I wish to speak to anyone who attempts to dream of the unimagined. To those that still have a spark that wishes to ignite a fire that burns all that is superfluous, leaving only that which is as strong as diamond. To speak of secrets that are so close that we no longer see them. I’ve spent my life searching for truth so that I may live again. I am not the only one. History is filled with truth-seekers that spent their whole lives dedicated to this quest. So why do the truth’s of the past seem so decrepit and inadequate today? What motivated our ancestors to build the wonderland we live in everyday yet take for granted? I don’t wish to declare any eternal truths, but rather gesture towards a light that can guide any person to their own truths. I’ve had an experience that is so beautiful that I wish to share it with anyone that wishes to see. But you have to really want it. It’s easy to cling to what we already have but if we do so we may lose something greater. I invite the reader on a journey to suspend as much preconceptions as one can muster in an attempt to see that which I wish to share.
To begin my argument, I must do the impossible, get everyone to agree on one thing. I’ll address this point in a later essay, but for know it’s important to know the only way to get everyone to agree is by giving up on such a task all together. But that’s okay if you don’t actually agree. It’s just to get us started so anyone may at least understand where I come from, but we will return to the beginning at the end. Because, like any good point, I cannot just jump to the end. Because the point cannot stand on its own, floating in space relating to nothing, in order to see it we must reach it a step at a time as we work our way up. A good way to visualize this is we all come with a background of knowledge of how we understand the world. Much of our background knowledge overlaps but figuring out what we disagree on and why is a difficult process. If I wish to share something with someone I cannot show them in the same way that I understand it, rather I must relate it in such a way that the other person can understand dependent on their own experience. Even when we look at the same thing we will experience it uniquely dependent on what we associate with each point and from the position we stand. That doesn’t mean we can never understand each other, it just means extra effort must be made in order to experience a point from the perspective of somewhere other than where you stand.

This leads me to my starting point of how we know anything at all. Truth isn’t something that stands alone. Truth emerges from its relations to other things. For something to be true without relating to anything else would be outside of our experience. For example, a philosophical discussion that has been going on for hundreds of years is, are numbers real? This seems like a reasonable question since we use them all the time and when we do it always works. 2+2 always equals 4. But what gives math its validity? One can speculate about metaphysical possibilities, but realities outside our experience are fundamentally completely unknowable. Numbers for human beings are as real insofar as when we use it, it works. Pragmatism is the highest truth that can ever be attained by us limited humans. Pragmatism says we only know things insofar as it helps us accomplish a goal. If you need to use a nail and all you have is a rock then the rock is a hammer. There is nothing inherit that gives it its hammer-ness, there are merely better and worse hammers. A good way of understanding this conception of truth is imagine a pawn in a game of chess. What’s the meaning of a pawn? It can move forward one square at a time and captures pieces diagonally. Now remove the pawn from the game. Now what does the pawn mean? From this perspective you would be talking nonsense because it no longer has any meaning since all of its meaning is derived from the context of the game.
So what does this mean for humans? It means we only know things insofar as they have helped us survive and reproduce. But in certain situations this can give you a pretty queer definition of truth. For example, can porcupines shoot their quills? The correct answer is no but maybe not from the perspective of our ancestors. Back when our ancestors lived in trees we had a very small conception of the world. You can quickly see the evolutionary advantage of acting as if porcupines could shoot their quills since you would be more careful about keeping their distance. It’s possible for humans to act around something that is objectively false but breeds a greater truth. The other crucial part of this reasoning is to understand that the mere acting towards something that is objectively false isn’t experienced that way in the moment. On the contrary, it feels quite right. That is to say, that we experience the lie as if it were true. This psychological truth is a fact that is so rarely recognized by us moderns. To give an example, there are primitive humans that have a daily ritual to facilitate the rising of the sun every morning. The fact that their actions have no causal relation to the movement of the sun is irrelevant since, psychologically, they feel and experience the world as if they do. Can you imagine? Have you ever felt a feeling so great that you felt like you could literally move the sun? Today we feel the weight of consciousness to be almost unendurable. We pessimistically assume we know better and to feel such vigor must be dependent on a lie or narcotics. Jung outlines this point in his essay on The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man:
How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the universe…Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.” (Carl Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man)
What separates us modern’s from the primitive? Is it our technology? Our governments? Our ethics? Though all of these are true, fundamentally what differentiates us from our ancestors are our presuppositions. From these roots do our ever-reaching branch of information grow. What would the fact that the universe is expanding mean to a 3rd century Chinese women? Or the concept of evolution for a tribal man in ancient Africa? These facts would be cold, hollow, and straight wrong from their perspective. It wouldn’t mean anything since it didn’t relate to their way of life.
This understanding of a person’s experience of the world dependent on the presuppositions of the day shed light on how our ancestors acted the way they did throughout human history. Specifically religion which seems so foreign to us to be motivated by such strange rituals. Why would anyone base their lives on such unbelievable books? It’s much less surprising when you look at the experience of an individual person since to them it would be common sense. When the entire world is telling you the same story and reaffirming its validity to believe otherwise would be foolish! The presuppositions of the current times colors your vision so you’re more likely to see that which you’re looking for. If you perform an animal sacrifice and you have a bountiful harvest then that is evidence for its validity. But if you have a poor harvest then your sacrifices obviously weren’t pleasing to your deity. Whatever framework that we use for interpreting the world you are more likely to find what you’re looking for. That’s because your presuppositions filter out anything that doesn’t fit because it’s not relevant. We’re forever bound by our framework, looking at it from within it. Like a bird analyzing its cage, we cannot reach beyond it. But we know its not fixed. History tells us that quite clearly. Just looking at the various ways people view the world today tells us that. Because it’s not fixed and clearly could be better why don’t we do something about it?
