Of course, these thinking people often seek the company of other thinkers, as was the case with me.
‘Boy,’ my father used to say, ‘you think too much. Go play outside.’ But that didn’t interest me. They could say it so convincingly, that it was healthy, and that one looked much better if one played outside a lot, but my real friends and I preferred to stay inside together and exchange thoughts. That was already the case when I was 10. Before then, I felt very lonely, because my brothers were the preferred outdoor players. I drew a lot, and of course I read, but it was only when I met my fellow thinkers that I became happy. We called ourselves philosophers and some of us even read Nietzsche and Plato!
But, so it goes: as we got older, some of us moved away, got married and had children and the bond largely dwindled. Only by email did we keep in touch. There was hardly anything thought-worthy in those mails. Loneliness struck again and I decided to begin a study of philosophy. Then I would surely meet kindred spirits.
The first three months were great fun and also interesting. But what I certainly did not expect was that my way of thinking did not fit in here at all! These people were very different from my previous philosopher friends. They were very serious, but I had the feeling that they were quoting the great philosophers and teachers rather than thinking for themselves. That may sound haughty, but it still seemed that way to me.
Was I being cocky? I began to wonder. For some time, for instance, I had been thinking about the question: what is the heart of all things? If humans have a heart, and animals, and flowers, and the earth, and the cosmos too, then there had to be a larger heart as well, the heart of everything. It couldn’t be otherwise, I was sure. I was talking about it with a fellow student who I thought was a bit closer to me, but it was disappointing. He looked at me like I came from Mars. ‘The heart of everything? How do you come up with that? That’s just an idea, isn’t it? Cars, for example, they don’t have a heart, do they?’
He just didn’t have any idea of what I was talking about! I considered one teacher after another, but based on their lessons, I saw little point in their answers. Not that they didn’t know a lot of things, but I had never seen an indication that they might have any questions themselves. As summer approached, it occurred to me that perhaps I could devote a holiday to this issue. Just go to the places where the great philosophers had lived. Maybe their influence was still there. But then I realised that I had not read anything about the heart of everything in any of the great philosophers’ works. Maybe I had to find it myself.
Now I decided to approach things from an unexpected angle. I would study everything about the human heart. Simply, about its construction, functioning, size, colour, everything. Then, if I didn’t find the heart of everything, at least I would know everything of the heart. ‘That is a colourful thought’, it went through my head, and this surprised me greatly. What an unusual expression: a colourful thought. Now where did that come from?
I threw myself into studying and found an incredible amount of facts, in books and conversations with medical students, on the internet and everywhere else I could find. After a year and a half, I felt like an expert on the heart. But in the meantime, I hadn’t made any progress with my real question. Instead of attending lectures and classes, I now gave them myself, about the heart, of which I thought I knew every cell. The students were enthusiastic, but for me it felt empty.
One day I was sighing in that emptiness and suddenly something miraculous happened. The void seemed to open up, crazy as that sounds, and in the middle a flower appeared, a golden flower. The heart of the flower radiated so strongly that I almost fell down and I realised I was in contact with my own heart, a place I had not yet searched. And from my heart my knowing was illuminated, I have no other words for it. I suddenly knew with complete certainty that that flower was the heart of everything, that it did not differ from the hearts of all other people, things, worlds, and whatever. That heart was light. It was love. And it had found me.
