Chapter 12 - Viagnostic

Almost all of us at some point in our lives have wished that we had the ability to go back in time and change a decision that we had made at that particular moment in our past or to correct a consequential habit much earlier in life when we had the chance to do so. We hypothetically play out a variety of choices and outcomes regarding our personal investments such as our vocations and families, but we especially reflect upon the people we chose to trust and let into our little worlds and wonder how differently our lives may have unfolded. We often think of the problems we could have avoided, the opportunities we could have leveraged and the versions of reality we think we could have been living in the present. And while life is sometimes like a video game where we can play repeatedly until we get to the next level, many scenarios do not easily give us a second chance like when we encounter the rarity of genuine love and let it slip away or when we make a fatal mistake that leaves someone dead or permanently injured. We often follow our erroneous logic to its inevitable conclusion that places us in the opposite direction to the path of life we seek until we lose sight of our essence.

The true challenges of life are not the obstacles we face as much as they are the false notions we form about the world and ourselves that we need to deconstruct. There are basic truths we need to comprehend about our existence so that we spend less time worrying about our decisions and more time unshackling what is already within us to actualize in the undiscovered world yet to be created. But instead of venturing into our own mysteries within the greater enigma of the cosmos, we resist our natural integration with the universe by behaving like intelligent automatons designed to clean up or hide the flaws of someone else’s masterplan. We are a society primarily preoccupied with addressing problems, which seem to sprout out of other problems that we apparently already solved because much of what we do is unsustainable as we leap from one short-lived remedy to another.

Our understanding of the world is limited by the information we can access. When we tackle a simple math question, we are given the minimal information needed to derive the answer. But life is not a math problem however complex it might be because we are almost never provided with all of the information we require to find definitive approaches to our intricate struggles, and we can never seem to turn our reemerging insecurities into a lasting form of absolute confidence. This is because, in the real world, we do not even necessarily know the issue. Nevertheless, we are obliged to deal with unclear challenges and develop approximate solutions based on what we think we know. In addition, many of us find ourselves confronting problems that we do not really need to resolve. They are just complications that others among us invent to make our own lives seem important to justify our relative socioeconomic status or reinforce our delusional influence on society. But we shroud these petty diversions with our fabricated truths we come to accept as facts about the world, which contradict and conceal realities that we do not want acknowledge or face because they may unveil the meaninglessness of our lives.

While we all want to shift our efforts to worthwhile ongoing pursuits, our attention is drawn to trivial concerns driven by fears of falling behind or passing up career or business offerings that are dependent on meeting endlessly urgent deadlines. Time is held at ransom for many of us and the price we pay is the consumption of almost all of the resources we have with the illusion that one day our schedules will be unconstrained to pursue what we want or at least not to do what we do not want. However, that day never really arrives because we are prisoners of our own lives, and only our awareness can liberate us from the jail cells of our minds. Despite all the efforts of those trying to be enlightened and/or engaged in professed self-improvement, it is typically only those of us who manage to develop meaningful and caring relationships that seem to enjoy more and suffer less. Those of us searching and hoping for solutions that will forever cure our ills ensure ceaseless frustration and disappointment. This is perpetuated by the repetitiveness in how we deal with life personally and professionally as we become engrossed in the idea that we are not doing enough of what we think we should be doing or that some external dependency on a person or thing is not behaving as expected. It is our own beliefs supported by our self-justifying line of thinking that never changes and prevents us from overcoming or managing our most critical trials in life and finding a true sense of meaning, and it is our perception and experience of time itself that hinders our awareness.

We all have the capacity for time travel. We actually do this every day without realizing it because we travel through time mentally as we do through space. When we travel back in time, we do so by our recollection of the past retrieved from our reconstructive memory as surveyed through our own perceptual distortions. We are also teleported to the past through the edited playback of our recorded history, including the recovery and interpretation of preserved clues like fossils of forgotten eras. And when we travel forward beyond the present, we find our hopes and fears waiting for us as we do our normative expectations and simulated predictions that give us a line of sight into a potential future. We experience this through the conscious part of our minds that we tie to a continuous identity and that many of us refer to as the self or the ego. And it is this identity that serves as a constant in our shapeshifting world of impermanent things, however fast or slow and steady or sporadic it changes. This varies with each of us as our consciousness dances, wrestles and clashes with existence. But it is our egocentric illusion of separateness from the universe that limits our sense of space-time and shapes our perception of reality as a set of solid, unalterable facts broken down into countable bits as being either black or white. And the game we play unwittingly becomes a rigid exercise in gathering all of the resources we can find as we gamble on the fantasy that we can secure a heavenly place for ourselves or our significant others during our extended stay in the inferno of life. But this is the myopia that plagues our beliefs and reduces us to one-dimensional beings passing through multi-dimensional space.

When we say context is everything, we also mean that perspective is everything or that it is essential. These two terms are related insofar as perspective naturally depends on context. We need background and situational data to place things into focus, and we can configure how we see the world and what we come to believe and defend among our beliefs through the perspectives that emerge. But since many things can be simultaneously true and the meanings of these things change at different levels of awareness, our perspective must widen if we are ever to appreciate the multiplicity of views that can help us navigate through life, including the elusive concept of time that rests at the base of this challenge. We know the past is done and will never be revived but it retains information we need, and the future always remains in the future as a set of possibilities where we can explore each one as if each has already occurred until one version becomes the past. This leaves us with having to recognize that the only thing that actually happens is in the present, and that the past and the future are merely resources to manage the flow of our existence. The wisdom of time travelling is to know how to position ourselves in the temporal playground between the before and after so that we can best live in the present. Whether we travel back to the past or jump forward into the future, it is the information we return to the present that triggers the insight relevant to the here and now. Otherwise, it would be as if we were on a long voyage to a distant land only to find ourselves looking at a map to point to where we were or to where we are going, and never bothering to pay attention to where we actually are. Throughout the ages, ancient teachings have consistently reminded and cautioned us to never miss the basic point of living, which is to live now as opposed to repeating yesterday or waiting for tomorrow.

