After a decade of debrainwashing, I hit an impasse. “Debrainwashing” is what I called that process of lifting, layer by layer, the conditioning I had been taught by my family, education, religion, and society at large. In some way to and to some extent, I was finding each layer false. Whatever I had been taught was not, in fact, true. I had fallen into the rabbit hole, taken the Matrix red pill, and the more untruths I uncovered, the more I found. I had hit that point that every genuine truth-seeker eventually arrives: is there anything we can know to be true?
If you take any paradigm to its natural conclusion, you hit its delusion, its opposite. You will prove it wrong with your own paradigm. My heroine of Just like Eve took the training she had been given by her church to its conclusion and exposed the lie based on its own teaching. Although her church condemned Eve, Jasmine read the Bible the way her church taught her to read it and found Eve heroic.
Physicists are doing the same thing. While probing the mysteries of science, they are undermining their own laws. Their own tools and methods are proving their science to be false.
In Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller shows the same for the scientist she follows, David Starr Jordan. He had faithfully followed Darwin’s scientific philosophy, faced despair, and only conquered his despair by discounting his own philosophy, yet not admitting it. Taking his own philosophy to its conclusion, he had declared “Nature no respecter of persons,” yet he overcame his despair with an opposite manifesto: “That which is in man is greater than all that he can do.” Of this Miller says, “It was the kind of lie he promised he would never tell himself.” Later, she demonstrates that Jordan undermined Darwin’s philosophy when he, Jordan, declared certain persons “unfit,” even advocating for their sterilization. Darwin, however, had adamantly insisted this is Nature’s job. Not man’s. Darwin warned men not to interfere with Nature. Jordan, a devoted follower of Darwin, did just that.
My own truth-seeking under the paradigm I had been taught also led me to its natural conclusion. I had “wrestled” for years with the “God” I had been taught, particularly “his” cruelty that extended even to commanding genocide. In my moment of emptiness, like Nietzsche, I declared this “God” “dead.” Although the death of this “God” was a relief, I was now left with the greatest of mysteries: What is the realm just beyond our senses? Is there an Intelligence within it? Does this Intelligence care about us, in our world?
My impasse into emptiness was mirrored by my external life. Within two years (2021-23), a mere blink, I had lost my marriage, my career, my two kids off to college, and even our two cats, the first to my former husband and the second to my daughter. It was also during this blink that I left the church and the “God” it taught, though continued to follow its teacher. Just has my inner life had morphed into emptiness, so did my outer life into an empty home, no longer a teacher, wife or mom with kids and cats at home.
My blank slate drew me into discoveries new yet old, ancient, in fact, that had lain deep within my own intuition. Having studied the wisdom of other traditions, I was aware of the ancient maxim, As Above, so Below, along with its corollary, expressed, for example, in Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas, to “make the inner as the outer,” or that our internal self is reflected by our external life. My own life demonstrated this to be true.
Meanwhile, I was finding synchronicities everywhere, a remarkable universal harmony among all things, and that what I sow I also reap. It often comes many years later and in ways I never would have imagined, but in some way, sometimes happily and sometimes sorrowfully, in my own lifetime, I reap what I sow.
Still, mysteries without answers remain. Maybe I reap what I sow, but does everyone? I’ve longed to see it confirmed, yet meet another impasse. Bullies keep bullying and the bullied keep getting kicked. How do wealthy narcissists who exploit others to make themselves great again and again continue to win in the game of life?
True, occasionally, some rich bastard gets his due, locked up for some white collar crime, with his mug shot plastered over the evening news, and the rest of us celebrate that this crook who had stolen from thousands finally got what was coming to him.
But the story, reporting the
conviction of this crook, masks all that’s behind it. Who are the crook’s friends? Superiors?
Colleagues? Was he just a fall
guy? For a much bigger empire? A pawn of a mafia? My longing for revenge upon the hateful
persists.
Then there are the kind, lovable, oppressed, exploited, abused ones who have done nothing to receive such abuse, then die a cruel death. Again, no answers.
I think about the little boy in a favorite story, who stands amidst a vast mass of starfish washed upon the seashore, throwing a few, one by one, back into the ocean. A passerby, perhaps a teenager who’s been stomping on the poor starfish to his twisted delight, mocks the boy. “You can’t save them all.” The boy picks up another, tosses it into the ocean and says, “But I can save that one.” This little boy will reap what he sows, right? Some day, someone might save him too? And what about the teen who’s been gleefully torturing other starfish? Will he also reap what he sows?
I wonder whether I can’t see the “reaping” for the people I find hateful because I find them hateful. Seeking vengeance, perhaps I’m not intended to enjoy the chance to see them get their due.
Could the Universe be testing us? Are we given exceptions to the sowing and reaping law to keep the mystery alive? We see exceptions, point to them, and say to ourselves, “It’s not true. What we sow, we don’t reap. Look at them.” So what do we do? We start sowing bad seeds to our own delight at the expense of other people, because, why not?
Given that we all intuitively believe what goes around comes around, we’re challenged with the exceptions. Will we follow our intuition and try to sow kindness? Or, will we be tempted to follow the exceptions that tell us it doesn’t matter, that we can do whatever we want?
With plenty of reason to doubt,
many quit bothering to try. Others persist
in the hope for a reward and get disappointed when the “return” seems elusive
or takes a long time.
That’s me. Staying true to my intuition of its truth, I’ve tried to live it, and often, the “reward” comes barely in time to avoid a crisis. Could this be because I’ve expected one? If I were more like the boy who casts a starfish back into the ocean just because he can “save that one,” would the return appear more readily? Perhaps to me, the Universe has shrugged, “Yeah, yeah, you sowed, so you’ll also reap, because that is how the Universe works, but you since you did it for a reward, you’ll have to wait for it. You’ll have to wait so long, you’ll doubt it. Then it can be known whether you’re willing to sow even if you don’t reap.”
Imagine a friend of the boy, also casting back starfish, who hears the boy’s reply that he can “save that one” and, in sheer delight, pipes in, “And it’s fun to throw them back!”
These two boys aren’t saving starfish because they think one day they’ll also be saved. They are sending the starfish back in a moment of joy. They delight in saving starfish. Maybe we also can delight that there are some mysteries without answers.
© 2024
by Karina. All rights reserved. Please use with permission and/or a link to
this blog post.
