Facing the Truth

It's ironic that even the enlightened philosopher can be limited by the yearnings of the egoic mind and blinded by lessons inherited rather than learned. Out of humility, I hesitate to appear to criticize renowned and  accomplished thinkers, but from my experience an intense focus on an area of expertise can occasionally make it nearly impossible to accept something that even the diligent lay observer can see as clear as day.

In his insightful guide to spiritual enlightenment The Power of Now, Eckhard Tolle writes eloquently of "...an inward journey that will take you ever more deeply into the realm of great stillness and peace, yet also of great power and vibrant life. At first, you may only get fleeting glimpses of it, but through them you will begin to realize that you are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between birth and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation. Underneath your outer form, you are connected with something so vast, so immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be conceived of or spoken of -- yet I am speaking of it now. I am speaking of it not to give you something to believe in but to show you how you can know it for yourself."

I believe in meditation; and I believe that contemplation is our highest activity. Cogito, ergo sum. Disciplined meditation has in fact revealed a vast inner self to which I was more or less oblivious when I was younger. And it's indisputable that we humans are in fact born from the physical artifacts of a larger organism, to which we return said borrowed materials upon our passing. And it's not unreasonable to view ourselves as individual components of a force that could be thought of as a collective intelligence that is greater than humanity. But to assign sacredness to that intelligence, which is really just nature (which surely does not consider itself sacred), or to imply that we are more than meaningless fragments in the grand scheme, is to fall victim to counterproductive tendencies that have dogged mankind at least since the earliest days of recorded civilization.

If history has taught us anything, it is that we are wired to assign supernatural explanations to things we don't understand, explanations we embrace doggedly until each is inevitably proven to be false. The fact that we find something to be awesome says everything about the limitations of our intellect and nothing about the object; apart from the human mind, the quality of awesomeness does not exist in nature.

It's also easy to understand how we have evolved to value human life above nearly all else. A species that didn't fight single-mindedly for its survival would not have ended up at the top of the food chain as we have (so far). As a result of that evolution, we believe that we are the most important beings in the Universe. We dream of an afterlife and of a connection to a sacred intelligence.

The good news is that information is all around us. We learn from every single thing we see, hear, and smell, and from everyone around us. Believe what is real. Pardon my French, but don't make shit up. The truth is always best, even when it inconveniently does not lead us where we yearn to go. It's far better to discipline ourselves to believe in and then to embrace what is real. Why would we strive for more than this inherently wondrous and wonderful life that has been bequeathed to us?

Eckhart Tolle
The Power of Now
René Descartes