Brainbites I
All right, so...
This year, I have gone through two huge emotiaonal rollercosters and, as is the case with such things, neither one was pleasent. The year has been bad all around (except one notable exception - G's visit here), and two things stand out the most. In January, my father, whom I adore and who has always been one of the, if not the most important figure in my life has been diagnosed with liver cancer. He died in June, 4th to be precice. The second thing happened only a week ago: my boyfriend, my partner of the past 12 years, left me.
I don't feel like dwelling too much on either right now. Both were devastating experiances, both shook me to the very core of my being, the wounds are still way too fresh for me to poke them yet again so... I won't. I will jsut say that, yes, I'm wrecked but yes, I'm still kicking. I am mentioning both just to put some things in perspective, because I feel the need to mention them and because of all the ways I could have started this post, I found this to be the best one.
With that out of the way, I will continue to say that I am still shaking like a leaf from being left like this. Both my father and my boyfriend were big parts of my life, from emotional fulfilment to intelectual satisfaction to any number of everyday, common little things, quirks and habits that I loved and enjoyed having in my life. With both those men now gone, each in his own way, there is a whole heckload of empty space left behind and I have yet to fill it with something else.
The thing with filling such gaps, though is this: I did not want for thsoe gaps to appear in the first place. What space there was, I filled with things I wanted there, things dear to me, things that were there because of all the possible things, they fit my personal physical and emotional space the best. Yes, of course that in time, the void will hurt less and less. And of course that all that empty space will eventually be filled with other things instead. Not necessarily better ones, not necessarily worse ones either. Some things, I will never be able to replace or at least, not replace them completelly. Most of it I will fill up again with things that also satisfy me but are different then the things that were there before. And some empty space will always remain empty. Because that's the way things go. I will never have another father, and even if a very father-like figure appears again in my life (it won't, but I'm mentioning it as a hypothetical possibility), he will never, ever be exactly like my father and will never fit my father-shapes spot as fully and as perfectly as my father did. In that sense, some space will forever remain empty because there is nothing but the thing that was once there that can fill it.
So, I sit here, writing all this down with a great sense of emptiness inside. It's... bearable and by now, it does not cloud my thinking, but it nonetheless sets an emotional frame for my toughts and words. I'd still have the same thoughts, but in some other emotional frame, the words, at least, would be different.
Toughts, however, remain as they are. And for this post, not toughts about my father or about my ex-boyfriend (on that note: talking about people who ahve been a part of my life for so long in past tense takes time; it took me a long while to get my self to start talking or even thinking about my dad in past tense and it takes some conscious effort to talk about my ex-boyfriend as an ex-boyfriend now). Anyway, for this post, the toughts I have are no longer about my father or my ex-bf, though thinking about both of them did spur me into thinking about some other things further. And it is those other things that I feel the need to talk/write about. I say "things", but what I really mean is "me".
Because, among other things, one of the reasons for our breakup was the lack of mutual understanding. And by that I don't mean the general, mundane "we couldn't understand each other" situation.Quite to the contrary, we did, and still do, understand each other very intimatelly and very deeply. However, some things we obviously failed to notice, failed to understand completelly and thus, failed to understand one another's current, past and future toughts and positions.
That is what spurred my current chain of toughts (jumbled and full of digressions as it will likely turn out to be), and I took it from there and expanded it further, beyond my ex and our breakup and applied it to people around me in general.
And so: me and why am I like this.
One thing I know most people around me think about me is "stubborn". Unyielding. Set in my ways. Not flexible. And I won't and can't deny that over time, I did indeed grow to be that way. What I often keep forgetting and what I just as often find faulty in people around me is that even though I truly am all those things, they are not the foundation upon which I built myself but the end result of the, for the lack of a better expression (though I am certain I could find one if I tried more), the "personal path" of self-development that I took. What I keep forgetting more often then I should is that every now and then, I really should calm down and explain where does it all come from and not just toss the end product into people's faces expecting them to automatically gobble it up. And what I find faulty in other people and often, find to be offensive, is that they, too, keep forgetting that, if I am tossing a conclusion into their faces, I also have a good reasoning and experiance behind me that led me to that particular conclusion.
And right now, probably in great part due to the fact that our breakup stemmed from that as well, I find myself mulling things over and feeling the need to pause, take a deep breath, tone down the habit of instantly growling out my positions and instead, explain them. To all the people who know me, all the people I care about and just about everyone else who, for some weird reason, wants to listen.
Where to beigin? What is probably one of the first things people learn about me and definitelly, the first thing that is on my mind right now, is my completelly unyielding, aggressive and often assertive stance on religion, karma, astral projections, horoscopes, gods of all sorts and kinds... in short, things I lump together in one huge box labeled "superstition" or, more accuratelly "utter bullshit".
