This Is What You've Been Looking For

Goodness in thought and goodness in action run side by side. One cannot thrive without the other. It's like chicken and egg. Which one comes first? If I am not good in thought then I cannot do good deeds and if I do not do any good deed then I cannot have good thought. Why? If I do not do good deed, my mind will know it and my mind will always try to escape from it. In doing so, it cannot think or decide unbiasely in future. And these effects are cumulative. That's why good action is a prerequisite for clarity of thought which is in turn a prerequisite for good thoughts. On the other hand, if you do not have the good thoughts or intentions then how can you ever do any good deed to begin with. Again, this is same the problem of chicken and egg. Good thought and good action are circumambulating each other around same cycle and you need a little alchemy to solve the paradox. Just enter the cycle from outside in whatever phase or part (good thought or good action) of the cycle, without thinking too much, such as, in what phase I need to enter, (action or thought), when should I enter, what should be my exact entry point, should I enter barefooted or with shoe, should I do it in the morning or evening and so on, ad infinitum. Just do it, like you go to sleep or walk without thinking too much about detailed of such actions. Just follow the cycle, it will take you to the escalating cycle of goodness of action and goodness of thought, like magic. The intention to be in that perpetual self maintaining circle and the actual action that initiated the start and hence continued circumambulation of the cycle is the secret of that alchemy. In doing so, did you see that you just solved a paradox!!

Now why you need good thought in first place? Your mind will not open completely without good thoughts and actions. You cannot open your mind just by commanding it or ordering it or forcing it. Your mind will only open fully only when you are in the cycle of genuine good thoughts and good action persistently, even in face of self-sacrifice or material/emotional disadvantages. And finally, only when you mind opens fully, it will start to work to fulfill its original purpose, just like a parachute that only works when it is fully open. When your mind opens, it will have diamond sharp edge yet crystal clear clarity. Only with that clear mind, you will begin to see things "As They Are".

Everything is in motion or changing or interacting or transforming into something else.  The rate of changes, although might be slow or fast, but the information or evidences of such changes as recorded in the fabric of the nature itself, where available, is always happening at a Max speed, like a speed of light or if not, at superluminary speed. Motion, however, also implies existence of stillness. Unless it was still, then how come everything is now changing. And it is changing from what? The answer is stillness. Motion and Stillness are the primordial eternal duo.

Now if you consider the entire universe, is it changing? Change means an outside reference against which you compare and contrast the change. How do you measure changes if you do not have anything else outside you. Then how do you know that anything is changing, ever? From the perspective of the entire universe, there is not even a concept of change. Everything is the same and still, forever. Yet, internally, the smaller parts are changing, incessantly, in reference to one another. In this way, the universe is simultaneously still and ever-changing, just with the change of perspective. Things those which are currently changing has an imprinted information/memory of both original and current stillness in the background, even though they cannot perceive that stillness themselves. A good analogy will be a photon and a human. A photon is already moving at the speed of light, hence from its own perspective, no time passes by and hence nothing is happening.  Everything is just still.  But the human sees that the photon is moving very fast, at the speed of light. For a human, nothing is resting, everything is changing. If a photon wants to perceive changes and motion, it has to slow down. It's a paradox! In order to see the changes, ie, changing yourself more, you have to do less changing ie. slow down!  For a photon, if you want to experience time, motion and changes, you have to slow down. In fact, the photon will experience the greatest time, changes and motion if he completely stop. Likewise, we are perceiving the highest degree of changes because we are relatively still compared to photons. For the "time perceiving" purpose, still objects like us are at the highest speed at perceiving and the photons are at the lowest speed. If photon ever wants to do that, then it will face the problems, as we are facing, like causality, and time. The morale of the story is that the universe is simultaneously still and in constant motion, depending on context, both of which are equally valid.

This co-mingling of stillness and incessant changes gives rise to "something". This "something" is just "one thing" but unfortunately named and used as "different things". Because this is just "one thing" but people have treated it as completely different things, people cannot reconcile the difference among them. The difference among them are purely your misunderstanding or ignorance, it will not be reconcilable unless you can see that it is just the same "one thing". The relation of incessant motion against the bigger, more primitive absolute stillness is that "one thing". It has been known as Time, Causality, Memory, Logos, Mind, Physical Laws of the Universe, Karma, Universal Consciousness, Thermodynamics, etc.. The sheeple might call it with different names but the Sages of all ages always knew that, "It's just One".

