Lacking the first, you will never seek or see the second. Lacking the second, some part of you will prevent you, at a preconscious level, from becoming aware of the first. To do otherwise is to admit functional helplessness. Some can, but most can’t or won’t.
This is of course the rough outline of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths. It is as important to convince people their houses are on fire as to convince them there is a way out of it. And that first argument is hard to make with people who have been living a certain way for a very long time, and getting along just fine, thank you.
What I see is that many of our obsessive, rigid patterns, originate in antiquated but once useful adaptations to real situations. The problem is that they exist in a space beyond time, and bringing them into time–the present, specifically–is the only way to show them that circumstances have changed, and that something new is desirable, that they have a path either to extinction or improvement.
In some cases, these relics make us tired and old beyond our years. In such cases, allowing them to sleep is quite welcome. It is setting down an unwanted burden.
In others, they are thwarted life energy, and what is needed is an infusion of new energy, of new passions, and new directions.
Most of us enjoy the idea and prospect of travel in the outer world easily enough. We naturally want to go places we have not been, in most cases provided we can then return home to a familiar place and way of being.
Where I–and I think many others–have often erred, is in thinking that changing means going somewhere new and staying there. What I think it really means is learning how to build a much larger, and much safer home. It means expanding the domain of comfort, of surveying new land, finding it congenial, and expanding emotionally and psychologically, such that there is no need of return, because you are already there. You are already welcome. You are already at ease, and feeling safe and known, in a world you in turn know well.
In the past five or six years, I could easily have traveled the physical world with all the money I have spent on personal growth–money, indeed, I continue to spend. But my feeling has been “why go anywhere else, when I don’t know how to be where I already am?”
I have filled by bookshelf with some old Buddhist texts, but my sense is that the path forward for all of us, as it evolves, assuming it does evolve, and evolves in a way consistent with freedom and dignity, will not lie through any historical creed or teacher. It will be an Emergent Property of science, which has done so much in so many realms, but as yet offered us so little in terms of culture and reasons for metaphysical optimism, despite the fact that its methods lead inexorably in that direction, when applied–and this of course has been the problem–with diligence and true scientific integrity and dispassion.
Diogenes would search in vain in most universities the world over, when searching for those who are truly honest when it comes to the nature of reality, and as-yet unintegrated empirical research in domains like the survival of death, and the energetic fields which seemingly connect life with life, humans with humans, and past with present and future.