I won't lie - When I say "utter bullshit" I really do mean "utter bullshit". And I am long in habit of saying just that ond only that, having, over time, lost the will to explain myself or all the reasons I have for saying it. Similarelly, I have long lost the will to explain where does my infamous agressiveness towards it comes from and why do I feel the need to lead my own personal "crusade" against them, wherever I spot them. Even just saying a "crusade" rings wrong to me - language conventions and idioms developed over time in particular cultural frames do tend to annoy me to end more often then not: let me just be clear on one thing - Though the zeal I show equals that of the long-gone crusaders out to liberate Christ's grave or whatever, the underlying reasons behind it differ like night and day: their absolute conviction in doing the right thing came, ultimatelly, from faith, with all other reasons built up upon those foundations; mine comes from the foundation of reasoning and the faith I have in doing the right thing came about as a result.
But now, after all that happened happened, I do, again, feel the need to explain. Just explain. Not to justify myself, not to prove myself right, just... explain. And if you want to hear the explanation, fine, and if you don't, that's also fine. In the end, you may agree or disagree, wish to argue some points or accept some others... it matters not. The point is not to convince but to understand.
So... Magic. Or rather, what I call "magical thinking" as opposed to what I consider "rational" or "critical thinking". If you know me, you know I find the latter to be infinatelly superior to the former. But again, even that is not an axiom I expect you accept as such. I find it to be so because I've had reasons to come to the conclusion that it indeed is so.
So let me then say something about the way people think to begin with. I'll skip all the neurological or psychological data for now and use an example instead. To use the abovementioned crusaders, their way of thinking was "this is so, and therefore I must do this". Mine differs slightly in saying "if this is so, then I must do this". In my eyes, that one little "if" changes the whole thing. In saying "if", I start not from a fixed axiom, but am leaving the possibility of things not being like "this" but like "that" instead. And following that, I also start off with the option of, if things being like "that", then I will act upon them in a different way.
You could now say that, sure, I get it, but I still don't see the difference. Surelly, those crusaders started off exactly the way you have - because if they were not certain there is such a thing as god and if they were not certain that there is such a thing as Christ's grave and that it is indeed worth liberating, then they, of course, would not go into the whole thing in the first place.
Yes and no. At a glance, you could put out such an argument and you would be generally right. To argue that specific point any further would require us to take in a whole load of additional factors and information into account, make a digression upon digression before we could come to some sort of a conclusion on whether they wouldn't or would regardless. And this is the point on which I err most often. I either do go into it and spread the discussion so thin that half-way through, we forget what the hell were we talking about to begin with or knowing well how big a digression it would take, I give up at the very beginning and say "Look, they would, all right?! Just take it!"
And that is where I come off exactly the same as those crusaders - Obviously, I have already decided that things are the way they are and that I am right and you are suposed to accept that and jsut roll with it. When I confront you in that fashion, you have all the rights to lump me into the same box as thsoe crusaders and move on, shaking your head. So what I want to do now is to correct my on mistake and get to the bottom of it rather then give up half-way through and say "I'm just right, all right?!"
Of course, it is not easy to do so. First of all because of the aforementioned corpus of additional data that we both need to operate with in order to get to the bottom of the crusader thing. So, let me try to go even deeper, to the very root of the thing and that means going back to my original point - the way people think.
Let us, for a moment, step back and agree on one simple starting premise. Let's say that you believe in god and that I don't. We are, by now, both very certain of our respective stances and we both have, what we believe to be sound reasons for that. And to avoid confusion that might follow, I will now expand on the crusaders example and include all the various things from my "utter bullshit" box - horoscopes, karma, spirituality, and everything else that ever crossed people's minds that we consider to be in the domain of metaphysics. Just so that this doesn't start sounding like yet another one of my rants about how there is no god and now I'm about to prove it.
So, I am now encompassing all those things metaphysical, not just the existance of god or gods and attempting to make a step back without making any definite claims either for or against all the various possibilities.
A small digression: didn't I just put a foot into my own mouth here? Am I not the one who claims taht oh yes, we so can know if such things exist or don't, we so can put even god into a petri dish and observe it. Yes, I make that claim and you know I stand behind it. But right now, I am going a step back to explain how I ended up claiming such a thing and to do that, I must step back into a prior moment, a moment of complete ignorance and endless possibilities in order to demonstrate how I sifted through all the possible answers and reached the one I have.
So, here we are, and ehre is this big, vast universe all around us. Right now, we don't know a thing about it and thus, are free to fill it up with anything we want and the chances of each and every one of those things is, at this first moment, equal. I am making no prior claims about anything just yet. I am accepting the possibility that anything might go. But, I am curious and I want to end up not guessing but knowing waht is it that is really out there.