THE PERSEVERANCE OF WISDOM

Our beliefs and views are almost interchangeable since we cannot really have one without the other. A belief is a stated claim or unspoken assumption of proposed truth and a view is the angle from which we understand that belief, which is itself a belief about how to frame the world. With each view, we increase the possibility of generating insights, expressed as relationships or generalized principles that we can apply in how we align with our surroundings, others and ourselves as well. As our perspective expands and diverges, we converge on the truth and gain more wisdom. And it is this wisdom that peels away our layers of delusions and dissolves our hallucinations of success and happiness through our compulsory participation in the colossal theatre of life.

We know that wisdom is not easy to attain, and that we are not born with it either. With the exception of our biotic encoding that holds within it some survival mechanisms and basic instructions for learning or relearning key skills built into our design, we do not come into the world possessing prepackaged wisdom, and it cannot simply be acquired through good schooling. However, we know what it is when we see it being applied in real life across a multitude of varying conditions or when it saves us from suffering the consequences of what could have been any number of terrible decisions. And while we may not inherit complete answers to our problems, we are endowed with the ability to discover those answers. Hence, as we gather more experience, we learn how to deal with the world and manage ourselves in terms of our sensitivities and the insecurities we have about our competencies and our relations with others. We learn to be cautious when being frivolous, and to be open when being too guarded or controlling. Wisdom is bred from experience, which aligns with the fundamental viagnostic truth that we have to live life to know it. However, experience alone will not give us the insight we seek. It requires the reflective mind, for example, to assess whether or not we are fooling ourselves or to better distinguish our friends from our enemies. In order to differentiate between what is real and what is not, we need to question our experience as well. It is by testing reality that we come to discern what could happen and what is inevitable or likely after anticipating and witnessing what does happen.

Although we cannot prevent much of what we can foresee from occurring, we can still choose from a limited set of options to move us closer to what we really are in this shared existence, and to contribute in our own unique way to the movement of life itself. Undoubtedly, many of us live our lives with the notion that there is or will be a detailed training manual for managing anything and everything of assumed importance. And while we may find this belief reassuring, the moment we walk outside of the safety and predictability of our mechanized society, we quickly lose all sense of direction and autonomy. It would be as if we were in the middle of a vast desert with neither a compass nor a map and with no water to carry us through the rest of our journey. Some of us compensate for this fundamental insecurity by trying to threaten and control others in an effort to restore a small measure of perceived order. But inevitably, we are all either stumped or left drenched in the sweat of our own fear when we realize how vulnerable our societal structures really are, especially after nature makes its presence known. Only the possibilities of the universe afford us life and the means to live it.

Although survival drives our very existence to learn, act and react, it is uncertainty that forces us to make decisions. It is what we do not know that motivates us to ask questions and explore, which can come from either our own curiosity or out of desperation. Otherwise, decisions would not be required because we would always know what to do. But since the world is full of unknowns, we are obliged to operate with inadequate information to make decisions, that most of which we will never know if they were the best decisions to make based on the information we had at the time. Regardless of this reality, information remains our primary instrumental resource. We need it to find sources of nourishment and energy, to construct and maintain a shelter, and to identify and locate any other resources we require as well as to detect any threats to our well-being. And when we utilize this information to understand the world and act upon it to consistently predict and produce results that can be used as evidence, we begin to shift some of our relevant beliefs into the realm of knowledge.

Information needs to be distributed, retained and utilized in order to become knowledge, and it is only as knowledge that information translates into its real value, whether it is to follow procedures or make decisions, or to anticipate events or substantiate our beliefs. Knowledge gives information its power by letting it serve as evidence and by potentially employing that evidence through its awareness. In being cognizant of what we know and what we do not know, we take the facts of the who, what, where and when associated with any set of events to question and propose how those events come to occur or how things work and why they function as they do. But if knowledge involves asking questions to gather answers, then wisdom knows which questions are pertinent to ask and which answers are sensible to accept and apply. While many philosophies and religions try to instill in us what some of those answers might be and especially about what our path in life should look like, wisdom helps to unveil our place in the universe and tells us to identify our own paths so that we can navigate through it with the right kind of success and failure. It is not about what we get right as much as it is about what we learn when we get it wrong. We may be driven to become immortal gods, but only to discover that our true challenge has always been to preserve our youthful wonder as the seed of our wisdom.

There are multiple views and definitions of wisdom, but each meaning is valid because wisdom extends beyond itself. This means whatever we come to comprehend about the world and ourselves becomes part of the wisdom we have already obtained as we constantly refine our current conception. One common view of wisdom is that it is the knowledge and experience we accumulate over our lifetime, which we utilize to extract or determine the principles on which to live life. Some would say that it is the mere awareness of those principles that define wisdom. Another definition is that wisdom is specifically the ability to apply our knowledge, which we demonstrate by producing significant results. Hence, those of us who can generalize an understanding of life and the world from one set of circumstances and then apply that understanding to another set of conditions are those who are truly wise. And this implies yet another view, which is that it is not how much experience we accumulate, but how much insight we derive from the experience we gain. It reflects the relationships we discover or learn from the events we witness.

However, wisdom is not only the capacity to generate insights from our knowledge and the information we gather through our experience; it simultaneously includes the cumulative catalogue of insights we possess, which we can apply to the realities of life. Both are integral to its definition because we are able to develop a new understanding of the world from the understanding we currently hold. Wisdom builds upon wisdom as knowledge builds upon knowledge. But in the same way that we develop knowledge from information, we also build wisdom from our knowledge and experience. The key qualities of wisdom lie in its applicability, effectiveness and consistency across conditions, which jointly point to its perseverance as its true measure. True wisdom overcomes the test of time. It is the supreme time traveller. It not only knows what happened, what is happening and what might happen, but it knows how and why it happens. It is for this reason that wisdom is a necessary ingredient for living a viagnostic existence, where we develop our viagnostic narrative and unearth its lessons. It is in grasping the moral of the story that we align with life and ultimately reveal the true self that emerges from our essence, which is interminably one with the universal truth.

