Karl's Interminable Search for Truth
Some context
The last four decades have been characterized by searching. From a young age, I was obsessed with the idea of Truth with a capital-T, a grasp of things as they really are, the fundamental and the ineffable. I left no stone unturned.
I mined the darkest depths of poetry, literature, and philosophy. I knelt before the altar of Natural Science. I dabbled in the esoteric and the arcane. I traveled the road of excess in search of palaces of wisdom. I watched my body waste away from radical asceticism.
And of course, I looked for God.
From the Evangelical Christianity of my birth to Catholicism, then to TradCath fanaticism before crossing the Tiber for various flavors of Eastern Orthodoxy. I shaved my mustache and let my beard grow to better fit in at Jum’ah.
I danced around bonfires in Edinburgh at Pagan festivals. I performed blót with Heathens. I did some weird shit with witches. I rang the bells at Hindu mandirs and Shinto shrines. I stared at a wall for countless hours on an uncomfortable zafu under the watchful eyes of Zen masters.
I’m pretty sure I’ve read every (relatively mainstream) holy text available in English. And then I read the commentaries.
And, of course, there was the schooling. I did my undergrad at a Catholic university, where I majored in Philosophy and Theology. I’ve started (and dropped) a handful of graduate programs, from law to continental philosophy.
All of this – every stupid second of it – was focused on this nebulous enlightenment that was always just around the corner.
So, what have I learned?
Everything is Empty & Awake.
Credit again to Scott R. Jones. I’m dead serious though. Toss this one way back into the dark, empty dungeons of your mind. The oubliette. Let it stretch its legs, come of age. When the time is right, it’ll be back. And it’s going to hurt.
Emptiness, śūnyatā, is the truth that all phenomena lack an independent, permanent self-existence. Thus, all is impermanent, fluid, and interdependent. And despite nothing being solid, it is profoundly awake. It is cognizant, luminous even. Prabhāsvara.
Nobody knows a goddamn thing.
Like, nothing at all. That is as much a statement on religion as it is epistemology in general. Make of that what you will. Accept nothing as gospel. Get out there and see for yourself.
Theism is rotten at its core.
And the Abrahamics are the worst. These religions are demonstrably, unequivocally, not divine. The mechanism is evolutionary in nature; the psychological safety and tribal cohesion it once offered are no more, and humanity has yet to shrug it off.
Like a gangrenous limb, it sickens the entire body. We are all worse off for ideologies that permit gratuitous suffering, conflate love with obedience, and make morality arbitrary. It’s used to justify atrocity and systemic oppression, discourage critical thinking, and devalue this precious human life in favor of a fictional afterlife, in which the majority suffer for eternity.
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It’s easy to type these words out and send them off into the ether, but what’s the point? It’s all just talk. Truth is praxis, after all.
There’s a gif for that. Two bodhisattvas, two statements. Exegesis of the highest order. This is Prajñā to live by, a perfect distillation of a lifetime of searching:
