Since it’s the end of the year and all, I thought it might be worthwhile to mentally review some of the more important lessons I learned over the past year, in regards to my life, my writing, my research and the conversations we have here at this website. It’s been quite an eventful year for me, and I hope for everyone else. I’d like to thank everybody who took the time to share and interact on this site. The sometimes small interactions we all have grow exponentially when we put them all together.

1. I don’t know as much as I think I know. And I make mistakes all the time. Recognizing this has allowed me to keep moving forward, rather than stagnate. It’s kept me flexible, open to correction and alternate viewpoints (er, usually anyway).
2. Trying to understand what things mean can become a negative addiction which can become so overwhelming intellectually that it can cut you off from the simple experience of what things actually are.
3. Words are different from things. If you dig down deeply into these relationships, you’re likely to find that the things and the words that represent them are connected on a more or less arbitrary basis. Over time and across cultures, these relationships modulate very drastically.
4. Just as meaning may cut you off from simple experience, words have a tendency to cover up or replace the things they represent. Since these relationships are basically arbitrary, it’s important not to get too wound up in the maze of words. If you have trouble or get frustrated, remember that these aren’t “words,” they are lines and shapes on a screen, which refer to phonetic sounds made by the mouth of a primate, which have arbitrary connections to something totally vague called “meaning” which varies from primate to primate and from herd to herd. For an even better illustration of this, pick any word and repeat it to yourself out loud really fast until it loses meaning and starts to sound really strange. Try it now. “Primate,” “Primate,” “Primate.” primateprimateprimate pri ma tepr imat eprim ate….
5. If numbers 2-4 above are correct (which they may not be, based on number 1), then chances are good that we can’t trust words or meaning too far. We could maybe use them on a provisional basis, but not in any kind of absolute way. Even if we were to make an absolute “factual” statement, such as “All humans are primates,” it’s still just a string of gibberish syllables assigned an arbitrary value by culture.
6. If assertions that we make are always questionable at a base level, then maybe it’s better to always question them (or maybe not, see number 1 above). What I mean by that is, by phrasing things as questions rather than assertions, we recognize that maybe they aren’t true, or at least maybe not in the way we thought they were. So instead of saying “George Bush is our president,” we could say, “Is George Bush our president?” While it’s a clumsy way of communicating, the uncertainty inherent in a question format allows for the possibility that there’s no such “thing” as “George Bush” “us” or a “president” in the first place. If we examine it further, we might realize these are words rather than things.
7. The other reason questions are more useful than assertions is that they are open rather than closed. Rather than having a single meaning, we admit the possibility of all meanings. When we say “God is ___,” we effectively say that “God is only ___ and nothing else.” But if we say “What is God?” then suddenly God becomes not just anything, but everything. What I mean by that is that the best questions also tend to invite conflicting answers. By asking “What is God?” one person may answer “God is X,” while another answers “God is not X, but Y.” By asking “What is God?” and focusing on the question rather than the answers given, we allow for both possibilities as being equally valid.
8. The third reason I like questions is that they are a great way to start a conversation. Conversations allow us to explore differences in meaning, language and personal experience. And they’re fun. It feels good to interact with people, compare notes, challenge each other and have a community of people exploring the same questions together.
9. People are more important than words or meanings because they are actual things rather than representations. When you interact with people, you don’t have to worry about what they as people “mean” so much as you’re interested in what or who they are. (Although, according to number 1 above, this could be totally wrong. And according to 6 & 7, it might be better to ask “Are humans real things?)
10. If we are people and we agree that people are things rather than mean things (which you can take or leave based on item #1), then this very likely indicates that people don’t actually make sense. Or more broadly, life doesn’t make sense. We do things and things happen but they just are. They don’t, in themselves, mean anything.
11. So where does meaning come from? One possible answer out of many is that meaning is something that we invent or project onto things. And it modulates from person to person across time and across cultures. But where and do we do the inventing or projecting? Many religions, philosophies and occult traditions offer different answers to and ways of exploring the implications of this question. If we can hold all of their answers to be equally true, equally gibberish, both true and gibberish and neither true nor gibberish, then we’re probably getting somewhere. But the question is: where?
12. The reason we have religions, philosophies and other story-systems is that these types of questions are weird and confusing. While we might get a charge out of the uncertainty, it can also be extremely difficult. If you live your life according to the principle that nothing means anything and nothing makes sense, then it’s going to be very hard for you to get along with other people. And if what we said in number 9 above about people being more important than words or meanings, they we’d have to conclude that people are more important than the principle that nothing means anything and nothing makes sense. After all, it’s just an idea, rather than a thing.
13. Since we ourselves are things, we have a tendency to want to reify words, meanings, ideas, and concepts. We somehow want or need to relate to these representations as though they were themselves real things, like we ourselves are (or are we?). Doing this allows us to act as though meaning were real, rather than arbitrarily invented or projected, which allows us also to have a common ground to interact culturally. Maybe we could tentatively define a culture as a system whereby humans take things that are not real, and pretend as a group that they are real things.
14. This is all probably getting kind of confusing. Secretly, that is part of my goal. It goes back to number 1 above, and the recognition that we may not know as much as we think we know. And when we start to think we do finally know something, or that we’ve reached important an important conclusion, it might be a good time to go back to the beginning and start over in the process. Think about the things you believed as a kid which proved to be wrong when you were a teenager. Think about the things you thought were right as a teenager which you later on found out weren’t the whole picture. Any time you feel a great certainty, imagine what would happen if you someday found out this was all completely wrong.
15. What I’m building very intentionally is a self-destructing ideology. If you believe it, you end up eventually not believing it. It’s sort of like how you use a scaffold to build a cathedral, but once the building is done, you remove the scaffold and you’re left with the cathedral. The trick at that point would of course be to recognize that the cathedral itself is another type of scaffold that you’re building around God. And just maybe, God is yet another scaffold that you’re building around something else. And on and on. That’s what I mean by a self-destructing ideology or philosophy. It’s both a scaffold and a means of removing the scaffold(s) once you’re done with it.
16. Let’s try this out with another type of metaphor: God is the ocean. We are fish. Religion is a net. We create the net in the hopes of catching God. Instead we catch ourselves in our own net, but forget that we made the nets. We believe that God made it, that the net is God. But if God is the whole ocean (rather than just water), then God also includes the net and is the net. Of course, since we’re talking now in words, images and representations, we run into problems - because we know that fish don’t make nets. People do. The point is not that it’s a perfect metaphor or that we should cling to the image, but that we should learn to use metaphors (like scaffolds) and put them aside when we are done with them. How do we decide when we’re done with them though? And how do we put them aside when we are? Good questions. See number 7 above.
17. By now, you’re probably becoming aware that what we’re after here is not so much an ideology as it is a methodology. It is the process, rather than the product. With the thought processes outlined here, I’m illustrating how this methodology could work, and one of many paths it could take. If we wanted to encapsulate this whole process into a super-simple, easy to remember dictum, we could try on something like: Question everything, even questions. Then question why you would want to question everything. Then question why you would want to question why. Rinse. Repeat. All the rest of this is incidental, and done solely for illustration. If we want, we could also give this process a cool name like “The Path of Radical Inquiry” or maybe “zetetics“.
18. The term zetetics is a reference to the ancient schools of philosophical skepticism, as opposed to modern scientific skepticism. Scientific skeptics typically question things until they can be proven (or not disproven), whereas philosophical skeptics tend to question whether anything can really ever be proven at all. The philosophical or zetetic mode of skepticism is not well understood or widely known today. People mostly think of scientific skeptics when they think of skepticism at all. Philosophical skepticism, however had a very different goal. The goal was not to find the answer, but to achieve peace of mind.
    

