The Ontological War

I previously posted this to a discussion group I was on; several changes have been made here.

We need to keep in mind that there is a difference between intellectually learning something and the knowledge that comes with becoming more who one truly is. Two examples of the latter are seen in the college freshman who thinks about his girlfriend of two months: “I can’t get any closer to her than she is to herself,” and in men and women who realize in their own lives that a person can understand others only as well as the person understands himself or herself.

We, all of us normal people, like to think we are living fully in reality as our natural selves, the natural self of humans. But in cross section, we are like donuts: We have a big hollowness or void at the center of us and that hollowness or void then makes for an even bigger void all around us. The awareness of these two voids is then responsible for people saying things such as “I don’t know who I am” or “the world doesn’t feel real to me.” When men and women make statements like these, they are experiencing these voids directly.

We, again all of us normal people, also like to think that the cause of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia lie completely within mentally ill people or with what has happened to them. But the answers to these causes actually lie at the very center of all of us normal people: It doesn’t seem like it from inside the donut, but these are problems of human existence, and ontologically humankind has never been very good at figuring out human existence.

On reading this a few young and optimistic people might think “Great. If that is where the answers are then all we have to do is go there and use our intellect to figure them out.” But this belief does not take into consideration the fear we all have of who we might truly be, of what might be within us, and of what might happen to us if we go there. This unacknowledged fear is so strong that it can be described as our Super Taboo, since this unspoken taboo brings almost all of us to a complete halt in our exploration of this indispensable area of ourselves. One of the many inevitable consequences of this future-stopping taboo is that it prevents us from fixing or curing many of the problems that greatly diminish all of our lives.

In a future post I’ll write more about our fear of these voids and our fear of ourselves: What’s ironic about these voids and fears is that even though they are real—they are experienced with intensity—once one understands them one sees that there was never really anything to fear about them.