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When you wrestle with existential questions it’s inevitable to reach a certain intellectual end-point. That intellectual end-point is usually not a comfortable one because it comes with two bummers:
– I don’t know anything except that I exist (and even ‘I’ is not certain).
– Life is meaningless.
If you’re honest with yourself and leave your emotions/heart out of the argument, you’ll reach that point.
In philosophical lingo this means you either become a solipsist or a nihilist.
This doesn’t mean that you’ll live like either one. Practically, you can’t and don’t want to live like only I exist and nothing has any meaning. Theoretically, you can’t get beyond those two notions.
So what do you do?
You must go beyond the intellect.
Most likely you’ve started probing those existential questions because you wanted to know the truth. You wanted to know what’s really up, what you really are, what any of this really is.
So you reached the intellectual truth. But instead of the universe serving you a nice hot fudge Sunday for it, it gave you an existential wedgie that made you taste and smell your underwear.
This is not what you signed up for. This is not what anyone signs up for.
Luckily, intellectual truth doesn’t mean diddly squat.
An intellectual truth is made up of words and words are never final. Words can always be refuted by other words, even if those words are coming out of the mouths of the most revered scientists, sages, wise men, or whoever your preferred authority on truth matters is.
Truth is not a concept though. Nor is it a thing or an object.
It’s also not the special domain of lifelong meditators, spiritual geniuses, and followers of esoteric teachings.
The experience of truth is different from the truth’s intellectual sideshow. It’s most likely a bit more shocking than a wedgie.
Its ordinariness and familiarity are devastating, like a hydrogen bomb to your cerebellum that you have planted and detonated yourself.
Or to choose a less explosive simile, like living in darkness your whole life and suddenly turning the light on and realizing that the light has been on all along and all you were doing was covering your eyes.
What Does Actually Exist?
Some philosophically inclined individuals use solipsism and nihilism as insults. It’s the black hole they’re afraid of.
But labeling someone by some philosophical theory never abdicates us from facing the facts about our own experience.
If that is what they’re afraid of, then the truth might be a tad harder to digest. The truth is solipsism and nihilism rolled into one — the philosopher’s worst nightmare (look, it’s the title!).
You’re alone and it’s meaningless.
But!
But in the best way possible.
You might be alone but you’re not lonely. And even that is not exactly true because aloneness exists only in relation to not-aloneness.
Life might be meaningless but that just means freedom. And even that is not exactly true because… you know why.
This also means that solipsism and nihilism are of course not literally true. They’re ideas masquerading as truth. They’re training wheels that need to be discarded.
The questions of solipsism and nihilism arise only if we have accepted some kind of fundamental structure (e.g. consciousness, nothingness, reality, etc.) to exist objectively.
After having had some realization, it’s easy to imagine some kind of “ground of being” or “view,” and that everything within this imagined structure is “me,” or “I,” or “Consciousness.”
But that implies the possibility of something that may or may not exist outside of this structure.
There is nothing outside. And I don’t mean nothing as a form of something that exists outside — nothing doesn’t exist, which is its one defining feature.
If I then think only “I” exist or only “my” experience exists, I reach solipsism. But it’s not “I” that exists as a separate point of sentience, nor is it “my” experience. Saying so implies not-I and not-my.
There is only unbounded awareness but the moment we imagine it as something — a container, for example, as is common — we leave space for something else to exist.
True Freedom
Freedom is freedom from holding on to any concept, model, or theory as absolute, including consciousness or awareness.
When we choose to speak about these things, we have to choose a model. In everyday life, I choose a model where human beings exist in an objective space-time universe. Anything else would be silly.
When I write or talk about truth stuff, I choose a different model. That doesn’t mean that one model is more accurate than another. Models are thoughts and thoughts are derived from direct experience.
Bring it all back to direct experience, always.
If you still think I’m talking about something I believe in then I must hold your horses right there.
This is not something to believe in. This is before even the possibility of believing something can arise. This is what makes the appearance of belief possible.
Nothing but your own immediate recognition can make this clear to you.
Look into that and see what you find.
First, you realize you are nothing (nihilism) then you realize you are everything (solipsism), and finally both are eliminated in mutual negation (whatever).
And then you can use models and theories and words as freely as you like. You no longer need to police your expression.
Nothing we could ever say could capture what we are. But because there is nothing but what we are, the act of trying to capture what we are is also what we are.
You know what that means, right?
It means you have already arrived. It means you know everything there is to know. It means you are whole, complete, perfect as you are right now.
Look at you, you fucking boss. I would tip my hat to you if I was wearing one.
Luka
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I could read your articles forever! Thank you! Although I haven’t experienced an awakening I always feel so much better reading your articles
Thank you for your kind words, Ashley. I’m glad to hear that.