Another little digression: one tripping stone here is definitelly the fact that, as I have heard enough many times from enough many people, the very core of any sort of faith is, well, faith. That faith, in the end, requires no definite knowledge. Some even proclaim that to be on of the faith's biggest virtues. Whatever your own stance on the matter might be, I do think we can all agree on a simple terminology: once some thing is shown, beyond any doubt, to exaist, one can no longer "believe" in it. One can then only "know", as a fact, that it is real. Where knoweldge begins, faith ends. Yes, of course, additional knowledge about a certain thing can, and does serve to reinforce the faith, the belief in something, but... Let me put it like this:
Say you believe in karma. That is you having faith. And during your life, you'll come across various facts, events, details big and small, that apperantly fit the "karma hypothesis". That, then, is additional knowledge that reinforces your belief that there is such a thing as karma. However, once you come across a fact, an experiment, and event, whatever, that definitelly proves that karma exists - and by this I mean something or somethings that cannot possibly exist unless karma exists as well - then, you can no longer "believe" in karma. That is the moment in which you now "know" karma is real.
I might come back to this a bit later (or not, depending on where my toughts and fingers take me - I'm writing this for my own sake, not an essay for science journal) to consider in more detail the ways people observe the facts and ways they put them together. But for now, if we can agree that "faith" and "knowledge" are mutually exclusive - that you can either 'believe' in something or 'know' that something exists but never both at the same time - I will finish this digression and move on.
So, here we are, staring at the big, vast universe, aware of the fact that anything might fill it up and that, in this moment, everything has equal chances of turning out to be true. In other words, if I am now discussing karma or gods or whatever with you, I am doing so from the very beginning meaning, I am now saying "For all I know right now, there could be a god or there could be karma or there could be just about anything else I did not even think about yet."
And now, I have to ask you a question: "Do you want to find out?". Are you standing here with me, staring at it all, wanting to find out for certain what fills all that space or are you perfectly happy with things exactly as they are now? Are you happier standing there and not even exploring? Does the idea of always having possibilites satisfy you? IF yes, then I might as wellleave you alone right now. To keep standing there without any desire to know, only to dream. And that, too, is, I think, all right. If that is truly what makes you happy then so be it. I cannot and will not try to force you to find things out if you don't want to find them out. Be well, and happy dreaming.
However, if there are people like that, I have never met them. Sure, there might be those who are exactly like that but now, I'll assume you are like me and that faced with endless possibilities, you are curious to step ahead and try to find out which ons of them really are there and which ones aren't. Because, whatever is really out there is our reality and since we cannot live in a limbo but only in reality and in order to do that, we feel the need to first find out what that reality is.
Don't get me wrong, if there really is such a thing as "limbo", or heaven, or hell or oness with the universe and so on... if those things really exist then they are reality and again, the only place in which we can exist.
And that is what having an open mind truly means. Being able to say, at all times, that things are so and so but there is always a possibility of them turning out not to be quite as we tought them to be the day before. Because we might learn somehting new tomorrow and then we'll have to shift our worldview accordingly. The problem that I see in people every day is their habit of regularelly giving that "but it could be" a tad bit more credit then it really deserves.
Let me, again, resort to an example. If you jump out of the window on the second floor, you can safelly say that you know you'llend up going downwards, fast, and finish the fall with an unhealthy splat. Not that you believe that will happen but that you know that will happen. And what is it that makes you, me and just about everyone else bar those who believe themselves to be birds that certain that that's theway things are? What is it that makes us say that we "know" it rather then that we "believe" it?
Experiance, for once. People have been jumping from great heights before, so many times and almost always with the same end result - an unhealthy splat. It is in that case, when something happens nearly 99% of the time that we say we "know" it will happen. If we were to use even more exact terminology, we would say "we are reasonably certain that a splat is the most likely outcome of that jump". Instead of putting it like that, we say that we "know" that - that is what "to know" means to us. We are so used to that term that most of the time we take it to mean "100% beyond any doubt, no other way, period, fin". And I think it's perfectly all right to use it like that in every day life.
Because, like any other sentient creature, what we always strive for is control. We need to be able to affect our own lives and the immediate reality around us in order to exist in it. We need to be able to affect our surroundings just as it affects us. We need to be in control, as much as we can. And more certain we are about something, more in control we fell. We'd all feel like shit if every time we'd say "if I jump out the wondow I may or may not end up in a splat". Because if the possibility of either this or that remains uncertain, we'd rarely be able to make a decision whether to jump out said window or not. Yes, of course, if we had some other compelling reason to do it, we'd do it anyway, but that's not the case that I have in mind. We don't all jump out the windows day in and day out. Let's say that the only decision you are to make right now is whether to jump or not, for no reason for or against it. Every day, we pass by our windows and generally, don't make the decision to jump out jsut because. Because we know what the most likely outcome would be. But can you imagine what your life would be like if you had no clue what would happen? If you knew that chances of you getting yourself killed is exactly the same as chances of you lifting up in a happy little flight? Chances are, you'd be torn between the desire to try flying and the desire not to die, every damn day... And making a decision would be that much harder. And if you can't make a decision about what to do with yourself right now, then you are not in control of your life. That is what I mean when I say we are all creatures who need to be in control, and that is what I mean when I say that, in order to have as much control as we need in order to function, to live, we need to 'know' things about the world around us - not just 'believe', but 'know'.
