Why do believers congregate in groups but seekers of enlightenment walk alone?

Home - Quora Link

It’s more a matter of personal preference for how you want your dogma served up. Dogma, answers which you don’t like but don’t have better solutions for the questions they pose, is more of a concern for the solitary seeker than is for their more social counterparts.

The seeker demands better answers and is willing to sacrifice the support structure of a group in order to find them. The congregant looks at the seeker and sees a whole lot of work for not much added clarity or insight.

I never sought enlightenment but I was always interested in the topic, always willing to read about another way to understand the world and myself. My path took me into and out of the arms of various groups. I’ve also gotten to know solitary seekers from time to time as well.

Meditation is a great tool for insight, it focuses a person’s experiential reality around the questions they have. The seeker experiences the answers to those questions. And once the technique is mastered, it can be used on any question.

What Buddhists will tell you is to always refocus back onto the self. But in the moment, while you’re meditating, while your experiential reality is wrapped around the question you’re trying to answer, the gentle guidance is often lost. The self as object of inquiry is lost, and as such, progress in developing insight halts. The question asked doesn’t involve the self, the resulting answer, composed of experienced reality, also doesn’t involve the self.

Being that the answer is reality that was experienced, the naturally-limited self holds on to that answer. Dogma, strongly held answers to questions that weren’t really that important to begin with, is created in the mind of the solitary seeker. But it’s the seeker’s dogma, so it’s far more comfortable than someone else’s. Eventually the unnecessarily restrictive nature of the dogma will be revealed, perhaps through other means than meditative experience.

The congregant spends more time watching other people, they do not have to spend all of their time locked up inside their own mind. Patterns of thought are witnessed first in others, then in oneself. The dogma is acknowledged and incorporated, with the healthy understanding that the reason dogma exists is largely historical.

A varying amount of understanding exists throughout the congregation of the political nature of the dynamics of dogma. Martin Luther’s reaction to these politics split the Christian world. Anybody can play the role of prophet, prophets work to bring people back to basic, fundamental spirituality, being good to others selflessly. And such people will find themselves favored by Spirit.

So as you can see, it’s not so much about truth, no one approach can ever embody truth, all seekers solitary or otherwise enjoy a healthy relationship with truth. It’s more about how you prefer falsity to manifest.