In order to arrive at the essential truth of Being, I must begin with my immediate perception. Phenomenological experience. Anything that cannot be arrived at through my perception of the present moment must be discarded and rendered irrelevant. I am a 28 year old male homo sapien sitting on a couch in an apartment in Michigan in the United States on the planet Earth pressing keys on his laptop computer with his fingers in order to write in a word processing program that is installed on said computer. My perception of this state of affairs is arrived at through my body’s senses: I see the computer in front of me on the coffee table in the room that I am in, I feel the couch underneath me and the carpet beneath my feet and the computer keys on my fingers, I hear the humming of the refrigerator and my three cats running around the apartment. I do not smell anything at the moment. I have a pouch of tobacco between my lower lip and the gums underneath my bottom row of teeth. My thoughts are in English as this is the only language that I have ever learned. Where are my thoughts located? They can not be seen or heard or felt, only experienced as thoughts. My thoughts at any given moment are a reaction to all present stimuli. I have also begun to suspect that there is no such thing as “willing” any particular action. All actions performed by a body are reactive and therefore determined; the sensation or experience of willing an action is merely the type of experience of thought that results from the action taking place.
Society is maintained by our collective agreement to uphold a litany of illusions, abstractions, and outright falsehoods. The truth of the matter is that none of us really know anything. We are living on a planet that we have agreed to call Earth that is floating in outer space. From what we can tell, Earth is the only planet that has conscious life forms. However, our view of space is extremely limited. We can only see so far – not very far at all, in fact. We are born and we spend our lives surviving so that we may reproduce and repeat the cycle. We reproduce through the act of sexual intercourse. Our sex drive exists solely for the purpose of reproduction. But why do we want to reproduce? Why should life continue to exist? What purpose does it serve other than to continually propagate itself? We invent concepts of good and evil, which are directly connected to our survival: that which supports one’s survival is good and that which threatens it is bad. We suffer endlessly so that we can survive. We work in order to maintain our society and in exchange for currency which allows to purchase the resources that are necessary for our survival. That which threatens our survival causes us to experience pain (injury, illness, isolation). That which encourages our survival feels good (sex, accrual of resources). Science observes patterns in the natural world but it can never answer why any of this is happening.
Left Hand Rising 