When I was younger, every time I was exposed to a new way of thinking, I was making an “ism” out of it. Like “postmodernism”, or “Buddhism”, or “materialism”, or whatever. Every philosophy, every system, esoteric science, ancient practice, all these were somehow wrapped in their own bubble, and each of them was holding “the truth”. Of course, only until a new one appeared, popping the previous bubble, and reinstating itself as the only truth bearer.
As I grew older, I stopped doing this, and, instead, I’m using the concept of “context descriptors”.
What Is A Context Descriptor?
Like I wrote above, a context descriptor is any system in which you try to make sense of reality, from philosophy to religion, or esoteric practices. For instance, astrology is a context descriptor for me. I’ve been using it like this for more than 15 years, and I’m still using it. Never been very public about this, but that’s another story.
What matters is that I didn’t discard astrology completely, in favor of an allegedly “truer”, unique system. I didn’t say, for instance, that “only science” can accurately describe reality. By the way, if you really stop for a while and try to understand this approach, thinking like this is more like dogma, than science. Anyway, it goes like this for anything, from shamanism to yoga, and from quantum physics to the theory of relativity.
The bottom line is that everything that describes reality, is well, just a descriptor. No matter how accurate, or how complete it seems, it’s just one single way to look at things. We shouldn’t take this description as the reality itself. Or, if we do, we’re in for a bad ride. At best, it will be just incomplete, and at worst it can become delusional.
Reality can’t be described completely, it can only be experienced fully. Of course, with observation and focus, you can isolate repeatable characteristics, you can start inferring some patterns, but these are happening always after the experience itself. They cannot be used or understood as a substitute for the experience.
If you look at the featured picture for this post, you’ll se a cylinder, projected in a 3d environment. For every plane, the projection is correct. In some planes, the cylinder is “circle”, or a “rectangle”. All these are accurate, but only for that specific perspective.
Whereas the “truth” can only be experienced in the simultaneous conjunction of all those 3 planes.
I’m not sure we are equipped to even imagine the number of “planes” in which we are acting. Let aside to be able to describe them accurately.
What can we do, though, is to try experience all that we get.
