Is It the Forest or the Trees

The ever increasing degree of specialization in human collective knowledge has resulted in a level of detail that is beyond the comprehension of any one individual. The great early 20th century physicist Erwin Schrödinger lamented this high degree of specialization in his preface to ‘What Is Life?’ as follows:

 
We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us, that from antiquity to and throughout many centuries the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. 

Erwin Schrödinger 'What Is Life?' 1944

The 70+ years since this publication have seen the volumes of human knowledge increased by many orders of magnitude, but a clear understanding of the All-That-Is remains a mystery.  Perhaps even more of a mystery, now that it is buried in all this newly discovered detail.  What is really need to 'welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole'.

Some are convinced that the whole can only be understood by understanding all the parts. For the All-That-Is, understanding all the parts to understand the whole is beyond the range of human understanding.

There is a commonly understood notion that someone can become so involved in the details of a particular problem that they lose sight of the broader situation as a whole. In so doing, the big picture view of this more general situation is lost in the mass of details. By analogy, they can’t see the forest for the trees. Such is certainly the case in the search for the ultimate truth.

Take for example an actual forest, the level of detail to be considered is very considerable. There is botany for the plants, and zoology for the animals. There are matters of geology and hydrology in addition to climate and . Science has long since recognized this dilemma for real forest, and they have created a higher level of study that extracts bits and pieces from these other masses of detail to create ecology.

The unimaginable levels of detail are much like the Sirens described in Greek mythology who with their enchanting music lured passing sailors to shipwreck on their rocky island. There is something similarly enticing about these extreme levels of detail that many seekers of truth cannot resist. They are lured by them into an inescapable, complex collection of information that smothers and ultimately consumes them.

Resist the alluring temptation of the incredible layers of detail.

Evolution in Western Religious Thought

There has been some historical intellectual consideration of the root source of all things and the possibility of some intelligent creator throughout the course of all humanity, but to connect with any type of unbiased serious intellectual consideration, one has to find a time prior to the corrupting influence of all the politically inspired religions hat have been created along the way. To reach this point of intellectual consideration, one has to look way back to a time when all this hype and hyperbole were not so extreme. In Western thinking, most of this clear consideration goes back to the time of the ancient Greeks, but a few things such as panpsychism actually preceded even that.

Thales of Miletus in the tradition of panpsychism was one of the first to explain the vast diversity in nature as deriving from a single ultimate substance instead of the more traditional use of imagination driven mythological devices. Later, Anaxagoras presented the concept of a universal mind in which he proposed the power of this mind in organisms that enables them to extract nourishment from surrounding substances. Anaxagoras’ concept of mind (nous) and awareness (gnó̱si̱) were believed to be more widely distributed than just humans. He felt that all living things exhibited these characteristics in their interactions with their surroundings, and he further speculated this primal substance of consciousness existed in both animate and inanimate things.

During the first and second century CE, a variety of ancient religious and philosophical ideas began to be fused together under the modern name of gnosticism. Gnosticism is the conflation of ideas from various Greek philosophers steeped in the belief of panpsychism and the emerging teachings of Jesus. The fundamental tenet of all these various flavors of gnosticism is that a person in this material world exists as a divine spark trapped in the human body that can only be liberated by gnosis (aka spiritual knowledge) acquired through direct experience. In gnosticism, one achieves salvation by acquiring correct gnosis (knowledge).

Later, the Christian religion evolution took a radical departure from its original gnostic approach after the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity. The influence of Constantine refocused the religion away from spiritual revelation of knowledge to something much more politically expedient for him. In this more political approach, follower were aggressively ‘marketed’ into a religion where the faithful were forced to believe what they were told. This new dogma shifted from the individual focus on peace, love, and knowledge to something more conducive to the accumulation of power, control, and wealth by the church and its administrators.

The point where this power shifting dogma occurred is where everything suddenly gets way more complicated. Up until this point, everyone was free to consider the topic of a conscious creator without worrying about infringement on someone’s intellectual property rights to the Divine. Before this Christian self-proclamation as the only access point to knowledge about the conscious creator, no one owned sole source access to the creator being. Needless to say, consideration of the topic got weird at this point, and these notions about a creator took a turn for the worse.

The intellectual openness of the Enlightenment undermined the oppressive authority of monarchies and the Christian church and paved the way for the political and religious revolutions to come. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, and constitutional government wherein the church and state are separated.

Also during this Enlightenment, a new religious philosophical position of Deism emerged that rejected this Christian revelation as a source of all religious knowledge and asserted that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to establish the existence of a conscious creator of the Universe. In something of a return to the original Christian gnosticism, Deists believed answering the question about the existence of a conscious creator can be based on reason and ordinary experience of nature which they in turn called natural theology.

Deist philosophers were not the only ones to reject the Christian revelation as a source of knowledge and to appeal only to the truths that could be established by reason alone. Beyond deism, many others became so disenchanted with this oppressive Christian revelation rhetoric that they became full fledged intellectual deniers. They resist any possibility that such a creator might exist even in the face of certain things that defied their materialistic view of reality such as their very own mysterious consciousness.

In Search of the Ultimate Truth

The concept of an ultimate truth that explains all the happenings in our world and more importantly in our lives is a very intriguing possibility.  Its existence is a mythology to most, but some few get so caught up in this intrigue that they spend their whole lives in search of this wonderful possibility. 

In eastern culture, there is a very specific concept for which there was no direct parallel in western culture. This concept is the belief that there exists a state of human consciousness that transcends suffering and longing and enables the liberation from the cycle of rebirth and death of the individual who attains this level of consciousness.

 Eastern cultures have words like nirvana, moksha, or satori that accurately expressed this concept.  In the English, language this concept was initially translated to the word enlightenment. Today, nirvana has been assimilated into the English lexicon, but the earlier association of this concept to the English word enlightenment has stuck. 

This association by translation has over time actually endowed the word enlightenment with all these higher meanings from these eastern words to the point that it is frequently used to denote these spiritual concepts without further qualification. In the context of this discussion, enlightenment is considered very specifically to be the development of a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of one’s Self (i.e. who/what you are) and the reality surrounding that Self (i.e. what it is and how you relate to it) to the point that one attains this liberation. 

 As human beings, we are self-awareness and have the ability to think, reason, and feel great passion about things. By virtue of these two things, we are able to experience great pleasure and happiness, or conversely, they can also cause us to feel great pain and sorrow. In our lives, we attempt to string together a series of events that optimizes the pleasure and happiness experiences over those that bring pain and sorrow, but this simple life mission proves to be extremely difficult for most of us. 

Most would agree that the gift of life is a great blessing. It is also a compelling mystery whose true meaning appears to be very difficult to understand, but the meaning of life is not really hidden from us. We make it difficult to understand by virtue of the many veils of illusion that we create for ourselves in the form of the many things that we choose to believe about our individual reality. 

We have no choice in this matter of belief. Everyone has to believe some things, but this simple process of believing is a lot harder than it seems. A belief that is assumed correctly with all due diligence and care will eventually evolve into something that is known dispelling the illusion of mystery, but much more commonly an incorrect belief is casually adopted that only creates illusion and the appearance of greater mystery. 

It takes great patience and much thought to decipher the real truth about life from the information that is available to us, but it is worth the effort for it is this Truth that will truly set you free. This collection of thoughts across these blog posts offers some critical observations relevant to some key questions in the life experience. These thoughts are being humbly offered to all fellow seekers of this ultimate Truth for their consideration and independent verification as we are all here just looking for something credible to believe.