A Road To Knowledge

A Road To Knowledge

By Ron Hooft

Copyright Ron Hooft 2011

Published at Smashwords

Introduction to the Seeker’s Guide

The series starts with the seeker’s guide. It is primer for those wanting to start a journey to enlightenment, or just want to figure out what all this (existence) is about.

The Seeker's Guide

A way to knowledge

Prologue

In every human being's life there comes a time when the big questions pop up. You know the ones: Who or what am I? What is all this about? What is my purpose or the purpose of existence itself? There are so many ways to formulate the questions but they all add up to the same thing for almost all of us: What’s really going on around here?

For some it is inherent in their very being that they should be seekers. For others the task proves too daunting or they have little or no real interest in knowing for whatever reasons; and there are many. Some just follow their birth religion, while others wander from belief to belief looking for the right system for them. Some are happy with faith alone. Some are forced into it all kicking and screaming.

Whatever the philosophy, discipline, or religion, everyone will tell you that seeking those answers can be a lifelong process. So the question is: Where does one begin? Who does one join? Should you join a religion or affiliate with a philosophy? Should you look to one of the Eastern philosophies or Western Judaism, Christianity or Islam? Do you want to be Wicca or a Buddhist? Or should you be an atheist? Many people cherry pick; mix a bunch of ideologies and world views together, take what they like and leave what they don't. Who has the real answers?

When I was a very young boy I was faced with this very problem. I couldn't reconcile my given religion with reality, and when my mother informed me that probably no one actually had all the answers I was at a loss. Where does one begin when one begins from nothing? If no adults knew all the answers, then what was the chance that I as a child could figure it all out? And was my mother right? Was it true that no one really knows?

I had to find out. But there was my problem again: how? How would I know whether what anyone said was true? I didn’t have any way of knowing. The only thing I knew for sure was that there had to be answers somewhere. There is obviously truth and falsehood. As long as you are sure of that, there is a place to start.

What I did was go from religion to religion. None of them rang completely true for me. They often contradicted each other, and all of them claimed to have all the true answers. But that is impossible since they all seem to have a different take on what the ultimate answers are.

I wasn't happy with any of it. I soon started pondering the problem intensely. If all of them say they have the right answers but they all contradict each other, what is the likelihood that any one of them is absolutely correct? After all, if you have two contradictory ideologies that both claim to be true at least one of them, and perhaps both, must be false. Again, how would I know? There had to be a way… And of course there is. But I had no idea what it was at the time.

I decided that the only way to find answers was to go with my gut. Mothers tell you that all the time. Go with your feelings. If something didn't sound right I either did not understand what was being said, or there was something wrong with it. I would cherry pick my own religion or philosophy, my own world view, all from my gut and my intellect. What a task that turned out to be. All too often, what a waste of time; though I have no regrets.

I went from Christianity to Eastern philosophy studying all they had to say and weeding it out bit by bit. I looked into every philosophy I could get my hands on, all to find my own answers within them. This went on for most of my early and teen years. In the end, what I found was better than just answers. It was a way to find the questions. Asking the right questions is as hard as finding the answers to them. If you ask the wrong questions you find the wrong answers. So let’s start with the big question: the question of god.

Chapter 1: The Question of God

If you ask who created this, you assume someone created this, not to mention that you assume that it was created. This can only lead you to one place, a god of some sort.

Don’t assume anything. If you do not assume anything, you have to ask something like: How did all this get to be the way it is? If you ask that question you do not negate the possibility that some sort of god or higher intelligent power created it. But you don’t assume it. When you do not have the facts it seems useless to assume anything. That’s the first way you know it is going to be the right question. If the question assumes something it is only as good as that assumption. If the assumption proves false then the question was a waste of time.

Of course it is easy to see why humans assumed a god or higher powers. We are creators ourselves. We learned to create fire. We create new and innovative things all the time. But we do not create the stuff we make things from. We manipulate what already exists. We create other humans through sex, but that is controlled by forces we do not control. It turns out there are a lot of those and these days they all fall under the heading: Natural processes.

Since we are intelligent, thinking beings, we assume something with even more intellect than ours must have created the matter we manipulate and most importantly to us, intelligent beings. We exist, and we didn’t always exist individually, nor did the human race. So somehow we got here. Thus, god must exist. There must be a first mover.