And so, I'll asume that faced with the vast universe, most people will not be satisfied with not knowing what fills it. And history -past experiance again - shows us that that is indeed so. Ever since they could, various people ahve been poking, prying, guessing, testing, trying to find out as much as they could about the reality around them. Again, I cannot say for certain that each and every person ever living on this Earth felt like that and surelly, not equally intensivelly as the next one, but overall, yes, we, humans, want to know our reality and we have activelly been trying to find out more about it every since the very beginning, whatever that beginning may have been. We all are, in short, on a never-ending quest for knowledge, from breakthrough discoveries at the cutting edge of science to mundane, every-day little things such as finding out which store around the corner has better bread. The scope and implications vary, but the driving intention remains the same.
So, fast-forward from the initial moment in which we were all standing and staring into space. Both we, as a humanity overall and we, as individuals, have passed a chunk, picking up experiances and connecting them along the way. Humanity made a lot of blunders along the way, got sidetracked, spent centuries thinking something to be true until it turned out that it wasn't, really... And so did we, individuals, on our own scale did the same thing for ourselves. And of course, we did not all end up in the same spot. I went my way, others went theirs. And standing right where we are now, we are all certain of our own path and our own position and we all think that the other party is wrong.
Not all things in life and reality are black and white. I hope we can all agree on that. In life, things and choices we make are very often neither right or wrong - the most we can say about them is that they are different but on the whole, neither is 'better' or 'worse' then the other. However, there are some things, things regarding reality, that really either "are" or "aren't". For example, electrones are both a wave and a particle. It takes a bit to wrap the mind around the concept untill you step back and realize that the supposed duality isn't really a duality at all. But once you get there, you can easily understand how "particle" and "wave" are both an integral part of what an electrone is. However, electrones and protons are definitelly not the same thing. A particle is either an electron or a proton, but it cannot be both.
Expand that to other concepts now, those that have, so far, rested in the domain of metaphysics. Is there such a thing as karma? Well... can we agree that we cannot both be right? I say there isn't, you say there is. Objectivelly, it can either exist or not. Oh, I don't know... maybe it both exists and doesn't? Maybe there is a metastate in which something simultaneously exists or doesn't? But we'd all have a problem with such a concept, wouldn't we now? Because if there is a metastate of some kind then outside of the metastate, something again either exists or does not exist. Think Schroedinger's Cat here - in the end, not only is the cat either alive or dead, but even though we could not know it for certain until we opened the box, that cat eitehr stayed alive or died at some point. Hells, even if it died and turned into a zombie afterwards, it still doesn't change the fact that in point A it was alive and in point B it was dead, but never both at once.
So, some things either do exist or they do not exist. Things around us, things that are real, all the things that could be in that great big universe... while in the beginning the possibility of every single one existing out there was, to our knowledge, equal, in turth, even back then, they either were or were not. Things appearing later on or dissapearing later on are, of course, also a possibility but even then... even then, said "things" did exist in point A and did not exist in point B.
But before I slide into philosophy too much, I'll just conclude that, in the beginning, none of us was certain of what is our reality and now, after some time has passed, we grew certain about it. If we reached the same conclusion, then fine. But if we haven't... Well, if we haven't, then, as certain as we both are that "I am right and you are wrong", we both know that only one of us can, in the end, be right.
And that is when we hit the problem of both being so damn certain of our position, of being right that we both forget to take that step back and try to find out which one of us made a mistake. But then, why would we? We both know we're right, right? No need to discuss it or prove it further - we both took our paths, certain in them and in the conclusions we drew from them so no need to prove the point all over again. We both already know.
But do we?
This is the point in which I usually snap, certain in my own conclusions, loaded with facts, pregnant with conclusions and unbearable in my high-horse attitude. This is the part where, if I even bothered getting this far to begin with, shake my head, growl something and come off just as stubborn as the next fundie.
This is the point where I make my mistake.
What I should do instead is to grit my teeth and, having reached this far, follow through to the end. Not with asserting my conclusions onto people but explaining them and the reasons behind them even better. Let me jsut say at this point that hells yes, I really don't consider most people worthy of my time, I really don't feel like explaining myself to every single person that crosses my path. I don't have either time nor patience for it. But for some people, I do have time. For some people, I do feel the need to go all the way through. Not to change their minds or mine, but to find a common ground with those I wish to spend my time with. Nothing more and nothing less than that.
So how to go about it?
