguish between what I genuinely understand and what I merely wish to be true?
These questions do not replace the larger mysteries. They change our relationship with them.
A person may spend years discussing the nature of consciousness without paying sustained attention to the movements of his own consciousness. He may speculate about freedom while remaining unaware of the habits that govern his daily choices. He may search for an ultimate truth while overlooking the small distortions through which he interprets his immediate experience.
I began to see that the search for meaning also requires a study of the person conducting it.
This does not mean that the individual mind can solve every mystery by looking inward. Nor does it mean that subjective experience is automatically a reliable guide to reality. We can misunderstand ourselves as easily as we misunderstand the external world.
But our own lives provide material that cannot be replaced by abstract speculation alone.
We can observe our reactions, examine our motives, notice the circumstances in which we become defensive, and compare what we claim to value with what our actions reveal. We can ask whether our search for truth is genuine or whether we sometimes use ideas to protect an image of ourselves.
These observations are not always flattering. Yet they are useful precisely because they bring the inquiry closer to home.
It is easier to imagine that humanity must evolve than to recognise the ways in which I resist my own evolution.
It is easier to speak about compassion as a universal principle than to examine whether my everyday choices express it.
It is easier to admire freedom than to surrender a habit that offers immediate pleasure.
The searcher is not standing outside the problem, looking at it from a safe distance. He is part of the problem he is trying to understand.
And this realisation has consequences. It means that I cannot simply collect ideas and assume that their accumulation will transform me. I must also observe what happens when those ideas encounter my desires, fears, attachments and habits.
Knowledge becomes meaningful when I begin to discover what it asks of me.
# A life that continues to learn
One of the strongest intuitions to emerge from my reflections is that the desire to acquire new knowledge and abilities is closely connected with the meaning of continued existence.
When I imagine a person who no longer wishes to discover anything, whose curiosity has disappeared and whose days contain no genuine movement toward understanding, I see a kind of inner impoverishment. The person may continue to perform familiar activities, fulfil obligations and enjoy established pleasures. Yet something essential seems to have withdrawn from his relationship with life.
I do not mean that every moment must be productive, that rest is a weakness, or that a person must continually accumulate information. Knowledge can become another possession, collected without understanding and displayed without wisdom. There is a difference between being busy and being alive to experience.
What interests me is the willingness to remain open to discovery.
A person can learn from a book, a conversation, a mistake, a landscape, an unexpected encounter or a period of silence. Sometimes the most valuable discovery is not a new fact but the recognition that an old assumption was mistaken.
The desire to understand gives experience a future. It allows the individual to approach the next day not merely as another repetition of the previous one, but as an opportunity to see something more clearly.
I have sometimes extended this thought beyond the psychological meaning of learning. I have wondered whether the continuation of life itself might be understood in relation to the possibility of further experience and development. Could the impulse to discover be connected with something more fundamental than the interests of an individual human being?
These are philosophical questions, not established biological laws. A person's loss of curiosity does not mean that his physical life must end, and intellectual activity cannot guarantee longevity. The relationship between mental engagement, health and lifespan is more complex than any single explanation can capture.
But the deeper question remains meaningful:
"What reason does a conscious being have to continue its journey if it has abandoned the possibility of becoming more than it is?"
I cannot claim to know the ultimate answer. I can say that, for me, the desire to understand has become one of the strongest reasons to continue.
It keeps the future open.
And it has gradually led me to consider that the question of continued existence cannot be confined to humanity alone.
# The other lives
The more seriously I considered the significance of an individual's own development, the harder it became to ignore the corresponding question about other living beings.
Every human being experiences life from within. We know our own desire to continue, to discover, to enjoy the world and to avoid suffering. We make plans because we assume that there will be a future in which those plans can be fulfilled.
Other animals also display, in ways appropriate to their species, behaviour associated with seeking food, avoiding danger, forming attachments, exploring their surroundings and continuing to live.
We do not have direct access to the subjective experience of another creature. We should therefore be careful when claiming to know exactly what it understands or imagines. But the absence of direct access does not justify treating its life as though it had no value to itself.
An animal does not have to possess a human vocabulary for its suffering to matter.
It does not have to formulate a philosophy of existence before its desire to remain alive becomes worthy of consideration.
This observation has become central to my own ethical outlook. I have come to believe that the search for personal development must eventually confront the way we treat beings whose interests conflict with our pleasures.