The perseverance of wisdom is what enables us to approach the truth. But to be clear, itis not time itself that is tested as much as it is the validity of our cultivated wisdom that is confirmed in response to the accumulation and variation of circumstances over the course of our collective history. It is for this reason that the base principle of all principles is that the more conditions to which a principle can be apply, the greater the function and veracity of that principle. Wisdom only seeks the truth by putting its closest version of it into practice so that life may be lived with meaning as we confront its hardships and seize its opportunities that slip between our hopes and fears enveloped by the mystery of existence and the uncertainty of our fate. It is in tragedy that we find our emotional resilience and in temptation that we challenge our moral fortitude. And although a liberating consciousness is bestowed upon us all, this same gift can drives us into inescapable madness because our ideals clash with the paradoxes of life that tend to appear as nothing but cruel contradictions. The awareness of this truth is shared by both the wise and the mad. But while the wise can see beyond this reality, the mad are bewildered and often expelled from the world as the psyche splits into countless fragments to flee its dissonance. Our conflicting beliefs are behind the mental carnage we experience, and it is only through their dissection and our change in perspective that we free ourselves of needless agony.

REPLAYING THE PAST TO UNCOVER OUR BELIEFS

History teaches us not to repeat our mistakes because history also demonstrates that we will repeat our mistakes both as individuals and as a society or culture. There are numerous reasons for our failings, and one of them is due to our successes. We attempt to replicate our achievements not realizing that those apparently positive accomplishments in the immediate may have negative effects in the long term. Remnants of our global history provide evidence of this such as the consequences of resource repletion in the sustainment of great civilizations. Past success does not truly predict future success because we are not autonomously isolated entities. What we do individually impacts the whole system, however trivial it may seem, while we collectively can modify our environment almost as significantly as it modifies us.

Our shared history also has a cyclical nature, and this arises from other interrelated reasons for us to consider. One is simply that we forget or we choose not to remember, and our failure to remember may be due to a loss of a documented past resulting from annihilation or desperation that shifts resources towards immediate survival at the expense of recording critical events and valuable lessons. However, in our increasingly modernized world, we find ourselves discarding the relevance of the past to our seemingly invincible system of the present and projected future. We come to believe that conditions have changed so drastically that history has little to offer in addressing our current reality. And although there is some degree of truth to this in trying to solve new and original problems, we ignore the very high likelihood that our ancestors had once reached the same conclusion regarding their own novel set of circumstances. Moreover, we misconstrue the idea of living in the present as being solely concerned with the immediate, while being fully aware that how we live in the present is always informed by the past. This past includes our experience, our culture and the coding of life itself.

We survive and progress based on our programming because we cannot learn without it, which ironically makes it very difficult to change as well. The things we need to help us grow are also the things confine us. Our means of adapting to the world is imprinted in our genetic blueprints, cellular substructure and neural memory. It is also transcribed to all of the technology we use and have used to retain our knowledge, but the basis of that knowledge is found in our intricate biocultural programming. And since past success is etched into its code, it does not change easily unless we repeatedly detect that our programming is neither serving our ability to function nor adequately meeting our immediate concerns. This is when our culture sees intergenerational shifts in values swinging, for example, from conserving to indulging and then back again. A threshold must be reached before we can open the floodgates to recycled beliefs that will permeate our society. And although we change with conditions, we forget that we are contributors to those conditions and only history reminds us of the cycles we will repeat because we are not cognizant of its fluctuations and the impermanence of our circumstances.

While we can naturally rewire some of our accessible circuitry, deliberately or unwittingly, the answers to our current problems often lie in our past conditions where we originally designed the spectacles we use to view the world today. The danger of looking into our past is that we may remain there and never return to our live action drama where history is being fashioned. One of the most common mistakes we make with the past is to dwell on what we had and lost, or unknowingly relive our traumas buried in our relationships, which we routinely reveal through our present day interactions. The past is a valuable resource for reinforcing advantageous habits and breaking unfavourable patterns. Our beliefs are projections of our past. We may unveil them in the here and now, but they were born way before we knew we had them, ranging from how we think the world seems to work to how we think we are supposed to behave. This includes whom we learn to trust and not to trust, how we should see ourselves, and who we should strive to become. These are all beliefs that stem from the deep roots of our past and stretch back to the earliest stages of life, where we have no conscious recollection. Encoded in the biology of our natural inclinations and in the culture of our societal indoctrinations, we find provisional instructions on how to operate in this ambiguous and tentative world.

What we learn is all by association as a vast network of ideas and procedures, which are tied together by proximity, relevance, likelihood and impact, and which are drawn from our direct sensory experience and through the layers of symbolic expression that point to either the tangible or the abstract. These associations are the building blocks of our beliefs, containing our personal and cultural past, which tell us what to believe is true and what to expect in the future to dictate what is important in the immediate. The vision of our preferred state fits in a particular mould we apply to ourselves as well as to others and our surroundings, and it does not matter if it is actually good or sustainable as long as it resembles that desired image.

The past provides us with clues as to why we have come to believe what we believe and why we consistently feel the way that we do. It is within our individual and collective histories where we find the sources of our influence as well as the logic we follow to arrive at our beliefs, which range from the highly conscious to the deeply unconscious. We can trace some of these sources to dramatic events that gain our full attention and insert themselves involuntarily into our emotionally charged memories. Similar events or simulated triggers that we interpret as familiar to us can easily stir our unwanted feelings while being oblivious to their source unless the recall of the original trauma completely resurfaces. These traumas can be single occurrences of a major experience such as a fatal personal loss or a brutal violation of our being, or the repetitive bombardment of seemingly lesser trials such as unrelenting criticism or verbal abuse. They are all equally traumatic in their own significant ways, and we manifest their effect on us in much of what we believe as well as in our outrights denials, malicious attacks and defensive posturing; this is inherent in how we behave and what we assume about another person’s intents and judgments, which are often projections of our own.

