The Seeker's Guide

The Seeker's Guide

A way to knowledge

By Ron Hooft

Published by Ron Hooft at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Ron Hooft

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Prologue

In every human being's life there comes a time when the big questions pop up. You know the ones: Who or what am I? What is all this about? What is my purpose or the purpose of existence itself? There are so many ways to formulate the questions but they all add up to the same thing for almost all of us: What’s really going on around here?

For some it is inherent in their very being that they should be seekers. For others the task proves too daunting or they have little or no real interest in knowing for what ever reasons; and there are many. Some just follow their birth religion, while others wander from belief to belief looking for the right system for them. Some are happy with faith alone. Some are forced into it all kicking and screaming.

What ever the philosophy, discipline, or religion, everyone will tell you that seeking those answers can be a life long process. So the question is: Where does one begin? Who does one join? Should you join a religion or affiliate with a philosophy? Should you look to one of the Eastern philosophies or Western Judaism, Christianity or Islam? Do you want to be Wicca or a Buddhist? Or should you be an atheist? Many people cherry pick; mix a bunch of ideologies and world views together, take what they like and leave what they don't. Who has the real answers?

When I was a very young boy I was faced with this very problem. I couldn't reconcile my given religion with reality, and when my mother informed me that probably no one actually had all the answers I was at a loss. Where does one begin when one begins from nothing? If no adults knew all the answers, then what was the chance that I as a child could figure it all out? And was my mother right? Was it true that no one really knows?

I had to find out. But there was my problem again: how? How would I know whether what anyone said was true? I didn’t have any way of knowing. The only thing I knew for sure was that there had to be answers somewhere. There is obviously truth and falsehood. As long as you are sure of that, there is a place to start.

What I did was go from religion to religion. None of them rang completely true for me. They often contradicted each other, and all of them claimed to have all the true answers. But that is impossible since they all seem to have a different take on what the ultimate answers are.

I wasn't happy with any of it. I soon started pondering the problem intensely. If all of them say they have the right answers but they all contradict each other, what is the likelihood that any one of them is absolutely correct? After all, if you have two contradictory ideologies that both claim to be true at least one of them, and perhaps both, must be false. Again, how would I know? There had to be a way… And of course there is. But I had no idea what it was at the time.

I decided that the only way to find answers was to go with my gut. Mothers tell you that all the time. Go with your feelings. If something didn't sound right I either did not understand what was being said, or there was something wrong with it. I would cherry pick my own religion or philosophy, my own world view, all from my gut and my intellect. What a task that turned out to be. All too often, what a waste of time; though I have no regrets.

I went from Christianity to Eastern philosophy studying all they had to say and weeding it out bit by bit. I looked into every philosophy I could get my hands on, all to find my own answers within them. This went on for most of my early and teen years. In the end, what I found was better than just answers. It was a way to find the questions. Asking the right questions is as hard as finding the answers to them. If you ask the wrong questions you find the wrong answers. So let’s start with the big question: the question of god.

Chapter 1: The Question of God

If you ask who created this, you assume someone created this, not to mention that you assume that it was created. This can only lead you to one place, a god of some sort.

Don’t assume anything. If you do not assume anything, you have to ask something like: How did all this get to be the way it is? If you ask that question you do not negate the possibility that some sort of god or higher intelligent power created it. But you don’t assume it. When you do not have the facts it seems useless to assume anything. That’s the first way you know it is going to be the right question. If the question assumes something it is only as good as that assumption. If the assumption proves false then the question was a waste of time.

Of course it is easy to see why humans assumed a god or higher powers. We are creators ourselves. We learned to create fire. We create new and innovative things all the time. But we do not create the stuff we make things from. We manipulate what already exists. We create other humans through sex, but that is controlled by forces we do not control. It turns out there are a lot of those and these days they all fall under the heading: Natural processes.

Since we are intelligent, thinking beings, we assume something with even more intellect than ours must have created the matter we manipulate and most importantly to us, intelligent beings. We exist, and we didn’t always exist individually, nor did the human race. So somehow we got here. Thus, god must exist. There must be a first mover.

Thomas Aquinas wrote a very persuasive proof for god along these lines that is still used by the Catholics and others. This is the basic gist of all his proofs combined, in my words not his:

If there was a time when nothing at all existed then nothing could now exist. So something must have always existed.

If something has always existed then it is cumbersome and unsatisfying to think it had a creator, because that would lead to infinite creators, which is not logical. Therefore it must have always existed without beginning.

That means god must exist.

You can read all of Thomas’ proofs in his own words online in the Catholic encyclopaedia, or at the local library.

Anselm of Canterbury and Rene Descartes agreed with each other that further proof of god is in the idea that we humans could not possibly come up with the idea of perfection ourselves because we can only imagine what our experience teaches, and we have no experience of ultimate perfection. A god must exist and have implanted the idea in us, for us to have thought of the most perfect being that could possibly exist. This is called the Ontological Argument. It is the argument from perfection, and I’ll get back to it in a moment.

First, what about Thomas’ arguments? Yes, we are here. We do exist. We did not always exist. So if you define that which produced us as god, then a god exists by definition. But is it a requirement that this god is an intelligent being? Or is it possible this god is a process: The god process, the creative process, the process of existence? We assumed a god must be intelligent and self aware. But assuming is not the same as knowing.

No requirement exists that a god must be conscious, even though all gods traditionally are. How ever, to assume that what is behind existence is intelligent is a weak point in thinking. Unless an intelligent god shows up and actually tells us about itself we can not prove whether it exists or not. We can have our opinions on the matter but without good evidence our opinions are just so much unsubstantiated speculation. While speculation is wonderful, it isn’t fact; and that’s what we are out to discover isn’t it? Therefore all we can say with certainty right now is that we exist. At least that is a fact…. Isn’t it? Don’t panic…. It probably is.

But low and behold I proved logically that god exists if you define it as that which produced us. What a feat! Well Aquinas would be happy, anyway. Now, you can define god in other ways, but for most people, while they will argue about their gods attributes, there is a consensus that who ever created us is god. But not as many would agree if we said: What ever produced us is god. My statement assumes nothing, while a theological stance assumes a conscious being.

I am not saying ‘created’ on purpose because rightly or wrongly it implies an intellect. We haven’t established that the real god has one. If god turns out to be a natural process or set of processes, or even all of them put together, can we still call it god? How else is a god defined besides that which has produced all things?

If we are just talking about the Christian god, that’s easy. It is above all else, it is all wise all knowing, perfect, separate from time and its creation, etc. If we are talking about any of the other several thousand gods man kind has worshiped and believed in, it isn’t that easy. Some religions didn’t even believe their gods created man kind. Often insignificant gods create man, like in the Sumerian stories. But what all these other gods supposedly have in common, besides producing us, is consciousness. Natural processes probably aren’t conscious.

At first, ancient people didn’t believe in gods. At first we believed in the ancestors. In some oriental countries they still do. Later we believed in spirit. The world was filled with spirits. Everything was considered alive. This is called Animism.

Eventually nature itself was a goddess, (Gaia) and not only was it conscious, it intimately connected all