    He argued that to reach the state of ataraxia (approximately ‘peace of mind’), philosophers must first learn to ’suspend judgement’, that is, to believe to an equal degree any claim and its denial. Unlike the skeptics of Plato’s Academy, Pyrrhoneans did not think that nothing is knowable. The claim that nothing is knowable struck them as a sort of dogmatism. Instead, they suspended judgement about whether or not anything is knowable.

    They would argue multiple conflicting sides of argument with equal passion until they were able to show that both were equally plausible. At which point, they were able to suspend judgement altogether, and achieve piece of mind. Their approach I think is similar and complementary to what I’ve outlined above.

19. What does the peace of mind brought about by this radical zetetic devotion to questioning look or feel like? In my own experience, it feels like certain questions become unimportant. It happens one question at a time, but it turns out that the time you spend unraveling the knots finally does pay off. Certain arguments become meaningless and finding the final answer slips away as a goal. You become better able to truly understand multiple conflicting points of view at once. And paradoxically, you also become able to recognize the “sole truth” of any one system of belief. I wouldn’t say I’m very far into this process though, because that would violate number 1 in this list. It seems as though I’m just starting to grasp the outlines and the implications of it all, and I recognize that all of this could be completely wrong or meaningless. And I intuitively understand that on some deep primate-mouth-sound level, none of this is really important. But in the meantime, it’s the peculiar net which I find myself caught in (#16), and I’ll keep thrashing around until I either break free or realize it’s all the same ocean regardless.

Happy New Year!