CHAPTER 1
You Know
I have always had an intense sense I knew. This was very much a subjective feeling, not made up of learned opinions or facts. At an early age there seemed to be nothing I could identify as what I knew. Yet the sense I knew persisted, as though it were a core part of me. It felt like a source, or primary urge to find meaning in my life. For much of my life through to adulthood, I sought confirmation of this sense of knowing, which I likened to being aware. At the time, it seemed the only way to proceed was by asking questions.
Since I first became aware of my own thoughts, I have been asking questions about myself and others, and exploring the answers. Why did that classmate ridicule others, while I didn't want to? What ability allowed him to reduce other classmates to tears in less than five minutes? How was I to escape this fate? I also recognized, I had been asking such questions from a very early age, perhaps as young as five. If you are inclined to interpret my introspection in a negative way, bear with me; being centered in self in this way is vastly different from being self-centered. I will return to the distinction shortly.
How did I arrive at the conclusions I'm about to reveal? Quite simply, I have spent my life studying myself! The context for this includes my mind and body, as well as my relationships with people and the world around me. However, this is true for all of us; we have a natural instinct to explore. In my case, I was most interested in the mind delivering this sense of knowing. Other people's use of their minds was the perfect mirror for my exploration, though I didn't understand this at the start.
I listened intently to what others said, and pondered what I read about every facet of life. Information came readily from many sources, including the thoughts of my elders and religious interpretations of life. During my upbringing, all sorts of things were said about me; ranging from what a good boy I was, to being a disgusting little creature. Much of it just didn't sit well with me. It neither felt right nor made any sense. It confused me no end, but somehow I did not think this was my fault.
In my childhood years, it was very difficult to make sense of what I saw going on around me. Adults were acting in unpleasant ways which seemed strange, even crazy. Did you notice this when you were a child? Why would anyone choose to be unpleasant when they could be pleasant? As a child this didn't make sense to me because, with only a few exceptions, those adults around me were not making sense of life, particularly the ones who believed they were. My conclusion was; there was something about life we didn't understand.
At this stage of my life, very little felt good to me, and I knew I was very unhappy. It seemed the only good feeling I had was coming from the sense I knew. So the approach which served me best was to move along, only with the ideas which made sense to me.
Later in life, I realized this sense of knowing was not related to things of the world. Rather, it was an attribute of me which I brought to the world. It gave me a greater appreciation of life experiences, in particular, knowing I had a place in the world. So when anything made sense to me, it was because it came from an internal, subjective knowing. Coming to know myself is a process of turning my instinctive impressions into conscious understanding. How simple is that? The implication is startling; I do know the truth about myself when I hear it, or more specifically, when I conceive it. I still ask questions, but now I also have answers.
Over decades of exploration, by following the signals of my instinct, I gradually pieced together explanations which made sense. I didn't realize it at the time, but there was a sign I had been using from an early age. If something did not seem right, based on my instinctive impressions of life, then I did not accept it was true. I didn't just believe what I was told. The things I didn't understand were not discarded though. I tucked them away for consideration at a later time, in case some new evidence came to light.
So I'll set the scene with a bold question. Can you and I find the answer to any question about our life experience? What follows in this book are my answers.
If I could give you a mission in reading this book, it is to explore your sense of knowing to see if these answers are true for you. In advocating people explore their own minds, I have made a difficult choice not to cite references—though a couple of recommended readings are included. I hope by the end of the book you will understand the reason behind this decision. In essence, this book is about your sense of knowing, and I am suggesting the only reference you can use to access this is your instinctive impressions of life.
Instinctive Knowing
How could you or I possibly know anything to be true beyond doubt? Having an answer to this question is a major stumbling block for some, so I will say it plainly. The answer is threefold:
1. We have an instinctive sense which recognizes the truth about ourselves. Most people aren't taking notice of this because they have been taught not to listen to it.