Our freely expressed beliefs are like windows into the inner workings of our psyche, and our behaviour provides a record of its patterns to reflect what we really believe. We can trace our belief systems to underlying motives buried under our current conditions and their perceived history. Over time we learn to orchestrate a set of viewpoints intuitively positioned to justify our actions or to provide a rationale for the particular circumstances of our lives, whether it is defending our comparatively advantageous status or uniting around a common foe to blame for our ills. We also use our beliefs to conceal our doubts and anxieties, and to manage the cognitive and emotive disturbances of our egos. They act like a protective coating against the penetrating rays of reality, which can be partially deflected or deferred by altering our interpretations of the past. It is easier to change our perception of events that have transpired long ago than to confront direct realities that challenge the world we want to believe already exists, and this is reinforced by our tendency to synchronously rehearse and recite from the same traditional scripts that overlap with our own original screenplays.

In the film Happy-Go-Lucky [12], a free-spirited primary school teacher named Poppy is taking driving lessons from Scott, a cynical and emotionally reserved instructor with a conspiratorial worldview that conceals the cavity of his lonely life. As the story follows her along her seemingly carefree adventures and humorous rants, we come to realize that she is a warm and thoughtful creature of love on an implicit quest to make everyone happy. We also come to recognize the power of her biographic intuition regarding the psychological continuity of individuals. This is reflected in her sensitivity to how the harmful effects of childhood experiences could result in the negative demeanour of adults later in life. We see this when she correctly deduces that one of her pupils was being mistreated at home, and later asks Scott if he was bullied as a child based on his generalized anger towards society and presumptions about people. However, as Poppy frighteningly discovers, her optimistic attempts to spread extreme positivity can be misread and surface the darkest places in others.

Our beliefs and attitudes are our defenses against a world we neither understand nor control. We are fundamentally vulnerable. And although some of us are fortunate enough to express our vulnerability within the security of loving relationships, too many of us have it exposed and abused only to serve others who are unable to deal with their own abuse or misfortune. It is the one of the most distressing aspects of our lives, where we have to find the strength to accept our circumstances and acknowledge our sensitivities as the path to being who we really are while facing the risk of being mistreated or neglected. We split into two identities when the person that we think we are or should be, or that we are told we are or should be, conflicts with who we essentially are and spiritually need to be. But the wider the divide between those two notions of ourselves, the more likely we will fabricate other personalities to close that gap by either flatly denying our vulnerable existence or blindly protecting it against any possibility of abuse. And if we fail to recognize the growing presence of these characters, there are no limits to the horrors that may come from an incubated nature that is left unchecked or unable to redirect its actions towards good.

We do not see the madness that stems from our past, which we express every day in the way that most of us constantly play with reality to feed our delusions. We reshape the world to fit into our beliefs. This is why we spend so much time persuading others to believe what we believe or what we want to believe. The more people echo the same words, the more it reaffirms the appearance of truth. However, our outward lies and self-deception only dig us deeper into a cerebral trap, where we unsuspectingly lose our ability to distinguish between actualities and illusions, especially those we share with the majority among us. In addition, we increasingly become addicted to our routines and the repetitiveness of behaviour that we mainly perceive as serving our immediate gratification or alleviating the fear of a world that we feel we cannot control or influence. We manifest this in various ways that may include sexual fixations, digestive pleasures, state-inducing substances, heart-pumping activities, entertaining diversions and exhausting work obsessions to counter our anxieties and escape the dulling of our senses. But as our addictions grow in their tolerance, we are compelled to increase the frequency of these actions to offset their diminishing returns and sustain the same initial level of reward that only lead us back to the numbing of our souls. This is the outcome of deep-seated insecurity and distrust.

We generally do not wish to repeat an adverse history, whether it is our own or that of our common ancestry, but we may want to carefully consider replaying the past to uncover our beliefs and decipher our unconscious assumptions that slip out in our emotions and reactions to specific events and familiar patterns of behaviour. We already recite the past by following our traditions and practicing our rituals that normally provide consistency and stability to our lives. And while many of us do not always know why we observe our customs and maintain our habits, we largely understand their functions such as our local greetings that impart the basic respect we intend to show one another. These sacred acts, particularly on special occasions, are reminders of who we think we are and what we believe is important, even it is simply to enjoy life. This extends to storytelling, art, music and dancing as well as meditation, where we can trigger or relive meaningful experiences. However, replaying the past also means revisiting our tainted memories of events and the buried secrets of our personal and communal histories. It is here where we brush against reality to find relevant clues to our own paths where we can genuinely partake in life. And so instead of insecurely altering our accounts of the past to reflect the beliefs we presently hold or unwittingly activating the base code of our compulsions , we should treat the past mainly as a reference library to prepare us for playing in the continuous field of the present.

ACCEPTING THE RISK OF BEING ENGAGED IN THE PRESENT

The present is the point where time instantaneously moves from the uncertain future to the definitive past. It is the infinite space in which we perform in the live theatre of existence, which means that we are in the moment of experiencing things more or less as it is happening. It is as if we are reading this while it is being written. From this perspective, time has yet to have meaning because everything is still in the process being decided or determined. It is in the act of becoming. Hence, when we are truly experiencing presence in the world, space-time is instantly generated with our response to stimuli and our perception of change as we piece together sequenced events and modified states of a universe limited only by what we can sense, feel, imagine, read and logically derive thereafter.

