Eternal truth or the eternal quest for truth
Posted on: March 29, 2008 - 2:30am
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Eternal truth or the eternal quest for truth
Which would you choose?
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Is the eternal truth God, or the truth about everything(ie beginnings of the universe, how life was created)?
If it was the actual truth about everything, I think I would want to know that. Although there is something to be said about life being a journey, not a destination.
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Yoda
I can't answer this question until I know what it's asking.
You mean if it were on a silver platter? To be honest, I think I'd rather choose the quest. What's the fun of just getting something without having an adventure first? Compare:
"Remember that time we braved fire, snakes and booby traps to get the holy grail?"
"Remember that time the FedEx guy brought the holy grail?" (Sign here, sir.)
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I'll have to think about that one.
Forever.
I mean eternal in the symbolic sense.
Basically absolute knowledge. As in *poof* you know every formula, every mechanism, average time it takes for a deer to digest an apple etc..
Or quest as in all the resources made available, but you have to learn it yourself.
Ah, so you're asking if I would rather have absolute knowledge (i.e. omniscience) or enjoy the fun of searching for it?
Hm. Well searching for it is pretty fun. I know, because I've studied.
But I have no idea what the alternative is like, so I have no basis for comparison.
Omniscience sounds kinda bad ass, but it might suck donkey balls for all I know.
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.
The only choice we really have....the eternal quest for truth, we can never know the truth about everything, therefore we are always looking for truth, and as we find one, another quest begins for another truth.
Is true omniscience even possible?
You can't know ABSOLUTELY everything, because that seems to entail that you would have to know what it was like to know nothing, or at least very little, which knowing everything else wouldn't seem to allow.
A place common to all will be maintained by none. A religion common to all is perhaps not much different.
I think it doesn't matter if we ever choose. We already are on (almost) eternal quest for truth (remember, I am a convinced propagator of reincarnation). Thus we are also destined to reach the eternal truth. It's impossible to know it right here and now, because we're unable to comprehend it.
Buddhism doesn't speak of God, because almost all people are sleeping. They have their unreal dreams, and they don't even know, that they're sleeping. If anyone would tell a sleeping person anything about God, the sleeper would just create a simple dream about God, one of many such a dreams. It has no sense to tell a sleeping people about God, they will just continue dreaming. They must be awaken first. 99.9% of humans are unconscious sleepers, passively vegetating, they can be easily reduced to a mechanism. Psychologists, saying that human is just a biologic machine, are on 99.9% true. Our dreams are filled by our always babbling mind, active specially, when we doesn't need it. People should think only, when they do some maths or goes voting, for example, and then shut the mind off, and don't mechanically react, but act creatively. Mind is just a machine, it gets some stuff on the input, and it chews it through and gives some output, nothing more. Things like understanding God are far beyond a limits of mind, which is only a tool.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
I wanted to add that I don't think the colloquial use of the term is a true sense of "omniscience," but an imagined increasing of information availability, by degrees, in whatever vectors we choose to imagine. Knowing everything would at least place one in an apathetic state, as there'd be no difference between doing and thinking in terms of feedback.
I'd choose omniscience. I know, "life is a journey", "its more rewarding to obtain all the knowledge on your own", blah blah blah. But looking at it practically omniscience is the better choice. If you have knowledge of everything then you're essentially raised to the level of a demigod. You'll know how to give yourself eternal life, how to manipulate the physical universe to your will, what will happen in the future, what anyone is doing at any time...the only thing that would keep a person with only omniscience from being a god is that you'd have to go about things according to the laws of the universe (assuming your omniscience doesn't grant you the knowledge needed to bypass said laws). Meanwhile choosing to go on an eternal quest for your knowledge doesn't give you anything you don't already have except for a longer life span necessary to obtain said knowledge. But in the time you spend searching for all that knowledge you could have already cured all diseases, given other people immortality, solved every environmental problem, resolved all political disputes...basically have eradicated all the ills of existence. So not only do you reap immediate benefits but so does the rest of humanity (and really all life in the universe depending on how far you feel like carrying this scenario out) thus making it by far the most beneficial choice.