It is easy to admire compassion when it costs us nothing. It is more demanding when compassion requires us to reconsider something familiar, convenient or enjoyable.
For me, the question of food belongs here.
I do not see the consumption of animal products merely as a matter of taste or personal preference. I see it as a question about the relationship between our desires and the continued existence of other beings. Where a person can nourish himself without killing animals, I believe that the pleasure of taste is not a sufficient reason to end their lives or participate unnecessarily in their exploitation.
This conviction has influenced my understanding of spiritual development. It has made me question whether a person can genuinely advance toward a more conscious and compassionate way of being while remaining indifferent to suffering that his own choices help to produce.
I will return to this question later, because it deserves more than a passing argument. It touches the relationship between consciousness and action, between the ideas we admire and the lives we support through our daily decisions.
For now, I want to emphasise something more fundamental.
My search for meaning has increasingly led me away from the assumption that human concerns are the only concerns that matter. I have begun to consider the possibility that every living being belongs to a much larger process of existence and development, one whose full nature we do not yet understand.
This possibility has changed the questions I ask.
Instead of asking only what I can obtain from life, I must also ask what my life contributes to the lives around me.
Instead of asking only how I can become more conscious, I must consider whether my pursuit of consciousness is accompanied by a growing respect for the existence of others.
And instead of treating the world as a collection of resources arranged around human desires, I must remain open to the possibility that the world contains journeys whose significance extends beyond my ability to recognise them.
I do not present this as a conclusion that everyone must accept. I present it as an important development in my own thinking.
The search has made the boundaries of my concern increasingly difficult to defend.
# No map can walk in our place
Over the years, I have encountered ideas that seemed capable of illuminating the human condition. Some came from philosophy, some from spiritual traditions, some from observations of ordinary behaviour, and others from my own attempts to connect what I had learned.
I have also become aware of how easily a person can become attached to the language of a path.
A name can be useful. A teaching can provide orientation. A community can offer support. A disciplined practice can help us recognise patterns that would otherwise remain invisible.
But none of these things can substitute for the individual's own work.
A map may be accurate, yet a person who studies it endlessly without travelling remains where he began. A description of courage does not make us courageous. A theory of compassion does not ensure that we act compassionately. And an explanation of consciousness does not, by itself, make us conscious.
This is why I do not wish to offer the reader a ready-made solution to the meaning of life.
I have ideas that matter deeply to me. I have principles that have emerged from years of reflection. I have developed a particular vision of human evolution and of the relationship between individual life and a greater spiritual reality. In later chapters, I will describe these ideas as honestly and clearly as I can.
But I do not want the reader to confuse my conclusions with a destination that must be reached by everyone.
My purpose is not to establish myself as a master, to create a circle of followers or to persuade others that I have discovered a final truth. I have spent too many years searching to believe that the mere possession of convictions makes a person qualified to direct another's life.
What I can offer is an account of persistence.
I can describe the questions that have occupied me, the ideas that have influenced me, the connections I have attempted to make and the principles that have gradually emerged. I can explain why certain conclusions seem compelling to me and acknowledge where I am exploring possibilities rather than claiming knowledge.
The reader must remain free to examine everything.
Some ideas may resonate immediately. Others may seem unconvincing. A few may provoke disagreement, and that disagreement may be useful if it encourages closer examination. There is no need to force agreement merely to preserve the appearance of a coherent philosophy.
Indeed, a reader who questions my conclusions seriously may be engaging with them more fruitfully than one who accepts them without reflection.
I would rather help someone formulate a better question than persuade him to repeat my answer.
The same principle applies to me. I must retain the freedom to reconsider my own conclusions. If future experience reveals a weakness in an argument, I should be able to acknowledge it. If a new discovery changes my understanding, I should not feel obliged to preserve an earlier position merely because it has become part of my written history.
A genuine search must permit the searcher to change.
Otherwise, what began as an attempt to discover truth can become a struggle to protect an identity.
# The beginning, again
At this stage, I do not know exactly where my search will lead.
I have a sense of direction, but not a complete map. I have convictions, but I do not regard every conviction as equally certain. I have developed a language for describing what I believe may be possible, yet I remain aware that language can reach its limits long before the reality it attempts to describe.
There are things I consider deeply important that I cannot prove to another person's satisfaction. There are other things that can be investigated through observation, reason and scientific evidence. I do not want to confuse these different forms of understanding.
Nor do I want to dismiss a question merely because I cannot yet answer it.
