The target cannot be hit

You have been aiming at certainty. Certainty that you believe, certainty that the thought meant nothing, certainty that you are safe.

Here is the difficulty, and it is not a motivational point, it is a structural one. Certainty about your own inner state is not something that can be obtained. There is no instrument for it. You cannot open yourself up and read off the value, and neither can anybody else, which is why no answer from any scholar has ever quite done it.

So the search has not failed because you searched badly, or because you did not find the right book, or the right shaykh. It has not ended because it is not the kind of search that terminates.