Two huge challenges
image: fort photo
Two questions, among the many, that are huge.
How can a person to know anything? And how should they try to live?
To the former there are several answers according to various traditions. The most compelling for me is the empirical one, that is according to one’s experience. The only things you can know with certainty are those things that you have personal experience of. The call then upon any of us is to seek out experiences and to refine our own appreciation of the things that we encounter. This is not hedonistic sloganeering. The object is not to experience things merely for the sake of experiencing them, but to take oneself upon a progressive journey, one that leads somewhere and has definite objectives.
To the latter there are also many answers. Here I have alluded to The Good Life. The idea of right thought, right action or right being and right doing. Right in this context meaning most appropriate according to the level of experience and development of the individual. Not a pejorative right as opposed to wrong.
With age comes wisdom and the follies of one’s youth become clearer with the passage of time. An interval needs to pass between the action and the perception of the action in order for the membrane of connectivity to become weaker and have less of a hold upon you. Doing the right thing is often difficult at the point of issue, so much of the journey into conscious being is about shortening the gap until there is integrity between the act and the motive. The act being the action and the motive being the reason why.
We live in a setting that clearly makes huge allowance for us given our apparent inelegance. We seem to make a mess of things and I suppose that is consistent with where we as a species or a race are in terms of our collective development. We bicker and fight, conflict with one another and generally seem incapable of harmonious co-existence.
Vast fields of assumption are cultivated by our indifferent and irresponsible attitudes. Pinpricks of light shine through the small acts of being that we are privileged to enjoy yet these things are subject to the whim of fortune and we proceed in an ever more precarious way given the continued unfolding of what we know.
If I look to a God for answers I see that there is none. There is no God that fits the monotheistic archetype, there is no omniscient being whose wisdom is imparted to me through special communion. Our age is finely balanced between the opposite ends of a pendulum’s trajectory. On the one hand there is a self serving hedonistic attitude and on the other is genuine opportunity to break through the membrane of the chrysalis that the human race is in.
A God that provides templates of stone and words to the wise is no longer an option. That may have been appropriate for a human race in it’s collective infancy but the landscape we occupy now is vastly different from the theme park that the monotheistic traditions sprang forth from.
There is only oneself in the Universe and the implications that arise from that. There is absolute consistency in the Universe and that is the greatest clue of all. There is an unchanging, inviolate set f holding patterns or templates around which the chains of molecules that form the Universe and the environment that we recognise form up.
We know this, and we know too that from the development of a child into its maturity there are specific stages that it has to go through. Consider the human race as a singular entity, like one person composed from the many billions of us. Each of our experiences is a small contribution to the aggregate of what the human race is. Where do you think, extending the growing child analogy, we are?
I return to the opening questions, how can a person know anything? And how should they to live? There are answers and you will come to your own, what are they?