I was recently invited to do a talk on the Bahá’í Faith by a group called the Religious Quest. They meet twice a month and invite different speakers to explore spiritual matters.

But before I could even start the presentation, they started firing the questions and were really keen to find out as much as possible about the Bahá’ís.

Two ladies said that they had been looking into different religions for the past 40 years called themselves seekers.

So I started the presentation with a story about an ancient Greek philosopher who demonstrated the importance of searching for truth.

One day a young student came to the philosopher asking how he should look for spiritual truth.

Without answering, the philosopher took the pupil to the water's edge and thrust the student's head under the water until he was struggling for breath.

Eventually the frightened student was pulled out of the water and regained his breath.

The teacher then said: "That's how we must seek the truth. With the urgency of the drowning man who seeks the life-giving air."

In the Bahá'í Writings too we find this same sense of urgency when it comes to seeking out the truth.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, son of Bahá’u’lláh, Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, wrote: "The state in which one should be, to seriously search for the truth, is the condition of the thirsty, burning soul desiring the water of life, of the fish struggling to reach the sea … of the lost and wandering ship striving to reach the shore of salvation."

But we don't need to be a philosopher or scholar to seek spiritual truth. The success of our search, according to the Bahá’í Writings, depends upon a person’s ability to seek in a logical and unbiased way.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá went on to say: "… It is imperative that we should renounce our own particular prejudices and superstitions if we earnestly desire to seek the truth. Unless we make a distinction in our minds between dogma, superstition and prejudice on the one hand and truth on the other, we cannot succeed. When we are earnest in our search for anything we look for it everywhere. This principle we must carry out in our search for truth."

Those wonderful people in the Religious Quest group certainly met these requirements, as they were looking everywhere for the truth, even from me! But I think the most important clue about the sincerity of their quest was that even after 40 years of searching they still hadn't given up.