The Spectrum of Human History

 

The consequences of starting with such an idea is that this philosophy does not claim to be 'the' or indeed even 'a' truth. It starts with the declaration that perhaps there is no truth and if that is true then what can we think about the world and our relationship to it.

If you view the present moment through the spectrum of human history you will find those truths you know with heartfelt conviction and certainty are exactly the same as those heartfelt convictions of those who came before you, those who are now utterly and blatantly wrong.

You can escape the cycle of history by letting go of truth and instead replacing it with an open mind, that accepts and rejects all things. A mind that is aware that it is incapable of holding the universe within itself.

This must apply to the philosophy of open mindedness itself. Maybe a good way to see its flawed and temporal nature is to look at the furnace in which it was made.

I used to be a frequent poster at http://www.thelastfreecity.com a Matrix fan forum. Especially and almost exclusively in the Philosophy section (naturally) where I first started arguing in a thread about the Proof of God, and evolution, that god doesn’t exist and evolution explains everything.

I talked with some very insightful people who challenged many of my ideas and helped me learn how to articulate certain views. As a young child the first “big” book I read was George Orwell’s ‘1984’. I fell in love with it, not so much because of its bleak vision of the future, (though as the complex child I was, I certainly enjoyed that) but because of how it descried the Ingsoc truth relativism and subjectivism of reality. I think it is fair to say that I grew up firmly imprinted in me this idea of questioning all truths, especially religious ones.

Then skepticism easily turns to cynicism, and from there it is easy to claim that your method of viewing the world and challenging authority is ‘correct’. I think it is fair to say that the history of my philosophical conclusions has been one of cycles. Pulsating back and forth between finding an answer (i.e. atheism, evolution, agnosticism, utilitarianism, subjectivism) and then letting go of that answer (zen).

So below is the petri dish of what would later become my current philosophy, it is reproduced without permission from www.thelastfreecity.com and has been edited slightly:

Zen - A powerful way of looking at reality