What’s the point of it all?

Third Thesis:  Meaning is found within—purpose is found without.

To most people, the question of whether or not their lives have meaning and purpose are basically the same question.  In reality, however, they are two very different questions with very different answers.  Not recognizing this critical distinction can lead to many wrong choices and negative consequences in life.  What is the difference?  The bottom line is that only you can give meaning to your life, but your life can only have purpose in relation to your place in the greater web of life, in what you do for all of the other lives on this planet, what you do for Life itself.  Meaning comes from the values and beliefs that you imbue all of your experiences with.  It is an internal process.  Purpose comes from you fulfilling your place in the overall scheme of things, finding out what you were put on this Earth to do to move the web of life forward, and then doing it.  It is an external process.  One process can and should inform the other, but they are not the same.

When people look to externals (career, wealth, fame, popularity, etc.) to give their life meaning, that’s when they start making bad decisions and will ultimately not find the meaning they seek. A sense of meaning comes from knowing who you are, what you believe in, and how you should live in this world.  This kind of meaning will only come after much introspection, spiritual seeking, and having experienced the world to a great enough degree that you can then decide what gives your life meaning, why you get up in the morning and why you do what you do.  Who can really be happy and live a meaningful life when the criteria for doing so is that they have X amount of money, or achieve a certain amount of fame (or notoriety), or have certain kinds and numbers of friends?  The answer is no one.  All of these things are not within the power of an individual to fully control.  You do not need to depend on anything external to you for your life to have some kind of meaning, for it to make some kind of sense to you and be worth living.

Another way to look at this distinction is to realize your life can have meaning, but no purpose.  If, through some sort of post-apocalyptic happenings, you were the last person left on Earth, your life could still have meaning, however you chose to define it, but your capacity to have a greater purpose would be greatly reduced.  On the other hand, if you life does indeed have a purpose, and you know what it is and are fulfilling it, that can give your life enormous meaning.  That interplay was what I was referring to by saying that one process can and should inform the other.

We all have to seek both meaning and purpose in our lives, and indeed, it is our highest calling to do so.  We need to seek them together.  We need to find the meaning in our life that we can achieve by finding our purpose and living up to it.  Doing so will give our life the highest level of meaning that it can have.  If we are not working toward the Greater Good, if we are not advancing Life down the road just a little bit, that purpose cannot be found and the meaning our life has will be paltry and small.  Knowing the difference between meaning and purpose is the first step to finding both.

Truth and Consequences

Second Thesis:  No person has to have someone else interpret Truth for them—they can directly experience and comprehend it themselves without any intermediary. 

The essence of the above thesis is that other people cannot present you with the Truth--you have to experience it for yourself.  What I have called “self-evident truth” in my previous blog always has to be derived from and based upon “experiential truth”.  If a belief is not grounded in truths for which you have direct experience, even if it is so grounded through a chain of inference, it is basically free-floating, with no conceptual framework to support it, and thus likely to be false.  Beliefs and truths that are not grounded in First Principles are the proverbial castle built upon shifting sands.

The negation of the above thesis has caused much harm in the history of religion.  The rapid rise and development of the early Christian Church, for instance, was basically about control.  It was about controlling the population and the way that the Church devised to do that was to teach that you had to come to the priests and clergy to hear the real Word of God, as they were the only ones that had true knowledge of it.  Since they were essentially the gatekeepers of Heaven and an intermediary between you and God, they wielded enormous power over you, which they often exercised for their own benefit instead of for the benefit of your soul.  The Bible was not allowed to be printed in English for centuries, not because of some philosophical precept or blind adherence to original language, but so that the common man could not read it and would have to depend on the clergy to hear it translated out of Latin.  In fact, it was not printed in the English language until Myles Coverdale printed his first complete version in 1535.  If the Bible had been available in English since the earliest days, the power, authority, and income of the Church would have been greatly reduced.  Again, it was (and still is, albeit to a lesser extent) all about control.  Similar examples abound in all organized religions.  This simple fact alone argues for the avoidance of “organized religion” in favor of a personal, individual, and private pursuit.

