The moment of embracing an answer is a choice each individual must face, an assent of will and integration of meaning and future destiny of action that is most akin to love. I do not deny that a good teacher makes the answers and the questions clearer to the hearer. But the best teachers are those that clarify and heighten the gulf that must be crossed, that show what different lands and paths lie before us and the distance between them. They cannot carry us across. It is more than the mere answering of a question that ends our pursuit, it is a question of who you will become. To what will your soul belong?

The more you understand of those divergent destinies, the harder the choice may become for the hearer. And for those bad teachers who merely want followers, such hesitation is undesirable. So they offer us simple answers and suppress our questions. They fancy that their truths belong to them, and by them they may alloy others to their cause and ends. But to such creatures as us, trapped in time, small within our particular temperaments and abilities and backgrounds, any truth of any significance is a master we submit to, not a servant we control. And that submission is itself terrifying for such a little, mortal creature, with but a single life to spend on the outcome. Choice and risk become paralyzing if we contemplate them too much. We cannot forsee the future and know the consequences of all we do and believe in the moment. And the larger the question is that we try to answer, the more faith it demands of us to submit our future to it.

The lives of all thinking humans depend upon risk and faith, and the more they think well, the more faith that will be required of them, not less. Contemplation, teaching, learning, and analysis are wondrous tools, but they will not save us from the hard choices that must be made or their consequences. They will not and should not make the choices easier and more thoughtless, less of a risk, less of a threat or benefit to your destiny and identity. Rather, they increase it, because we see more clearly what different paths we choose, what different gods we submit our destinies to, whose nature and ends we are unable to completely fathom, what different people we may become. True knowledge is not an end to our journey, not a shortening of the path or a relief of the burden of consciousness. It is the mountaintop view across infinite lands that lays the true nature of it and the limits of our own scope and identity before us.

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But there is a secret hidden within this burden, that by carrying it, it also carries us. By lifting it we are lifted. And the greater the burden and journey we undertake, the more terrible the understanding of the load that we bear, the greater the wind that lifts beneath our wings, and the more destructive are its collapses and falls. Being alive is a fearful thing. To be aware, to be conscious, even more so. But even the deformity is lays upon us can render us beautiful, the weariness it lays upon us provoke our strength. A small thing like us should not be able to shoulder so great a weight. Yet somehow, as we lift it, as we lay our own tininess against its vast, dark expanse, we find that we are not destroyed, but take root in it and grow into it; by giving in we gain, and by lifting are lifted. Somehow, in seeking our own greatness, we remain small; in seeking our own smallness, we become great. “For whoever would save their life will lose it. And whoever loses their life out of love for me will save it.”

It is not clear why this is so, only that it is one of the paradoxical truths of our existence. Good teachers help us to confront the mysteries of existence with courage and understanding. Their lives and knowledge and faith can inspire us. The learning we gain can give us strength to continue on our path, or strength to turn aside and seek a new one. True knowlege is closer to perspective than it is to a bridge, as the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. It is only when we see our own smallness that we have the chance to become great. Knowledge isn’t the path or the choice, it’s merely the ability to see the path and understand the choice.

So when we seek teachers, we should not seek only those who have all the answers, but who have all the questions. We should not seek only supreme confidence, but supreme humility. Answers and confidence bought with questions and humility will yield far greater riches than easy pride. And pride can easily lose us the fruits of knowledge bought dearly in more humble times. That is why the pride and confidence of the saint is not in themselves or their deeds, but in their god. Anything less would make the world as small as themselves, inflate their self-regard, subvert their understanding, and end their journey of growth. The fundamental nature of learning is acknowledging a world greater than yourself. So pride is your greatest enemy, and a teacher filled with it is a danger to themselves and their students.

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The attendant virtue, that is sometimes forgotten when it is not applied in error to ourselves or made a false god, is reverence. Those who only seek to dismiss and demystify and humiliate all knowledge and deny it its due are not the friends of knowledge, nor do they help you to cross the gulfs that consciousness demands of us. Their humility is a false humility that finds in no one nor any thing anything larger than themselves worth reverencing. This kind of humility is only pride with a false face, for like pride it admits no claims on itself, nothing to which it must bow or conform to, no burden that must be borne.

Humility is a virtue for humans, because we are small and limited, and it does us well to recognize that and correct some of our tendency toward personal hubris and opens us up to the world. Reverence is always a virtue when applied to the greatness of truth, beauty, and goodness. It becomes a beast only when we overestimate it in regard to ourselves, or when we misplace our appreciation of its greatness in our own persons, rather than in what we serve, or raise some part of it that we can grasp to ultimate godhood, and ignore all other truths and goods.

Only when it becomes our slave does knowledge become a tyrant. Only when we make our share of it a god does it become a devil. And so, those who seek to humiliate the truth serve only to make tyrants themselves. To deny the inherent terror and tyranny of truth, the vastness of its claims upon us, is to deny its proper relation to us and our chance to grow by embracing it.

It is surely a strange fact that we can be so easily subverted by our greatest truths, misused. So much of life and proper thought is bound up in taking care and finding balance, in proper approach and the attitude of our own souls, as much as content. For we have a boundless capacity to use the good for our ends, and improperly so, and so add a new layer of confusion on top of the struggle for knowledge we already face.

And that, one might say, is the pursuit of wisdom. More than mere knowledge, wisdom recognizes that what you do with truth, how you use it and respond to it, how it changes you, is at least as important as knowledge itself, and is far more of an art of great difficulty. Anyone, after all, may know a thing. But it takes a truly wise person to recognize what it really means, when and how to use that knowldge, and how they must change in light of it.

Wisdom is the journey that knowledge charts and the leap of faith (or love) sets us upon. It is the actual walking through the land we find rising before us, day by day, step by step. That is why the words of wisdom are life. Wisdom is knowledge become a living thing. And it’s life within us if the life that lifts us up.