(continued in the next post)
This year, I have gone through two huge emotiaonal rollercosters and, as is the case with such things, neither one was pleasent. The year has been bad all around (except one notable exception - G's visit here), and two things stand out the most. In January, my father, whom I adore and who has always been one of the, if not the most important figure in my life has been diagnosed with liver cancer. He died in June, 4th to be precice. The second thing happened only a week ago: my boyfriend, my partner of the past 12 years, left me.
I don't feel like dwelling too much on either right now. Both were devastating experiances, both shook me to the very core of my being, the wounds are still way too fresh for me to poke them yet again so... I won't. I will jsut say that, yes, I'm wrecked but yes, I'm still kicking. I am mentioning both just to put some things in perspective, because I feel the need to mention them and because of all the ways I could have started this post, I found this to be the best one.
With that out of the way, I will continue to say that I am still shaking like a leaf from being left like this. Both my father and my boyfriend were big parts of my life, from emotional fulfilment to intelectual satisfaction to any number of everyday, common little things, quirks and habits that I loved and enjoyed having in my life. With both those men now gone, each in his own way, there is a whole heckload of empty space left behind and I have yet to fill it with something else.
The thing with filling such gaps, though is this: I did not want for thsoe gaps to appear in the first place. What space there was, I filled with things I wanted there, things dear to me, things that were there because of all the possible things, they fit my personal physical and emotional space the best. Yes, of course that in time, the void will hurt less and less. And of course that all that empty space will eventually be filled with other things instead. Not necessarily better ones, not necessarily worse ones either. Some things, I will never be able to replace or at least, not replace them completelly. Most of it I will fill up again with things that also satisfy me but are different then the things that were there before. And some empty space will always remain empty. Because that's the way things go. I will never have another father, and even if a very father-like figure appears again in my life (it won't, but I'm mentioning it as a hypothetical possibility), he will never, ever be exactly like my father and will never fit my father-shapes spot as fully and as perfectly as my father did. In that sense, some space will forever remain empty because there is nothing but the thing that was once there that can fill it.
So, I sit here, writing all this down with a great sense of emptiness inside. It's... bearable and by now, it does not cloud my thinking, but it nonetheless sets an emotional frame for my toughts and words. I'd still have the same thoughts, but in some other emotional frame, the words, at least, would be different.
Toughts, however, remain as they are. And for this post, not toughts about my father or about my ex-boyfriend (on that note: talking about people who ahve been a part of my life for so long in past tense takes time; it took me a long while to get my self to start talking or even thinking about my dad in past tense and it takes some conscious effort to talk about my ex-boyfriend as an ex-boyfriend now). Anyway, for this post, the toughts I have are no longer about my father or my ex-bf, though thinking about both of them did spur me into thinking about some other things further. And it is those other things that I feel the need to talk/write about. I say "things", but what I really mean is "me".
Because, among other things, one of the reasons for our breakup was the lack of mutual understanding. And by that I don't mean the general, mundane "we couldn't understand each other" situation.Quite to the contrary, we did, and still do, understand each other very intimatelly and very deeply. However, some things we obviously failed to notice, failed to understand completelly and thus, failed to understand one another's current, past and future toughts and positions.
That is what spurred my current chain of toughts (jumbled and full of digressions as it will likely turn out to be), and I took it from there and expanded it further, beyond my ex and our breakup and applied it to people around me in general.
And so: me and why am I like this.
One thing I know most people around me think about me is "stubborn". Unyielding. Set in my ways. Not flexible. And I won't and can't deny that over time, I did indeed grow to be that way. What I often keep forgetting and what I just as often find faulty in people around me is that even though I truly am all those things, they are not the foundation upon which I built myself but the end result of the, for the lack of a better expression (though I am certain I could find one if I tried more), the "personal path" of self-development that I took. What I keep forgetting more often then I should is that every now and then, I really should calm down and explain where does it all come from and not just toss the end product into people's faces expecting them to automatically gobble it up. And what I find faulty in other people and often, find to be offensive, is that they, too, keep forgetting that, if I am tossing a conclusion into their faces, I also have a good reasoning and experiance behind me that led me to that particular conclusion.
And right now, probably in great part due to the fact that our breakup stemmed from that as well, I find myself mulling things over and feeling the need to pause, take a deep breath, tone down the habit of instantly growling out my positions and instead, explain them. To all the people who know me, all the people I care about and just about everyone else who, for some weird reason, wants to listen.
Where to beigin? What is probably one of the first things people learn about me and definitelly, the first thing that is on my mind right now, is my completelly unyielding, aggressive and often assertive stance on religion, karma, astral projections, horoscopes, gods of all sorts and kinds... in short, things I lump together in one huge box labeled "superstition" or, more accuratelly "utter bullshit".
