“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
– Richard Feynman
Is there any hope for a fly in the wall to understand your world?
No. It only “understands” its fly life.
You cannot understand her life either, only describe her behaviors from a human perspective.
You don’t understand the fly’s life because you don’t have a fly mind and body.
Can a human understand a more intelligent, UFO-time-traveling alien?
Figuring out what their life is all about, certainly sounds… not possible.
So for a human to understand what All Life is about seems even less possible.
But can you at least figure out your own life?
EXTERNAL TRUTH
“Science is about observables; decisions, risk, life, profits and wisdom are about unobservables.”
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb
You can uncover explanations that bring satisfactory answers to “how the world works”.
Let us call this external truth.
Laws in physics seem to give universal explanations. Even though they keep getting revised (from Newton’s gravity, to Einstein’s relativity), science is very good at figuring out how the observable world behaves.
But there is a difference between drawing models of how the world works, to answering what Life is all about.
The search for external truth can be an exciting lifelong endeavor – as long as it stays within realm of the observable.
If you try to use the tools of thought to uncover the unobservable… you risk facing an angst that kills before you die.
Can you foresee a time when science or philosophy are finished doing their work?
No one has ever managed to “solve” Life using this external truth approach.
Not Newton, not Einstein, not Feynman. It sounds like a bad, bad idea.
Even if one day we came to a complete explanation of “how the world works” – this wouldn’t help you “how to live your life”.
And this is a freeing realization: you can’t figure out Life.
Some, however, do seem to figure out living.
INTERNAL TRUTH
“I think it just helps to be very aware that fundamentally, there are no adults. Everyone is making it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, taking and discarding as you see fit.”
-Naval Ravikant
Internal truth is realizing Life.
In this sense, it seems to be a gradient, not a binary switch.
It is experiential, rather than theoretical or conceptual.
Internal truth is not an answer that can be written out, though this has been done many times.
Those words are just pointers from someone trying to help others see beyond the words.
Inner realizations are not intellectual achievements: they transcend thinking.
Internal truth cannot be grasped from the level of thought.
This is why living is not a science – but an art.
LEARNING & LIVING
‘The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.”
– Bruce Lee
Once we realize that figuring out the World and figuring out Life are two different things, we can let go of angst.
Figuring out the World deals with knowledge: predicting the future – it is the realm of thinking, of learning.
Understanding how the Universe works is a game we’ve been gifted through our intellect.
We can step into the wonder of understanding either some tiny part – or a generalized of external reality.
Figuring out Life deals with wisdom: how to live a good human life – it is the realm of being, of presencing.
It cannot be replied with a right or wrong answer like knowledge from a school test.
To understand Living, you have to let go of understanding – and become Life itself.
Reply