Introduction

We live in an age surprisingly devoid of self-reflective thought. Millions of people follow the religion of their parents. The educated tend to believe whatever they are taught in schools. Many people believe that their culture and government are superior, and feel a kind of team spirit towards other people who just happen to live in the same nation state, who speak the same language, or who have adopted the same package deal of religious beliefs. This successful behavioristic conditioning of the mass of humanity should be regarded by any sane man as an absolute horror! He should wonder why he was born into this hell-world of the brain-dead.

Most of us, most of the time, let ourselves be brainwashed (conditioned) by the circumstances of our lives. These circumstances may be accidental, they may be consequences of past action, who knows?

But we are always capable of rising above this hypnotized state. At any instant, we can cast away most of our conditioning, and can be open and questioning about existence.

We must be open-minded and critically scientific at the same time. To be open-minded is to be willing to examine almost any aspect of reality, or any idea we are drawn to examine. We must then be good critical scientists by testing each thing or idea in the laboratory of our own experience. It is your own personal experience that must test everything, not someone else's.

The motivation to open-mindedly question existence is latent in all of us. It is part of the quest for self-evolution, the only dance there is. However, few of us answer the call of this quest. Those who do must separate themselves from the mass of beliefs around them, in order to step onto the path.

We could call the attempt to evolve ourselves as individuals to be the study of real philosophy.

Now, in our time, academic philosophy has degenerated into near mind-game meaninglessness. Yet, philosophy should be the mother of all studies. Many of the ancients considered philosophy to be a practical study of the world, with an emphasis on how a man might best live his life. I suspect that "as above, so below", and that seeking to understand ourselves, and seeking to understand existence itself, is the same study.

How can you go through a day without wondering:

To me these are forms of the BIG QUESTION, the big WHY.

I consider it natural as a human to question everything. This does not mean that everything we hear is necessarily wrong. It means that our ‘rational faculty’, as Aristotle so aptly named it, is meant to be judgmental. Furthermore, I suspect that each of us has within him the ability to understand almost anything that any man has ever understood. While the study of chemistry or some other physical science may take years, we each contain a laboratory of basic human awareness and experience. This laboratory can evaluate many things that few of us use it for. Since we all want happiness, peace, contentment, bliss, etc., we can all wonder and think about the best methods to achieve these ends. We can all wonder and think about our mode of life in a society.

Obviously, many of the ideas presented here conflict with what many people believe, and just as obviously, this does not matter. This entire collection of writings, aside from occasional expressions of my personal preferences, is the result of my own search for truth. Hopefully, that search has been open-minded and Socratic. My intellectual goal is to seek the best from the world of ideas. I’m attracted to thoughts that address the BIG QUESTIONS, that offer better solutions to practical life problems, or that integrate several branches of knowledge.

Thoughts can only be a partial reflection of reality, thoughts are but one type of experience. We all seek a kind of peace which supercedes thought. Thus, I don’t claim that any of the ideas presented here are the supreme ultimate solution to anything, but my own search for the lost cosmic connection drives me to present them.