“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

I was thinking this evening: “what happens to somebody when they get to know everything? Everything, as in, they reach the endpoint of a crucial and paradoxical question. The question itself might differ from person to person. For some, it might be “Is there a God?” For others, it could be “Do we even exist?” Basically, the same kind of questions that messed with the heads of ancient philosophers, gave them headaches that lasted for years, and in some cases, might have even driven them to their deaths.

I started thinking a bit more – and loads of examples came to my mind. The first one was Paulo Coelho. I’ve read The Alchemist and The Fifth Mountain both as a 14-year-old kid and again as a 17-year-old teenager. The difference between those readings was pretty significant. When I was 14, The Alchemist felt like nothing more than a boring, simple story of a shepherd searching for love and treasure. The Fifth Mountain was just an interesting story about a prophet forced to flee his country and who finds shelter in a widow’s house. But when I reread them this year, the stories felt completely different.

I realized: even though the books are simple, sometimes overly simple, Coelho knows something. He knows the answer – or at least his answer – to that crucial question. I was impressed. I took a lot of lessons and wisdom from The Alchemist. It felt deeper than it had before.

But after sitting with these thoughts for a while, I came to a different conclusion. Maybe Coelho doesn’t actually know the answer to his crucial question. Maybe he’s not even close. I read about his life and found that he didn’t seem to suffer the kind of headaches, breakdowns, or social alienation that usually accompany the search for the truth and the answer. He lived, for the most part, a pretty normal life. So my conclusion? Coelho wasn’t enlightened – he was educated. Very educated. To write what he wrote, he must have studied religions, traditions, stories – Islam, Christianity, Judaism, maybe even mysticism. So I made a kind of 1-10 scale in my mind:

1 → the person who has zero idea about the crucial question
10 → the person who has fully unlocked the answer to the crucial question

I placed Coelho somewhere around a 7 or 8.

Why not 9 or 10? Because I’ve read people who were at 9. People who haven’t cracked the full answer, but who have gotten close. Very close. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Augustine – at least on some level. These were people circling their “crucial question” with intensity, so close to cracking it that their lives started to collapse. The closer they got, the more miserable they became. Their contemporaries didn’t admire them; they were seen as maniacs, outcasts. Nietzsche, for example, wrote over a dozen books – The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science, and many more – but barely any of them made him famous while he was alive.

Coelho, on the other hand, found global success in his lifetime. His books got translated into dozens of languages and read by millions. Who lived the “better” life? Coelho, clearly. But does that mean not knowing the answer is better? Not exactly. Because knowing the answer – or almost knowing it – can ruin you. Either you know nothing and stay comfortably around 7 or 8, or you make it all the way to 10. Anything in between, especially 9, can be unbearable. (And maybe it’s not even us who decide where we are on that scale – maybe it’s the scale that decides who we are.)

Then comes the obvious question: how do I know that people like Nietzsche or Heidegger were 9 and not 10? My answer to myself seems pretty simple – people at 10 don’t live in misery. And people at 10 don’t write.

Think about it: those who reach the answer to their crucial question don’t need to write books about it. They don’t need to argue or explain. They go into peace. They’ve found their truth, their purpose.

Examples? The ones that come to mind are Prophets. Jesus (PBUH), Muhammad (SAW), Moses (PBUH) – none of them really wrote books themselves. Their words and actions were recorded by others. And while their lives weren’t free of pain, they didn’t end in the same kind of confusion or torment as the philosophers. Their moments of doubt were resolved – directly, by God.

So maybe the difference is this: writers like Coelho stop at education. Philosophers like Nietzsche collapse at the edge of discovery. And Prophets – they reach the end.

Why was I even thinking about this in the first place? Maybe because sometimes I wonder which level I’m on – or if I’m even on the scale at all. It feels like most of us live somewhere between 1 and 7, distracted, entertained, half-aware. But every once in a while, when I read or think too much in silence, I catch myself brushing against that higher territory. And it kinda scares me. Because I’ve seen what happens to those who get too close.

The real paradox is this: part of me wants to know, to reach that final answer, to stand in the same peace as those prophets. But another part of me is weary of ending up like Nietzsche – burning out at 9, trapped in a place where you see the outline of the truth but never the whole of it. Maybe that’s why I respect Coelho, even if he’s just “educated.” He stayed human. He didn’t self-destruct. He gave us stories that were simple but carried just enough truth to reach people without destroying himself in the process.

-faiq