Thomas Aquinas wrote a very persuasive proof for god along these lines that is still used by the Catholics and others. This is the basic gist of all his proofs combined, in my words not his:

If there was a time when nothing at all existed then nothing could now exist. So something must have always existed.

If something has always existed then it is cumbersome and unsatisfying to think it had a creator, because that would lead to infinite creators, which is not logical. Therefore it must have always existed without beginning.

That means god must exist.

You can read all of Thomas’ proofs in his own words online in the Catholic encyclopaedia, or at the local library.

Anselm of Canterbury and Rene Descartes agreed with each other that further proof of god is in the idea that we humans could not possibly come up with the idea of perfection ourselves because we can only imagine what our experience teaches, and we have no experience of ultimate perfection. A god must exist and have implanted the idea in us, for us to have thought of the most perfect being that could possibly exist. This is called the Ontological Argument. It is the argument from perfection, and I’ll get back to it in a moment.

First, what about Thomas’ arguments? Yes, we are here. We do exist. We did not always exist. So if you define that which produced us as god, then a god exists by definition. But is it a requirement that this god is an intelligent being? Or is it possible this god is a process: The god process, the creative process, the process of existence? We assumed a god must be intelligent and self aware. But assuming is not the same as knowing.

No requirement exists that a god must be conscious, even though all gods traditionally are. However, to assume that what is behind existence is intelligent is a weak point in thinking. Unless an intelligent god shows up and actually tells us about itself we cannot prove whether it exists or not. We can have our opinions on the matter but without good evidence our opinions are just so much unsubstantiated speculation. While speculation is wonderful, it isn’t fact; and that’s what we are out to discover isn’t it? Therefore all we can say with certainty right now is that we exist. At least that is a fact…. Isn’t it? Don’t panic…. It probably is.

But low and behold I proved logically that god exists if you define it as that which produced us. What a feat! Well Aquinas would be happy, anyway. Now, you can define god in other ways, but for most people, while they will argue about their gods attributes, there is a consensus that whoever created us is god. But not as many would agree if we said: What ever produced us is god. My statement assumes nothing, while a theological stance assumes a conscious being.

I am not saying ‘created’ on purpose because rightly or wrongly it implies an intellect. We haven’t established that the real god has one. If god turns out to be a natural process or set of processes, or even all of them put together, can we still call it god? How else is a god defined besides that which has produced all things?

If we are just talking about the Christian god, that’s easy. It is above all else, it is all wise all knowing, perfect, separate from time and its creation, etc. If we are talking about any of the other several thousand gods mankind has worshiped and believed in, it isn’t that easy. Some religions didn’t even believe their gods created mankind. Often insignificant gods create man, like in the Sumerian stories. But what all these other gods supposedly have in common, besides producing us, is consciousness. Natural processes probably aren’t conscious.

At first, ancient people didn’t believe in gods. At first we believed in the ancestors. In some oriental countries they still do. Later we believed in spirit. The world was filled with spirits. Everything was considered alive. This is called Animism.

Eventually nature itself was a goddess, (Gaia) and not only was it conscious, it intimately connected all things. Then there were the pantheons. But the gods were far from perfect. In fact perfection regarding gods wasn’t even on the menu in the minds of ancient mankind. Even when Moses defined the Jewish god, it wasn’t perfect, just too powerful not to obey. It wasn’t until the Christians that god became perfection itself and was defined that way.

While Aquinas had some good solid points, Anselm and Descartes have a problem in logic. Perfection is not an objective idea. It is an ‘almost’ completely subjective idea. The idea that a perfect being would create anything at is illogical. Logically there is no perfect being because we exist. To make this a little clearer: a perfect being would have no needs and therefore no need to create anything. If a god has needs and desires it is ruled by them as we are, and cannot be perfect. That leaves the Christian god out of at least one of its attributes.

Now, suffice it to say that every ultimate attribute of the Christian god can be shown to be false. But I am not here to debunk the Christian god, so I won’t spend much time on it here. My point is that I think you will find that no claim of ultimate attributes stands up very well, logically.