The tidbits of information we collect are only samples of reality, and the nuggets of knowledge we hold are merely thin slices of the truth. In any given moment, we are exposed to a wide and continuous feed of data that we must funnel, filter and sift through to build a relatively complete, but shifting picture of our reality through the lens of the self. It is like the endless recording of a film we concurrently edit to tell a story, which arbitrarily terminates with our own lives. However, for any of this to occur, we must either assume the role of the main character or serve as the narrator of this tale. As the narrator or witness, we as our egos dissolve into the background while we resume perceiving the happenings of our environment, from our innards and extremities to our surroundings and beyond. But as the performer or artist, we jump into the foreground with our egos to act upon the world or respond to its movements as if we were making a declaration of our individuated existence.

Everything transpires in the here and now. We do not work and play tomorrow or yesterday. It is in the conscious reality of the present that we live, and to live life is to enjoy the moment as much as it is to survive it. But the imaginary separation and importance of the ego obsesses with our continuity to the point that we align only to what we think we should be doing rather being or expressing what we really are. The present moment tends to be lost in the hypersensitive awareness of personal risk, whether it is biological or economic, or political or emotional in nature. The dread of risk transforms into a desire for an overly managed life that is stripped of any meaning other than our security. It is not that our own lives do not matter or any less than the lives of others, but to live purely for our subsistence is to overlook the cosmic wonder of life itself. It is a kind of death where we are caged like a mouse learning to perform tricks for a behavioural trainer in anticipation of its cheesy rewards. Many of us behave similarly in our hope for a better job, a fancier home, a more gratifying vacation or just greater income to acquire more things we want to gain an allegedly happier life. Although these may be understandable and possibly noble pursuits, our minds do become almost exclusively conditioned for achieving goals and our egocentric continuity takes command of our priorities as being instrumental to the whole of life. The ensuing logic is that we have to persist in order to keep reaching for higher and higher goals that may have less and less to do with living and knowing life and with finding the unarticulated meaning we seek. It also becomes clear that the management of our perceived time caters primarily to our beliefs about our future and capacity to influence it rather than to our deeper appreciation of life as we are living it.

Our perceptions of the world and the beliefs we hold about it work hand in hand. Perception affects what we think we are experiencing and shapes what we come to believe, while what we believe simultaneously sways our interpretation of the experiences we perceive. But although our beliefs and related practices may be the bricks and mortar of our culture that we need to inspect, our perception is the window to reality that we need to monitor as it stands between what is real and what we believe it to be. Since our perspective is tied to our beliefs and alters our perceptions, it is our perspective that needs to change or expand in order to call out our unspoken assumptions and question our unchallenged opinions, particularly those shared by the majority of us on the way things are and how things should be. It is through this process that we acquire new insights and gain the wisdom needed to realize that our contrived ambitions do not align with our more ethereal aspirations, especially after successive achievements fail to light the torch we need to find our path to a meaningful life.

How we perceive reality, what we believe about the world and what we expect from life mould what we think will fulfill our needs and steer our actions in very decisive ways. Even how we define and evaluate ourselves dramatically sways the choices we make in living our lives, and this includes the characteristics we select for in a suitable mate, the type of career we can advance and where we want to live. Although some of these choices can seem trivial, most align with the political and moral views we seem to endorse, which influence the information we filter in and out as being relevant to us. In addition, we behave according to what our beliefs dictate regarding the critical factors in achieving success and happiness, and any deviation from those expected states can cause us distress, frustration or anger. However, instead of questioning our beliefs when we see a discrepancy, we tend to strengthen their support and engage in denial to the point of vacillating between overt delusion and veiled depression. We have specific expectations we demand from life that are accompanied by an insistent feeling of entitlement. And while this may sometimes result in socially recognized expressions of success if we are willing to compromise other values like honesty with ourselves and respect for others, it does drive us away from the intrinsic fulfilment we need to build towards a meaningful narrative. This occurs when we fail to realize that contentment is achieved in the actual process of doing without expectation and not in some long awaited desired outcome. It is actually in accepting the risk of being engaged in the present that we find the opportunity to experience its inherent value within each moment of life.

The ego unfortunately interferes with our capacity to be present by measuring time against what we have accomplished with our lives as the principal evaluation of our identity. Our social standing becomes the sum total of our worth no matter how unfulfilled we may feel after our triumphs and how little we learn from our failings. But is the question we should be asking really related to what we have or want to achieve, or should we be examining whether or not we are living our lives in accordance with our inner nature? We can never express who we really are if we are too concerned with being someone other than who we really are. The ego tends to lean towards the socially accepted persona of the self rather than the faithful expression of who we really are, and who we really are cannot be discovered without the elaboration of our narrative and the meaning from which it is derived. Making this discovery requires that we expose the ego as the fraudulent self and fictitious guardian of our beliefs. But we cannot banish it any more than we can make anything that does exist disappear. The ego is one part fake and one part authentic. Its separateness and independence from the universe may be a fantasy, but its awareness can be acknowledged and distinguished from others. And just as a rainbow may be an optical illusion, it is still part of an actual experience. Hence, to prevent the ego from consuming our spirit, we must welcome its presence in our reality with the knowledge that it is also a hallucination.

However, this does not fully resolve our aversion to risk and our fear of uncertainty, which triggers our preoccupation with control, and specifically control over our own lives. We cannot live in the present if we are obsessed with the future. While the practice of meditation and frequent contact with nature can help reduce self-absorbed rumination and bring us back to the present moment, it is by letting go of our attachments to the beliefs we sternly defend that we can counterintuitively capture a more genuine sense of control. Our deep-seated insecurity actually lies with the flaws we dismiss in our beliefs rather than with the unknown, and the world is too dynamic to entertain an excessively dogmatic and regimented life. The more we hold onto our faulty beliefs, the less willingness we have to truly test and refine them. The prescribed remedy to the suffocating terror of uncertainty is not to respond with overconfidence or belligerence, but to permit ourselves to challenge how we think and what we believe by examining why we come to believe what we believe. As we peel off our false assumptions, we loosen our mental rigidity and begin to perceive what is already there within and around us. Questioning ourselves without the punitive judgment of a misled ego cures us of our spiritual blindness and detaches us from our artificial identities as we realize that it is the natural confidence of living that keeps us present and unleashes the potential that defines who we really are.

UNLEASHING OUR POTENTIAL TO REALIZE A FUTURE

There is one significant blind spot in seeing the truth as universal or absolute, and that is that we do not think of it as potential. It may be whole and perpetual, but it is also infinite in its possibilities. Reality is always in the process of being actualized as potential that is continuously created or unlocked. As one thing is generated, the possibility of other things arises. We experience the world as a shifting system that is not just the result of fluctuating conditions, but of emerging phenomena that never previously existed or that were never previously perceived despite always being there. Hence, when we build working models of the world to navigate more effectively through life, we are not adapting these models to a static, unchanging reality, but rather to a constantly adjusting universe built on a fundamental and everlasting truth, which itself does not change or grow. However, everything else that ascends from the truth varies over time and contributes accumulatively to its unlimited expression.

Nevertheless, these theoretically infinite possibilities of the truth only persist in an indefinite future where only one version returns back to the present as it converts likelihood into actuality. This is because the future only exists as a possibility where each conceivable event is assigned an adjustable grade of potentiality dependent on present conditions that determine whether it will surface as reality. The future remains in flux as an unknown within its own sphere of impermanence until it is definitively consigned to the past. For the wise among us, this means that we need not concern ourselves with events that may not happen and we should only prepare to respond if or when a fated event is in the making or on the unstoppable trajectory of its unfolding. It is pointless to worry about what will, might or may never happen because we cannot account for every contingency and we cannot respond until one occurs. While we can prepare for a highly anticipated future and we should practice for its eventualities based on the lessons of the past, we do not physically live in the realm of the prospective or the imminent. We live in the now-playing theatre. Hence, a mind that remains in a future that it cannot realistically alter or guarantee does not focus on living in the present, where it can proactively consider how to achieve outcomes to be experienced in a possible and preferred current state.

The wisdom of our foresight and planning depends on our consciousness of the here and now. In other words, knowing what we need in the moment thrusts us into motion to execute a series of tasks over the passing of time to meet that need. Necessity is always present as a pending or projected requirement. And since fulfilment inherently implies a delay no matter how instantaneous the gratification may seem because we can only gratify what wants to be gratified, this inescapably attaches the future to the present. Our movement in the present is guided by a vision of what is forthcoming while our awareness of the immediate constantly amends our prophecy of what is inevitable. It is as if we routinely travel to the future in our cerebral spacecraft to point us back to what we can or should do in the present. The future, much like the past, is a source of information for the present. And while the past captures what did happen and what can be derived from its occurrences, the future instead displays for us the possibilities of what could happen to consider as we chart forward. Nevertheless, we rely on what we know of ourselves and where we are in any given moment that is supported by what we unearth and retain from our past. Our starting point is always where we are now as of today because tomorrow remains an unknown until it becomes yesterday.

Too many of us are preoccupied or arguably obsessed with a future that diverges from our present state, which is inadequately aligned with what we desire. The constant fixation with the scale of that discrepancy keeps some of us seething in trepidation, especially if we cannot counteract that attention with pleasantly novel distractions through physical activity, social interaction or passive entertainment. But as we acquire interests and hobbies or practices that help us refine our knowledge and skills while offering us a forum for our creativity, we begin to uncover something about ourselves that seeks to be defined. And whether we can explore our curiosities as part of our livelihoods or can commit our leisure time to see the fruition of our efforts, we are all mutually engaging in the potential manifestation of who we really are and often without our deliberate awareness.

Our concern with time, both in terms of how much of it we have and how we spend it in the context of what we should accomplish, prevents us from ensuring that what we do in the moment reflects the essence of who we really are. Although there are always things we do to alleviate the fear of neglecting the necessities of life, we also feel culturally obligated to be someone other than who we are. Consequently, we shift our time and resources towards maximizing what we think we can extract materially and reputedly from life before we have no future to plan or before we have no present to live. Yet we secretly tend to procrastinate or distract ourselves from societal expectations because we subconsciously sense that this is not what life is supposed to be. We are left wondering what choices we can make to convey who we really are. Some of us ignore this question because we are too concerned with what we might be missing relative to the rest of us, while many of us are so programmed and trained in our way of life that we either do not believe that there is an answer to that question or that there is no significance to its answer. If it has no relevance, then our future is no different from our past. It remains unalterable because we are mere cogs in a wheel that spins in perpetuity, which is ironically true for those of us who believe we are masters of our own worlds because we are equally confined to them. However, if it does have relevance, then the universe instantly collapses back to the eternal now.

Everything that matters is already present because our potential is seeded in our essence much like the prospect of a magnificent oak tree is found in an unassuming acorn. But like nature, we can only be who we really are by being in the process of becoming who we are. And the moment we do that, we are already manifesting our essence. The specifics of what we are doing are less important than the mere reality that they are being done. What matters in any situation in which we are placed is that we are acting in alignment with that essence, and we know that we are when we feel we are aligned with the true world that underlies and surrounds the one we are conditioned to believe is the real world. We become indifferent to a fictitious hierarchy, which continuously tells us what success looks like and that our inherent value can only be measured by that success. But our challenge is that we live in a world consumed by the relative appearance of what we are or where we are, and that we do not matter or are unworthy of attention until we mature into an oak tree or convince everyone that we are one. If success is predefined for us, so then is our belief about happiness or fulfilment. We even temporarily elicit contentment from our socially accepted achievements because we believe we should, or perhaps because we confuse that elation with the relief we experience from social approval after unknowingly feeling that we were unrecognized or unimportant until that moment.

Our challenge extends further to the reality that we also live in a modernized world where the delay between the awareness of basic needs and their gratification has become so negligible that we substitute the intrinsic value of living in the present with our instantaneously attained external rewards. The primordial brain is being inundated with mild, but persistent incentives that keep us glued artificially to one another through a system that feeds our subsidized autonomy and sponsored status both of which can be withheld at any moment if we fail to meet their conditions. This occurs when this spiritually oblivious system we mistakenly call our enlightened and progressively society inherently steals or redirects our souls away from our essence to the point where our biotic blueprints are modified and our circuits are rewired imperceptibly to serve a master ego that is as illusory as our own.