I won't lie - When I say "utter bullshit" I really do mean "utter bullshit". And I am long in habit of saying just that ond only that, having, over time, lost the will to explain myself or all the reasons I have for saying it. Similarelly, I have long lost the will to explain where does my infamous agressiveness towards it comes from and why do I feel the need to lead my own personal "crusade" against them, wherever I spot them. Even just saying a "crusade" rings wrong to me - language conventions and idioms developed over time in particular cultural frames do tend to annoy me to end more often then not: let me just be clear on one thing - Though the zeal I show equals that of the long-gone crusaders out to liberate Christ's grave or whatever, the underlying reasons behind it differ like night and day: their absolute conviction in doing the right thing came, ultimatelly, from faith, with all other reasons built up upon those foundations; mine comes from the foundation of reasoning and the faith I have in doing the right thing came about as a result.
But now, after all that happened happened, I do, again, feel the need to explain. Just explain. Not to justify myself, not to prove myself right, just... explain. And if you want to hear the explanation, fine, and if you don't, that's also fine. In the end, you may agree or disagree, wish to argue some points or accept some others... it matters not. The point is not to convince but to understand.
So... Magic. Or rather, what I call "magical thinking" as opposed to what I consider "rational" or "critical thinking". If you know me, you know I find the latter to be infinatelly superior to the former. But again, even that is not an axiom I expect you accept as such. I find it to be so because I've had reasons to come to the conclusion that it indeed is so.
So let me then say something about the way people think to begin with. I'll skip all the neurological or psychological data for now and use an example instead. To use the abovementioned crusaders, their way of thinking was "this is so, and therefore I must do this". Mine differs slightly in saying "if this is so, then I must do this". In my eyes, that one little "if" changes the whole thing. In saying "if", I start not from a fixed axiom, but am leaving the possibility of things not being like "this" but like "that" instead. And following that, I also start off with the option of, if things being like "that", then I will act upon them in a different way.
You could now say that, sure, I get it, but I still don't see the difference. Surelly, those crusaders started off exactly the way you have - because if they were not certain there is such a thing as god and if they were not certain that there is such a thing as Christ's grave and that it is indeed worth liberating, then they, of course, would not go into the whole thing in the first place.
Yes and no. At a glance, you could put out such an argument and you would be generally right. To argue that specific point any further would require us to take in a whole load of additional factors and information into account, make a digression upon digression before we could come to some sort of a conclusion on whether they wouldn't or would regardless. And this is the point on which I err most often. I either do go into it and spread the discussion so thin that half-way through, we forget what the hell were we talking about to begin with or knowing well how big a digression it would take, I give up at the very beginning and say "Look, they would, all right?! Just take it!"
And that is where I come off exactly the same as those crusaders - Obviously, I have already decided that things are the way they are and that I am right and you are suposed to accept that and jsut roll with it. When I confront you in that fashion, you have all the rights to lump me into the same box as thsoe crusaders and move on, shaking your head. So what I want to do now is to correct my on mistake and get to the bottom of it rather then give up half-way through and say "I'm just right, all right?!"
Of course, it is not easy to do so. First of all because of the aforementioned corpus of additional data that we both need to operate with in order to get to the bottom of the crusader thing. So, let me try to go even deeper, to the very root of the thing and that means going back to my original point - the way people think.
Let us, for a moment, step back and agree on one simple starting premise. Let's say that you believe in god and that I don't. We are, by now, both very certain of our respective stances and we both have, what we believe to be sound reasons for that. And to avoid confusion that might follow, I will now expand on the crusaders example and include all the various things from my "utter bullshit" box - horoscopes, karma, spirituality, and everything else that ever crossed people's minds that we consider to be in the domain of metaphysics. Just so that this doesn't start sounding like yet another one of my rants about how there is no god and now I'm about to prove it.
So, I am now encompassing all those things metaphysical, not just the existance of god or gods and attempting to make a step back without making any definite claims either for or against all the various possibilities.
A small digression: didn't I just put a foot into my own mouth here? Am I not the one who claims taht oh yes, we so can know if such things exist or don't, we so can put even god into a petri dish and observe it. Yes, I make that claim and you know I stand behind it. But right now, I am going a step back to explain how I ended up claiming such a thing and to do that, I must step back into a prior moment, a moment of complete ignorance and endless possibilities in order to demonstrate how I sifted through all the possible answers and reached the one I have.
So, here we are, and ehre is this big, vast universe all around us. Right now, we don't know a thing about it and thus, are free to fill it up with anything we want and the chances of each and every one of those things is, at this first moment, equal. I am making no prior claims about anything just yet. I am accepting the possibility that anything might go. But, I am curious and I want to end up not guessing but knowing waht is it that is really out there.
