There is this lesson given in the Chandogya Upanishad, a sacred text of Hinduism.
“Just as a bird, tied to a string will fly around in all directions, and finding no resting place anywhere else, will resort to the very string that holds it captive, so too the mind will fly around in all directions, and finding no resting place anywhere else, will come to rest in the breath of life, for the mind is the captive of the breath of life.”
This text from approximately the seventh century BC could sit equally well in the diary of the seventeenth century rationalist Rene Descartes as of the twentieth century father of phenomenology Edmund Husserl. Every philosopher tells us to clear the mind, stop all the flow of thoughts, and to look, behold. What is there but the receptivity to think, a reflectivity awaiting to reflect, a consciousness being conscious of being conscious—simultaneously of self and as being open to a world. But how we see that world depends upon how we see the self, how we experience self. If the self is wrapped up in being loved, the world will look very different from the world seen if the self is wrapped in aloneness and starved of self value. The string that holds us is not of the same quality for us all.
The Book of Genesis opens with a variation on this theme, a vision of a void over which hovers the Creative Spirit that will spin out a world dubbed good. It is a brilliant piece of human psychology apotheosised. It is an analysis which would be equally comfortable in nineteenth century German thought, and a brace of other intellectual and spiritual schools.
They that have grown weary, however, of the tales of Western religion and the theories of Western philosophy might well be served by visiting the same ideas pronounced in the vocabulary of another cult and culture, reading perhaps from the Hindu Vedas and Upanishads. They may well find themselves rediscovering the truth and validity of their own cult and culture in the truth and validity of another wherein the same items are merely enunciated with that which will be experienced as an expanse and a freshness of flavours that intellectual dietary familiarity has sapped from the Western tongue. We are a race of tongues, Homo sapiens [wise man], but sapiens means not so much wisdom as a palate, an acquired taste for wisdom. Just as one grounded in a diet characterized by Sunday dinners of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and steamed vegetables will be gastronomically startled awake with the same items transformed to the taste in a vindaloo and aloo-gobi, and thereby also opened to the rediscovering and savouring of the tastes of one’s own native diet, so too will they that venture to the religions and philosophies of other cultures find not only the foudroyant of the new, but the calm assurance of one’s own history and its intellectual validity. Of course, experience, and especially cross-cultural experience, changes everything, and everyone’s universe will become the tad larger.
If one would be a missionary, if one would reach out to others, one needs be an adventurer first, xenial and open-minded.