Another Choice

Always there has been, around the quest, the sense of invisible dangers and terrible risks, among which the risk of being misled, misguided and deceived by a will for puissance and control, or a desire to possess, to acquire power.

Thus are our images and our myths peopled with menacing figures, illustrating the numerous ordeals of occult journeys.

***

That the trace of the Quest is constant in the memory of humanity does not however indicate that it has often been encouraged, nor even generally appreciated or tolerated.

Far from it.

For such a search undertaken by an individual member of the group, the clan, the society inevitably questions the established order and the recognized values, thus liable to open a breach in the unexamined adhesion of the consciousnesses. Consequently, in most of the societies through the ages, any person manifesting the wish or the need to embark upon the Quest was soon, if one could not be persuaded to rejoin the common pathways, to be rejected, condemned, banished or exiled.

At all times, ostracism has ever been the group’ ultimate weapon.

***

As if by a very ancient curse, the need for power and the need for truth seem to have in us inextricably and painfully joined, a strange twinship which it is very difficult to resolve.

Ever since death has become our single absolute before which we measure all our relatives, few have been those, few are those still, who manage to free in themselves the need to find truth and unite with it from the need to find power and possess it.

And thus rose and formed the necessity for initiation.

75