Even the idea that we cannot come to the concept of perfection on our own is false. Our lives were not very good thousands of years ago. Some of us have a very hard life right now. It is natural for a human being to think about how we can improve life. When we get the improvement we are after, we can always find more to improve. But we can’t always just continue to improve our situation. Eventually we run out of improvements to make.

If we could make all the improvements we want, and that could possibly be made, we would come to a stopping point where no more improvement can be made. That limit is what we have called absolute perfection. So certainly our experience of life not only allows us to think of absolute perfection, it leads us to imagine it even though we never experience it.

As I said, perfection is subjective because it is perspective dependant. While perfection for me might be perfect hot dry weather all year long and the ability to grow palm trees in my Canadian back yard, that would represent a boring hell on earth to someone who thinks of perfection as a never ending ski trail. It is perspective based perfection because it is only perfect relative to one or a group of individuals, it is not considered perfect by everyone.

The idea of perfect balance seems to be a good candidate for objective perfection’ but then one can be left with the idea of the universe going into heat death as a form of ultimate perfection. That wouldn’t be perfect for us at all. But it wouldn’t matter because none of us would exist. I’ll explain this idea a little farther as we go along.

The only ultimate objective perfection would be a Utopia where everyone and everything agreed that the state of being is perfect. It would be perfection by unanimous consensus. And that of course is not going to happen.

Now, I must admit I am putting the cart before the horse here because you have not heard all the reasoning behind my above statements about god and needs. That reasoning is what this text will explain among other things. But before we go on I would like to give a very short explanation of how the natural process, as seen by science, could be considered god.

Most of us now know Einstein’ equation: E = mc squared. It is the formula that told the world energy and matter are the same thing in different form. Energy is all there is in the view of science. We and all things are made of it.

The laws of thermodynamics state that energy cannot be created or destroyed. That means that energy, which is all that exists, is eternal. For all intents and purposes one can say energy is that which has always been.

All we can do with energy is transform it, and it does that constantly on its own. So what about before time; in the pre Big Bang singularity? Did the Big Bang create energy? No. While science tells us nothing can be known about the laws of physics in a singularity, the one thing we do know about it is that it is described as being a super condensed point of energy. As energy cannot be created nor destroyed, the singularity would have contained all the energy now in the universe. No more and no less.

What I am saying is that now, for the first time in history, we have two major alternatives. We have the idea of a conscious creator, but we also have the idea of a creative process. There is not just one game in town anymore, and we have satisfied all of Aquinas’ concerns. We also have good evidence for our interpretation while the theist has very little to none.

But that doesn’t prove no god exists. It just tells us there is probably no conscious god required, and it gives us a more compelling version of a god than the one we in the West were brought up with. So how do we find out what the truth is?

Chapter 2: It’s All A Crock

The questioner is nothing but the answers. That is really the problem. We are not ready to accept this answer because it will put an end to the answers which we have accepted for ages as the real answers. - U.G Krishnamurti

If you really are or want to be a seeker, one of the first things you have to know may come as quite a shock. It's all a crock. That’s the place to begin. Even though you may actually know a few things it is best to pretend for a moment you don’t, and perhaps discover them again if they really are true. Forget about all you have ever thought you knew about existence and those eternal burning questions. If you want to know how to find the truth about them, the first thing you have to understand is that you know very little to nothing about them.

Many people reading this may have already come to this conclusion or started their journey this way. If so, good going. It was purportedly a man named Jesus who said we must be like children. Whether he existed or not, that thought did exist two thousand years ago, and was passed on. It’s a good one. If you want the truth, the first place to start is by admitting you don’t know jack, and going from there.

To that end, here are some tips on how to get started.

1) Don’t assume anything. That’s how you find the right questions. Questions that assume something are not the ones you are after.

2) Forget the old ideas for now and be open to new ideas, but fall to none of those either. Don’t marry any ideas, no matter how good they might sound.

3) Be ready to drop any idea at a moment's notice if it turns out to have no validity. Better to know nothing than to believe nonsense for the sake of feeling good.

4) Accept what is, even if you don't like it. You may not like that the earth is round, but get over it. Liking has nothing to do with truth. Something either is, or is not true. Your feelings about it do not in and of themselves change anything.

5) Be only interested in the truth, no matter what it turns out to be.

