Question Everything

Comedian-sage George Carlin had a bit where he advised parents to encourage their kids to question everything. “Kids have to be warned that there is bullshit coming down the road,” said Carlin. “That’s the biggest thing you can do for a kid.”

Parents, Carlin added, are the biggest perpetuators of bullshit, which is why most kids are screwed even before they get started.

Mind you, it’s not the parents’ fault. Their ignorance was handed down to them in the very same way they hand it down to their own kids, human ignorance perpetuating human ignorance ad infinitum – ignorantia hominum perpetuitatis.

David Carse tackles this beautifully in his book, Perfect Brilliant Stillness:

There is an agreed upon, consensus reality which almost the entire human race shares. The world has been around a long time; it is ancient. Into this world you are born as an individual; you grow, learn, experience life, and die. There is some disagreement concerning what happens after that, except that for everyone else, life will go on – until they also die. Everybody thinks they know this – or some local variation of this. But in fact, when you were born you did not know this. You learned this. Everyone else learned it too and so it is an almost universally shared idea. But everybody believing something doesn’t make it true.

Chew on that for a moment. Everything – everything – you hold to be true was taught you. Including the language you use to contemplate such ideas.

Now take this idea of questioning everything a bit further. Consider what you know – what you really know – about the vehicle reading these words, thinking its thoughts, making its pronouncements about itself and the world around it.

We wag a finger toward something we dislike with zero understanding of that finger, or the thing wagging that finger, or the origins and makeup of the ‘thoughts’ doing all that liking or disliking and prompting that wagging in the first place, or the construction of the entire enterprise called ‘me.’

If this doesn’t at least temporarily stop you in your tracks, take a few minutes to watch this incredible animation of DNA in action – you know, the invisible mechanics behind that ‘you’ thing and all that it does.

The simple yet profound truth is that we know nothing about everything, including that which is hatching and contemplating this very realization. We are ignoramuses in the extreme.

And ignorance is that which spawns human arrogance – the human arrogance behind all that ails us and our world.

Assured of our knowledge of things, off we go through life, posturing and pontificating. Why can’t my mate understand how to correctly load the dishwasher? What kind of idiot would vote for Donald Trump? How confident we are in our belief systems, our knowing, our understanding.

And the thing about which we are most assured? Me, of course. How else to explain the rabid defenses mounted when an attack on me is perceived? Hell, people routinely fight and even kill, nations make war, when ‘disrespected.’

Recognizing these truths (or perhaps driven there by profound suffering), a small number embark on a spiritual path of self-inquiry or surrender in hopes of discovering the larger Truth about themselves and the world around them.

But here, again, we embark on said journey with a me and its lifetime of knowledge in tow. As Wei Wu Wei wrote of the spiritual seeker in Ask the Awakened:

Perhaps our most serious handicap is that we start on the wrong foot. In the end this is likely to be fatal, and, I fear, generally is. We have a basic conditioning, probably in some form of Christian religion, of which little remains today but its ethical content, or in one of the modern psychologies, that of Freud, Adler, or Jung, or in some scientific discipline, all of which are fundamentally and implacably dualist. Then the urge manifests, and we start reading.

Every time we happen on a statement or sentiment that fits in with our conditioned notions we adopt it, perhaps with enthusiasm, at the same time ignoring, as though they did not exist, the statements or sentiments which either we did not like or did not understand.

And every time we re-read the Masters or the sutras we seize upon further chosen morsels, as our own jig-saw puzzle builds up within us, until we have a personal patchwork that corresponds with nothing on Earth that could matter in the least. Not in a thousand million kalpas [eons] could such a process produce the essential understanding that the urge is obliging us to seek.

We are required to do exactly the opposite of all that. We are required to “lay down” absolutely everything that is “ours,” and which is known as “ignorance”—even though we regard it as knowledge. It is like stripping off clothes that have become personal. Then naked, but in a nakedness that does not recognize itself as such, we should go to the Masters, who will clothe us in the garments of the knowledge or understanding that we really need. It is their jig-saw we must com-plete, not “ours,” for their “doctrine,” what they have to reveal to us, is one whole and indivisible, and the statements and sentiments that we do not at once understand, rather than those that we think we do, are the ones that matter. One by one as we re-read, and finally all at once, their meaning will become manifest, and we shall at last understand what the Masters have to tell us. Then, and only then, can we acquire their understanding, which is the fulfillment of the urge.

I doubt many will read this post and that few will understand or appreciate its contents and fewer still will bother to contemplate their meaning.

Some – probably those who know me and have managed to make it this far – may think, ‘Doug is being awfully arrogant in his criticism of human arrogance.’

To which I’d respond, TRUE! Which is why, again, the title of this post is Question Everything. It’s also the advice I’ve been giving my own kids for as long as I can remember.

Question everything and everyone, including us, your parents.

Steer clear of the ‘self-confident’ and the blowhards brimming with knowledge and answers, the kind forever running their mouths or forever boasting of still more mind-made knowledge recently added to their brains – knowledge, again, that “corresponds with nothing on Earth that could matter in the least.”

Let me close with this gem from Robert Adams (pictured here).

Adams counseled his followers not to believe anything he said. Yet at the same time to heed his words carefully. The very definition, at least to me, of ‘sage advice.’

What is the meaning of life? Who am I?

You are the very answer to these questions. Make your life very simple.

Do not be too profound.

Do not go looking to teachers and thinking they have a special answer for you.

There is no special answer, there are no special teachings.

Everything you’re looking for is within yourself. Where else would it be?

What you are today is a result of all your thinking, throughout the years, through many lifetimes.

Your belief system has created the body that you need right now for your next step in evolution.

This is why I always say, “You are in your right place. There are no mistakes.
You are exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

If you don’t like where you are, look within yourself.