2. Our true nature is the instinct felt as a range of pleasant impressions or appetites, which collectively we could call goodwill. This term doesn't seem to have a good name in some circles, but I do not mean some moral code of conduct. I use this term to refer to our natural sense that it is good to be alive—acknowledging some people have lost touch with it. Goodwill supports our continued existence, in the same way hunger supports the continued existence of the body. When we listen to it, there is no doubt in our mind.
3. Most important, we do know what is good for us because we get confirmation. Yes, there is a feedback loop! As most people aren't listening though, they miss this crucial signal.
So what is the nature of this confirmation? It is this; we know if what we have in mind is true by the effect it has on us. Every thought and action carries a pleasant or unpleasant feeling. I think of it as my gift. In other words, confirmation of what we have in mind is provided by the natural effect the thought or action has on our experience of life. In my day this was called instant karma. Note I am talking about consequences here, not conscience. Our intelligence system comes with built-in support for our instinct. You and I can know if what we have in mind is in accord with our true nature, by the effect it has on us mentally, emotionally and physically. This may well be the most important point in this book.
This is true justice. What we have in mind at every point in time, determines whether we are having a pleasant or unpleasant experience in that moment. Even if unpleasant things are going on around us, our attitude and thoughts about the event determine which way we experience it. For instance, consider the situation of being a customer in a shop, when the attendant speaks unpleasantly to you. Your personal experience of unpleasantness only begins when you follow suit and have unpleasant thoughts. Alternatively, what happens if you don't follow suit? Have you ever stayed with a pleasant feeling in a situation such as this? If so, you have confirmed it is possible to stay feeling good. You can even make a comment to the attendant about their unpleasant expression—preferably with a smile.
The eye-opener for me came as the following insight. When I express my instinctive impressions of what feels genuinely good to me, I have a pleasant experience of life! Closer examination of this experience gave me the answer; I am free to choose whether or not to use my mind to create a pleasant experience of life. Listening to my will feels good because it manifests as goodwill; impressions of being happy, friendly, assured, and contented, which I can then give expression. If I do this when the shopkeeper is unpleasant to me, I am not affected. When I don't do this, I leave myself open to the unpleasantness expressed by other people.
Through observation and study, I identified an important fact about life. The things I conceived with my conscious mind became my reality. Created realities, also called belief structures, consist of patterns of thoughts, vivid images, feelings, and body sensations. These realities are the creations of my mind which make up the content of my experiences, be they pleasant or unpleasant ones. So my personal experience shows me what I am creating with my mind. There you have it!
In any and every moment, the choice not to live from a sense of goodwill is the worst choice we can ever make, and as close to a definition of insanity as you can get. Yet this is what we continue to do. We take on board what we are shown and told. As children, we were taught to replace instinct with beliefs, many of which were based in fear. The worst of these is the denial of our personal sense of knowing, which is the main reason we can't make sense of our lives.
As a child, I was told I didn't know anything. With respect to the objective world out there this may have been true, but with respect to my personal, subjective sense of life, it was never true. I do know, as do you.
At some point, the proverbial penny dropped. We do know instinctively what is beneficial. Our will has a way of showing what is true and good for us. This sense of innocence is how we behaved as children before the grown-ups spoiled it. The good news is that the innocence within is always waiting to be heard. In a child we see innocence as naivety, but in an adult mind it is empowering.
Somewhere along the way I came to the following realization; things only made sense when I was listening to me. My innocent sense of knowing gave answers! These answers proved I knew, and I applied this to my thoughts as well as the things other people said to me.
I also noticed along the way, everyone is in this same position, and little makes sense to begin with. Our journey is the same. How far each of us has traveled, or how much we have used our sense of knowing, varies among people. It depends on the direction taken, how much encouragement we were given, what was encountered along the way, and how we were taught to deal with it. No matter what differences there are between us, we are fundamentally the same. We all have the same sort of mind and body, the same instinct, the same primary sense of existence, and the same capacity to get answers. What differs is the content of our realities.
The basis for our equality is our instinctive sense of knowing. This is the presenting feature of our intelligence. Our sense of knowing has nothing to do with information learned. It is not about what you know or even who you know, but more simply about realizing you know. This sense of knowing is not learned, but is an instinct felt by us as an appetite to create. You can find it in your sense of wanting to know yourself.