If you do not think for yourself, but rather try to find the answer by reading other people's work you will never find any real meanings, because the Sages or wise people have something in their mind but write it only indirectly about it, either knowingly or unknowingly. When they do it knowingly, they do it, quite paradoxically, to help you, so that you can find the meaning of life or any other subject matter by yourself. Additionally there are some thoughts or knowledge in the mind of the writer that they themselves do not know how they know it. Even worst, there is a deep paradox at the core of existence that is not amenable to logic, inaccessible to ordinary intuition, and hence not communicable in writings. So, instead they write only the parts of what they know with full confidence but something is always missing from their writing. Words are not really enough to convey what they actually trying to say. One way or another, unfortunately, you cannot have the complete understanding and knowledge of being from the writings of your fellow people, although it might help you as long as you yourself is also thinking and verifying by your best inner judgments (see thought training essay). On the other hand there are some half wise who will deliberately hide the telltale signs or giveaways of their ignorance and will try to pretend as wise as their masters. The only way they can achieve it by obfuscation, difficult sentence and wordings and introducing a bunch of unnecessary and useless new terms to sound erudite. In this way they earn your confidence for their own ego boost and your demise. You will also find some quasi-wise who are just downright imbecile but unfortunately trained themselves to read, write and talk. Those are the real culprit for the confusion in the world if you take those stupid babeler as an authority, unsuspectingly, just because were were taught in the school as blind dogma.

Example: Plato.

Most of the Pre-Socratics came into the same truth but they approached it from different directions so what they were saying is partly true, but truth, nonetheless. It is like the elephant seeing by the binds. Some of the Pre-Socratics actually experienced the truth but only from different side of the elephant so their description seems totally disparate, enough for anybody to reject them altogether, if that person does not have the eyes to see it correctly. Plato, who himself never experienced the reality that the Pre-Socratics experienced, but pretended that he understood what they were trying to say and reconstructed a monstrous metaphysics, quite innocently. This is the problem of not knowing and not acknowledging one's own limitations and folly, and when one tries to hide it. But those who believed Plato as the authority, instead of themselves, are suffering intellectually and they deserve this suffering because it's simply self-inflicted.

On the other hand, instead of using the schema constructed by other people, if you think and observe yourself, you can reach a valid conclusion, all by yourself. After finding the meaning and the conclusion, as you read others sages, you will see that you are Right, too. Only in this way you can have your flower of your own, rather than poisonous schema injected by others, typically in schools. 

Footnote: 

If you don't know the meaning of the word babel, do your homework and read the meaning in context of Tower of babel.

As a human with a limited time to live, we have a constant need for short-cuts in order to be time efficient. This same time constraint is also the driving force for us to ponder about the meaning of our lives, because we will not be here forever, so it is natural to ask where we were and where we are going. Time constraint is the mother of everything in this physical world. Time makes us to think about meaning, and the same time is working against our understanding the meaning of life by tempting us to take short-cuts.

In this culture of post-modernity where real meaning of most of our lives has been long lost, it is hard to find what are the questions that really needs your attention and deserves an answer. Here are some questions as a starting point for your consideration:

1. Who are you?

2. Where were you?

3. Where are you going?

Instead of asking those questions, we are more interested in some immediate issues like 

1. What shoe I need to wear  in order to be more sexy?

2. What are the best ways to spend my easy money with my mistress?

3. What brand of toilet paper is recommended by your doctors?

If you decide to deal with first sets of questions, which are more general, eternal and of sublime importance, your natural starting point would be science and religion. But demystifying what religion is, why it started, who started it, is a daunting task. Much easier would be to follow what the priest say. But in case you really want to have your own answers to those questions, you have to dig deeper. The deeper you dig, it will become clearer that the world religions are Man made. They were started by Man, maintained by Man, amended and adjusted by Man to fit the need of time and culture. If you do not have time, and want to decide quickly, your verdict will be, religions are just nonsense, made up by Man! Once you convinced yourself, too quickly, that there is no substance in these so called religions, you have to turn yourself towards science to find your answers. If you want to find answers in science, which is a inferior mode of finding those nonscientific questions, the following quotes by Steven Weinberg will be the answer "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." In this dilemma where you can see that religion is a made up things by Man and science is not going anywhere, under the time constraints embedded in human nature to decide quickly, you will decide that there is no meaning of life. Nobody can convince you that there is any meaning of life. Because it's your own voluntary will, it is and will always be valid, no matter what, and it will become the new law, at least in your universe, that cannot be overruled. So before you decide anything you have to be really careful to make sure why you are deciding quickly. Is it you want to decide to get the ego boost for apparent rightness or you decided because that's the reality and there is no other explanation. You have to also very careful in your decision to check if you have any presupposed idea or preference or cognitive bias towards your intended decision or if you have some hidden biological, social, political or financial agenda but not consciously aware of those.

