Posted by How far is too far? What is the purpose of actively wishing to get lost, is it to disappear and be out of touch completely?
Is it perhaps the idea that one might never come back, as a “traveller” rather than a “tourist” would be defined? Is it to leave behind the past, the memories acquired over a lifetime?
Or perhaps just to allow life and living to become less of a routine, less predictable? We are a ‘sitting duck’, an easy target, when we never move away from our home, our identity, in this life.
Ouspensky talked about travelling as “searching for the miraculous”; Kafka referred to it as “reaching the point of no return”:
From a certain point onwards, there is no turning back; that is the point that must be reached.
“Getting lost” is really about disappearing from one world and arriving in another.
It is the search for something new, something different, untainted, from what we had before. There is a door we have to go through to ‘get lost’, but it isn’t a physical door, it’s a mental door that we need to step through.
Rudolf Steiner knew that attainment of new, higher, worlds was possible if we moved aside what he called “the guardian of the threshold”, our mental block on change in our life. This “guardian” simply vanished, freeing the path in front of us, when our minds were not held back.
In his book In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky realised that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions that we live in except by an entirely new road, unlike anything known or used by us up to that point. This was a road he was searching for, although he didn’t know where the road was. It was simply somewhere he knew existed, away from what he currently accepted as his reality. He said:
I knew as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin veil of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The “miraculous” was a penetration into this unknown reality.
Perhaps ‘getting lost’ is about finding ourselves, stripping away all the weight and ‘trappings’ that hold us back from stepping through the passage from one world to the next.
There was an expression in the series Westworld where the character says “I’m in the wrong world, where is the door to another world? That door may contain everything we have lost”.
That journey, that passage, is a journey of the mind, from which we might never return, much like Hermann Hesse’s 1932 novella Journey to the East: A journey that left the past behind, stripped it away, left no trace, once and for all.
This is the point we should be striving to reach before we transition out of this life, to remove attachments, addictions, obstacles, entities attached to us feeding off us, that hold us back from achieving the required escape velocity on departure from this brutal world into a new world.
In Paul Bowles’ classic novel The Sheltering Sky, the main character was permitted in the story to recall only one incident from his past, at a dinner party where he was told: “your life is so simple”.
In musing over this incident as he lay dying in the silence of the desert, his view was that those he left behind had elected to place obstacles in their own way, had encumbered themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance, and had no reason to object to his having simplified his life.
He recalled having said with finality: “everyone makes the life he wants, right?”
We can all step through that door into a new world any time we desire, get lost in a new life, but we cannot take the past, our memories, with us, we need to be weightless, free of limitations.
19 March 2025
Piers Morris Blogspot 