“How do you know that truth exists?”
Truth isn’t a thing that exists. It is not an object of knowledge. Truth has no content, and it is beyond all contexts necessary for understanding content. It simply is. You have to assume it for anything you think, say, do, or believe to have meaning.
This is more or less the premise of first century zen master Huang Po’s book On the Transmission of Mind. It is a collection of aphorisms taken from his writings, teachings, lectures, and conversations, reiterating this point, and purporting the elimination of conceptual thought as dualistic delusion, from different angles, over and over again – for good reason – because it is essentially the only wisdom there is.
My last statement contains an error, however, depending on how you take it. I may be attempting to explain Truth in some way, by means of language, yet it is a concept beyond concepts and therefore well beyond language. Language is a means to an end, and we can often say with more accuracy something in the form of music or art than we can in words. This is one reason Huang Po, and everyone without realizing it, has different words for referring to the different ways in which Truth contains (or simply is)all – God (a personified conception of consciousness), Mind (the collective self which reasons), One (the spatial realization of identity in all things), Love (the unconditional expression of connection between beings), Good (collective moral sensibilities on which all action is assumed), Soul (spiritual quality of being beyond the physical), and Truth itself (perhaps the version which is most free from mental content). These are all the same while each word in lowercase refers to a particular instance of it – e.g. your mind, my soul, our love, etc. At the same time of my reading Huang Po, I dabbled in the collective works of Plotinus who was onto the same program, but from a western, more content-rich perspective, for better or worse. One and Soul are the versions of Truth that he uses most often throughout his work.
This is all fine by me. I don’t mind what this or any book entails. However, having readon the Transmission of Minddoes signify a sort of ending – a transition from a phase of learning and reading, with the subconscious aim to find consolation that there is at least one other person, dead or alive, who gets it, into some other phase in which it is safe to pursue (actually do) things under the condition that I am not totally insane for realizing that absolutely nothing (and therefore, everything) matters – that things simply are, and you accept it or you don’t.
I have never been a man of the senses. I have good taste, and I enjoy things of quality from time to time, but it is clear to me that to value stuff misses the mark for why we’re here. Huang Po extends this sensory stuff even to concepts and learning, and that is quite refreshing. People certainly consume books as if they are sensory objects, or content on the internet as if it is the fall fashion line, and those very people often ask me “what are you reading currently?” or “what would you recommend on stoic philosophy?”, for example, as if leaching onto my mind as a product will somehow save them. To the latter question, sometimes I will just recommend the classics on the subject. If one wants to learn stoic philosophy, perhaps that will familiarize them with the frame of mind that stoicism exemplifies, but that is by no means a guarantee, for I cannot be sure that one other mind will not simply consume it as if it were another dessert, thereby taking nothing of value from it. Then there is the issue of their not having some of the background that the Greek classics put forth, and that of the pre-Socratics, but then we could slip down the slope that there is something in all of these that must be learnt, and that is far from the case being that the essence of any of these works can stand alone despite being part of some tradition. Perhaps some of these texts could help one along their truth-journey, I am not sure, but I am sure that they would in that case serve merely as a means and therefore deem themselves unnecessary. Huang Po may or may not have read Plato, and that doesn’t change the truth-value of his writing in the least, for Huang Po was on his journey, Plato was on his, I am on mine, and you are on yours – and all should be void to you, because they in fact are. No work from any of these thinkers is valid or invalid because of where they got their information from. Wisdom is not about information, and it certainly is not about time and space. The very question “Where did you learn that?” contains an error of materialism and demonstrates profound spiritual ignorance.
To the former question, about what I am reading currently, to many people’s surprise, I more often than not respond “nothing”. It is true, I don’t read that much. I practice stillness and emptiness of mind more often than not. At the point I feel I am consuming what I read, I immediately feel full and heavy, and I stop. Sure, I am not rich with money or things, but nor am I burdened by emotion, worry, and useless information. That is all that I see is necessary for Truth – being. Perhaps someday all of my nothingness will yield finances once it proves to be useful, which is not in itself a worthy aim, but a means to an end, and it is a mere matter of faith, for good or poor, that this nothingness transmits to everything as a reward.
