Life is a mystery. I ask myself a lot of questions, all the time. It’s a game I’ve been playing since I have memory. On my way home from school I used to ask my dad a question. His answer would only made me to ask another question. My siblings used to hate it. I still do that. The questions are now inside my head. Sometimes I get Luci involved.
Asking questions based on a previous question’s answer is like building a skyscraper (or writing code according to James). If your answers, as you go along, are fragile, the whole thing will eventually fall apart. Chess comes to mind where a game is a structure you build with each move, and each move is built upon the previous moves. There’s something I’ve noticed with my questioning mind over the last years: although I never find an absolute answer, the questioning structures all seem to point towards something. Something that seems unreachable for human reason, but something nevertheless.
I was walking my dogs at dawn this morning. I asked myself a question I’ve asked many many times: what is time? My first answer was that time is a reference system. What is a reference system? A method of describing properties about something. If you say something is red, there must be other colors that are different from red. That means red is a measure of something called color. A reference system for color can be the spectrum of visible colors for human eyes. There is no red without other colors. In those terms, and if time is a reference system, what is time helping us to measure or describe? The answer this morning was change in state. Time is a reference system that allows us to measure changes in state.
But this is not answering my original question, or getting to the guts of it. If time is a reference system, does it mean it is only a human thing? Is time a story, a myth, created only to help us describe the world around us? There is something more fundamental than time, what is it? Is it motion? Does time exist? Let’s say it doesn’t. Let’s say motion is what creates existence. No motion = No existence. If you bring the universe down to 0 degrees kelvin, it will cease to exist. Motion is just another word for energy. So time and energy must be linked in a very fundamental way. Is this what the second law of thermodynamics tries to explain? The concept of entropy can be used to show the arrow of time. In a closed system, things will not gain order by themselves over time. Do my dogs have a concept of time? I don’t believe so. If that is true, you don’t need to have a concept of time to live your life. Is time Life itself? Is this why we can’t explain it? Life explaining Life? A system explaining itself? A fish trying to explain how the ocean looks like from the air?
That brings up another question: what if the main reason we can’t explain so many things is because we are part of what we are trying to explain? That is interesting. I’ve been having to extend my arm more and more when I’m reading. This happens as you get old. The point I’m trying to make is this: if I hold my book close to my eyes all I’m going to see is a blurry shade of gray. It’s only when I get away that I’m able to see the words. When I get to these unanswerable questions about time, life, and the universe, could it be that I can’t answer them because I am part of time, life, and the universe.
Some days thoughts tend to get circular and redundant, like this morning. Other days they seem to be lean, robust, and straight. On these days, they reach a question that can’t be answered rationally. This chain of questions and answers that end up with an unanswered question form a sort of line. Some days this line is straight, others is just a random path. But they always point somewhere. This “somewhere” is unreachable with reason. But there is more to us than just reason, I know that for a fact. People have religious experiences, gut feelings, feelings of completeness. Could we, each one of us, be part of a bigger system, just like cells in our bodies are part of our bodies? How could I deny this theory? That makes sense to me, at least this morning. Are religious experiences linked to moments when we feel part of the bigger system we belong to?
When I was in my twenties I ate a small cactus that grows in the Mexican desert and has strong psychedelic effects. It was a spiritual experience: the disintegration of the concept of time, and the disintegration of the feeling that I was separate from my surroundings. I was standing inside a cold hotel room on a Mexican desert, in front of a mirror, feeling the heat coming from a light bulb three feet away, next to the mirror. I felt the heat on my skin, getting into my body, my neck, my chest, my legs, my feet and transferring part of it down to the floor of the hotel room. I felt the floor connected to the ground, the earth, all the way down to it’s molten core. The heat of the light bulb becoming one with the heat of the earth’s core, through me, and back to the crust everywhere else on the planet. That heat causing the air in the atmosphere to move as wind. The wind turning windmills in south Mexico. The wind turbines generating electricity. The electricity connected to a network which was lighting up the light bulb next to the mirror in my hotel room. There was a loop, a connection, a loop that made sense to me. A loop that answered questions in a non-rational way.
Not a breakthrough discovery, but made me smile in a way it’s hard to describe. My heart was smiling, my soul was smiling. The feeling of being unique and part of something bigger at the same time. A feeling of total control and no control at all. A feeling of knowing everything and nothing at all. The duality that we are immersed everyday that causes so much inner conflict all of the sudden made sense. Good and evil, hot and cold, light and darkness, time and no time; the one needs the other to exist, both are part of each other, duality is the essence of existence, or so I thought (or felt).
Reason, rationality, maybe that’s the myth we are immersed it. Maybe truth is not rational. Maybe truth is not a concept. Truth is lived. Truth is living. Truth is not something you will find in a book or a concept. What is truth then? Can it be defined? What if truth is something that the moment you define it ceases to be true? That sounds like an excuse to not find the answer, but maybe that’s just my rational mind fighting for turf.
What is that I am trying to answer? Why do I keep asking question after question? I am naturally curious, and being like this is definitely one of the reasons I am able to solve a lot of problems in my day to day life, one of the reasons I am able to run a business. Curiosity is necessary to solve problems. But fundamental questions require fundamental answers, and I think there is one fundamental answer inaccessible to reason. And I say this not in a cynical way. Some people call this God, love, nirvana, or kwan. I’m calling this a mystery, a mystery brushed only with the endings of my question and answer chains.