Another little digression: one tripping stone here is definitelly the fact that, as I have heard enough many times from enough many people, the very core of any sort of faith is, well, faith. That faith, in the end, requires no definite knowledge. Some even proclaim that to be on of the faith's biggest virtues. Whatever your own stance on the matter might be, I do think we can all agree on a simple terminology: once some thing is shown, beyond any doubt, to exaist, one can no longer "believe" in it. One can then only "know", as a fact, that it is real. Where knoweldge begins, faith ends. Yes, of course, additional knowledge about a certain thing can, and does serve to reinforce the faith, the belief in something, but... Let me put it like this:
Say you believe in karma. That is you having faith. And during your life, you'll come across various facts, events, details big and small, that apperantly fit the "karma hypothesis". That, then, is additional knowledge that reinforces your belief that there is such a thing as karma. However, once you come across a fact, an experiment, and event, whatever, that definitelly proves that karma exists - and by this I mean something or somethings that cannot possibly exist unless karma exists as well - then, you can no longer "believe" in karma. That is the moment in which you now "know" karma is real.
I might come back to this a bit later (or not, depending on where my toughts and fingers take me - I'm writing this for my own sake, not an essay for science journal) to consider in more detail the ways people observe the facts and ways they put them together. But for now, if we can agree that "faith" and "knowledge" are mutually exclusive - that you can either 'believe' in something or 'know' that something exists but never both at the same time - I will finish this digression and move on.
So, here we are, staring at the big, vast universe, aware of the fact that anything might fill it up and that, in this moment, everything has equal chances of turning out to be true. In other words, if I am now discussing karma or gods or whatever with you, I am doing so from the very beginning meaning, I am now saying "For all I know right now, there could be a god or there could be karma or there could be just about anything else I did not even think about yet."
And now, I have to ask you a question: "Do you want to find out?". Are you standing here with me, staring at it all, wanting to find out for certain what fills all that space or are you perfectly happy with things exactly as they are now? Are you happier standing there and not even exploring? Does the idea of always having possibilites satisfy you? IF yes, then I might as wellleave you alone right now. To keep standing there without any desire to know, only to dream. And that, too, is, I think, all right. If that is truly what makes you happy then so be it. I cannot and will not try to force you to find things out if you don't want to find them out. Be well, and happy dreaming.
However, if there are people like that, I have never met them. Sure, there might be those who are exactly like that but now, I'll assume you are like me and that faced with endless possibilities, you are curious to step ahead and try to find out which ons of them really are there and which ones aren't. Because, whatever is really out there is our reality and since we cannot live in a limbo but only in reality and in order to do that, we feel the need to first find out what that reality is.
Don't get me wrong, if there really is such a thing as "limbo", or heaven, or hell or oness with the universe and so on... if those things really exist then they are reality and again, the only place in which we can exist.
And that is what having an open mind truly means. Being able to say, at all times, that things are so and so but there is always a possibility of them turning out not to be quite as we tought them to be the day before. Because we might learn somehting new tomorrow and then we'll have to shift our worldview accordingly. The problem that I see in people every day is their habit of regularelly giving that "but it could be" a tad bit more credit then it really deserves.
Let me, again, resort to an example. If you jump out of the window on the second floor, you can safelly say that you know you'llend up going downwards, fast, and finish the fall with an unhealthy splat. Not that you believe that will happen but that you know that will happen. And what is it that makes you, me and just about everyone else bar those who believe themselves to be birds that certain that that's theway things are? What is it that makes us say that we "know" it rather then that we "believe" it?
Experiance, for once. People have been jumping from great heights before, so many times and almost always with the same end result - an unhealthy splat. It is in that case, when something happens nearly 99% of the time that we say we "know" it will happen. If we were to use even more exact terminology, we would say "we are reasonably certain that a splat is the most likely outcome of that jump". Instead of putting it like that, we say that we "know" that - that is what "to know" means to us. We are so used to that term that most of the time we take it to mean "100% beyond any doubt, no other way, period, fin". And I think it's perfectly all right to use it like that in every day life.
Because, like any other sentient creature, what we always strive for is control. We need to be able to affect our own lives and the immediate reality around us in order to exist in it. We need to be able to affect our surroundings just as it affects us. We need to be in control, as much as we can. And more certain we are about something, more in control we fell. We'd all feel like shit if every time we'd say "if I jump out the wondow I may or may not end up in a splat". Because if the possibility of either this or that remains uncertain, we'd rarely be able to make a decision whether to jump out said window or not. Yes, of course, if we had some other compelling reason to do it, we'd do it anyway, but that's not the case that I have in mind. We don't all jump out the windows day in and day out. Let's say that the only decision you are to make right now is whether to jump or not, for no reason for or against it. Every day, we pass by our windows and generally, don't make the decision to jump out jsut because. Because we know what the most likely outcome would be. But can you imagine what your life would be like if you had no clue what would happen? If you knew that chances of you getting yourself killed is exactly the same as chances of you lifting up in a happy little flight? Chances are, you'd be torn between the desire to try flying and the desire not to die, every damn day... And making a decision would be that much harder. And if you can't make a decision about what to do with yourself right now, then you are not in control of your life. That is what I mean when I say we are all creatures who need to be in control, and that is what I mean when I say that, in order to have as much control as we need in order to function, to live, we need to 'know' things about the world around us - not just 'believe', but 'know'.
