When the survival of a species depended on and still does on its social construct and its very evolution has been defined by the connected civilizations it fosters, it is indeed difficult and, nearly impossible for an individual of the said species to be, well, an individual. A introvertive, introspective, deeply contemplative, individual, a loner if you will.
It is hard to shake the shackles of such carefully constructed social bonds and norms. The mind, even if it does come up with a quasi original thought, immediately rushes to get some form of validation from the herd. If not instantly available as likes on fb, it searches through the yellowed books of yore, looking for validation. Not seeking such validation is viewed at times as fool-hardy, and more often as arrogance. But such adjectives are immaterial when the quest is nothing material.
Getting to the core of things is a one way, one-foot-wide path. Nothing that has been said before, nothing that is being said around matters. You cut the thorns and grass directly ahead, or trample on them if you will, and forge ahead. It does not matter in the very least if there is a vast forest fringed with a vast ocean around you. All that is immaterial. For all that is around you is but an extension of what is ahead of you, an extension of the fractal of the core of things.
The knowledge of the core of things is already within us, even if not consciously so. It is our awareness of it that lags behind. We flounder looking for it outside, while the outside is by design, but a complex metaphor. Not everyone’s thought processes lead on to the next step and then to the next and then the next. Some stop at the very beginning, accepting some pre-constructed paradigm, some venture out a bit more, but then give up and settle on some hybrid philosophy.
It is only the loner who forges on – and even if the loner’s goal is not at hand yet, every rest stop has a sense of contentment, of a part accomplished by the self and self alone. For in this journey in search of the self, what matters is but the self. Everything else, needs to be shelved.
The Naked Soul 