What do you wish that everybody knew?

Introducing The Question!

Finally, The Question has been finished! The Question is:

What do you wish that everybody knew?

https://thequestion.diy

There, anyone who can answer the Question, is free to do so, and everyone will see the anonymous answers of the world. I have high hopes for this project. Maybe it would be nice if it could achieve the popularity of PostSecret, but it would also be ok if it becomes a somewhat insular thing where some pretty unusual people get to say some interesting stuff. Either way, here I’m going to explain what the project means to me, before sharing the story of its entirely mystical origin.

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The Question can be seen in many ways. It’s the reason I came up with the triple look, the style toggler: communicate that there are multiple angles on this thing¹. I’m gonna start from the mundane and work my way up to the spiritual.

As wise sayings

What some people do when presented with the Question, is share something that could be called pretty wise, yet simple. For example answer #3:

We are all so very different.

And #5:

“First, do no harm” is an excellent rule that will keep you out of a lot of trouble.

I don’t knock that at all, both of these are great answers when put in the context of The Question: something everyone should know. #3 in particular is one of my favorite answers, since, having been an outcast for most of my life, I keenly feel that most people really don’t understand that, even in these supposedly tolerant times. I like it so much, in fact, that I may even get a tattoo riffing on that concept, which would be my very first tattoo…

Stated baldly, they may not be so heavy, but when you consider that it’s something all 8 billion humans should understand (at least according to someone), it really gives them a special heft.

But this is really the simplest view on the Question.

As grassroots philosophy

What I mean by that, is that instead of having philosophy be an elitist exercise in building a castle in the clouds, you can produce a truer philosophy by coaxing it out of the people with The Question! Because necessarily some people get pretty philosophical when confronted with the possibility of sharing something that should be useful to literally everyone. #10:

Modernity, and scientific materialism, has caused us to look “at things”. The more spiritual minds of the past looked “through things and up”. Everything made has a telos that is connected to its source of creation. Looking only at things as an end in themselves is akin to Eve reaching up and taking the fruit.

#17:

The only way a society can be free and harmonious where every person is heard is for that society to never exceed ~10000 persons. Hierarchies and their illegibility and alienation are the inevitable consequence of trying to squeeze together millions and tens of millions of a species that evolved to live with and understand only a scale of 1000.

I didn’t even like #17 at first, I thought maybe I shouldn’t publish it, but I decided it’s not actually a violent message, and you know what, maybe they even have a point, maybe it doesn’t make sense to posit there can be healthy human collectivities over 10,000 people. Who knows, but it’s something to think about, and someone thought this was very important, so up it goes.

In a way, this is getting back to the very roots of philosophy. Heraclitus:

So we must follow the common, yet though my Word is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.

It’s not “as if” Heraclitus, they do have a wisdom of their own, and The Question will reveal it! And as the Taoists and Heraclitus know, “we”, us mystico-philosophical charlatans with our head in the clouds need to follow the people, the nonsense we concoct has to help people, which, in a Pinocchio-like transformation, will make it not nonsense after all: it will make it real.

Speaking of real.

As spirituality

Many people, including myself, give spiritual answers to The Question. #1:

Everyone has a unique principle that is both their source and final destination. The truth they were born to manifest. It is not subjective, since it existed before anyone was born. Neither can it be spoken. But it is truth. And the truth is infinite.

That’s my answer. The first one at least (I may have another later). I feel it’s a little unfair to have my answer be the first one, but well, it very clearly is laying out the ethos of the entire project: revealing the infinite truth lurking inside mankind. When I first laid out The Question here, I shared something interesting about spiritual knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is:

1. Highly certain of itself

2. Needs to share itself with the world

So yes indeed, I do think answers to The Question are ultimately of a spiritual nature, even if their speaker doesn’t see it like that. But what is the spiritual? Necessarily vague. Nebulous. Underspecified. Bullshit under some definitions of “bullshit”. But. Spirituality is about truth. Capital-T Truth actually ². Since it’s about truth, there’s no particular reason the spiritual needs to be quarantined from the secular, as there are plenty of secular truths. Another of the goals of The Question is to explode the secular/spiritual distinction entirely: it is an unjust, maybe even delusional, cleavage being imposed on the truth. The truth transcends the spiritual/secular distinction.

I'll never get tired of this image.

Perhaps The Question will allow us to see the damn cylinder… Or…

The truth

I talked a big game about truth there, but actually, I still haven’t told the truth about The Question, the mystical origin. You see, everything I just said is actually something I realized after the fact of The Question coming to me, and yes, it did come to me.

One morning, shortly after my enlightenment, I woke up with an idea for a new religion already in my head. Not even really my idea (I see it as a possibility laid out in a certain book). A religion built explicitly around the Infinite, which I think is the thing that ties together every spiritual tradition (yes, even recalcitrant Buddhism has the Infinite at the center of it). I was batting around ideas of how to do it (in between narcissistic fantasies about appearing on Joe Rogan ³). The big blocker was that if I’m inventing a new religion, I will necessarily have to play the big guru, and there is no way in hell my brother would accept that. So how do I do this, without playing the guru? ⁴

Then, The Question exploded into my mind, in what I can only describe as runes made of fire burning themselves into my brain:

What do you wish that everybody knew?

I didn’t do anything with it that day, other than it consuming all my attention (much to my brother’s annoyance, since this day was his birthday).

Then I realized that that is the way: use The Question on the world and see what it reveals. Crowd-sourced scripture. Or crowd-sourced wisdom document, as I saw someone else call it.

In a very real sense, I think every scripture is actually a fully realized answer to The Question. And sure, a scripture is not a religion or a spiritual tradition, but there is no particular reason The Question can’t be part of a larger project…

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The Question is a very long term project. Once enough answers have been obtained, will patterns emerge in them? If it survives multiple generations, will there be changes in the answers each generation produces?

I can’t wait to see what The Question becomes. But, it’s finished, and now, I can get back to writing, since I expect that promoting The Question won’t be nearly as time consuming as developing it.

It’s like I can breathe again, being able to write again. And on that note, it’s time to begin on the next thing: either my overview of perennialism, starting with René Guénon, Author of the Necronomicon! Or something about my complicated relationship with the yin in yin-yang. We shall see.

1. I also kinda see this triple look thing as a 21st century illuminated manuscript.

2. Some Buddhists would object upon hearing their tradition is about Truth, it kind of isn't, but it really is, because come on, it's about the escape from samsara, it makes some pretty major Truth claims (such as samsara being real to begin with), even if it makes clear Truth is not the point.

3. That’s really very funny, it’s been ages since I’ve listened to Joe Rogan.

4. I never doubted that I should actually do this though.