If you can see the real situations or the real issues or the real problems, despite all the aforementioned noises, even then, do not decide instantly. Wait for a period of time, typically weeks to months to years. I am also aware of many mundane situations, where you cannot wait, rather you have to act quickly, because those has an immediate biological need (for example, you are hungry), or survival significance. Aside from those or similar situations, you don't have to decide quickly. You are not in hurry and hurry will distort your decision making ability. The issues that we are talking about in this discourse are not an urgent thing to decide quickly, not a shallow river to cross easily, not an easy cognitive task to be done by a rhesus monkey, not a job to claim that you are right and others are wrong. So, do not decide quickly and easily. You have enough time to do that in your life but do not do it under fixed time constraints. However, it does not mean that you can loiter away all of your valuable times and behave like a prodigal who has spent all of his money, but nothing left when he has to buy some life saving supplies.

If you are really sure that the decision you are making is the right one then try the following thought experiment. Try to reach the polar opposite conclusion that you previously make. Your only safeguard in this stage in utmost honesty and modesty. Do not try to distort, or get ego boost, but try to consider all explanations to explains the nature of the issues or situations. Be like Sherlock Holmes to rule out as many possibilities as possible & feasible and at the end use Ockham's razor for whatever remained after SherlockHolmian exclusion method. If you keep doing this for a period of time [in contrast to instant decision] then the real situation or truth will unfold before your very eyes. Because you waited enough, thought enough, cooked your own body enough, fermented your thought enough, your transformed mind will see the truth and then you can decide wisely. That is the only way you can decide, non-blindly. It's not easy, it will not give you ego boost quickly and it takes lots of time. All of these are exact reason why people tend to decide, even on very important life decisions, very quickly. Your premature decisions will blind you and do not dare to decide before your blindfolds has been lifted!

Everybody can see that there is something definitely wrong with us as human, and the world in general. We just accept the "Status Quo" as a given situation. We just know, it's there but nobody knows how these things happened to us. Without knowing the root causes, we are trying to solve the problem just like trying to clean the water from the sinking ship without fixing the hole in the bottom. In doing so, we are just adding more problem to the world. Why? Because, if you really want to solve the problem of the world, the very first thing you need to understand is how these human problems did happen? If you don't know the pathogenesis of this "disease", you cannot prevent it and it's bound to happen again, most likely from your contribution. If you don't learn from history, you are bound to repeat it. If you are not part of the solution, then you must be in the precipitation [ie. The Problem].

You think the world that we currently live in is a hopeless, corrupt, degenerated society created and fueled by mass of stupid, ignorant, consumption minded people. This is not a new phenomenon at all. In the records of most ancient cuneiform clay tablets found in ancient Sumerian and Babylonian sites, one of the first written records in the history, described a corrupt society, degenerated people, tyranny of ruler kings and the general people were frustrated by the dark demonic depravity of the world and they hoped that one day there will be a true divine redeemer who will destroy the evil in the world. In the time of Jesus, people thought they are living in the end time seeing the corrupt and evil society and eagerly awaiting for the promised savior or Messiah for salvation of their souls. Eventually, the Savior revealed himself according to "public demand" but the Pharisees rejected him because he does not have all the [quite unrealistic] criteria to be the real Messiah and they knew inner working of the demand and how and why the criteria for a Savior were selected. On the other hand, the believer of Messiah saw that the Divine Savior did actually appear before them but could not bring the kingdom of heaven, as promised. The work was just too arduous for one man betrayed by even his close associates and people who favored Barabbas instead of Jesus. On the contrary, to their surprise, he just died and failed his mission. So if he were to be a genuine Messiah, he has to come back to finish his job [establishing the kingdom of heaven]. This is how the resurrection of Jesus becomes mandatory, if the myth to be true, he reappeared in person. Subsequently, a "second coming" of the Savior myth is created so that he can try it again to establish the Kingdom of heaven, as promised by the intellectuals at that time. The chosen people [The Jews intellectuals] still are waiting to this day for a Messiah to come, who, because of their "high standard", almost impossible to come for real, and the believer of Savior [The Christians] are still waiting to for the second coming of the Christ to end the evils in the world.

