There is One Truth

Applying a bit of Kantian logic we can get this:

If there is a truth it must be universal.

This means it must be true in all places and all times and for all things.

This means the truth cannot itself have a place or a time or be a thing.

So we are left with this puzzle how do we approach something that has no place or time or even being?

A common form of the Universal is God. There is much debate over the nature of God and whether "He" exists.

It is a feature of most branches of Hinduism that God has a personality. Indeed that is the main difference from Buddhism which says the Universal has no form at all not even personality.

The common debate over whether God exists is probably better for what comes next.

Given we are talking about the universal how ridiculous to even be thinking about whether God exist. To ask this question of whether God exists means the questioner has limited their scope of questioning into whether things exist or not.

This is kind of Humian thinking (after David Hume) whose pronouncement that became knows as Hume's Fork was the inspiration that legendarily awoke Kant "from his slumbers":

 “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

But ironically this limits its scope below the level of itself. Does Hume's Fork pass its own test:

(1) contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No.
(2) Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No

Himes Fork is itself nothing about "quantity or number" and itself presents no "fact and existence." So it should be cast into the flames. This is classic SRH (see chunk so this blog)

But the point of interest here is how we become blinkered to the scope of the truth's we pronounce.

When Richard Dawkins is challenging the existence of God why does he think like Hume that existence is everything? Simple SRH: existence itself cannot exist! It is simply a limitation of scope chosen by the interrogator.

Instead of "scope" perhaps "context" is just as good. When performing some investigation or thinking we set a context, a playing field, in which to play out our thoughts. SRH is when our game goes outside the bounds and we are forced to re-evaluate context as Hume should have done immediately after establishing his Fork.

So when we speak of the Universal the classic mistake is to impose some context or bounds to our investigation. But we should realise immediately that to speak of the Universal we must include everything and so any bound we should establish is immediately subsumed by the object we are trying to contain and think about. God is boundless so all attempts to delimit and put a perimeter around the Universal are immediately futile.

So what drives people to still try and establish qualities and knowledge of God?

Well this I believe is called "Ego" and ironically this is exactly what God stands against. When the Devil tempts he calls upon our Ego to put up limits and barriers to exclude God. Ultimately under the commands of the Devil we may even think we know God and can put boundaries around Him. Again ironically we should perhaps try and do this to the Devil and the Ego itself before trying the Universal. That is SRH.

As noted in later blog about SRH here lies the great problem of SRH. It looks like a law we can apply to everything. But it's very nature is to say that boundaries are there to be broken. So any attempt to fix SRH into a well defined theorem is doomed to failure. It was noted that this "doomed to failure" nature of it however might be the key to a theorem that defines its doomed to failure nature and so fails itself thus at least remaining consistent even if incomplete. This was illustrated in this failed statement:  

"Every rule has an exception"

So if this is true then it must be incomplete and have an exception. But it is not inconsistent for that exception to be itself! Thus a self-contradictory statement can remain consistent ! It was speculated that SRH may have a definition of this form, where it states that all bounds are broken, and then breaks its own.

Anyway God breaks all bounds. And rather it is the way that we approach God that reveals our self. For Dawkins its was a preoccupation with material existence. For Hindus it is a preoccupation with personality.

The reason why God seems so baffling is because we find it so hard to give up our boundaries. If we live in a world of physical things how hard to give this up. Instead, like an oyster, we try and cover the annoying grain of sand in pearl and make it try and go away. So we rile against God and argue that he doesn't exist so that is the end of it. Or we try to coat him in Personality so he is more approachable.

Buddhism is very radical in this. Buddhism makes no pretences. The Universal is not graspable and is beyond all form and phenomena and thought or mental objects. There is nothing in all the universe called God so give up looking like this.

Buddha says in the Diamond Sutra:

"Someone who looks for me in form or seeks me in sound is on a mistaken path and cannot see the Tathagata."

So we are truly baffled what to do, where to look, this is hopeless we think.

But this is progress!

As Hui Neng says to Sin Hae:

 "Keep this 'don't know' mind at all times, and you will understand your Master.''

To truly grasp the Universal we need to start dropping everything. We are like a groundman who has covered the field in all sorts of chalk marks for the games. Some for football, some for rugby, some for hockey. Or perhaps like kids who have chalked the pavement to play a game of hop-scotch.

The whole world is like this to us. Everywhere the safe boundaries and signs we have set up to make sense and give us orientation in our world. And there is nothing wrong with that: but know that we don't need them. In the night the rain washes the hop-scotch game away and we are distraught that we can't play the game any more. Perhaps we push this away and draw a new one. But stop, look at the empty street as it is, don't redraw the game (yet) and gain something greater a freedom from needing the confines of the game. Just get used to the street again. It's frightening or depressing at first and the mind throws up a million emotions to drive us back into hop-scotch but have faith in the Universal. The Universal after all made the whole universe including yourself why are you suddenly so worried about not playing the game?

So universal is not like this. The universal is true in the hop scotch game. The universal is true when it is washed away. All things come from the universal, it is not itself one of them.

So really we grasp the universal not in things but in having a free attitude to things.