However, this is not to say that the knowledge of others is useless to us in our own spiritual quest.  While other people cannot present us with the “Truth”, they can be helpful in pointing the way.  Sages and philosophers through the ages have come to realize many profound and important things and the essential meaning of these things can be passed on to us.  However, each of us must assess their ultimate truth ourselves and incorporate these truths into our own meta-beliefs systems in our own way. 

What I’m basically asserting is the simple point of logic that the “Argument from Authority” is always an invalid form of reasoning.  If someone tells you that should believe something because someone else said so (no matter who that someone else is), or because it is written in a sacred book (no matter which book that is), you should in fact believe that it probably is NOT the truth.  In order to be useful to you, any purported truths should be grounded by testing them through your own experience and only then incorporated into your own conceptual framework.  And those statements that are not useful should be discarded.  The essential thrust of that particular tenet of pragmatism cannot really be denied.

There are many paths to the top of the mountain

First Thesis:  If A Way says that it is the Only Way, or that you should try to convert others to the Only Way, then it is to be avoided.  There are many paths that will lead to the same place on the mountaintop of enlightenment. 

Certainty is a strange thing.  We all assume that we want it, we strive for it, we think we have it when we are teenagers, yet when we really get it our mental exploration of the universe stops dead, our belief system no longer grows or evolves, and depending on those beliefs we are certain of, we can become very, very dangerous.  More harm has been done in the world in the name of certainty, usually with regard to religious beliefs, than anything else in the history of mankind.  But we must be certain of something, you may say, or else all is just belief and everything is relative.

Yes, the demand for explanation and reasons must stop at some point else we are faced with an infinite regression into nihilism (as every parent of a young child knows).  But at what point do we stop, what beliefs do we take to be self-evidently true?  Is it OK to be certain that there is a God (however we define that concept), that Jesus was the son of God, that Mohammed was his Prophet, that the Bible is the infallible Word of God?  If these are the kinds of beliefs in which you expect your certainty to reside, you are hitching your wagon to the wrong star.  You are in danger of one day becoming one of those very dangerous persons who can justify almost anything in the name of their religion or their philosophical or moral beliefs.

There are two ways that a proposition can be known with certainty to be true.  It can be known to be true based on personal, direct experience, or it can be assumed to be true because we have decided that no further explanation or reason can be offered in its support.  We will talk about the former (experiential truth) in later blogs.  With regard to the latter (self-evident truth), these should consist only of what I call “First Principles”, which are basically epistemological beliefs about how we should obtain knowledge, what constitutes a good belief, what is the place of intellect verses emotion in our belief system, and things like that.  These kinds of beliefs are what I’ve referred to as a “meta-belief system”.  They are on a higher conceptual level than any particular beliefs about religion, morality, politics, or right and wrong.  Most of the major problems of the world arise when people become certain of these lower level beliefs and start to think that their particular religion is the only one that can possibly be correct, that their particular ethnic group or tribe holds a privileged place in the world, or that anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe is bad.

So what does all of this philosophizing mean in practical terms?  It means that you should respect another person’s deeply held beliefs and not try to change them to match your own.  It means that you should realize that there are portions of truth in all of the world’s major religions and traditions, and also falsehoods.  You should recognize that no one person or faith has a legitimate claim to absolute certitude, that most tenets of religion are based not on ultimate experiential truth but on the cultural framework and traditions in which they are embedded.  The most dangerous religions are those that contain as a central tenet the command that their adherents must go out and actively try to convert others to their way.  These are the “Ways” to be studiously avoided.

It is a common metaphor that we are all striving for Enlightenment, Salvation, Oneness, or whatever you want to call it, which can be seen as the top of a tall mountain.  Each of the world’s faiths and spiritual traditions are a separate path to the top of that mountain, taking the acolyte through all of the cultural, religious, and moral traditions from which that particular faith arose.  But, after many years of advancement and personal growth, they all can eventually take you to the same place.  They all can get to the Truth, shorn of any cultural, ethnic, or personal practices that only serve their purpose to a certain point in the spiritual development of the individual.  And when these ceremonies, beliefs, and traditions cease to serve their purpose, they should be abandoned.  As the Zen tradition states, when you forget yourself completely and become an empty vessel, that is when you obtain True Enlightenment and can then fulfill your ultimate purpose for being here.