Unless you understand the hidden truths behind this story, why it was there, who proposed those, why the mass believed it, where does it come from, you are not going anywhere. In contrast, if you reject blatantly the story and hence hidden the truth behind these allegorical stories as just a useless figment of imagination induced by Mushroom or Soma juice, as the atheist do, you are not going to find any meaning of life or anything in this world. You have to realize that, this Savior story is the greatest story ever told, and in fact, this the only story ever told, across all ancient cultures. If you assumes that those ancients are bunch of uneducated, stupid people, then you are dead wrong! Do your homework, again and this time harder. Whatever the mass is doing, there is always a profound reason behind it. But what does these story actually trying to tell us? Have you have thought for yourself? Unless you understand how the world works, how the religion were developed, why people developed it, why people are following it even today, how government works, what is the law and how the law came as of today, what is money, who prints it, what is the collateral for money printing and lending, how the science works, how science came to be in the central position, who is financing the science and industries, why and who are financing the politicians, who is behind the religions, who are the owners of the corporations, what are they doing, and finally why there is rampant "evil" everywhere. Unless you have done your in depth homework and found these answers, you are not going to find solution that can satisfy your soul.

As Kant claimed, the thing-in-itself cannot know or solve it itself. Most of the philosophers and intellectuals without their own imaginations and aspirations took Kant's dogma as an unquestionable "truth". This is because of acceptance of the dogma of "if intellectual giant like Kant cannot do it, then nobody can". It is not based on any sound rationality, rather based on mere personal conviction. It's almost like a blackbox that we don't have any access to. On the contrary, you can gain some valuable and indispensable insight by examining what the worlds are doing around you and inside you. In the world, most accessible are the things who are doing something or have some language so that you can communicate with them meaningfully. If you examine the world, the nature, the animals, the plants, and most importantly humans, you can have some rough estimate of what the things are actually doing. Because you came out of this world, hence some form of similar activity has to be happening inside you too. On the other hand, if you go to the microscopic world you can examine what the cells, microorganisms, bacteria and viruses are doing. You can dig deeper to understand what the proteins, DNA molecules, and other elements are doing. You can dig even deeper to see what the elementary particles, photons, electrons are doing and how they are coming into existence. Once you have done sufficient homework you will begin to see some general pattern among the microscopic worlds and then you can understand yourself better because, after all you are made up with all these staff. Little by little, you will discover the gift of "transcendent perspective" and all these levels of understanding will give you an even better edge to understand the thing-in-itself. On top of these "as above and so below" levels of understanding, if you see what the whole human family is doing as a superorganism you can have a better handle on yourself and one by one, the veils which were creating the inaccessibility of thing-in-itself will be lifted and you will discover the light. Those things that were previously inaccessible, will become accessible to your hands for your own examination with the magic of supra and infra levels of transcending knowledge. Now the "new" thing-in-itself can examine it itself, and thus overcoming Kantian barrier of human knowledge. Unless you have done some serious homework to understand how the world and people actually work, you have no hope for salvation. You can believe in Buddha, you can believed in Jesus, you can believe in Muhammad, or you can believe in Science [ie. Atheist] but you will not get any real sense what they all tried to say. Unless you find out what they have found and understood, how can you ever expect to get anything that they have promised? The real salvation, if any, lies in understanding and knowledge, not in mere belief of these Masters.

Whenever someone lies in any subject matter not directly related to one's own survival, what will happen to a very honest, upright, wise man with a strong sense of dignity? It is extremely traumatic for one's soul. This is the most grievous insult for his uprightness and hence to his own existence. Any significant lie, if you are really really honest with yourself is equivalent to death of your morality. And what else is more valuable to the honest man than his moral value? It is indeed more precious than his life. Throughout the history of humankind we have seen thousands of people had committed suicide when they were found either by themselves or by others that they have lied in some significant way. Indeed lying and subsequent guilty feelings by honest men is the most common cause of suicide along with some psychiatric conditions, drug abuse, and psychological trauma. In most of those cases it either involved some wrongdoing or lying, with some rare exception where somebody took their own life for their loved one. If you have any insight into this subject matter, you would agree that wrongdoing, perceived wrong imposed on somebody or lying is the critical factor leading to a soul to commit suicide.

With this background, we can easily see that not only in our day to day common preference to the truth, our existence and our soul has a preference to stick with that truth. Why is this designed in such a way? After all, lying and devious short cut strategies are good to earn quick fame, wealth, money or comfort. Additionally if preference to truth and lie are truly random then it would be 50/50 in distribution. Why majority people agree on truth and why honest people who lied or did something wrong commit suicide? All these only suggest that there are some real deep utility and rationale to pursue truth and hence our innate conscious and unconscious preference to truth, not just for the sake of moral, ethical, religious or spiritual conviction.

