The Challenge
After having envisioned the evolution of the brook essays to a comprehensive philosophy of life expressed through action and the development of the BrookMaster game, I was still faced with the task of having to do it!
Upon sitting down at the start of my sabbatical to review what we had came up with, two main observations arose to prominence within my mind. At first thought these observations appeared to be contradictory. On the one hand, there was still an overwhelming amount of materials that had to be sorted through in order to reasonably pursue the task at hand. On the other, there appeared to still missing, from all the material in front to me, some key elements which I could not then readily identify.
Relying upon my experience with matters of collecting analyzing, documenting and presenting information, I was able to convince myself that the first of the tasks was not as daunting as it first appeared. That is to say, although difficult, it was not an unmanageable task to boil down the extensive amount of information that we had acquired into a sensible and useful summary, while eliminating much of the peripheral material.
However, the solution to the second problem, or the answer to the question, what is missing, was not so readily to be found. As it turned out, more that a year elapsed in introspection and reflection before I found a satisfactory answer to this question. The answer, when it was found, was most surprising and even somewhat amazing. The answer to this question was that the very process by which I came to the solution of my problem, in and of itself, was one of the key elements of knowledge that was missing from the mountains of information that I had gathered.
In other words, through an extended process of introspection and reflection, I discovered that what I had been searching for, was the very process of searching in which I was engaged. Another way of saying this is that what I was looking for was not to be found in the information or the “external” knowledge that I had accumulated.
The answer was inside me. And, through introspection, I found it within me.
During this period of introspection, there were brief moments when I felt suddenly inspired and perhaps even “enlightened.” The feelings that I experienced during those moments may be best described as a release, or freedom, of the mind from all its worldly constraints. Time seemed to stop, and nothing but the feeling of exhiliration mattered. It seemed as if life was continuing to flow past me, with complete serenity. Since then I have come across other individuals who have described having had similar experiences. These feelings, I now realize, resemble those attributed commonly to mystics, but which also have been recorded by prominent western scholars including William James, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. My experiences and my continuing feelings about life are even more closely described by the feelings accompanying the peak and plateaue experiences described in great detail by the late behaviorial scientist, Abraham Maslow.
Essays excerpted from The Trilogy, as well the entire Brookmaster Game, can be found in the pages of this web site.
Happy navigating and, again, welcome to The Brook!