It is difficult to contain the concerns and delusions of our own egos because we are afraid to unplug from the socioeconomic apparatus we depend on, which reinforces so many of our questionable and disposable beliefs. Most of us feel like we are in some grand virtual reality game whose rules we must learn to survive to reach each subsequent level as if all of the information needed is there for us to find and execute our next calculated decision. Space-time is stored in a box of zeros and ones with all permutations worked out for us to win or lose, or to try again. But many of us do not see the absurdity of trying to make decisions based on finding absolutely conclusive evidence that does not exist in the real world while being subjected to the false inadequacy of not knowing what to do that is compounded by the anxiety of doing nothing or doing nothing fulfilling.

The only way to influence our fate is by unleashing our potential to realize a future. This means that we overcome the uncertainty of the future by actualizing a version of the future in the present that aligns with our essence and releases our potential. Instead of worrying about the future we want, we focus on being who we really are in any number of possible futures. We need not concern ourselves with the future. Instead, we can point to a future where we always see ourselves being who we really are and actualizing the promise of what defines us to whatever degree life affords us. We do not know what we will happen, but we can ensure that we embed and express the essence of what we are in any version that is realized as long as we remain conscious of the sacred here and now.

A LAYERED PERSPECTIVE OF THE TRUTH

If the universe were to become completely inert, then everything would end. There is no existence without movement and no reality to reveal without change. But to appreciate the mystery of life and unravel its meaning, we need to adjust and expand our perspective beyond our basic perception of time and the physical boundaries that demand its necessity. We can only comprehend what it means to engage in instantaneous time travel when we perceive the past, present and future as one reality, where each is merely a view into the same existence. The present is the eternal moment of living when we simultaneously turn to the past to access our repertoire of inspirational lessons while playing in the imagination of a future that contains a set of concurrent possibilities from which some may be actualized. All exists in the present moment where we move and change with the cosmos by living our own narratives and by participating in or learning about the stories lived by others. But we need the past to mark where we have been to determine if we are moving forward or walking around in circles of perceptual enslavement, and we need the future to find a way to unleash our potential in the present.

By collapsing or shrinking space-time back to a single and indivisible point, we can return our attention to the universal truth without being distracted by the temporal barriers of our perception or without being bound to any assumed dimensions of the universe. As we already know, being viagnostic means more than being a scientist because to know life in a meaningful way extends beyond the domain of science. Nonetheless, science is always where we begin because in order to attain genuine faith, we have to discard our blind conviction, however persuasive or intuitive it seems. To follow the instructions and assertions of others or of our own without any proof or direct discovery is to have no faith at all. What does belief really mean without having some basis in our experience? We always need a reason to believe something, regardless if we can articulate it or not. But since we can also be misguided by our logic, we know the most resilient sense of faith is one that we practice and consequently test every single day. And it is in the sincere and courageous application of faith that wisdom can emerge and persevere in its alignment with the truth.

Given this context, we could easily argue that science is based on faith as well because science is founded on the presumption of an underlying order that is accompanied by the purported laws that govern it. We could not pursue the truth any further if reality stopped being orderly at a more basic level underneath or behind the seemingly chaotic events that we try to comprehend. We could never uncover its hidden patterns or gain any knowledge from a randomly occurring world. This fundamental order is not only a simple and largely unspoken assumption of science; it is the basis for all endeavours in the pursuit of truth, and for all scientists and enthusiasts alike. This perspective defines the core philosophical tenet of being viagnostic, and it is the first act of faith we unknowingly take after we acknowledge our own existence.

We express science as the merger of theory and evidence in a hypothetically open forum where we can share, examine and discuss our proposals and observations with the intent of achieving a better overall understanding of existence. This obviously helps us to resolve disputes when all parties respect the facts, but science is more than the empirical. It is not confined to laboratory test trials and field studies. It also conducts thought experiments and runs simulations to see the possibility of things because its ultimate goal is to arrive at new insights that augment our shared body of knowledge by diving deeper into its jumbled bits and discarding its faulty assumptions. And although science aims for the causal, it generally settles for the relational as in what we can demonstrate to be linked or associated in some way. Without having to assume causation, we can still make predictions based on correlation alone by measuring one variable and expecting the increased presence or deceased absence of another. This is important because much of our knowledge is essentially in the form of relationships, and causality remains a subject of dispute and a matter of perspective, particularly when we consider the classic quandary of which came first, the chicken or the egg.

Some of us would go as far as to argue that causality is an illusion precisely because we would say that time is an illusion. Our entrenched view of linear progression logically follows that only preceding events can cause subsequent events. But if time and space are truly relative and nonlinearity can conceptually transmute into being extradimensional or bidirectional, then a future action or incident could just as likely be the culprit of a past incident or outcome. It seems absurd, but we have recorded or witnessed many strange phenomena that can make us question the very foundation of what we deem indisputable, especially when we peer into the quantum realm and see the effect of a conscious observer or agent on the behaviour of particles and waves. We have no idea how limited our comprehension of reality truly is, and we will continue to reclassify what once seemed irrational or ludicrous as required reading for the most basic training as we have throughout our cultural evolution.

Obviously, none of this changes the critical importance of science and attempting to preserve some degree of objectivity in the vastly subjective realm of our experience. It is the base on which we best measure existence and understand reality. It is why since the advent of formalized study and the establishment of academic disciplines that we have seen exponential growth in our civil advancement, which includes dramatically extending the breadth of our knowledge and expanding the possibilities for individual human endeavour. Arguably, this has come at a very great price given the incalculable physiological and psychosocial risks that have arisen during our great era of technological ingenuity. But it remains vital to the welfare and progress of any society and its culture that we at least sustain a scientific ecosystem for openly testing ideas and methods that steadily provide a stable footing for the pillars of civilization. This assumes that we protect this function by governing our precarious tendencies to dismiss observations that do not support the assumptions of the current orthodoxy and to manipulate data that conforms to our agendas.