These days people lie on important subject matter all the time but why they don't do what an honest person would do ie. suicide. This is because lying is so common today that everybody has to commit suicide if they are truly honest with themselves. If they did that, the human species would become extinct by now. To prevent such a grand calamity, the instinct of survival has been called for to protect humankind and propagate its continuity. How does the instinct of survival work to overcome the injury of lie on the soul? The instinct to survive is creating a barrier or rigid veil to cover up the injured site [ie. the lie] and thus the psychi cannot see it. The psychi cannot see it not because it’s no longer there, but because the lie has become a blind spot for the eye of the psychi, so the psychi cannot perceive it. Over long term, with repeated lies, it will be filled by these blind spots resulting in a complete dark black soul that will prevent your psychi to see the reality as it is and your access to your own soul for your examination. It's just like the visual blind spot. It's still there, as always, but we cannot see it. This is how the survival instinct is protecting us by making us blind on the fact that we have done something wrong or otherwise lied somehow. Otherwise, we would have committed suicide long ago, if we are absolutely honest with ourselves.

Now over our life time, many times we have chosen, out of our free will, devious shortcuts to cheat others, get easy money, fame, power, jobs, class grades, vanity, to control or gain favor of other people which invariably involved some sorts of hiding the truth or outright lying. In order to protect ourselves, our survival instinct has been called for innumerable times and each time it created some blind spots as described above. This why over time you will lose your ability to see things as they are [Cognitive Dissidence]. You will look at those thing with a heavily blinded psychic eye and will not see it. The world will be perceived in a distorted way, you will not find the ultimate truth of life, its purpose, its sublime beauty. You will anxious and uncomfortable all the time. You will feel something is missing. These subtle uneasiness will be so deep and hidden in your unconscious that eventually it will be repressed in the dark recess and will be lost forever. It will be manifested in alternative forms such as impulsive behavior, emotional outburst, unreasonable anxiety, and fear of death or impending doom. To compensate you will try some adventure sports, unusual sexual practices, drugs and rock & rolls but nothing will quench your thirst and your life will be living hell but you will not voluntarily acknowledges it out of dignity and pride but you know it in the back of the your mind and others will perceive it from your impulsive behavior. There is no escape from this eternal punishment on the soul for not seeing the ultimate truth and meaning of life.

This is exactly why all the Masters and Sages of all age emphasized purification of soul and altruism before you can embark for any form of initiation and discipleship towards the Truth. Once the student purify himself, and only when the student is ready, teacher will appear either from inside or outside, but it will appear for sure, for which I can bet my bottom dollar. The teacher will help you find the right questions to ask because your psychic eyes are no longer blinded anymore as discussed earlier. You will seek, and you will find. You will ask, and will be given. You will knock on the right door, and it will be opened for you. You will then find the truth all by yourself and that truth will set you free, forever.

Originally, mystical experiences were very general and abstract but it had no names. The reality of mysticism was in almost everybody, hence it needed no names. Gradually with the rise of society, people gave it a name such as astrology, spirituality etc. and started to create gods and idols from these derivative and placeholder abstract concepts. The high priest or the kings of those cultures started to assume the role of gods for the rest of the people. With advancement of civilization, people started to add rigor to these subjective and authoritarian spirituality and renamed it a organized religion. Unfortunately, those religions themselves became even more authoritarian and dogmatic than ever before. With the advent of modernity people tried to add further rigor to this religion (rigor being empiricism) with some unrealistic and futile rigor called "Science". Originally it had no name, it only had the reality. Now it has only names such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, New Age, but they hardly have any residual reality anymore. It's the human nature to corrupt and degenerate whatever good was handed down to them. Over time, everything is reduced to some fancy names with no intrinsic value [nominalism], and the underlying reality is lost, with few exceptions. 

Originally Sufism did not have a name but they had the true reality. This is not entirely true because it had a name, the name being Islam. All the close companions of the prophet, all the builders of magnificent mosque, were themselves Sufi without any separate names. Now, Islam along with Sufism have names but its loosing it's reality, with few exceptions. 

Every early original scientists had the true essence of reality with them but they did not have any separate names. They were just regarded as "wise men" or Sages. With the advent of a name called "scientist" in 19th century [To be exact 1833 AD, not BC!], the scientists have lost their reality and now they have just its names and dogmas, with few exceptions. 

During early parts of your life, you felt the true essence in your guts but at that time it had no names. You felt the divine essence without any name or any proof. But soon you trained yourself in wrong hands, believed in those untrue premises as unquestionable and started to give those divine sparkle a name like "enlightenment". Soon thereafter, you are chasing this unreal ghost named "enlightenment". There are no enlightenment to achieve and conquer in first place. Whatever is there, it’s always there, and there is no additional need to hunt for it. Now the essence of enlightenment is gone and only the word enlightenment remains. This is how your life's reality is lost and only its name remains, again with few exceptions.