It is only all too obvious - what I see and know and have learned has to be real. Yet, if it were that simple, arguments and wars wouldn’t occur, would they? It’ll be all candy floss and lollipops. A quote says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Many times we’ve known that to be true, in conversations like these - “ooh he’s cute!” “Where got!?! You bat jiu ta stamp ar!”
There is such obvious proof of eternal and pervasive subjectivity before me, manifested best in wars between religions over a piece of land that is said in their Holy Scriptures to be THE place where XXX was born/prayed/died. So now we subscribe to the attitude of tolerance - “believe what you want, it’s cool! Just don’t interrupt my beliefs and force yours upon me.”
But I cannot swallow this because it means that what I can’t see, and what I don’t know, doesn’t exist as a truth. Rene Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am“, and this means that thought precedes all things - acknowledgement of existence, and hence, action that is intended towards this existence. And this thought is of course determined by the things we absorb, and believe to be true. It sounds perfectly logical, but only if we all truly believe ourselves to be the centre of the universe.
And this is where it is flawed. Because evidently, we aren’t, and nothing, not even Obama, can say that all things are, because “I am”. When a heartbreak, or a tragedy, or a bad grade strikes, don’t we all tend to ask -Why ME? But as I’ve learned from a video about a woman struck with terminal stage cancer, the question should be why not me? What’s so special about me that makes me exempt from disease and sadness and a phenomena called death that has hounded mankind since forever?
Our realities are greatly determined by what we choose to be relevant to us. “Eee, history. I’m psychology major I need to know all this for what?” or “oh, I’m a Christian so I don’t need to know about Hinduism/Buddhism/Islam. Nothing to do with me.” No matter how hungry one is for knowledge, nobody can claim to knoweverything. Unfortunately, our disinterest in something doesn’t negate it’s existence, and its reality to someone else! It’s so simple yet we hardly see it. Drawing lines around ourselves makes the differences more stark, and therefore can only result in apathy or extremism .
The point of what I’m saying is probably best summed up in this riddle - If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer may be a resounding YES!, because I am here and the tree is there - even if I don’t know it it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Yet, strangely, this isn’t the philosophy we apply to our own lives. We are content to live within our self-contained bubbles, and if anyone tries to introduce new ideas that we presuppose to be untrue or subjective to individual experience, we immediately shout, “INTOLERANCE!” Secularism has become a convenient excuse for our discomfort. Though outwardly we have access to more sources of knowledge than ever before, inwardly we are becoming suffocatingly narrow-minded.
(This is what’s happening in UK, a “Christian” country. A nurse lost her job because she offered to pray for a patient. Another was given a warning for wearing a cross necklace.)
Do we not realize that we are but a piece of a giant Jigsaw Puzzle? That there is a greater reality that transcends and unites all our differently sized and shaped realities - ‘the one ring that rules it all’? Just as the laws of Nature, backed by science, show that when something as big as a tree falls, it is impossible that it doesn’t make a sound, so there has to be a similar law of something, or Someone, greater than these little homo sapiens trapped in their time and space. I think you know what I’m driving at.
Just some thought these past week :)
Jess
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