This is the first lesson every seeker must undertake to learn in order to be purified; metaphorically speaking. It’s part of the serious seekers credo, and I will give more of it as we progress. It can all be filed under one phrase: Truth for truth’s sake. This credo can certainly be used by anyone actually looking for truth rather than just validation for their desires. If you are really interested in truth, you can find it if you are willing to accept what is real, no matter what it is.

The idea here is for you open yourself up to truth by guarding against confirmation bias. Confirmation bias being the tendency we humans have to look for confirmation of our preconceptions in any new information we get, and to avoid or irrationally deny information and interpretations that contradict our preconceptions.

So say we admit we know nothing but we hope we are discovering ways to find out what we want to know. Where do we go from here? How do we decide what the truth is and what it is not? We have to discern truth and make choices based on what we decide it is every day of our lives. Some truths are easy: If you do not pay the light bill, they disconnect your service. This is where we can start finding truths and putting the pieces together: In very basic mundane facts we face every day.

One of the first interesting facts science tells us about relates directly to our light bill: There is a direct causal relationship between action and reaction. Those actions and reactions are truth. It's called: Cause and effect. For every effect there is a cause. No matter what we do, there are consequences or effects. It's easy to see why we want to know what is going on. If you know the cause and effect correlations you have the power to make things go your way. This we know is a fact. The more you know the better. If you knew every causal relationship you would have few if any insurmountable problems.

Side note: (Wouldn’t that be perfect? This is yet another example as to how we arrived at an ultimate perfection without the idea being implanted in us.)

There are hundreds of facts we all agree are facts. But we have to be careful. Agreement is not proof of fact any more than desire alone determines fact.

Years ago it was a hard sell for anyone announcing that the earth was really round. It was an absurd idea. If it was round we would fall off. You could demonstrate that by putting something on a ball and watching it fall off. Besides which, except for a few hills and such it seems pretty flat to me. Ok, when I go out to sea I notice it is circular, but it can be flat and circular at the same time.

What is a dead giveaway though, is the fact that I can’t see other bits of land or other ships, and when they do come into view it is as if I am looking at them coming up a hill. I see a mast first, long before seeing the rest of the ship. And that is what started some sailors thinking there was more to it all. But that didn’t negate the idea that there still might be an end or tipping point where one might fall off.

Consensus can not be relied on to give us a good picture of reality. Particularly when our perception of reality is dead wrong, and the facts are counter intuitive given what we seem to know and experience. A surprising amount of facts about the world are counter intuitive.

Now, getting back to desire, I don’t mean that desire doesn’t shape our lives. Of course it does. If you desire something you are likely to work toward achieving it. What I mean is that desire itself will not make something true if it isn’t. It may facilitate something coming into being which did not exist before. A case in point would be any one of a million inventions we could name. But desire by itself cannot make something real which does not already exist. In other words, if there are no animals in the world that are part moose and part rabbit, just desiring that such a creature does exist will not bring it into being. Nor will desire make something cease to exist just by desiring it.

To make something a reality one has to translate desire into action. Not just any action either. If we really want to see such a creature we have to turn desire into actions which might bring it about. These days we might be able to create such a creature with genetic engineering. Why anyone would want to, is anyone’s guess.

In the past, of course, there was no way our desires along these lines could be accomplished in any real way. By real I mean by manipulation of the material world through a logical process that follows the laws of physics.

That didn’t stop our imagination from deciding we could make things happen with the right magic words or potions or rituals while invoking the supernatural. We were trying to bypass or influence earthly cause and effect by appealing to more powerful beings to do it for us. But we never had much real success with that, which is why we turned to reason. We probably never saw people with heads like a lion. But that didn’t prevent some of us from believing that since we could imagine them, they must exist somewhere.

This idea that the imagination has power by itself is still prevalent among many people. Superstition is still rampant. Even some interpretations of science seem to endorse the idea that imagination by itself plays a key role in creating the universe. Many religions seem to believe it as well; particularly Eastern religions.

But the premise that science is actually based on, is that there is an objective (factual) reality. So who do we believe and which version of reality is correct?

Chapter 3: Reality

Even today some say that we make our own reality through thought alone. It’s a poetic way to look at things. But if that were so we would all be millionaires. We would have our heart’s desire be it money or good health or ultimate happiness, wouldn’t we? But we don’t. We have to work for everything. Observing or thinking don’t cut it on their own. We know that from experience.