And so, I'll asume that faced with the vast universe, most people will not be satisfied with not knowing what fills it. And history -past experiance again - shows us that that is indeed so. Ever since they could, various people ahve been poking, prying, guessing, testing, trying to find out as much as they could about the reality around them. Again, I cannot say for certain that each and every person ever living on this Earth felt like that and surelly, not equally intensivelly as the next one, but overall, yes, we, humans, want to know our reality and we have activelly been trying to find out more about it every since the very beginning, whatever that beginning may have been. We all are, in short, on a never-ending quest for knowledge, from breakthrough discoveries at the cutting edge of science to mundane, every-day little things such as finding out which store around the corner has better bread. The scope and implications vary, but the driving intention remains the same.
So, fast-forward from the initial moment in which we were all standing and staring into space. Both we, as a humanity overall and we, as individuals, have passed a chunk, picking up experiances and connecting them along the way. Humanity made a lot of blunders along the way, got sidetracked, spent centuries thinking something to be true until it turned out that it wasn't, really... And so did we, individuals, on our own scale did the same thing for ourselves. And of course, we did not all end up in the same spot. I went my way, others went theirs. And standing right where we are now, we are all certain of our own path and our own position and we all think that the other party is wrong.
Not all things in life and reality are black and white. I hope we can all agree on that. In life, things and choices we make are very often neither right or wrong - the most we can say about them is that they are different but on the whole, neither is 'better' or 'worse' then the other. However, there are some things, things regarding reality, that really either "are" or "aren't". For example, electrones are both a wave and a particle. It takes a bit to wrap the mind around the concept untill you step back and realize that the supposed duality isn't really a duality at all. But once you get there, you can easily understand how "particle" and "wave" are both an integral part of what an electrone is. However, electrones and protons are definitelly not the same thing. A particle is either an electron or a proton, but it cannot be both.
Expand that to other concepts now, those that have, so far, rested in the domain of metaphysics. Is there such a thing as karma? Well... can we agree that we cannot both be right? I say there isn't, you say there is. Objectivelly, it can either exist or not. Oh, I don't know... maybe it both exists and doesn't? Maybe there is a metastate in which something simultaneously exists or doesn't? But we'd all have a problem with such a concept, wouldn't we now? Because if there is a metastate of some kind then outside of the metastate, something again either exists or does not exist. Think Schroedinger's Cat here - in the end, not only is the cat either alive or dead, but even though we could not know it for certain until we opened the box, that cat eitehr stayed alive or died at some point. Hells, even if it died and turned into a zombie afterwards, it still doesn't change the fact that in point A it was alive and in point B it was dead, but never both at once.
So, some things either do exist or they do not exist. Things around us, things that are real, all the things that could be in that great big universe... while in the beginning the possibility of every single one existing out there was, to our knowledge, equal, in turth, even back then, they either were or were not. Things appearing later on or dissapearing later on are, of course, also a possibility but even then... even then, said "things" did exist in point A and did not exist in point B.
But before I slide into philosophy too much, I'll just conclude that, in the beginning, none of us was certain of what is our reality and now, after some time has passed, we grew certain about it. If we reached the same conclusion, then fine. But if we haven't... Well, if we haven't, then, as certain as we both are that "I am right and you are wrong", we both know that only one of us can, in the end, be right.
And that is when we hit the problem of both being so damn certain of our position, of being right that we both forget to take that step back and try to find out which one of us made a mistake. But then, why would we? We both know we're right, right? No need to discuss it or prove it further - we both took our paths, certain in them and in the conclusions we drew from them so no need to prove the point all over again. We both already know.
But do we?
This is the point in which I usually snap, certain in my own conclusions, loaded with facts, pregnant with conclusions and unbearable in my high-horse attitude. This is the part where, if I even bothered getting this far to begin with, shake my head, growl something and come off just as stubborn as the next fundie.
This is the point where I make my mistake.
What I should do instead is to grit my teeth and, having reached this far, follow through to the end. Not with asserting my conclusions onto people but explaining them and the reasons behind them even better. Let me jsut say at this point that hells yes, I really don't consider most people worthy of my time, I really don't feel like explaining myself to every single person that crosses my path. I don't have either time nor patience for it. But for some people, I do have time. For some people, I do feel the need to go all the way through. Not to change their minds or mine, but to find a common ground with those I wish to spend my time with. Nothing more and nothing less than that.
So how to go about it?
(continued in the next post)