The World of Mind

In order to give some nominal structure to our discussions, I will group the ideas to be presented into four basic categories:  The World of Mind, The World of Nature, The World of Humanity, and The World of Spirit.  While somewhat arbitrary, this epistemological organization does allow for themes and discussions to develop organically around different topics and ideas.

By the World of Mind I mean those topics, questions and ideas that relate to how the human mind forms a conception of how things are in the world, of what is true and what is false, what is to be believed and what is to be discarded.  What I would like to suggest here is that if you do not at some point early on in your life step back from any particular belief you may have and take an objective look at how you think people should acquire their beliefs, what constitutes a good belief, what a coherent belief system would look like (develop a solid “meta-belief system” in other words), then you cannot realistically hope to work towards a useful set of beliefs that will be born out in reality and serve you, and others, well.  While it is possible to successfully change your entire conceptual framework later in life, the earlier that you think about these issues, the easier it will be to change course, if that is what is indicated for you. The longer you operate with a particular belief system, the more entrenched it becomes and the harder it is to widen or change that system or to see the truth that may lie outside it.  A belief is like a bone—it ossifies with time and becomes hard and unyielding like stone.

So that’s the general plan.  In my next blog, we will begin our philosophical journey into the transcendental dimensions of the Universe by considering what is perhaps the Big Epistemological Question, whether or not Absolute Truth exists.  If you saw it, would you know what it would look like?  If Truth came calling, would you know to open the door?

In The Beginning...

Deep down in our bones, we all know the truth.  Each of us, every man, woman, and child on the Earth, are products of the Laws of the Universe, so functioning according to those laws must be built into each of us at our most basic level.  The overarching problem of modern man is to enable that elemental pre-conscious awareness of how things are to rise into consciousness so that our logical, analytical mind can use it just as our primitive, animalistic mind does on an unconscious level. 

The Hopi have a conception of Original Instructions, the instructions that God gave all forms of life at the beginning of the World.  These Instructions are the laws governing each creature’s place in the Web of Life that must be obeyed if a being is to flourish.  All beings continue to operate according to their Original Instructions except Man.  We have forgotten those Instructions or have been led away from them.  The basic purpose of this blog is to point people to a path that will lead them back to their Original Instructions.

This blog is offered in the hope that it will help to promote a general widening of the reader’s conception of the Universe, both what it is and what it can be.  We believe this is best approached by seeking an understanding of those ancient, primitive truths that humanity knew before “Modern Civilization” took us away from Nature and from our own true nature.  The ideas we will present in the coming days are a statement of a philosophy and, more than that, a way of being and acting and relating to the world.  While readers will likely not agree with every idea, the conceptual framework that will be presented, when taken as a whole, is self-supporting and coherent as a worldview.  It is in fact the worldview of every group of people that still live close to the Earth according to their original instructions, the original worldview of all of Humanity.

It is somewhat ironic that this blog, entitled "The Thinking Person’s Guide to the Universe”, would have as one of its most important ideas that in order to truly grasp the basic, raw reality of the universe, one must in fact stop thinking.  Being in the moment, perceiving the universe as it actually is, not as we think it to be, is an important spiritual tradition in many cultures.  And it is one that is becoming more and more alien to the culture we find ourselves in today, a culture of noise, communication, music, shouting, a culture that does not recognize the value of pure, simple silence. 

But, before one can be open to this new way of thinking, the mind must first be prepared, prepared to relinquish its control over every waking minute of our lives, prepared to go to sleep when we need it to.  We do that by first using our mind to introduce a new conceptual framework, one that makes sense to our logical selves, one that admits that our thinking can sometimes get in the way of our perceptions of the world, of what it real and true.  Once we have made that leap of the mind, then we can, through trial and practice, turn it off when we need to just be and just perceive rather than to think.  And in those moments we open ourselves up to our real spiritual nature and the true nature of the world we live in.