The Path of Self-Discovery
Every human conscious experience of life whether we acknowledge it or not is on a personal path of self-discovery. Everyone’s life experience is a curious dichotomy of 1) knowing that we exist as a consciously aware experience of ‘I am’ and 2) experiencing the existence of a greater reality around us through our inherent process of ‘I perceive’. Our self-discovery experience of these two reality perspectives combine to become the foundation of our emerging understanding of our life situation.
In search of that understanding, each of these two first principles generate a particular line of inquiry that when combined becomes our personal path of self-discovery. Our experience of ‘I perceive’ is the very objective line of questioning that enables us to discover what is going on around us with physical success as our goal. Our experience of ‘I am’ generates the much more subjective line of internal questions about who we are and what we want that are generally not so clearly defined.
Everyone pursues these two first principles of their existence with varying degrees of rigor based on the life perspective they have chosen to pursue. The most common choice to make is to pursue the glaringly obvious perception experience of the physical reality that surrounds us. We start our consideration with the physical things that we perceive around us first because they are the things that facilitate our ability to survive, but in the course of that survival, we are exposed to many other less essential things that are more superficially very alluring to us.
Both these survival critical and simply alluring physical objects can be very distracting, but even for those hard focused on their physical reality, some measure of attention is required to formulate the willful conscious intention that directs the execution of these external pursuits. Formulating this conscious intention falls into the more mysterious, subjective realm of the ‘I am’ consideration.
Elusive though these internal things may be to know, they are necessary in our quest to be happy and content with the lives we make for ourselves. These two things together become the foundation against which the success of the rest of our conscious experience is measured. The whole of our human conscious experience unfolds around these two foundational revelations into the two distinct lines of questioning that we all are forced to consider becoming the basis of all the questions about our life.
The sense of existence expressed by the phrase ‘I am’ emanates from the conscious mind which automatically extends this sense of identity boundary to include this seamlessly attached physical body. The experience of ‘I am’ creates a space of self identity that establishes a clear line of demarcation between itself and the everything else that exists in this physical reality.
We know that we exist, but we do not have unambiguous internal clarity about who we really are or why we are here. These are things that we develop on-the-fly during the course of our interaction with things in the physical world around us. Initially, we define ourselves in terms of the things that we physically do to shape our physical reality into something that is comfortable and to our liking, but we harbor deeper longings that are not accounted for in this physical context.
This more superficial understanding of who we are and what we want makes sense in our physical existence, but frequently fails to capture the subtle nuances of what we really want deep down inside us. In order to develop a more comprehensive working sense of these more elusive internal things, we develop a conceptual Who-I-Am model in our personal truth that contains our current best sense of who we are in more specific terms. Over time, this model evolves to reflect changes in our best guess understanding of who we really are, what we want, and why we exist at any particular moment.
The experience of ‘I perceive’ is centered in the physical body with its vast array of various sensory mechanisms to engage and extract information about this other physical reality around us. These sensory mechanisms generate a stream of sensory impressions that seem to indicate the existence of an external collection of the everything else that is surrounding us. Our conscious impressions of this everything else are constructed from our perceptions to create a conceptual All-That-Is model to define the what, when, where, and how of all these various things going on around us.
This All-That-Is model by-product of the physical body’s various sensors is the collection of information about the reality around us that is vitally critical because our body must engage in certain activities to survive in this perceived external environment. The urgency of these survival related questions forces us to formulate and effectively execute some sort of strategy for successful interaction with this greater physical environment to simply survive.
Beyond this survival critical understanding, the All-That-Is also contains information about what is going on around us in the physical world that is additionally very important to the less serious issues of being happy and content with one’s life. This conceptual All-That-Is becomes our guidebook by providing all the conceptual understanding that we use to interface and interact with this external reality on a daily basis. Our success in life hinges on the integrity of the knowledge in our All-That-Is conceptual model of reality.
These two distinct lines of questioning address the only two things that are of any importance to us which is reflected in the greater context of our societies. This Who-I-Am curiosity about ‘who and why we are’ has gravitated in the context of our greater society in the direction of the subjective institutional practice of religion. Our All-That-Is fascination with what is going on around us has gravitated in our societies in the direction of the formal institutional study of science.
Together these two conceptual things of an All-That-Is and a Who-I-Am form the contextual basis of our personal truth explanation of the reality of our existence and shape all our actions in this external environment. These two conceptual models of the All-That-Is and the Who-I-Am with all their flaws and limitations become in our personal truth the carefully crafted cage from which we conduct the affairs of our life.
There is no shortage of persons who would like to help us shape our personal truth understanding of things because there is a great advantage that can be derived from this kind of control. Sadly, most of these obliging persons are motivated by the selfish intention to control our thinking in a direction that is favorable to them. This same selfish intention has become embedded in our society to the point that it is no coincidence that we find ourselves torn between the two belief support systems of religion and science.
Our experience of ‘I perceive’ begets our objective science of being alive that is our personal objective response to the first fundamental question; ‘what is going on around me’. It is the process operating at the center of every human life to systematically observe things looking for reliable trends and performing trial and error testing to verify our understanding about our life situation. We use this process in our every waking moment for the purpose of assembling a body of facts that can be shown to operate in a way that is predictable to conduct the affairs of our lives.
In this most generic sense, this everyday human process of accumulating knowledge about our personal All-That-Is of our self-designated area of concern is a textbook definition of science. It is an informal approximation of the very same information gathering process of the scientific method without all the intensity, rigor, and most importantly peer-review. It works just like the formal science we more traditionally know, but because we use it in our every waking moment, it just doesn’t seem very notable.
Our experience of ‘I am’ begets our more elusive art-of-living correctly is our personal response to the second fundamental question of ‘who-am-I’. It is the process that operates in parallel with the science-of-being at the center of every human life in our attempt to deal with the more subjective matters of being conscious. Our lives are cluttered with an ongoing internal confusion about who we really are and why we are here living this life. The vague and mysterious nature of our own conscious experience is at the center of this confusion.
Our understanding of consciousness stands in stark contrast to the objectively derived facts about the nature of our physical body and the life situation that is unfolding around us. Instead of the very obvious physical world, this conscious experience exists without any tangible substance. It is invisible to all our senses but nonetheless discernible as something that is of a more ethereal nature. It is a subjective realm of thoughts, emotions, and many other various conscious constructs that exist and only make sense in the mental context of the conscious mind.
The human conscious experience is basically a cascading stream of consciousness that reveals a series of questions that we each must answer in every phase of our experience. We like to rely on easy off-the-shelf answers for some of the more difficult questions, but there is a price to be paid by choosing that luxury. With every bit of control that we relinquish to outside sources, we surrender a measure of our own personal freedom.
The human conscious experience is a journey of self-discovery that is both a right to have and a responsibility that we must execute. Our failure to honor this self-discovery mandate compromises our ability to be truly happy and content.
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