We think of ourselves as so enlightened as not to kid ourselves with silly superstitions like our ancestors. Today we have science, that miracle of the rational enlightenment that hosted man from the muck of religion into the sphere of pure reason. Because of this we arrogantly assume we can know things for certain. But this certainty has made us question the very meaning of life itself. This rational skepticism is a natural byproduct sprouting from the core that gives science its validity. The unquestioned religion of the day is that of causality. That anything that acts has a cause. This powerful axiom has given us all the miracles of the modern day from computers, to bridges, planes, and bombs. It seems so self-evident once put into practice that to question it makes one a fool. As powerful as it may be it has yet to save us from ourselves. Our ancestors explored the world of spirit, hoping that if only we could perfect our souls would the world be redeemed and heaven would be re-instantiated on earth like it once was in the Garden of Eden. But the years went by and nothing seemed to change. The world was as decrypted and wanting as it was in the past. So we switched our collective gaze outward in the hopes that we may be redeemed by the material world. The birth of science sprouted from our search for the philosopher’s stone, that divine substance that could turn metal into gold. But now it’s been hundreds of years and though we are much more comfortable do we still believe that the material world will save us? Will there be a day that we know enough about matter that everyone will have enough and we will finally be happy? Dostoevsky plays with this idea in his book, Notes from the Underground:
Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself — as though that were so necessary — that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object — that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated — chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don’t know?
This addresses a crucial question that we so rarely ask ourselves. What do you really want? If you could have anything what would it be? Sex, fame, and fortune? Of course we know the right answer is no, but that doesn’t make these typical vices any less alluring in the moment. We’re weak willed creatures after all. But that’s okay, in this thought experiment we’ll give ourselves no limits, including an infinite amount of time to do as we please. What would we do? Well, most of us would start out getting as much hedonic pleasure as we could! But of course, we would get bored after enough orgies and being surrounded by nice things so we would probably start exploring the world. Given enough time we would have uncovered every corner of the globe, read every book, and talked to every person. Eventually the world would deteriorate and we would be floating in space exploring the beauty of the cosmos discovering all that it has to offer. Given another many billions of years the stars around us would all begin to die until there was nothing left in the universe except empty space and yourself. And after seeing, doing, playing, and creating everything there is to see, do, play, and create you would no longer resemble man but be closer to a god, and you ask yourself, “Is that it? Is that really what I want?” and if the answer was still no you would create some more universes to play in until everything imaginable and unimaginable had been done an innumerable amount of times and then you ask yourself again, “Is that all that I want?” And when the answer is yes, when there is literally nothing else to do you would be like the Buddha, sitting on his lotus flower, infinitely content for an infinite amount of time with nothing left to do.
Such a fantasy doesn’t seem relevant to our day to day lives but it reveals some wisdom that can give our lifes a little more spirit. What does the infinite lack? Limitation. If that doesn’t mean anything to you that’s okay. I mean to use it as a segue into a perspective that is rarely taken but is always implied in everything that we do. Where did we come from? At the beginning of time and the universe the only logical answers is either something was created from nothing or everything has existed forever. And now we are matter that spontaneously became away of itself and is now looking back at the universe we sprang out of wondering what should we do? And the longer we meditate on these facts the stranger life becomes. Things appear so normal and even mundane in our day to day life but isn’t it much more extraordinary the closer we look at it? The complexity that surrounds us in nature and culture, so many moving parts bound together by the fabric of reality. The assumption that everything has a causal relation can never answer the fundamental question of how the universe could ever come into being. And this is a shame since it colors our vision in such a way that we take our very existence for granted. We don’t believe in miracles yet forget that our very existence is evidence contrary to that claim. And though I type these words knowing they are true I still do not fully understand them because if I did I would be in awe. Sometimes we are reminded of the awesomeness of life from experiences from nature, love, drugs, or even something as small as seeing the light shine through your living room window just right. This heightened experience that is so meaningful inevitably fades away and we are left in an all-too human state to ponder the validity of such an experience. But the experience of meaning is a biological fact that we too quickly like to explain away with reductionist arguments. To say that meaning is a by-product of evolution would be an accurate claim but to say it is just that is to arrogantly assume that we know enough about the world to make definitive claims to truth. I’d rather leave the question open.
Beyond any claims of truth, belief, creation, history, the infinite, happiness, and experience none of it really gets to the point. We are alive and that is a fact. The value of life is something still to be determined. In order to know for certain we would need a perspective outside life and death. But the value of something is implicit in our actions. We make assumptions in the world since it’s too complicated so we need them to act. When we do something that we know to be wrong it means we have made worse assumptions than we need to do. And based off our conception of truth earlier we know our assumptions don’t have to be right, they can even be wrong and we’ll get along in the world better than before. This relativity of belief can shatter our conceptions of truth but it doesn’t have to. It can breed a higher conception of truth where we can act our things we don’t know in order to make it known. Because if you act as if life is valuable you create a world where that proposition is true. And we can use that to lessen the suffering across time. Because if we think about how our world came to be as amazing as it is we can see that it’s when our ancestors acted as if life was valuable and now we live with much less suffering than our ancestors every could have imagined. And we don’t know how good we could make things if we really aimed at it. We act towards an infinitely receding horizon. In a hundred, thousand, million, or billion years we won’t even resemble what we previously identified as “human”. And we have no more time to think. Now is the time to act. The world is changing faster than we can keep up. So when high level decisions about AI, space travel, and weapons of war are being made you better hope they are made for the betterment of everyone or else we could end up living in a place approximating Hell…
