Reflections on

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I watched this video by Belzebuub today.

It’s about the search for truth, and largely about the impediments to that the search and the difficulty of that search.

In reflecting on it, I can reflect mainly on my own search as it’s been so far.

In our culture the concept of ‘truth’ seems very unfashionable, especially in academic circles, where the idea of ‘truth’ is openly attacked. In a more everyday sense, a ’search for truth’ seems not so much attacked as it is marginalized, cast as something naive or idealistic or vaguely embarrassing to talk about.

And when we do have some yearning for truth, the easiest sources to turn to (at least initially) are those that have the greatest level of acceptance among the greatest number of people. These are the traditions that Belzebuub speaks about. They don’t rock the boat. They are well-known, established schools of thought, respectable authors, religions, and so on. They are acceptable. My earliest memory of having some sort of desire or need for ‘truth’ or sense of connection with a higher power went along these lines.

My upbringing was largely without spirituality, although my parents maintained some of the religious trappings for tradition’s sake. So my first impulse was to turn towards that tradition — not in a very serious way (being quite young) but taking whatever bits and pieces of it I could understand, putting them together into rites or rituals, and channeling whatever urges I felt into this religious system of my own making.

I remember later on having a brief interest in Buddhism, which seemed to capture some of the external forms of the spirituality I was innately seeking. But then I rejected it shortly after because some aspects disagreed with me. This kind of accepting and rejecting seemed very normal to me. I couldn’t imagine any other way.

I wouldn’t call any of this a real search for truth though. It was more like spiritual window-shopping, looking for something to put on like a suit of clothes. None of it really penetrated beneath the skin, except in that something within me was perhaps driving that search in an incipient way.

Eventually, the most logical thing (as it seemed to me) was to be an atheist. I could not see or know any sort of god. Therefore one did not exist. But truthfully speaking, my reasoning wasn’t really as honest as all that. I simply adopted the religion of the mind instead. I read books of philosophy, particularly Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism, and in her system I thought I’d seen the light. Logic had the answers. All truth was knowable to my mind. I was a powerful being, living a purposeful and creative life.

But beneath my philosophical surety was a a terrible weakness: I was always reliant on someone else. Whether my ‘truth’ came from a holy book or from Atlas Shrugged, it still came from a book. From someone else or somewhere else. I needed that external source for my knowledge. Take it away, and the reality was something quite different: a state of basic misery, squeezed each day between the rock of my ideals and the very hard place that was my internal world.

Emotions existed, and these were terrible forces. And equally painful was the mind: having made it my god, I became its slave. My high ideals of rationality were superficial at best. Beneath them was something I could not control — a mind that was compulsive and a vehicle for all that was negative in me.

Searching for understanding, the mind led me only in circles. Each thought was matched with an opposing thought. Like a perverse game of devil’s advocate, each conviction, each belief, each assurance I made to myself was met by its shadow: the sense that things could be and were otherwise. A lingering doubt and fear that the ‘truth’ was not as I thought it was.

My beliefs and convictions were adopted out of convenience, out of desire, because of probability, for any number of reasons — but not because I actually knew anything. It was all so tenuous.

Adopting the opposite of every conviction I held would have been equally useless. Both sides of the debate were wrong. I needed to do more than ‘find the answers’ — I needed to ask a fundamentally different question.

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I remember sitting one day in a park near home, where I’d often go with friends of mine. Usually I’d bring a folding chair and a few books and spend the time reading, trying to add more to the heap of information  within me while ignoring the basic facts before my eyes.

That day I read a different book. It wasn’t the best spiritual book ever (or the worst), but it was the book I needed to read at that moment. It was about an intellectual who is searching for something that transcends the limitations of the everyday. While he’s spiritually interested, at the same time he’s skeptical, not looking to buy into any particular system.

One day he meets an extra-ordinary person and begins to receive a very different sort of teaching. He learns that he is fundamentally asleep. (OK, but what does that mean?). He needs to wake up. (How?). And then…he also learns that he is made up of many different ‘I’s. Within him are many different selves, each with their own desires and agendas. Because of them, there is no real control, no individuality in any meaningful sense.

And in that instant, it was something I knew to be true.

It didn’t just ’seem’ true, or reasonable, or potentially accurate, or anything. I didn’t simply accept it. I knew it. Because I had seen it. In me. That was my life; that was how I was each day. It was reality.

This experience wasn’t instant enlightenment or anything of the sort. Nor did I really understand the depth, the real meaning of these concepts. But on some basic level, I had understood something that was real, based on my own lived experience, and it was an understanding that surpassed the mind.

So, in a sense, my search for truth began in earnest around that time.

Whatever the ‘truth’ was, it wasn’t going to come just from reading, from hearing talks, or from thinking about it.

It had to emerge from my own experience, from what I could see for myself. And since I couldn’t see very much, I needed to find a way to see more, to see something beyond. I needed tools for a different sort of perception.

“Gnosis is found within those who practice it.

This is the real knowledge. It doesn’t belong to an old tradition…we find it within ourselves, if we practice it properly.”

- Belzebuub