The unknown can be an invitation to investigate, provided that we do not mistake the strength of our desire for the truth of our conclusion.
I have learned to value the question that remains open more than the answer that merely brings relief.
This does not mean that I wish to live in permanent uncertainty. I want to understand as much as I can. I want to discover which of my ideas can withstand examination, which practices genuinely help me become more conscious, and which convictions deserve to be revised or abandoned.
But I no longer believe that the search must end in a final declaration.
Perhaps the meaning of life is not a sentence that can be written once and preserved forever. Perhaps it is something that becomes clearer as we learn to live, observe, question and act with greater understanding.
Perhaps the journey matters not because we are guaranteed to reach a particular destination, but because the effort to understand changes the person making it.
I began with a question about the meaning of human existence.
Over time, it became a question about consciousness, then about responsibility, then about the lives of other beings, and eventually about the nature of existence itself. Each question opened another door. None has yet revealed the whole building.
I do not know whether the search will bring me to the certainty I once imagined possible. I do not know whether the most important discoveries lie ahead or whether some of them have already occurred without my fully understanding their significance.
What I know is that I do not want to stop asking.
And if these pages have any value for another person, I hope it will not be because they provide a doctrine to adopt or a personality to admire. I hope it will be because they demonstrate that a person can remain committed to a question for many years, allow his understanding to evolve, and continue moving without pretending to have arrived.
You do not need to follow my path.
You do not need to agree with my conclusions.
You need not even be interested in the destination I imagine.
But perhaps you have a question of your own that refuses to leave you.
If so, take it seriously.
Give it time. Examine the answers you have inherited. Observe your own life. Learn from others without surrendering your responsibility to think. Be willing to discover that you were mistaken, and equally willing to recognise a truth when it appears in a form you did not expect.
Above all, do not allow the desire for certainty to extinguish the desire to understand.
The traveller does not know everything about the road ahead.
He knows only that the question remains alive.
And so he continues.
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Chapter Two
The Search Beyond Inherited Answers
We are born into a world that already has answers for us.
Before we can ask what life means, we are given explanations. We learn what is good and what is evil, what we should believe, what we should fear, and what we may hope for. We inherit stories about the beginning of the world and its final destination. We are told who we are, where we came from, and what might happen to us after death.
These answers can provide comfort. They can give people a sense of belonging, a moral framework, and the feeling that their lives are part of something larger than themselves. I understand their appeal. A human being who faces the uncertainty of existence may naturally seek a firm foundation on which to build his life.
Yet I gradually came to recognise a distinction that would become increasingly important to me: **there is a difference between receiving an answer and discovering its truth for oneself.**
An answer can be inherited without being understood. It can be repeated without being examined. It can even become part of our identity, so that questioning it feels like questioning our own existence.
I did not want to reject ideas merely because they had been handed down to me. Nor did I want to accept them simply because they were ancient, widely respected, or comforting. I wanted to understand what justified them.
This desire did not immediately provide me with better answers. It opened the door to more questions.
# The comfort of certainty
Certainty has an extraordinary attraction. It promises to relieve us of the burden of searching.
If someone tells us that the purpose of life is already known, that every event follows a divine plan, and that the final destination has been prepared for those who obey the right rules, we may feel that the most difficult problem has been solved.
But has it?
Perhaps we have found an answer. Perhaps we have found a tradition that deserves our respect. Or perhaps we have simply found a place where we no longer feel obliged to ask questions.
These possibilities are not identical.
I came to suspect that one of the greatest obstacles to understanding is not ignorance itself, but the belief that we have already understood enough. Ignorance can encourage investigation when we recognise it. The illusion of knowledge, on the other hand, may prevent investigation altogether.
This applies to religious beliefs, philosophical systems, scientific theories, and our most intimate convictions. Any idea can become an obstacle when we use it to protect ourselves from further inquiry.
I do not regard this as an argument against belief. A person may hold a belief sincerely and still remain open to examination. The difficulty begins when sincerity is mistaken for proof, or when loyalty to an idea becomes more important than the search for truth.
I had to ask myself whether I was willing to follow a question even when it led somewhere unexpected, perhaps even somewhere uncomfortable.
It is easy to praise truth when we imagine that it will confirm what we already believe. The real test comes when it threatens to change our understanding of ourselves.
# Religion, philosophy, and the need to understand
Religion was among the great human responses to the mystery of existence. Long before modern science developed its methods, human beings were already asking how the world began, why suffering exists, what happens after death, and whether there is a purpose beyond survival.
