“Those who seek cannot find, but those who find are the seekers.” Bayezid Bistâmî (r.a.)
I knew this saying, I had a friend who was looking for a treasure. So I came up with a saying out of my heart, with a version of this saying in my memory, inspired by Bayezid Bistâmî (r.a.), whom I had seen in a Leman-like magazine and knew nothing about except this saying:
“He who does not seek will not find, he who seeks will eventually find, but not where he hopes.” I said this to my friend during a conversation.
In those days, he was looking for treasure, and I was looking for treasure. There is a game called Dwarf Fortress on PC, probably in the top 10 of the most complex games in the world. In that game, I was making my dwarves run after imaginary treasures. You know when you know that it’s not what you’re really looking for, but out of sheer habit and the loss of spiritual center at that moment, you can’t stop yourself and old habits come to life. The mind struggles to search for happiness when you stop focusing on the happiness in your heart. It gets stuck in a moment when it used to be happy in the process of learning what the soul doesn’t know, and it tries to find solace by recreating that moment or some derivative of it, or by imagining ways of satisfying an unsatisfied desire related to that moment. Computer games were also very influential in my childhood in opening myself up and developing myself. So computer games are one of my escape routes when I lose my spiritual center.
Hm. Now Witcher 3 came out and I couldn’t play it, Witcher 3 was beyond my computer. Fallout 4 is also coming out. But the last time I played Dwarf Fortress, when the dwarves were wandering around in the castle I built as a personal fantasy artwork, I started to feel that the temporary happiness I was getting from the game was coming to an end. When you start digging below a certain depth in the game, there is something called Hell, let’s see Hell, let’s see Hell, these dwarves have worked for so many years, they have made so much metal armor and weapons, they have trained in their camps, let’s see the bottom of Hell and get rid of it 🙂 I dug and dug, I couldn’t reach any result.
Yes, there is also Mount and Blade Bannerlord coming out. I think I will want to taste all three games I mentioned. But how much I will get caught up in it and how much it will be a matter of escape and not a matter of heart, as far as I have learned so far, will depend on my efforts to stay in my heart. I don’t know if God is preparing a lesson for me, after all, doesn’t he create everything?
I will say, in short, that friend was searching for treasure in the mountains through codes and he couldn’t find it. But he was looking for it. He believed that treasure would bring him happiness. But I also knew that years would pass and he would struggle and he would not find happiness in his search for that treasure in the same way as I experienced accelerated dwarf fortress. But this is probably what he would find. A disappointment, and then if he continued his search, he would find that happiness comes from God, it comes from the heart, it comes from love, compassion, and that people who confuse temporary worldly experiences with this love think that happiness comes from experiencing the worldly object, but the truth is that the source is actually in God, that it flows from the depths of the heart into this realm, that it pervades everywhere, that is, he will not find it where he hopes, but he will find it in the end.
“He who does not seek will not find, he who seeks will eventually find, but not where he hopes.” Erdal Bora, inspired by Bayezid Bistâmî (r.a.).