nobody knows what any of this is or how it got here
Q: Dear Robert, I heard you on a podcast where you shared wisdom with the following words:
“This is your life. It belongs to no one else. And to be here, you pay a high price in pain and suffering. Do not let anyone tell you how to live. Just find your own mind here and now.”
That is as I remember it. Can you elaborate on what you mean by finding your own mind? By the word mind I understand thoughts and feelings. Is that also how you define it?
Hi. In my view, the entire matter of being here—being conscious, I mean, of one’s human primate animal subjectivity, which you called “thoughts and feelings”—is an enigma.
nobody knows what any of this is or how it got here
Nobody knows what consciousness is or isn’t. Nobody knows what matter is. Nobody knows what spirit is. Spirit and matter are just words. What they mean is what we understand them to mean.
Nobody knows anything about God, karma, life after death, or what the "self" is or isn't--none of that. Zero. Bupkis. Nada.
No one has factual answers to ultimate existential or metaphysical questions. Such topics can be discussed endlessly but never resolved. An answer may persuade, but persuasion is about enhanced belief, not truth or facts, and so being convinced cannot substantiate truth nor corroborate facts.
To live without seeing the difference between fact and belief is to inhabit a trance state in which one imagines having factual answers while unknowingly enveloped in a cloud of learned ignorance.
On awakening from that trance, here I am, as usual, without knowing how or why or the ultimate meaning of anything. One understands that no one has secret inside information about ultimate matters, only belief and conjecture. One is left with nothing to fall back on. Nothing to trot out in times of need. No cut-and-dried explanations of anything. In that condition, thoughts and feelings continue to arise, but one does not need to scribble over them with other people’s judgments and interpretations.
One walks through this world, seeing what one sees and feeling what one feels without coming to conclusions about any of it. You are naked and alone. That’s what I mean by your own mind.
The title of this essay and the photo is a wonderful ironic match, because somebody does indeed know what any of this is or how it got there. I mean, the janitor surely knows there should be a garbage can outside (or inside) the church so parishioners won't litter the immediate portal entrance to their holy gathering place, but the significance and meaning of why people do litter like that and what that garbage might symbolically represent could surely be the subject of many more essays about human behavior...
I love contemplative retreats, preferably contemplative retreats that are not connected to any particular religion, teacher, or philosophy.
I am a non-believer, and I believe in mystery and immanence.
This is difficult and I guess I am, according to what I see, I am a contemplative orphan.
Anyone else out there?
Thanks