When people arrive for a Buddhist teaching, to learn to meditate, or to begin therapy, they usually believe they know why they have come. 

They come because they are curious about meditation or Buddhism, because they have read a book, because they want to feel calmer or less overwhelmed, or because they are seeking relief from anxiety, depression, grief, or stress. 

Sometimes they arrive because a relationship has ended, a loved one has died, or success has brought far less satisfaction than they imagined. The reasons are often sincere and understandable. Yet the longer I have done this work, teaching meditation and sitting with people in the therapy room, the less interested I have become in the reasons people give and the more interested I have become in the question beneath them.

What exactly are we looking for?

“To love is to be in a state of perpetual want,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, a line that pierces straight to the heart of our restless condition. Love, for Nietzsche, was not a serene harmony but vital turbulence: the current that keeps existence in motion. To love is to reach, to desire, to yearn for what we can never wholly grasp. It is, in his view, the very expression of life’s creative yearning, the same force that drives the artist to paint, the thinker to question, the body to live.

Love, then, is not peace; it is movement. It creates a gap in the heart, an ache, a leaning, a pull towards the other. Even in moments of deep intimacy, something remains beyond reach: the ungraspable interior of the beloved. We can touch, but not merge; understand, but never exhaust. This distance is not the failure of love but its condition. Love requires the space between to stay alive.

The Buddha often refused to answer vague and unprofitable questions, which he called avyākata, meaning “undeclared,” neither affirming nor denying them. These were not seen as irrelevant but were deliberately left unanswered because they do not directly lead to relief from suffering.

Such questions include enduring speculative puzzles, such as whether the universe is eternal or not, whether the self is identical with the body, whether, upon death, the liberated being continues to exist, or whether there is or is not a soul.

Refusing to assert or deny is not a sign of ignorance. Instead, it is a compassionate and practical response. Engaging in such speculation often causes people to become trapped in mental loops, confusing permanence with impermanence, fixating on views, and polarising eternalism, such as the idea of some permanent essence, against annihilationism, which is the belief that selfhood ends at death.

Both extremes can hinder clarity, tranquillity, and dispassion, ultimately preventing freedom from suffering.

In the Acrobat Sutta, the Buddha presents a simple yet striking image: two acrobats performing a balancing act, one standing on the shoulders of the other. The teacher says to the student, “You look after me, and I’ll look after you. If we protect one another, we’ll perform our tricks, earn a reward, and come down safely.”

The Buddha gently reimagines the scene. “It is not in watching after the other that one protects the other,” he says. “By watching after oneself, one protects the other and by watching after the other, one also protects oneself.”

The convergence of Sigmund Freud's Drive Theory, Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution, and Buddhist philosophy offer a template for understanding human behaviour and consciousness. Each of these frameworks, while arising from different contexts and disciplines, intersects at critical points, providing a perspective on the nature of human existence.