However, science is not an all-encompassing philosophy of life nor is it intended to be. It only serves to amend the working body of knowledge we rely on every day to function progressively and to explore the unknowns of our existence. It may examine beliefs and values, but it is not our morality and it does not extend to the realm of moral truth as it does to being viagnostic. At best, it acts as an unbiased contributor to moral truth and to the wisdom of life in our search for meaning. The real value of science lies in the pure promotion of veracity, and its origins likely trace back to the earliest sentient attempts to better understand the problems that our very distant ancestors were trying to solve by uttering the right questions and looking for the most reliable evidence. We forget that the construct of the question in language remains as important as our imagination and creativity in generating solutions, and that it is a distinguishing characteristic of our intelligence from the basic ability of life to learn. To expand our knowledge, we have to actively pose questions to better refine the questions we ask and the answers we find. When we inquire and act upon what we know, we poke at reality to see if it will respond or cooperate. The power of inquiry is at the root of our wisdom, and nurturing it depends on the recognition that our knowledge is only as good as our capacity and willingness to question it.

The answers we seek in life do not lie in what we know or in reaching some purported pinnacle of consciousness, but in how we go about knowing. It is a process of being aware rather than the outcome of gaining knowledge. We can see it as a state, but it is more fluid than it is solid and more gaseous than it is runny. We must allow ourselves to disperse our awareness anywhere and everywhere in order to integrate everything we can while accepting that we may know nothing at all. To be truly wise, we need to let go of what we believe so that we can make room for perspectives that can enhance the clarity of our minds and ultimately the quality of our lives. We cannot open ourselves up to the truth if we think we already know what it is. We cannot relish in its simplicity if we do not appreciate its complexity. The truth is always somewhere between what we think we know and what we definitely do not know. And while it may seem to us like it is just beyond the horizon of our knowledge, we are not in a race to its attainment. We cannot reach it by rushing towards it with increasing speed because it can only come to us or come from us by surfacing within our own consciousness through our experience.

A genuine search for the truth is deeply humbling because we always see how much we do not know relative to what we do know. And although we may not be certain about anything, we can be confident in our capacity to be open and ensure that we will arrive at the truth or generally within its vicinity. This is the purest sense of faith, especially when we learn to examine and comprehend things for ourselves rather than just accepting what we are told. As long as we are prepared to question our beliefs, we should feel free to form them based on our own experiences and the information we process every waking moment of our lives. The truth is actually something we recognize because it has always been there just waiting to be seen. But the moment we stop questioning, we stop knowing as well.

Although there is no shortage of theories about the nature of reality and existence, there is also no way for us to perceive their inner and outer edges or to know conclusively the extent of their dimensions. If we were to equate all of this to the line of a perfect circle, we could understand everything as having no beginning and no end, regardless of its size or quantity as measured by its radius or circumference. We could only assume that reality and existence are always contained within it and that all things arise from it as well. But if we could at least contemplate an existence that is not limited to physical reality, then we could entertain what these other realities or existential layers could be such as a field of consciousness, a playground for the imagination or a realm of hypothetical universes and probabilities spinning and shuffling in a cosmic casino. Perhaps instead of a circle with one plane, there are several layers organized like multiple lines of concentric circles. Maybe we need to find a layered perspective of the truth, regardless of what these planes may be and however many levels exist, because we may never understand the importance of everything unless we have a complete way to enduringly look at everything.

There are at least three senses of reality we can explore that correspond to familiar facets of knowledge or belief, and these are the (a) objective, (b) subjective and (c) directive layers of the truth. The objective layer relates to things or events that are physically observable, measurable and verifiable. This is part of the scientific domain, which we invariably treat as the reliable leader of our aspirational objectivity and the theoretical guardian of empirical evidence. This layer also includes the economy of life, which some of us might reduce to the raw facts of survival. The subjective layer, on the other hand, covers the personal and communal domain of experience and of the imagination often as expressed through our literary and artistic creativity, where things are conceived and crafted for a fictional or symbolic world. It is here where we convey our sense of reality and our visions of another. The final directive layer concerns the moral or ethical domain that includes all spiritual, religious, legal and political matters in relation to our volition and accountability. This is the sacred ground of our direction.

Although each area speaks in its own native tongue, all three layers are legitimate ways in which we, as individuals and as societies, define truth. While we tend to position science as the dominant study of the veritable, art and literature often have ties to actual occurrences from which inspiration is drawn. Arguably, this imaginary space can describe reality without having to reference true events or accurately depict them. Nonetheless, storytelling involves a reasoned product, where a consistent set of rules or assumptions are established and where the events of that make-believe universe adhere to those rules. But while the literary realm is as much about being hypothetical as it is about expressing subjective truth, the directive layer captures our moral sense of truth that addresses the normative elements of what we should do and how we should be, which may need us all to endorse or consider.

Throughout our history, we have intuitively tried to reveal and reconcile these elementary segments of the truth through our qualitatively different explorations and examinations. While no layer of the truth has a monopoly on understanding life, we do see how the objective and the subjective jointly complement our sense of reality and how the directive layer guides our sentience through a sense of purpose. Regardless of their specific functions, these three planes are altogether needed to recognize the truth as a form of emancipation once we exercise our right to access it. We do this by observing the world as objectively as we can, expressing ourselves through our subjective experience of it and engaging in moral contemplation to guide our actions and their meaning. It is through this complete perspective that our time travel through life will find the wisdom to question our beliefs, embrace impermanence as the inevitability of change, and perceive the ego in the context of our individual and environmental totality. And as we learn to assimilate both sides of reality and recognize all levels of the truth, we will discover the essence of life as we witness its genuine meaning unfolding through the viagnostic narrative and our engagement in a sentient existence.