When the model you use does not reflect observation, your model has failed. But we have two models that both fail and are accurate at the same time, but not in the same way. We have classical reality which works very well on the macro level but doesn’t work on the micro level, and we have QM that predicts perfectly for us on the micro level but not on the classical level. Can’t we use both for what they are worth? Well we do.

But there is a philosophical difference between the objective reality of the classical model and the seemingly subjective reality of the quantum reality. We have a problem here; a contradiction of sorts. In this case it can be resolved by understanding that reality is both objective and subjective in different ways at different times. It isn’t a matter of one or the other. A contradiction would be to say that reality is both subjective and objective in the same way at the same time. That is not possible. Something cannot be true and false in the same way at the same time. If I say the light is both on and off in the same way at the same time, then I've created a contradiction. It can't be both at the same time in the same way.

There is one underlying reality and your perception of it is irrelevant except to you. It is Irrelevant in that it does not alter the underlying reality itself. For example: The type on an EBook page is not ink, though it looks like it. The page is not paper, though it looks like it. All electronic mail is, is the result of a program designed to look like paper and ink when all is said and done. So your perceptions can be wrong. The underlying reality of what looks like paper and ink on a computer is unseen. And when you know what the processes are you see they have nothing to do with the meaning of the word on the page. It’s an underlying process. It is an underlying layer of reality that creates the reality we see.

However, your perception does alter your actions. Your actions are real; your perception is real, though it is by far incomplete. Because of the incomplete nature of your perception it does not represent all of the layers of underlying reality it works within. It can be dead wrong and reflect nothing of reality at all.

Your perception is only a representation of reality limited by your conditioning; your combined physical nature and your learned behaviour. It is not a separate reality itself; it is part of the underlying reality. You cannot see at least three layers of the reality you exist in. You cannot see the world as atoms or molecules or cells. The fourth layer that you CAN see hear and feel, is at very best only part of that layer at any given time.

If we are doing or observing we have to focus, and thereby lose a large part of our information due to narrowing our scope of interest. The guy that coughs in the background, the one making coffee, the noises in the room, all pushed into background. Yet we have found out that all have an effect on what we are trying to do or observe, even though we view them as unrelated distractions. This becomes clear through chaos theory.

Our MO as students of life is our incapacity to deal with more than a few things at a time. This is why we have to learn to dissect information, process it, store it, and finally put things back into the big picture. Even then, chaos theory tells us that a snail knocking a pebble down a mountain last Thursday may have an influence on whether you get your cup of coffee this morning or not. It’s called the butterfly effect. It means cause and effect are not locally confined. We simply cannot take into account everything that affects our lives at any given moment. It is impossible; and that’s what I mean by we can only see part of this layer at any one time. Our perception is minimal.

The problem with mystics is that they want to perceive those other levels and think it can only be done through what amounts to magic. Then they come to believe that their perceptions are of a super natural world or a separate reality. But in fact, like any story about an experience, the telling is never the reality. It is only an interpretation of the events that really took place, and that interpretation is almost always bias as well as incomplete. Therefore you get a limited amount of accurate information from any re-telling of an experience.

It is not that the experiences of the mystics, or anyone’s experience of the supernatural, are not real experiences. It is the interpretation of the experience that has to be questioned.

I've been there. I have studied mysticism in my travels so I have some experience with it and personal knowledge of it. You can never be sure that what you perceive as supernatural isn't just your brain filling the blanks you want filled. I have found that usually it is. In other words, a lot of it is your imagination hard at work, with a brain that can be manipulated to allow you to perceive what you want.

I've experienced much of what Buddhism and Hinduism claim to be what one who is enlightened experiences. I know one can apparently leave their body, live in a state of bliss, experience the oneness of the universe, lose all ego and sense of self, and live in a state where you have the feeling you just know and understand everything; even though you really don't have any more information than you did before you entered that state. I’ve done all that. The only thing I couldn't accomplish was levitation, which would come in real handy.

Most of it, from personal experience, is nothing more than tricks of the mind, amazing as those experiences are. Imagination can conger anything, including spaghetti monster gods. The real magic is being able