The Long Flowing River

FROM THE PREFACE THERE’S AN OLD saying, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Well, maybe so, but the pain of having lost is never quite balanced out by the memory of a brief season of love. Besides, far more people go seeking something they have lost or have once glimpsed than those who only seek out of curiosity, and maybe the world has lost something that once existed here, sometime, somewhere. I prefer Neil Young’s well-known phrase, “I’ve been searching for a heart of gold, and I’m getting old.” His lyric describes pretty much what this book is about. In my life personally as well as in contemporary events, there was a treasure of the heart that seemed to have come and gone. As painful as the hardships of the circumstances I now found myself in, was the knowledge that there existed a far better way of living whose access now seemed impossible. Though very disillusioned, I had to find it again or at least discover the hard truth about its absence. So how would I go about the search? I decided early on that I wouldn’t be poring over my own biography. Looking within was fine but it had to be balanced with looking elsewhere, at somewhere less subjective and much broader in scope. The lost heart was not just a private matter, and there were some major issues involved. I thought of someone who wanted to look into a new book about the movies, only to find that it was just pages and pages of technical facts: all about the inventions that made motion pictures possible, stuff about camera work, set-ups for sound and lighting, and all the latest advances in digital imaging. The newfound book did a great job of presenting the technology and technique of film, but it missed a really important item — the story. Absent from that volume of cinematic techniques were the actual movies and why they were made, artistic trends and genres as these developed, together with the most influential productions and people. Our advanced technological age has tended to reduce much of life to matters of technique and formula, things that are more easily manipulated for the sake of the vast commercial interests of our times, though there are other reasons for this reduction. Now certainly techniques and formulas are great tools, and there is often a sense of improvement or accomplishment for those who use them. In fact, we like our more impressive products so much that we quickly fall into the belief that we can’t have a good life without them. But when they are applied crassly, without much personal concern, inspiration, or ethics, the inventions soon show their limits. They distract us from listening to our deepest desires, feelings and intuitive knowledge, so that we lose something of what it means to be fulfilled human beings. Our tools and techniques can never replace our hearts. Sensing that there must be something more fulfilling to life, many people go searching for their own soul, for an empowerment that can help them from within. Such a search is commonly called a spiritual journey. I’ve noticed, however, that many of the options placed before today’s spiritual searcher very much involve the use of …techniques. Contemporary spiritual conversation is often about how to do things in a particular way in order to get a certain benefit for oneself. The idea is that the more you do things as instructed, the better off you’ll be. The “steps-to,” the “how-to,” the “rules-for,” the “seven-secrets-of” — all such phrases suggest techniques, whether for home repair, business success, weight loss, stress management, personal relationships, or living with God. Sure, there are benefits to be gotten from techniques but in the end, they are just tools. Life isn’t as straightforward as the promoters of technique imply. I’ve even found that doing things right can lead to trouble and pain, and not to the better life, while doing it wrong can at least attract some friends who also have done it wrong. Moreover, at times I just wasn’t able to do the right thing even when I wanted to or when I was all geared up to do so. Therefore the story of life had to go deeper, and it was just too ironic to be focusing on a “spiritual how-to” when searching for something more profoundly meaningful than a technique-filled world.