As if our survival depends on it
There is a quiet question that never leaves us. It follows us through comfort and hardship, through success and distraction, through belief and doubt. It waits when life is busy and returns when everything goes still. However far we drift, it is there again, asking in its own way: what is this life for, and who am I within it? We may try to outgrow it, replace it, or silence it, yet it returns as faithfully as breath. It feels less like a curiosity and more like a necessity, as though something essential in us cannot survive without touching this deeper truth.
Across cultures and centuries, this pull has taken the form of prayer, scripture, meditation, remembrance, silence. In Gurbani it is Naam, in Christianity the Word, in other traditions simply Truth or Being. The names differ, but the gravity is the same. Human life, left only to pleasure, activity, and identity, begins to feel strangely hollow. We can eat every taste, wear every garment, pursue every role, and still sense that something central is missing. Not comfort, not excitement, but connection to what is most real.
This is why the spiritual quest does not feel like an added interest. It feels like something built into us. We are not only made to experience the world. We are made to turn back and ask what this experience itself arises from. At some point, the surface of living is no longer enough. The mind begins to feel the weight of repetition, the body carries unspoken tension, and a deeper question presses through: is there a way of being that is not just doing and becoming, but resting in what already is?
In our own language of the brain–mind, this is the system sensing the need to return to baseline. Life can run endlessly on residue, carrying forward memory, desire, identity, and reaction from one moment to the next. But eventually the system feels that only a deeper reset brings peace. The spiritual pull is the pull toward that zero point, that neutrality, where perception is clean and nothing extra is carried forward. It is not an escape from life, but a return to the place where life is assembled before the story about it begins.
This is why traditions insist on daily remembrance. Not because truth disappears overnight, but because the world constantly trains us away from it. Each day reinforces that we are what we achieve, what we own, what others see, what we desire next. Without a countercurrent, attention is pulled outward until we forget the depth that holds all of this. Spiritual presence is that countercurrent. Like breathing, it is ordinary, repetitive, and essential. It brings us back, again and again, to what does not change when circumstances do.
Seen this way, religion at its best was never meant to be mere belief. It was a living structure built to protect this remembering. Scriptures were not just teachings but anchors. Rituals were not performances but rhythms. Communities were not clubs but living reminders that life has a centre deeper than survival and success. When those forms become hollow, people drift away. But when life itself becomes hollow, they begin to look back.
This is where many young adults find themselves today. Saturated with connection, yet lonely. Flooded with information, yet unsure what matters. Social media offers endless stimulation, but no stillness. It multiplies identity, but cannot answer who you are. It reacts to pain, but cannot sit with it. For a while, distraction feels like life. Then anxiety, fragmentation, and emptiness begin to show through. What is really being felt is not boredom, but starvation for depth.
So some are returning to churches, to scriptures, to real books held in real hands. Not because the past was perfect, but because it carries something the present cannot manufacture. A language for suffering. A story larger than the self. A truth that does not bend to trends. They are not just looking for advice on how to live better. They are looking for an answer to why they live at all.
In this sense, the spiritual quest feels like survival because, in a way, it is. Not survival of the body, but of meaning. Of coherence. Of wholeness. Without it, life may continue, but it becomes scattered, driven, reactive. The mind grows loud, the heart grows tired, and even joy feels thin. With it, something settles. Not fireworks, but grounding. Not escape, but a quiet sense of being at home in oneself.
Gurbani says that without this living connection, the body is like a corpse, busy yet inwardly dead. Christianity says that gaining the world means nothing if the soul is lost. One’s own insight says that when the brain–mind completes its reset cleanly, awareness appears without residue, and life is no longer burdened by what it carries forward. Different voices, same recognition. There is a way of being that feels true because nothing in it is forced.
This is why the quest keeps returning. Because nothing else finally satisfies the question it answers. We can delay it with pleasure, success, distraction, and noise. But when things fall apart, or when they finally fall into place and still feel empty, it is there again. Not as a demand, but as an invitation. Come back to what you are. Touch the source before the story. Remember what does not age.
Perhaps this is why it feels as if our survival depends on it. Because something in us knows that without truth, life becomes clever but shallow, busy but lost. And with truth, even ordinary living carries a quiet depth that nothing can take away.
Not because something new has been added, but because we have stopped forgetting what was always there.
Across traditions, this recognition has found its voice in many ways. One such voice, from Gurbani, speaks with striking clarity about a life lived without remembrance, and what restores it.
ਗਉੜੀ ਮਹਲਾ ੫ ॥
ਅਨਿਕ ਰਸਾ ਖਾਏ ਜੈਸੇ ਢੋਰ ॥ ਮੋਹ ਕੀ ਜੇਵਰੀ ਬਾਧਿਓ ਚੋਰ ॥੧॥ ਮਿਰਤਕ ਦੇਹ ਸਾਧਸੰਗ ਬਿਹੂਨਾ ॥ ਆਵਤ ਜਾਤ ਜੋਨੀ ਦੁਖ ਖੀਨਾ ॥੧॥ ਰਹਾਉ ॥ ਅਨਿਕ ਬਸਤ੍ਰ ਸੁੰਦਰ ਪਹਿਰਾਇਆ ॥ ਜਿਉ ਡਰਨਾ ਖੇਤ ਮਾਹਿ ਡਰਾਇਆ ॥੨॥
ਸਗਲ ਸਰੀਰ ਆਵਤ ਸਭ ਕਾਮ ॥
ਨਿਹਫਲ ਮਾਨੁਖੁ ਜਪੈ ਨਹੀ ਨਾਮ ॥੩॥
ਕਹੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਜਾ ਕਉ ਭਏ ਦਇਆਲਾ ॥
ਸਾਧਸੰਗਿ ਮਿਲਿ ਭਜਹਿ ਗੋੁਪਾਲਾ ॥੪॥੫੫॥੧੨੪॥
Translation:
We chase pleasure the way animals do,
tethered by the rope of our attachments.
Without living company of truth,
this body is alive, yet inwardly dead —
wearing itself out in endless cycles of coming and going.
We dress ourselves in beautiful clothes,
like a scarecrow dressed up in a field —
a show without life inside.
The whole body stays busy with one thing after another,
but a human life bears no real fruit
if it never turns toward the Name, the living truth.
Says Nanak:
Only those who meet grace
find true company,
and in that presence,
remember and live in the One who sustains all.
Feel free to explore the Guru Granth Sahib:
An Ai-App that explains the Guru Granth Sahib through the Kaur & Singh brain–mind model, revealing the inner structure of Sikh spirituality by connecting Gurbani with consciousness, coherence, and the unfolding of awareness.