This life. This existence. This universe. All this. Just What Is All This? What is going on?

The biggest What, Why and How of our existence are unknown. It’s a mystery.

But, even after knowing that it’s a mystery, what do we do? How do we live? How to live? How to act in the world? JUST WHAT DO WE DO?

Let’s find a way…

In fact, I have found it!

 

 

Imagine a thick book as shown in the graphic above. The cover ‘Do’ is the book’s essence – the actionable concentrate. Contents of the book just back this essence — they go into detail and explain why the ‘Do’ is true. Knowing that, and if you trust the book enough, you won’t have to open the book again and again. You know that the essence is going to be ‘Do’. The book says ‘Do’ with all the power of ‘Because’ behind it. Why calculate again and again when you already have the proof?

So what’s inside the book? The answer is both – everything and nothing. Everything in the sense that a follower a practitioner of ‘Do Because’ could potentially always impart further strength to the idea of actionable ‘Do’ by glorifying it with every learning, every experience and every situation. Things you can put after ‘Because’ are practically infinite. And Nothing in the sense that the trick is to just know the power of ‘Because’. Trusting ‘Because’ without thinking of its contents every time. You just know that if you open the book you will find all the reasons, explanations and justifications. So after some time you may begin to stop opening the book and start taking it at its face value.

Some background

I had a rather sudden spiritual coming of age a few years ago. I used to be very logic driven before that and was overly proud of that fact. But post the spiritual churn, I got more and more interested in the nature of reality, mind, existence and all that there is. Almost as if a third dimension had opened up in my -thus far- two dimensional life. I got acquainted with some of the shortcomings of the human mind too. Clearly there was much more to life than logic, reason and this “2-D”-ness.

Over the next couple of years I ended up reading a lot of religious scriptures, a lot of philosophy and far too many self help books. It was all very new and eye-opening to me. I probably read more than what was healthy, but the truth is that I was so shaken by this new change in life that I had to get to the bottom of it anyhow. What else could have been more important? I kept running around looking for larger truths and newer insights. And once you go down that road, you realise there are plenty to be found.

It gradually became my habit to get obsessed about a new learning, announce it as my new way of life, stay with it for some time and then fall back to the lost-and-wandering state as the obsession and meaning wore off. Until the next voila! moment. Involving some new ‘larger truth’ or ‘deeper insight’.

Rinse and repeat.

Except…. one day, when the new idea was, in retrospect, a breakthrough. I was playing a sport totally engrossed in it and a strong sudden realisation came about how happy I was at that time.

May be life is that simple?

Over the next few days, my thoughts increasingly drifted towards the need for applying this seemingly simple knowledge to my life in a sustainable way. What if there was a simple practical philosophy I could follow all through life? Something to hold onto amid ever changing circumstances and even my own ever changing thoughts, feelings and beliefs? After a lot of pondering, polishing, iterating, generalising and real life testing – all of it somehow crystallised into a concept named ‘Do Because’.

Little did I know that it was going to completely change my life. It was a ridiculously simple but an incredibly remarkable idea.

A simple ‘how to live’ concentrate of all our learnings and experiences

Imagine if we put all our leanings, ideas, philosophies and arguments into an empty water-tank and the tap at the bottom of that tank pours out a simple ‘how to live’ practical philosophy to us. 

Specificity and Generality of ‘Do Because’

Specific enough that it has concreteness and avoids vagueness/confusion. General enough that it allows freedom and avoids dogma/rut. A sweet spot between Abstractness and Concreteness.

Why? How? What?

The text below assumes it is part of a book called ‘Do Because’ much like as shown in the graphic at the top.

In the face of ‘Do’, a question may be raised in the form of what, how or why. This book deals with all of those questions in the context of life, existence and the problem of ‘how to live’. And as has been said and as you will see, the essence of the book is available even without opening it. The front cover is the conclusion of the whole body of the book.

The book is divided into three major parts called Why, How and What. The ‘Why’ deals with big questions of meaning, purpose and existence and highlights the usefulness of ‘Do Because’ in that context. The ‘How’ gives you tools to manifest ‘Do Because’ from an abstract concept to daily practical living. And the ‘What’ overwhelms you with its sheer size.

Problem with This-ism and That-ism

“Between this-ism and that-ism, all we really want is a daily practical and peaceful living”

Optimum Life Perspective and Need for a Constant

“An optimum life perspective from the point of view of a human being living on earth should be the one which factors in all the factors that affect a human being’s life across his lifetime. The big picture truths need to be intelligently appropriated into our way of life.

That life is finite…  that we will get old…  that our loved ones will die…  that there will be new technologies and new solutions…  all the tricks of the human mind and of the world…  our one thousand biases…

That how small we are in the universe…  that how magnificent it is to still have born on this earth…  that life could end prematurely as well at any moment…

… and that there is something rather than nothing.

All these factors and many many more not written here should empower and be part of our envisioned perspective. Something that corrects for the truth. Something that brings us back on track every time.

A perspective that makes a balance between weightage-of-the-past, pleasure-in-the-present, and care-about-the-future. This perspective should hold true at any moment of our life – in tragedies and in times of happiness, in ups and in downs, in pleasure and in distress.”

Size of The Truth

Let’s create a small empty circle and call it ‘Truth’.

 

Now let’s start putting things inside it and give it some size and strength. Consider this statement “At any moment of time in a day, stuff happening in the life of a single human being is a very very small fraction of all the things happening around the globe and around the universe.”

Each one of us will agree that the statement is fairly true. Now consider this: “We live on a spherical rock we call planet earth that’s orbiting around sort of a fire ball we call sun.”.

When we hear such things we do realise for a moment how small we are in the grand scheme of things and how all the stories that surround us in an average life here on earth are just all kind of man made.

Now, in those moments we do feel a certain sense of freedom, abundance, wonder and expansiveness. Problems of our lives look trivial and unnecessary. But these feelings are generally temporary and we soon get back to living our usual life.

What if we make use of all these recurrent realisations and put them under a larger umbrella called Truth. So with each realisation we impart strength to the idea of Truth. Over time our Truth should gain strength and size and become a source of, well, Truth, for us.

This way we start latching onto something that is bigger than anything we know otherwise. It is bigger than our individual selves. Bigger than our individual learnings. It is bigger than the stories of our lives because it encompasses all of them and in a way sits above all of them. And its strength and size keep on increasing as we keep on imparting more power to it. It becomes a gigantic nebulous blob. A whole that is difficult to describe in words.

Our belief in it, then, becomes an important tool that frees us from the troubles of an average human life. We then know in the heart that despite whatever is happening, there is a behemoth called Truth above all that. We start realising that Truth is closer than we think.

Usefulness of the Facility of Faith/Trust/Belief/Reliance

We only have limited bandwidth available to us in life. Time, Mentation, Willpower, Rationality – they all come and go and we only have so much of them to expend at any time. This is where the facility of Faith and Trust comes in. If something has worked as intended and expected in the past, we begin to have faith in its working and start using it as a blackbox. A blackbox that has expected input and output and has certain predictability attached to it. Consistency helps solidify this predictability and trust over time.

And why not? What else can we do? It will be foolish to not trust the obviously trustable stuff. We wouldn’t be left with any bandwidth to do anything else otherwise.

Faith then becomes a useful tool that aids our intuition, helps us in making decisions and frees us from constantly calculating and pedaling.

Hierarchy of Ideas

“Tree of ideas with one broad all-encompassing idea at the top with all its glory and every thing else below it”

 

[Developing …]