Additionally, it would be spiritually irresponsible for me to recommend a reading to anyone unless I were acutely familiar with where that person is on their spiritual journey. It is like offering LSD to a toddler.
There is another confusion here that could be taken from my previous statement: but how do I practice stillness and emptiness of mind?
Shut up. You’re missing the point. There is no how. JUST BE! Let everything pass, including all concepts. But I cannot guarantee if even this will be of help because you’re likely making all of this into a concept without realizing. You cannot fathom conceptionless stillness and acceptance of all as both nothing and everything, neither created nor destroyed, if you keep asking questions.
Then there is the question “who is your favorite philosopher?”, and to that I might be tempted to say myself, for there is a love I have for my own journey, as should be the case for you and yours. However, we can re-frame that question as “who do you think is the best clarifier of concepts?” if we take philosophy itself, as Wittgenstein claimed, to be the field which clarifies concepts. To that question I would answer Wittgenstein, or parhaps Roger Scruton, but that is conditional on Wittgenstein’s definition of philosophy, which is just another concept. Perhaps we can go further back in history, west or east, to find multiple thinkers which sought not to think at all but to free their minds of content, including Wittgenstein and Scruton, so that clarifying concepts ultimately reduces to dispelling of them. Socrates did not even write, but he was written about in his journey to refute the errors made by others’ minds in the streets of Athens. Huang Po did the same with the monks. I do much of the same with people around me who ask me questions. The conversation may go like this:
“Where did I go wrong in my thinking?”
“You went wrong by thinking to begin with and by creating concepts in your mind.”
We are not here on this earth to learn things. That may be your proclivity, but it is still a proclivity, and therefore your means to satisfy the senses. Huang Po, to me, put this best in the totality of his work. Perhaps On the Transmission of Mind is the means which best appeals to my senses for getting that point across. I have encountered no book which does it nearly as well, though. While both Charles Darwin’s and George Orwell’s works, while seemingly very different in subject, can both be reduced to the statement “nature is undefeated”, even that statement can be reduced further to “Truth”, even if all of the contents, and the mere publishing of the book to begin with, were not factual but were mere expressions of the ego – “Look at me and how much I think I know about how things work.”
The philosophers I think are best are those who published very little. Publishing is a business, so its ultimate aim is never Truth but profit. The best thinkers knew that there is never really anything to say or think about. They observe, listen, exist, and move on, and if they write at all, it is about the art of writing itself, the thought that might inspire it, and the wisdom that one must let it go. It has never been more clear to me since reading Huang Po’s work. However, this truth can either send one straight to the monastery to take up a devout life of spiritual nothingness, or it can serve as the very end of a phase of expressing the desire to know things, freeing one up to do anything one wants – because it more than sufficiently dispels of that myth which enslaves so many intellects. Whichever path I decide, probably the latter, I call this transition the “death of mind” – a sober spiritual trip (that I am sure one can experience with substance, but then there is no guarantee of integration once the feeling fades). You become free from the quest to satisfy the senses through the acquisition of knowledge.
Wittgenstein said that the purpose of philosophy is the clarification of concepts. This is true in the sense that it is the highest means we have with which to do so, for it does not commit one to a particular metaphysical framework for the sake of efficiency, such as science does with materialism. However, this definition of philosophy presupposes the existence of concepts in the first place, and that is problematic in the sense that for every concept x, there is an opposite concept, even if that is just the broad category of not x, and that traps us in duality if we are to raise that experience to the level of a metaphysical theory. Duality has its practical uses, but it fails in allowing for the essence of anything. Essence is contained in one, whether that be the identity of an individual or the totality of all as One. It takes a rather philosophical mind to come to this truth, but philosophy itself is not equipped to insofar as its purpose is the clarification of concepts, and therefore dualities which are illusory – mere constructs of the human intellect.
If you don’t get it (or might I say “It”) it’s either beyond your subjective capacity for reasoning, or it really doesn’t make sense. Be careful which you assume – one is easy for the ego in the face of uncertainty, and the other is hard, for it requires us to fully accept uncertainty per se, instilling us with Being, which is beyond the capacity for any embodied being – for that would be to attain something.
There is nothing to attain, for everything, and therefore nothing, is already within.
Overthought Consulting 