I am using the term instinct to mean the event happening naturally to us, rather than the product of what we think. Instinct is an innate impulse or appetite happening without prior thought. Bear in mind, the act of thinking itself is based in instinct. We do not learn to think any more than we learn to blink. Some people use terms such as intuition or gut feeling as synonyms for instinct. Intuition may be an aspect of instinct, but I am using the term instinct much more broadly. Instinct is best viewed as our natural inclination. Can you think of some appetites not related to your body? Wanting to feel happy, be heard, get ahead in life, and have intimate relationships are all examples. Wanting answers to questions about life is a big one for me.
The Limit to Thinking
In addition to my self-exploration as a philosopher, I have spent my career years as a research academic, learning and applying the scientific approach. The approach presented in this book is consistent with this, but adding instinct to the mix might make the end result look quite different. The disciplines of philosophy and science have both served me well, but something is missing; something more than thinking and experimentation. That something can be found in the instinct, of which both philosophy and science say little. I can only hope the scientific community will someday be pleased with my meticulous observations and study, tested and reproduced with myself as the subject, somewhat like the newly adopted thought experiments of theoretical physicists.
The discipline of philosophy is based on thought structures and reasoning. One poses and ponders questions, seeking solutions in the form of other ideas. Essentially, philosophy means enquiry into any idea entering our mind. Have you ever wondered where this inclination to ask questions comes from? For me, enquiry is one of the most elementary aspects of instinct. It is directly linked to our survival, or in the bigger picture, coming to know about ourselves. Nevertheless, from my endeavors in philosophy I found no evidence of my instinctive sense of knowing, or my subjective sense of existence. In philosophical terminology; I concluded this is because instinct is beyond the realm of reason.
I'll give you a teaser about a philosophical issue I take up later. At school were you taught that our instinct is all about survival, or staying alive? Calling our primary instinct a survival instinct is very, very limiting. Our primary instinct is much more about thriving than surviving. An instinct to thrive is more pro-life than just staying alive. Instead of looking over our shoulder to stay alive, our instinct prompts us to look forward to and enjoy life. This is an entirely different concept to the view we are driven by instinct. In the scenario I present, instinct is not fear-based.
The discipline of science is based on experimental, reproducible proof. One asks questions with the objective mind and seeks evidence in the physical environment to provide answers. Using the scientific approach, I again found no evidence of my subjective knowing or self-evident sense of existing. No matter how much information science provides, like the body being two-thirds water or we usually have 70,000 thoughts a day, it doesn't show the link to the significance of my experience of life. In fact, this subjective sense has traditionally been heavily discouraged in science. Science is objective in its endeavors, and proud of it. For example, understanding the nature of our bodies, other species, and the planet, is based on observable re-producible evidence. The admission of a subjective sense of anything is its antithesis. Science places questions about the meaning of life outside its realm.
However, there is a danger in exclusive use of objective thinking which science does not acknowledge. Objectivity, by definition, means to be impartial or detached. Thus, objective reasoning is supposed to be devoid of any sense of self. We have an objective sense of self developed from thought and images, as well as a subjective, direct experience of self. Objective thinking discards both so as not to contaminate what is being studied. This seems reasonable, as you might expect because it is based on reasoning. The majority of people in western cultures cannot see any problem with placing emphasis squarely on objective reasoning. We apply this paradigm of thinking to life in general, but it comes at a price.
The danger with exclusive use of objective reasoning is the development of information and beliefs which have no bearing on our actual subjective sense of life. In particular, this applies to our senses of self. People relying on objective thinking usually have a sense of self based on individuality—separation from others. Thus a purely objective view of self is at odds with our subjective experience of self, which is based on inclusiveness—totality. This leads to a misconception about our place in the world when we are faced with scientific facts. For example, from the point of view of science we are specks of dust in the universe. Arguably, this view may help when it comes to understanding the laws of physical nature. However, it has adverse implications when it comes to questions about our existence, and the meaningfulness of our lives.
