Be An Inner Scholar

In all our striving, in our pursuit of knowledge, in our hunger for success, in our yearning for love, we are really seeking one thing. One eternal truth that has lived within us all along.

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Transcript

Tara Westover was born into a strict Mormon survivalist family in rural Idaho. Her father's paranoid distrust of mainstream society meant she never attended school, received medical care, or even had a birth certificate until age nine. Instead of formal education, she spent her days working in her father's dangerous scrapyard, helping her mother's herbal medicine business, and preparing for the end times.

Despite this isolated upbringing, something within her yearned for more. At age 17, having never set foot in a classroom, she taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to pass admission test to go to university. The transition was jarring. She had never heard of the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement, and struggled to understand basic classroom etiquette.

But she persisted. Driven by an inexplicable inner hunger that formal education might satisfy. She went on to earn a PhD in History from Cambridge University, becoming a renowned scholar. But her true transformation wasn't academic. It wasn't just intellectual. It was more intangible, more meaningful, more profound - it was spiritual. She achieved external success that many would envy, but she also discovered that her real journey was internal.

In her memoir "Educated," she writes: "I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the core of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind."

As the Yogis teach, your external pursuits - for education, success, or recognition - are merely vehicles for the soul's growth and self-recognition. Westover’s fierce drive for education expressed a deeper spiritual hunger, manifesting through her pursuit of knowledge and truth.

Like so many seekers before her, she searched the outer world for what could only be found within. Not in libraries, though she haunted them. Not in lectures, though she absorbed them. Not in accolades, though she earned them. What she discovered, what we all must discover, was that the journey outward is always a journey inward. That every book opened, every horizon crossed, every summit reached is but the soul's ancient quest to know itself.

In all our striving, in our pursuit of knowledge, in our hunger for success, in our yearning for love, we are really seeking one thing. One eternal truth that has lived within us all along.