The Basic Problem of the Human Being – November 14 2018

The basic problem of the human being is that he wants to see the whole picture, both the phenomenal picture and the non-phenomenal picture, with his limited intellect. It’s like a little screw wanting to know the whole machine.

 

Heisenberg, who originally stated the principle of indeterminacy, says, “The very attempt to conjure up a picture of elementary particles and think of them in visual terms is wholly to misinterpret them.” But that is precisely what the human intellect wants to do. The human intellect wants to find out. And in trying to find out, it creates problems. So, until the human intellect accepts that all it can do is to go along with nature, the human intellect will never be able to understand nature.

Ramesh Balsekar, Consciousness Speaks

 

We spend our lives by and large identified with our thinking. With our ego, our ideas of who and what we are. We may have no sense at all of what we are that is other than our thinking.

 

So when we begin spiritual work, like everything else in our life, we will try to ‘figure it out.’ And some things indeed will begin to make sense to us intellectually. But in meditation, and then even outside of meditation, we begin to sense that which cannot be seen. The non-phenomenal picture, as Mr. Balsekar puts it. And this unseen part of life never will be understood by the intellect. It simply is not possible. In the realm of the non-phenomenal, A plus B does not equal C. Rather, A, B and C simply are. In the realm of the non-phenomenal, Truth is self-evident. It cannot be proven. It cannot be held. It can be spoken of only in metaphor. It can be experienced only subjectively.

 

This does not make it unreal.

 

The Veda tells us there is nothing to figure out. It tells us that life is, that we are, and that we are not separate from life. The Veda tells us that life is joy. By stepping past the intellect, we can experience this joy now. Today. It’s there whenever we want it. Available to us right here in our experience of the non-phenomenal world. We have it by expecting it, by owning it, by insisting on it; not be figuring it out.

 

Today I will assume there is more here than I ever will be able to understand, I will assume a benign universe at play within me and around me, I will assume I have a place in this universe, and I will assume that I will discover my place within this universe by insisting on joy.