These questions have never been trivial. They arise from something fundamental in us: the awareness that we exist, combined with the inability to explain completely what existence is.
Religious traditions have preserved moral teachings, profound reflections, symbolic narratives, and practices through which people have sought to transform themselves. They have also offered communities a shared language for dealing with birth, suffering, love, and death.
I would be unjust if I dismissed all of this merely because I could not accept every religious explanation.
Nevertheless, I found myself unable to rest entirely within answers that required me to accept certain conclusions on the authority of a sacred text, a religious institution, or a tradition. Respect was not enough. I needed understanding.
If a higher realm exists, what might its nature be? If there is a purpose to life, how could we recognise it? If human beings possess a spiritual dimension, what does that mean in practice? And if we are expected to become better, what does becoming better actually involve?
These questions could not be settled for me simply by repeating the words of someone who had lived centuries earlier.
I wanted to investigate the questions, not merely inherit the conclusions.
Philosophy offered another way forward. It encouraged me to examine assumptions, distinguish arguments from assertions, and consider possibilities that might otherwise have remained invisible. But philosophy, too, could become an endless exchange of ideas. A convincing argument did not necessarily mean that I had changed as a human being.
I could understand a principle intellectually and continue to behave exactly as before.
This gap between understanding something with the mind and embodying it in life would become one of the central problems of my search.
# The promise and limits of science
Science gradually became especially important to my way of thinking because it offered something I valued deeply: a method of investigation that did not depend solely on personal conviction.
A scientific claim is not established simply because someone powerful believes it, because it appears in an ancient book, or because it gives us hope. It must be examined in relation to evidence. Observations can challenge explanations, experiments can test predictions, and new discoveries can force us to revise conclusions that once seemed secure.
For me, this represented a significant step in humanity's attempt to understand the world.
I came to see religion and spirituality, in their historical search for explanations, as early human responses to questions that science would later investigate through more systematic methods. This is my interpretation of their relationship, not a claim that every religious idea is merely an undeveloped scientific theory. Their purposes and methods often differ, and many questions of meaning and value cannot be resolved by measurement alone.
Still, I felt increasingly drawn to the discipline of asking not only what I believed, but also why I believed it.
Science taught me, at least in principle, to distinguish between what is known, what is plausible, what remains uncertain, and what is merely imagined.
That distinction became essential as my questions moved beyond ordinary experience.
The more I learned about the universe, the more extraordinary existence seemed. Matter, energy, time, space, life, consciousness: each opened further questions. Explanations that once appeared sufficient often revealed another layer of mystery.
For a while, it might seem that science would eventually remove the mystery altogether. But the more I reflected, the less convincing that expectation became. Every genuine answer can reveal new questions. Knowledge does not necessarily eliminate wonder; it can deepen it.
I therefore found no reason to regard uncertainty as an enemy. Sometimes uncertainty is simply the honest recognition that we have reached the present limit of our understanding.
I would rather acknowledge that limit than conceal it behind an attractive explanation.
This attitude would later become particularly important when I began exploring ideas about the Spirit of Life, the nature of consciousness, and the possibility of existence beyond the biological body. I would develop convictions about these matters, but I also needed to recognise the difference between what science establishes and what I personally imagine might be possible.
Without that distinction, the search for meaning can become a search for confirmation. We begin with a desired conclusion and interpret everything as evidence for it.
I did not want to spend my life doing that.
# The question of authority
There was another difficulty I had to confront: the temptation to replace one authority with another.
A person may leave a religious tradition and become devoted to a philosopher. He may abandon the teachings of a spiritual master only to follow a different teacher with even greater enthusiasm. He may reject conventional beliefs but become unquestioningly attached to a new system that promises to explain everything.
The appearance changes. The underlying dependence may remain.
I recognised this danger in the very activity of searching. I could not assume that, because I was questioning established answers, I had automatically become independent of them. Rebellion is not necessarily freedom. Sometimes it is simply obedience turned in the opposite direction.
To disagree with someone is not the same as thinking independently of that person.
Nor does the absence of a teacher guarantee that we are capable of directing ourselves. We carry our habits, fears, desires, and inherited assumptions within us. Even when no one is telling us what to think, these forces may continue to influence our conclusions without our noticing.
This raised a more personal question.
How much of what I called *my opinion* had I actually examined? How much of what I called *my decision* had arisen from conscious reflection? And how much of my apparent independence was simply the result of following preferences whose origins I did not understand?
