The Eternal Riddle

At the core of human existence lies a single, ancient triad of questions, three whispers that have haunted every mind capable of self-reflection:

Who am I?

Where did I come from?

Where am I going?

These are not idle curiosities. They are the primal riddle, the uninvited guest that arrives the moment a child first senses the “I” behind their eyes and never truly leaves. No one escapes them. They wait patiently in the background of every life, sometimes silent for decades, sometimes roaring like thunder in a single sleepless night.

Most of us feel the weight of the riddle and quickly look for shelter. We borrow ready-made answers, religious doctrines, scientific materialisms, spiritual teachers, ideologies, or cultural scripts, anything that lets us close the door and get on with the practical business of living. And this is not weakness; it is survival. A mind paralyzed by the abyss cannot raise children, build cities, fall in love, or laugh at a joke. Prefabricated answers are scaffolding. They allow the construction of a workable self and a livable world.

Yet life has a way of kicking the scaffolding out from under us. A parent dies. A child is born. A diagnosis arrives. Love collapses or, just as brutally, ignites. In those moments the borrowed answers ring hollow, and the riddle returns louder than before, stripped of politeness. The universe leans in close and asks again: Do you really know who you are now?

Some people spend the rest of their days fleeing the question a second time, patching the old scaffolding with stronger dogma or numbing it with distraction. Others, and they are rarer turn around and face it. They become obsessed. They read the works of the philosophers until the pages fall out, sit in silence until the body aches, pray or meditate or think until thought itself breaks. They argue with priests, mock gurus, doubt scientists, and finally argue with the empty air. They scream into the void, demanding an answer that no book, no authority, no tradition can give.

And then, for a few, truly only a few the void screams back. Not with words, but with a sudden, wordless recognition. The riddle dissolves, not because it has been solved like a math problem, but because the one who was asking and the mystery that was asked about collapse into the same indivisible reality. This is what humanity has always called enlightenment, awakening, gnosis, satori, the peace that surpasses understanding.

It cannot be given. It cannot be taught. No master can hand you their realization any more than they can hand you their digestion. Another’s map may point you toward the wilderness, but the journey through it is radically, achingly alone. It is walked in doubt, terror, grief, and a strange wild joy. Most who set out turn back or get lost. A handful keep walking until the path, the walker, and the destination reveal themselves as the same thing.

The good news, the terrifying, exhilarating news is that the door has never been locked. The void has been whispering the answer all along, gently, ceaselessly, to anyone willing to fall silent enough to hear their own name spoken by silence itself.

The riddle can be lived through to its end. Not by following someone else’s footsteps, but by daring to leave none at all.