But how big is the scope? We don't redraw the hop-scotch game and go for a walk outside it boundaries instead. Wow this feels liberating we think, I never realised I had grown to need hop-scotch so much. Am I enlightened now?

Well you have a taste but hop-scotch is a small boundary indeed and the walk was a couple of steps to get outside.

If we take Dawkins' hop-scotch game it covers all of existence! So what exists?

Okay now we get to the real sticking point. What about myself? Am I a boundary that I need to get outside of?

Uh ho we have a problem now. Suppose we think we need go for a walk to get our self outside the boundary of this limitation. We go for a massive walk, perhaps get on a plane and fly across the planet. Climb a mountain and stand at the top staring across new worlds we have never seen. Are we outside the game of self?

Of course not we just took it with us!

"you" cannot put "you" outside "yourself"

Again completely bamboozled. It's hopeless how on Earth do you win this one. We are a long way from stepping outside hop-scotch game we loved. This is a vastly different challenge. But is it?

We loved that hop-scotch game so much we didn't want to let it go. But after we had it was liberating and we looked back and wondered how the confines of that chalk pattern could have been so enthralling. Its not that we never played hop-scotch again but we were not contained by it anymore.

But that was hop-scotch, this is me. What am I without myself, this is craziness you are asking me to die.

Not the first to struggle with this.

Okay this can get crazy. A person struggling with escaping the limits of them self finds a cliff and jumps off. Unfortunately that achieves nothing, because like flying across the world we just take our self with us. This is why the Hindus say you get reborn, and why suicide is a sin. If you take yourself to the grave then unfortunately you will live again because you failed to get outside the hop-scotch game of life. Okay that probably sounds crazy doesn't matter let it go.

Getting outside the game of self is nothing something we can do. That "ego", that conception of ourselves as "being" with boundaries and which does things and has a name etc all that is just a hop-scotch game drawn on the pavement of the world.

Now you are talking rubbish. "I AM" and I exist as a real thing separate from the world with a beating heart and real feelings and a real life and you can "f*ck off " with your rubbish philosophy and just leave alone.

So exactly like previous post we've got the protagonist angry at the suggestion they are not a single real thing in the world.

But we were at Dawkins stage and challenging the boundary of existence and it can be seen clearly that our protagonist needs that existence to secure their self: "I AM"

But what if you were greater than existence? What if it was just a hop-scotch game and like the kid it is possible to step outside of this? And that does not mean die, or live or do anything it just means step outside the game right now.

To do this is exactly the same process as with hop-scotch. Buddha makes it very simple he says:

"all things are non-self"

So full disclosure I have not done this myself. It is not obvious how to do this. But we can see that is must be possible. Take our protagonist: what did they list as reasons to believe they existed.

"Beating heart." Well we know under surgery that beating heart can be removed and another one put in. And for a while with machines processing our blood we have no beating heart. Would we say those machines are "me"?
"Real feelings." Is there a particular feeling that we have always had that could be me? We have no idea what we will feel in 5 mins let alone a life long feeling. So none of these feelings is me.
"Real life." Think "life" here means the amalgam of people I know and things I do and what makes up my life. But this is hardly a constant. That person we liked the company of so much we end up not wanting to spend do much time with. It is all subject to change. Sometime for the better sometimes for the worse. Nothing constant in all of this "life" you could call me.

Instead of actual existences and things we can hold up and say "this is me" really what we are saying is that I can feel my heart beating and I can feel my feelings and I relish the world around me and the people and things that go on around me. So we are not identifying with any of these existences at all! We are kind of the camera at the centre seeing it all and living our life.

We are kind of a long way from existent things now. But one remains that camera at the centre seeing it all. We tend to think of that as a thing.

But if we examine it it is just thoughts and feelings and memories and wishes and lots of "things" but it has no thing of itself. This is why Buddha says "all things are not self." List everything and none of it is you. "you "is the thing doing the listing... except we are not a thing!

We are all stuck in Dawkins world at the moment more of less. Even faced with overwhelming evidence like Hume asked for, where nothing in all the world is actually "myself" we still hold on to the hop-scotch game drawn on the pavement that draws out the boundaries of a "me" or an "I."

It takes along time, perhaps many lifetimes, but we are free to step beyond that game at any time.

And when we do we are one step closer to true God. But unlike the common belief in Hindus and most religions we are free from the idea of an existing personality or entity to confine God.

This is not to say that all Hindus and Christians and Muslims don't understand God. We are all confined in different games and chalk boundaries and many people have done great work to step beyond these boundaries. We should not measure people by the side of their boundaries. That kid wiping away the tears as they realising their is gone and stepping beyond hop-scotch is gaining freedom as Buddha when he made the final step beyond all chalk boundaries. 

So returning to to the top. Yes there is a universal, there must be a universal, because that is the pavement on which all the chalk games have been drawn and what remains were all the chalk to wash away*.

* caveat we don't need to wash it away! People go and live in caves and throw their lives away. It is enough to know deeply the true nature of these things, although it is such a precious gift to know this that the games of our life are not important in comparison. "Come follow me" Jesus said.