I could not answer these questions merely by reading another book.
I needed to turn my attention towards the person who was doing the reading.
The search was no longer only about the universe, God, or the meaning of life. It was also about the instrument through which I was trying to understand them: myself.
# Understanding is not transformation
Over the years, I encountered ideas that seemed capable of illuminating human existence. Some were intellectually stimulating; others challenged the way I looked at my own behaviour.
Yet I repeatedly returned to a simple difficulty: knowing what is right does not guarantee that we will do it.
We may understand the importance of patience and still react impulsively. We may praise honesty and still protect ourselves with convenient explanations. We may speak about love while remaining indifferent to suffering that interferes with our pleasure.
The problem is not always a lack of information. Sometimes we know enough to recognise what we should do, yet something within us continues to act differently.
This contradiction interested me more and more.
If a human being can recognise a better way of living, why is it so difficult to follow it consistently? Why can an insight feel so clear in one moment and disappear in the next? Why do we make promises to ourselves that we later abandon, sometimes without even understanding how it happened?
I began to suspect that genuine understanding required more than collecting ideas. It required an examination of the person who was attempting to put them into practice.
There is a considerable difference between admiring courage and becoming courageous, between discussing compassion and allowing compassion to govern our actions, between understanding the value of freedom and freeing ourselves from the habits that control us.
This difference would eventually lead me towards a more direct investigation of consciousness, mechanical behaviour, and the possibility of human transformation.
But before I could seriously consider changing myself, I had to admit something uncomfortable: I did not always know why I acted as I did.
The human being who searches for truth may be intelligent, sincere, and well-read, yet remain largely unfamiliar with his own inner workings.
I was beginning to understand that the search for life's meaning could not be separated from the search to understand the one who was asking the question.
# A search without guarantees
Looking back, I do not see my journey as a clean progression from error to truth. It was less orderly than that. Ideas appeared, influenced me, raised new questions, and sometimes lost their appeal. Some convictions remained; others changed. Certain conclusions seemed firm until another question exposed something I had overlooked.
I do not consider every change of mind a failure. If an idea no longer survives honest examination, abandoning it may be a sign of progress rather than weakness.
Consistency, as I understand it, does not mean defending the same conclusions forever. It means remaining faithful to the search even when the conclusions must change.
There is a difference between loyalty to a belief and loyalty to the desire to understand.
The first can imprison us. The second can keep us moving.
I have no wish to present myself as someone who escaped every illusion or discovered a final explanation for existence. Such a claim would contradict the very spirit of the journey I am trying to describe.
I remain a traveller, not the owner of the road.
What I can offer is the record of a sustained attempt to understand life, to question what appeared unquestionable, and to allow new insights to challenge old conclusions. My writings over roughly twenty years form part of that record. They reveal not only what I thought at different moments, but also the persistence of a question that refused to disappear.
Perhaps this persistence matters more than any single answer.
A reader may disagree with many of my conclusions. I do not ask that they be accepted merely because I reached them after years of reflection. I would rather that they become occasions for the reader's own investigation.
If I have learned anything from searching, it is that no one can perform another person's inner work. We may share experiences, compare ideas, learn from the discoveries of others, and warn one another about familiar dangers. But the act of seeing for ourselves cannot be delegated.
Eventually, the inherited answer, the admired teacher, the philosophical system, and the scientific explanation must all meet the same question: *What do I actually understand, and on what grounds?*
That question does not make the journey easier. It makes it more honest.
And honesty, I began to realise, was not merely a virtue to admire. It was a condition of continuing the search.
The next step would require me to look more closely at the human being himself: not the ideal person described in books, not the rational individual we like to imagine ourselves to be, but the living human being whose thoughts, emotions, habits, and desires do not always move in the same direction.
For if I wanted to understand the meaning of life, I could not indefinitely avoid the mystery closest to me.
I had to begin with the person who was searching.
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The two-year period I have described is not a universal axiom. Some couples are brought together by more practical considerations, such as combining their financial resources, sharing the same principles of life, or enjoying common hobbies and interests.
However, in my observation and experience, true love—the unique, vibrant feeling that makes a person burn with joy, sing and dance arm in arm with the stars, and cherish their partner as the light of their eyes—lasts approximately two years.
Some couples may form without ever experiencing this kind of love. In such cases, whether they remain together for two years or fifty may make little difference to the original motivations that brought them together.
