We are, as evolved animals, highly driven by our desire to survive. And that desire relates directly to why we want to reduce or eliminate ambiguity. We want to know what’s going on. Because ‘knowing’ means we are more likely to survive. And that was deeply significant back in harsher evolutionary times.
We are evolutionarily driven to ‘know’. We are driven to think that we have, or can obtain, actionable answers to the questions that confront us.
But, if we look at our real situation in this existence, that desire is a heavy, if not an impossible, load to carry.
The fact is that we are recently evolved semi-smart biological monkey-like creatures who have only existed, as we are now, for about 200,000 years.
And the planet has been around for nearly 3.5 billion years.
And this universe has been around for approximately 13 billion years old.
So, we’ve just barely arrived here in this existence and we find ourselves, with our limited minds, gazing out at an existences which is vastly more complex than we are even remotely capable of understanding.
And yet, here we are, driven by our biological survival urges to try and understand it all and come up with actionable answers.
It would be quite funny, except for the fact that we take ourselves so seriously.
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My friend, I admire your incessant yearning to ‘understand’. But I do not think it is within our possible grasp to be able to come to any final answers about the mysteries around us.
As an illustration of our inadequacy consider how often we employ the simplistic ‘Either-Or’ logic tool.
How often do we try to divide and conquer the world around us with it?
We say, ‘It is either this or it is that.’
We say, ‘It is either Dual or it is Non-Dual.’
We say, ‘We either have Absolute Free-Will or everything is Deterministic and we have no agency at all.’
Instead, the reality around us is much better understood by seeing it through the Both/And lens.
It isn’t this or that – it is both. It is all moving, together, seamlessly (as John Troy likes to say).
It is only our limited human minds that feel the need to break existence into separate nameable pieces in order to try to make sense of it.
So, we strain and we struggle to solve the big questions about existence and Free-Will and Duality and such things because our evolutionary heritage makes us anxious when we feel that we do not understand.
Not understanding the situation in earlier evolutionary times was often a death sentence.
We want simple, actionable answers and we think that if we have them, then peace will descend upon us and life will be good.
But it is impossible.
There’s a lot we can understand. But ‘everything’ is not among them.
And, no matter how much we do understand, ‘everything’ will not be among them.
Accepting this reality gives us an entirely new way of proceeding.
Know that the more you understand, the more you will be able to understand how little you know.
Know that the more you understand about yourself and existence, the greater peace you will experience. But the peace will not come from having final answers. It will come from a deep acceptance of the fact that there is no end to the road.
Think of yourself as a frame moving forward through time. New things occur everyday and they enter your frame as experiences and new understandings. Everyday, if you pull the summation lever down, you will have a new ‘best’ idea of what you understand up until now.
But know that it will be new and different sum again tomorrow. There is no end to it. Going with this and saying ‘yes’ to it is the best way – because it is a reflection of how things are. Things are, from our very limited POV, always growing, expanding, changing and evolving. The urge to come up with final answers is NOT our friend. It is driven by evolutionary fear.
If you live or if you die. If you never understand another new thing or if you understand 10,000 new things, it doesn’t matter to existence. It just is. The only one who cares is you. And the only thing you have of any real value is the time you still have left between this moment and when you die.
Don’t decide how it is, open yourself to new understandings, move into future and into experiences that get more and more interesting as you go and give up thinking it has to ‘do’ something, mean something, achieve something or anything else. It just is as it is. Say ‘yes’ to it and enjoy it.