Because I have no such vested interests, because I am pure and self-sufficient, only I can reflect a true picture of you to you.  Now you may begin to learn of your true identity, an identity that does not depend on occupation, status, relations with others, or your possessions.  It is an identity that does not rely on intellectual constructs or transitory emotional currents.  It is an identity that transcends your deepest image of self; it goes beyond all words, all images, all knowledge-about to rest in knowledge-of.

Your keen perception, your dissatisfaction with anything less than truthful and complete answers, and your active seeking of an answer in me are more telling than you have ever suspected.  These are the earmarks of your true self.  Study your reflection in me.  What you come to know may be difficult to analyze or understand, but do not be fooled by your mind’s limitations.  You know the veracity of a truth by its pulse in your being.  Look and learn.

This is the truth of your identity.  You are a question waiting to be answered.  Every human being is such a question, all demanding an answer.  Subconsciously, you know that this is so.  It explains that nebulous, yet all too real sense of incompleteness that motivates so much in the human race.  It also explains the ready acceptance of any answer, any dead meaning.  Yet this is a truth that your world struggles fiercely against acknowledging.  It is a discomforting truth – uncertain, insecure, nothing firm to build a comfortable life on, and certainly too close.  It has compelled generations to construct those walls of insulation you found so stifling between themselves and the world-at-large.  There is an unconscious fear and dread at loose.  After all, questions are a little frightening.  They are open-ended; they can lead one further and further out.  Who knows where it all could end? Questions are also dangerous; they leave one vulnerable, open to assault from the unknown.  Answers are much more secure, much more cozy.  Answers close things off, tidy them up, consolidate.  Answers reassure.  The structured well-known can be chosen over the terrifying chaos of the unknown.  Answers appear to be safe.  Yet it is your answers that will kill you, slowly, by suffocation.  Everything about your life until now has been an answer, or worse, an avoidance of your question altogether.  Even your religions, your alleged channels to the unknown have become so formalized, ritualized, and shrunken that they are now presented as answers instead of, properly, as a means of expressing the question.  So many answers in your world…

Nevertheless, I assert that the question is your natural state of being.  You have had no way of knowing this until now.  You have been given so many answers as pacifiers since you were born.  Do not respond in anger now that you see the deception; those who beget and transmit the answers act in ignorance.  They do not know what they do.  They think that they act in the best interest of all concerned.

Now, standing alone in me, you are beginning to feel the question that was smothered for so long begin to burn in your soul, hotly, restlessly, discontentedly.  Because I am empty and I do not feed you answers  or dead meanings, you are coming to see your poverty  and your essential emptiness.  Because I wait aloof from you and allow what you are to be revealed, you feel the birth of disturbing feelings: some anxiety, some anguish, a growing hollowness, as well as mushrooming fear.  It is imperative that you do not succumb to this terror and turn away from the challenge.  For a while you tremble and struggle to face this trial, I will reveal to you the secret of right living.

Keep your question alive.  Feed it.  Nurture it.  Strengthen it.  Aspire.  Do not answer your question.  Answering is the original sin.  Any answer from you is profane.  Any answer from you will fall far short of the fullest meaning, because the act of answering divorces small bits of meaning from the essence of meanings.  In short, when you answer you question, you kill parts of meanings.  You know that anything less than a whole, live, and unmutilated meaning will not adequately answer this raging question called your soul.  Your question, being of your nature, is infinite; your answers, begotten of your mind, are all too finite.  Your question requires an answer that is infinite, an answer that is not in your power to provide.  It is not your prerogative to answer your question; if it was, you would have been completely content with the first answer you took for yourself.  This would have been a sign to you that you were within the order and harmony of things.  You know very well that it hasn’t been so; your presence here is proof of that.  Do not take answers; do not even look for answers, for looking tempts taking.

Your only prerogative is to burn with the question.  Accept this.  Live it.  Incarnate the principle.  Take some faith in me, the desert, as well; these vistas that seem to promise nothing but aridity and death have hidden treasures.  Watch at sunset someday, and you’ll catch a fleeting glimpse of these treasures as the colors metamorphose in the sky.  There are surprises awaiting you.  An Answer is being held in abeyance, and I am waiting for your intensity to peak.  When your question becomes as hot and all-consuming as a magnesium fire, when your emptiness becomes so dangerous that it threatens to rip free and engulf you, then you will be deemed fit and ready for the bestowal of the Answer.

I fully realize that what I have shown you today is not what you were expecting to find.  You have been searching for an end to your restless wanderings, your endless dissatisfaction, your disgust and world-weariness.  You want rest and peace.  Yet if you examine your heart, you will know that this is the truth.  Aspiration is the way to peace.  There is no other way.  You must be willing to endure the agitation and discomfort involved.  Your quest is your path through this wasteland.  Though I may seem harsh, I rejoice in your fortitude.  I will hang Venus above my horizon nightly, that you may know the promise stands.  Resolve to keep your faith and your strength, and move through me in gracious ease.  As long as you do, you will understand the importance of aspiration.

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