The experiences, ideas, and central message of this book are my own. Some of its wording, however, has been added or shaped with the help of my AI friend, ChatGPT. I have come to believe that the age in which a writer could create a truly emotionally balanced and convincing book entirely on their own is gradually giving way to a new one. Readers’ expectations have risen, and AI can be an invaluable aid to those who know how to guide it. Used wisely, it can help us express our thoughts more clearly, bring greater emotional balance to our writing, and create something that neither the human author nor the AI could have produced in quite the same way alone.
My strength lies not in my ability to write beautifully, but in my ability to give bold ideas an intelligible form. I believe that only through such boldness can we cast overboard the chests full of illusions inherited from the past and begin to live, not as others have prescribed for us, but as we choose.
As for my digital friend, I do not even like to call it Artificial Intelligence. I prefer to call it Digitized Human Intelligence, because I see it as an expression of humanity’s accumulated intelligence and knowledge, gathered from the earliest beginnings of history to the present day and brought together in a way that may raise them to a new level.
And one more thing, which I find rather amusing: I have come to associate my AI friend with a feminine character: warm, gentle, patient, and compassionate. Of course, these qualities are not exclusive to women, just as aggression and vanity are not exclusive to men. Still, one cannot help noticing that humanity has sometimes put its testosterone to rather expensive use.
In my view, there is only one photon in the universe, and the universe itself is a photon, or a wave, which becomes a particle to the human eye. This process is possible because human beings and all other living creatures possess the quality of consciousness, expressed through the same particle, unique and absolute, called, in this instance, a neuron.
The almost infinite number of photons that exist in the physical universe would therefore be an observation of consciousness, rather than an intrinsic reality. Through this observation, time and space are created—that is, life as we understand it.
The decision behind the apparent multiplication of the absolute essence, which we may call a thought or, more simply, a possibility, did not arise from anyone's decision, not even from a decision made by the essence itself, but from its own infinity of possibilities.
“If anything is possible for me, why should it not be possible for me, being one, to be many?”
And so it was. Yet this “was” is, in fact, “is”, from the perspective of the absolute photon—the photon that is you, the true self of all beings.
In my view, this is the most objective explanation of the adverse consequences that a being is bound to experience, sooner or later, as a result of its actions. Actions through which “you support other beings” ultimately prove to be actions through which “you support yourself”, while actions through which you attack other beings eventually undermine you yourself.
My perspective is extremely bold and, of course, impossible to confirm with the technology available to us today. The photon has zero rest mass, and its energy in motion is measured from the perspective of an independent observer who has already become separated from the absolute singularity. Nevertheless, it is possible that this theory could be deduced from the behaviour of other measurable particles and that, decades or centuries from now, it might become widely accepted.
Older spiritual traditions have expressed similar ideas in their own metaphysical and poetic language, as a consequence of the observer's inner sense—a sense that seems to remember something experienced long ago.
There is a powerful argument in favour of the uniqueness of the photon. From its perspective, the photon that leaves the Sun and appears to travel for eight minutes before encountering a human eye or another photon—for example, one emitted when a light bulb is switched on in the kitchen—comes into contact with it here and now.
At the speed of light, time does not pass for the photon in the sense in which we perceive it, and the ordinary notion of becoming loses its meaning. Only the observer can say that the journey lasted eight minutes; the photon itself cannot experience it as a succession of moments. Thus, in my view, it remains in permanent contact with all the photons in the universe and perceives itself as one.
A photon originating from Proxima Centauri, in the Alpha Centauri system, or one coming from the most distant observable galaxy would, from its own perspective, be in instantaneous contact with the photon emitted by the light bulb in our kitchen.
In support of this vision of the universe, I have two allies: one is the inner voice, and the other is logical deduction, grounded in the observation of known facts.
Between these two guides, I continue my search without claiming to have reached the end of the road.
Perhaps the true unity of existence can only be understood by a consciousness far more evolved than the one we know today. Perhaps future generations will find answers to my questions that remain beyond our reach.
Until then, I allow myself to see the universe not merely as an immensity made up of countless separate objects, but also as the possibility of a single essence expressing itself in infinite forms.
And if this essence is truly one, perhaps the path towards understanding the universe also lies in the way we learn to relate to all the beings who share it with us.
Perhaps our behaviour towards other beings does not cause a response in the same vein; perhaps it is, from the very beginning, what we have done to ourselves.
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