For millennia, philosophers have argued about the substance of the world. For millennia, the great thinkers of this world have tried to refute each other with their logic and to substantiate and establish their own views on content and cause. Quibbles are quibbled about terms, the words are occupied once with this and another time with that nuance of meaning, in order to attain trickily the logical superiority. The goal is always the same: To „prove“ one’s „own“ views as truth.
Other thinkers – the skeptics, for example – think that there is nothing that can be proved at all. They say that all cognition is based on the perceptions of our five senses and whether these perceptions are correct can never be determined. They mean indeed in contrast to the other thinkers that nothing is provable, but they speak still only of the cognitions accessible to the understanding. From perception about the five senses and the logic.
These great, much quoted and highly honored men, whose statements have survived the millennia, appear to me today – I beg your pardon for this formulation, but this is the image I see before me when I think of philosophers – as nothing more than petty nitpickers. I was stunned when I realized this one day. I used to think of these thinkers as people who were capable of learning about the world. Outstanding minds who could make us see new things. Special people who could enlighten, illuminate, even enlighten us. I was dumbfounded when I realized instead that they, too, could not get beyond things and time and space, and that this was the reason why their insights could never be clear, true, and irrefutably conclusive. Logic. Cause, effect, concepts, in relation to concepts, in relation to further concepts. Nothing else was apparent to me in their texts. It became clear to me that on this level, of course, there would always have to be a right and a wrong. Their cognition was imperfect because they could not include the perceptions of their sense of soul in their calculations. When I read their discussions, I get a sour taste. Sophisticated. Cleverly complicated. Pulling the hair out by reinterpreting terms. Strange logical chains, which are supposed to prove the own and negate the other. Insistence on space, time, logic. The compulsion to prove. To prove in such a way that the mind is satisfied with the result. That alone is what their thinking is about: to satisfy the mind. There alone lies a fallacy: It lies in the assumption that the affirmative judgment of the mind is decisive for the correctness of a statement. Another fallacy lies in the assumption that the mind is able to recognize the world completely with its means and to form a judgment thereupon. The last fallacy, however, lies in the assumption that there is a judgment – a right and wrong – at all. This assumption results again from the method itself, which – since its results must satisfy the understanding – is always a method of understanding and therefore just separates and thereby creates right and wrong first, must inevitably create.
This is the image I see when I read the words of these people: Peas, small, itty-bitty, dried-up peas – gray-green and hard – are laboriously lined up on a crooked table, rolling and rolling. They never stay in a straight row. They always roll out of the nice row by one, two millimeters or centimeters. It is maddening. It is lined up and at the same time again an unruly pea with a life of its own is brought into line and corrected in its position, with the result that other peas by the breath of air or the slight vibration on the table also come back into silent or quiet happy clicking movement and it simply becomes nothing with this beautiful clear and straight line of peas lined up behind each other geometrically clear.
In the end, the desperate thinkers, in their helplessness, have no choice but to redefine the concept of a straight line. They point to their table and say to their audience: „What you still see as a crooked jumble of unruly peas is actually an absolutely straight line. You just don’t know it yet. But I will explain it to you. We’ll get it all worked out. Somehow. We’ll define some new terms. Then it’ll work out. Somehow.“ And all the other philosophers at the other tables next door will look up startled from their fumbling and then quickly point to their tables and claim the same thing about their crooked pea constructions. The skeptic will continue to say, „No one can say with certainty whether tables, peas, lines, and philosophers even really exist in this form. So let’s leave it at that.“ For him, there is no knowledge at all. Not in any form. Because he, too, does not know how to listen to his soul-sense, which could give him such other, such new, true and, above all, complete and conclusive cognition in one clear sound.
I was amazed when I realized that all these famous, much quoted, much printed and honored with many busts and statues and biographies and treatises have been honored for their inconclusive bean counting and apparently had never heard the sound of eternity. Infinity and eternity and unity have remained alien to them. So much they have leaned on their one-sided and not very bright advisor, the mind, and tried to please it according to its specifications. They divided and separated and got into quarrels and separated and put together and said they were right and the others were wrong. These wise men were but puppets in the service of the mind, which likes nothing better than to separate and to judge right from wrong, thus creating loneliness. Quibblingly, they played with their peas, not realizing that their souls were communicating the truth to them all along. The truth that is not comprehensible, not recognizable for the mind. The truth that goes far beyond its horizon. The truth that every pea, every table, every philosopher, every cognition, every true, every false, every word, the logic, the illogic, every opinion or view, every existence or non-existence are part of one. A single one without before and after, a single one without cause and effect. A single one without causal or logical chains. The truth that everything is eternal and infinite. That everything is the One.
Only… the intellect cannot comprehend that. And as long as the truth is searched only about him, so long these realizations will remain hidden to the great thinkers and will remain accessible only to the non-thinkers. How many non-thinkers, who have attained non-mind knowledge, were and are there in this world for every great and honored thinker who has spent his life in letting his peas get into complete confusion and then still thought he had achieved something? Is it not perhaps the non-honored who know of the one truth?
This is also something that I have experienced through non-thinking and therefore I cannot prove it to the satisfaction of the mind.