“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”
Okay! there you are, the wonder of this universe! Extremely conscious, self referencing being. I am glad I was able to get your attention amidst all those unfinished tasks and goals you have set for yourself. Don’t be surprised, it’s not that hard to predict it - don’t you see? Every conscious being in today’s world has goals and deadlines for himself, trying to win, trying to get rewarded. Some may seek for external rewards and some for internal reward, which is just a feeling of accomplishment which enables him to keep moving.
But why do we run away from our self? I mean, we are constantly busy working on a goal or being entertained - either way, we are trying to escape from being with our self. I have done that myself, being with one’s self is hard, queer questions crops out of nowhere, questions like “what is life?”, “what am i doing here?”, “Is there any meaning to my life at all?” etc etc. Those are hard questions, it’s better to be entertained than paying attention to such questions isn’t it? I am sure everyone had encountered these questions at some point in our life, mostly in our adolescence.
I am not going to talk about the answers to the questions, but rather emphasize the importance of the questions and how we react when those questions are thrown at us. According to me, people can be categorized into 3 types based on how they react to the existential questions:
Heroes
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane” — unknown
Heroes are people who never give up asking the questions even if it costs them their life. Most of the heroes are frowned upon, hated or even killed by the community for their radical beliefs and ideas but the same community worships the heroes of the past like we do worship/admire the heroes of our past. Heroes usually renounce dogmas and doctrines passed onto them historically, they prefer to find their own answers, they are not followers, they are leaders, they believe in absolute certainty and proofs.
Pythagoras, Plato, Godel (to name a few) are heroes who applied their minds towards absolute certainty and sought after objective truths.
Sheeple
Sheeple are people who always wish to follow, they are not comfortable seeking answers to questions about life themselves, they worship doctrines and dogmas accepted by the majority just because it gives them a sense of hope and security free of cost. They like to compete in the rat races and run after materialistic possessions, They do charity and show compassion believing that they will be rewarded for it by God when they go to heaven. They believe in heaven and hell with absolute certainty, they take pride in their humble behaviors, they renounce all heresy and feel remorse to even talk about it. they become martyrs only because they believe in the treasure they saved for their after life, that’s the apex of greed.
Philosophers
Philosophers are the ones who wish to understand reality and wish to sacrifice their sacred cows only for the pleasure of understanding the reality. philosophers are the ones who emerge out as heroes, they constantly seek to learn for the mere pleasure of learning but never get carried away by other’s ideas. one of the important attribute of a philosopher is that he is always skeptic that there’s more to it than that meets the eye. Plato described his beautiful mind very clearly with his “cave allegory”:
The life of a philosopher is not easy, he can’t settle with any answer nor can he give up asking question, he’s not someone who gets satisfied with any model of the reality.
“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Everything is meaningless!” — Ecclesiastes 12:8
The “I”
We understood that how we react to the questions of life, meaning and reality defines who we really are (heroes, crowd, philosophers) but how does it matter if we are heroes, crowd or philosophers, as death is inevitable for all.
To understand that, we need to look deep into where the questions come from? I think the questions originate from our selfish human instinct which strives to exist and exist beyond space and time which we call the “I”. who or what is this “I” that is willing to exist?
Let’s break it apart!
“I” asked “why should I exist?”, if you notice that at the very moment I was asking that question I am indistinguishable from my question. I and the question are one and the same isn’t it? So if I expand the question further, it becomes “why should “‘why should I exist” exist” (by substituting the question itself for I)
Let’s expand it further “why should “why should “why should I exist” exist” exist”
Well, we could keep expanding but never succeed in completing it. If you are from a programming background then you must be familiar with “recursion”. (I would recommend reading “Godel Escher Bach” by douglas hofstadter if you want to further understand how does self originates.)
So all there exists is a nameless, stateless, formless recursion that exist only so it can exist so it can exist……
This willingness to exist is sometimes termed as “instinct”. Isn’t it just a word? What does instinct really mean? We will talk about meaning in general later in this blog, but for now let’s learn together what this instinct means in particular.
I was recently reading about ant pedometer, it is noticed that ants have an interesting ability to find its way back home after it wonders away in search of food. It uses a very interesting algorithm to calculate the number of steps and the direction to map its way back to home. Some curious ethologists conducted an interesting experiment to amputee the ant to see if it affects its pedometer algorithm, surprisingly it did affect the ability of the ant, if the legs are shortened then the ant stops before reaching its intended destination and if the legs are elongated then it walks past its destination without trusting its other senses (if it has any) to conclude it crossed the destination.
The ant experiment makes us think that every “thing” or “being” we see in the universe has a fundamental force inside it which is just enough for it to survive and exist. It’s not the ant which makes the decision, the ant is just physical equivalent or just a mere reflection of another form, something which Platonist called the “true forms” or “platonic realism”
Likewise, we human beings also are driven by a similar force which makes us just a reflection of its abstract form.
“god created man in his own image” — Genesis 1:27
some of us call this force as instinct, we don’t have any choice to suppress it but merely observe it, the one thing separates us from the animals is the ability that we can observe our own spontaneity to a great detail that any creatures.
For instance, we all breath to stay alive but do we breathe forcefully? It’s spontaneous and reflects very nicely the instinct that is willing to exist. Of course you could take control of the spontaneous breathing process either by stopping it or breathing harder, in both cases you cause disharmony and nothing useful. We humans do have control over our life, but there is a greater force that controls us which we only can observe, standing against it causes only disharmony.
Like Marcus Aurelius once said, life is like a dog tied to a cart, we have two choice — either to run with the cart or get dragged with it
Kurt Godel’s ingenious paper “on formally undecidable propositions of principia mathematica and related systems” makes us realize the nature and limitations of axiomatic systems and even human understanding, which is also an axiomatic system using language for propositions and rules of inference (syllogism)
One wonders if the formal system in the physical realm is an isomorphic reflection of another formal system which Plato called the true form?
Let’s turn our attention to an interesting verse in the bible:
“in the beginning there was the word and the word was with god and the word was god” — John 1:1
This verse makes me wonder what does “word” really mean? is the word limited to a specific language? No, I understand it differently than the literal sense of the term “word”.
word is just a physical manifestation of an idea/thought or, or, or, or, a formal system! yes, before time began, there was formal system and the creation of our physical realm is merely an act of isomorphism of the objective form. That’s true, I believe that god created us (or the universe) in his own image which means we are just mere reflections, understanding this reflection is like grasping water with our hand, or looking our eyes with our own eyes which is impossible. However, we could model this physical realm with various models — newtonion model, relativity model etc. But all models are an attempt to understand the reflection and not the truth.
Freewill
If “I” is an infinite reference to itself, does it have free will? in order to understand that, one needs to study the “I” at different stages.
The physical birth of an individual (“I”) as an infant is at it’s purest form, which never asks philosophical questions but rather just lives, it has no faith, no beliefs and no worry - it is purely carried and moved by it’s true nature of “being”.
But when we grow up, the infinite “I” is bombarded with Ideas from all over it which transforms it constantly, but the ideas are actually coming from other “I”s around it which is it’s environment.
Does this mean that an “I” is shaped only by it’s environment? well, everything in nature has a tendency to be in it’s natural state of harmony with it’s environment - just like an elastic when stretched always comes back to it’s original state.
Same way, the “I” which is stretched in all directions by ideas, doctrines, dogmas always comes back to it’s original state if and only if you allow it to or you could keep bombarding it till you stop existing in the physical realm.
Yes, we do have a choice to either allow more ideas, thoughts, worries to stretch our “I”, or allow it to settle to it’s natural harmonious state.
May be this is exactly what the verse mean in the bible — “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”
We never breathe at will, but we could create disharmony by taking control of our breath. meditation is a practice of letting your control to the divine force that moves the universe to it’s harmony.
Having said that, I don’t mean to say that the “I” is what it is at any point in time in a particular environment. well, that’s one way of looking at it, but every “I” has it’s true nature which is bestowed upon it by nature itself, which is the reflection of it’s true form (objective form).
If you take any other “I” and put it in the same environment as the Einstein “I” may not produce another Einstein. Every “I” has it’s true form which reacts based on it’s predetermined true form!
Yes! heroes, crowd or philosophers are predetermined! some of us might shout “unfair”, but remember we are looking at the mere shadow and not the true form yet!
Patterns & Beauty
“Recognize beauty and ugliness is born” — tao te ching
Having talked about “I”, “true forms” and the states of “I” in the previous sections. what does beauty really mean? does it exist only in the physical realm or it also exists in the abstract non-physical realm?
I believe that the beauty is in the patterns. patterns transcend physical realm, patterns give beauty to physical forms. but does beauty exist if there are no observers to stand in awe? No, the beauty pattern includes all actors to produce the awe. yes, beauty exists in the presence of an observer, the observed and the surrounding environment all put together it is a pattern!
“The Observer is the Observed” — Jiddu krishnamurthy
yes, the observer and the observed are not 2 different entities. they are two images of the same entity which we described as “true forms”, the divine “formal system” and now as a “holy pattern”
The evidence for patterns are everywhere in nature, for instance consider the golden ratio, the golden ratio could be seen in beautiful physical entities which means the abstract concept or “pattern” of golden ratio is present in the divine formal system
An interesting revolution in software industry was triggered by the ideas from Christopher Alexander about the profound idea of “patterns” and “pattern language” in his book “the timeless way of building”
Can we understand reality?
This brings us to another interesting question, could we really understand the true nature of the reality? do we have the potential to achieve that? well, we can answer these questions with multiple theories.
Zen theory (tat tvam asi)
Zen is a beautiful philosophy, to simplify the idea, it says that your mind creates reality. The Zen question “a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around, will there be sound?” Is the best question to understand Zen, everything happens in your mind. You believe the thoughts in your mind as reality but how do you know you are not dreaming or hallucinating? How do you know time is a concept created by your mind? So according to Zen, you are what you are looking for, you cannot logically understand your self but realize the eternal truth of tat vam asi
Flatland theory
If you haven’t read the book “flat land” by Edwin Abbott, I highly recommend it. It’s highly philosophical, it would enable you to look at life with a different perspective, it takes you thorough a journey of life in 2 dimension and their inability to comprehend the 3rd dimension. which in turn will make you wonder if is it possible for us creatures living in 3 dimensions (with time as another dimension) can one day transcend into higher dimension to understand the true form of reality?
Existentialism (“Existence precedes essence”)
Another popular theory is that there is no meaning to reality, we just make things up. our awareness of our existence is an accident and we are intimidated with the fact that there is no meaning to life and hence give meaning to the meaningless so we have hope in vain that there is more to it than that meets the eye.
In conclusion, I don’t propose any religion or philosophy, but contemplated on reality with an open unbiased mindset.
