There Are No New Philosophies

I’ve heard this more than once. Whatever idea someone comes up with, somebody else has probably had it before. The Greeks, the Buddhists, the Vedantins, some mystic somewhere, or a German philosopher with a very large book. Maybe that is true. But here is an unusual proposition: what if the new part is not what a philosophy explains, but where it decides to stop explaining?

Let me explain...

Human beings have been looking at the same basic questions for thousands of years. What am I? What is reality? Why are we here? What is suffering? What is a good life? What happens when we die?

What if a philosophy did not try to answer those questions? What if, instead, we stopped for a moment before the explanation and looked at what can actually be experienced?

That is where the philosophy of How We Are Here begins.

Before the explanation

Let’s imagine four people have exactly the same profound experience.

For a moment, the usual boundaries of the self disappear. There is an overwhelming sense of oneness. Time seems to fall away, separation is gone, and there is a deep sense of peace and love. Perhaps there is even that strange certainty that what is happening is somehow more real than ordinary life.

For the sake of the example, the experience is exactly the same for all four people. But one is a Christian, one a Buddhist, one a non-dualist, and one a committed materialist.

Then the experience ends and the explanations begin.

The Christian may say they experienced the presence of God. The Buddhist may understand it as the disappearance of the separate self and an experience of interdependence. The non-dualist may say they directly saw that separation is an illusion and reality is one. The materialist may say the brain temporarily stopped constructing its usual sense of a separate self, creating the experience of unity.

Same experience. Four explanations.

The difference appears afterwards, when the experience passes through language, culture, beliefs, knowledge, expectations and everything else already present in the mind.

This does not mean that any of those explanations are wrong. Any of them may be right. But that is not the point.

The point is that the experience itself has not established which explanation is true.

This is where How We Are Here does something slightly unusual.

It stops.

The invisible wall

Why does any of this matter?

Because How We Are Here is not primarily interested in producing another explanation of reality. Its purpose is much more practical: to invite more peace into an ordinary human life.

During a profound experience, no explanation may be necessary at all. The experience simply is. This may be part of the reason such experiences can have such a strong noetic quality. They can feel immediate, complete and extraordinarily real.

Then the experience ends and we begin to speak about it.

There is nothing wrong with that. Words help us remember, communicate and make sense of what happened. But something subtle can happen at the same time.

A word becomes a concept. The concept becomes an explanation. The explanation becomes a belief. And the belief may eventually become something we identify with and defend.

It is almost as if each explanation can place another invisible brick between us and the original experience. Brick by brick, we can build a wall around something that originally had no wall at all.

And this matters because even philosophies and spiritual teachings whose purpose is peace can accidentally create another source of conflict. Once an explanation becomes doctrine, there is something to be right about, something to defend, perhaps even another identity to maintain.

A teaching may have been created to lead us toward peace, yet the structure built around it can quietly move us away from the very thing it was pointing toward.

How We Are Here tries not to add that extra structure unless it is needed.

It does not throw explanations away. It simply stops before turning them into certainty when certainty is not available.

Perhaps that leaves us a little closer to the experience itself, with a little less for the mind to defend.

One step before

There is no shortage of philosophies, religions and spiritual traditions that travel some of this territory. Buddhism, nondualism, Advaita Vedanta, monism, existentialism, phenomenology, agnosticism, mysticism, theism, atheism and many others all contain observations that may overlap with parts of How We Are Here.

That should not be surprising. We are all looking at the same human experience.

How We Are Here does not claim to have discovered an entirely new collection of observations that nobody has ever noticed before.

The difference is somewhere else.

The difference is where it stops.

Again and again, it stops one step before an observation becomes a final explanation. Not because the explanation is wrong, but because we do not actually know that it is right.

That one step matters. It is often the point where a living experience becomes a conclusion, the conclusion becomes a belief, and eventually the belief becomes something the mind feels compelled to defend.

The open question becomes a closed case.

The mind likes a closed case

There is nothing wrong with knowing. Knowing is enormously useful. I need to know which side of the road to drive on. I need knowledge to repair an engine, build a house, treat an illness, prepare food or find my way home.

But the mind has a tendency to want the same certainty in places where certainty may not be available.

What is consciousness? What happens after death? Does the universe have a purpose? Was that mystical experience a glimpse of ultimate reality? Why am I here?

An open question can be uncomfortable, so the mind looks for somewhere to stand. A belief will do. A teaching will do. A scientific sounding explanation will do.

Even I cannot know will do.

Case closed.

Interestingly, even I don’t know can become another kind of closure. The answer has been given and the question can be put away.

But there is another possibility.

I submit to not knowing

I submit to not knowing.

That is not an answer to the question. It describes my relationship with the question.

I am not saying the answer does not exist, that it can never be known, or that somebody else cannot know something I do not. I am not even saying that what I currently believe is wrong.

I am simply refusing to manufacture certainty because uncertainty feels uncomfortable.

The case remains open.

And then comes the second half:

I trust enough to stay there.

Not knowing can be uncomfortable because the mind wants a conclusion, a framework, something solid. Trust allows the question to remain open without immediately filling the space.

That trust does not require a metaphysical explanation either. I do not have to decide that I am trusting God, the universe, consciousness or destiny. I do not even have to explain trust.

I simply trust enough not to force an answer before an answer is actually there.

This is where not knowing, trust and surrender begin to melt into one another.

I submit to not knowing. That is surrender.

And I trust enough to stay there.

Not knowing does not end inquiry

Submitting to not knowing is not intellectual laziness, nor does it mean shrugging at everything and declaring that nothing can be known.

Quite the opposite. The question stays alive.

New evidence can enter. Another person may show me something I have never considered. Another experience may change what I thought I understood. Science may discover something new. My interpretation may turn out to have been badly framed from the beginning.

I remain available.

That is very different from deciding that something is unknowable.

I cannot know can close the door.

I submit to not knowing leaves it open.

And perhaps that open door is far more interesting than the answer we were in such a hurry to put behind it.

What remains when we stop explaining?

A great deal.

We can observe thought and notice that thoughts often appear without being invited. We can see what happens when we believe every thought that appears.

We can observe emotion and feel what happens in the body before the mind has even finished explaining why we are upset.

We can notice resistance. Something happens that we do not want, and almost immediately another layer appears: this should not be happening.

We can observe fear and wanting, and see the way the mind places peace somewhere in the future. When I have enough money, when this relationship changes, when I am healed, when I become enlightened, then I will be okay.

We can observe identity too. A body becomes “me.” An opinion becomes “me.” A religion, political position, wound, achievement, profession or spiritual experience becomes something that must be protected because it no longer feels like something we have. It feels like what we are.

And here the purpose of the philosophy comes back into view.

Every time we identify with another explanation, another belief, another idea of who we are or how reality must be, there is something else that can be threatened. Something else that life has to agree with before the mind can relax.

Peace becomes conditional again.

None of this requires an explanation of ultimate reality before it can be seen.

We can simply look.

Belief does not have to disappear

A non-doctrinal philosophy does not need to become anti-belief.

Someone may believe in God. Someone else may believe reality is nondual. Someone may believe consciousness is entirely produced by the brain, while another believes consciousness is fundamental. One person may believe in reincarnation and another that death is the end.

How We Are Here does not require any of them to abandon those beliefs.

It asks for a simpler distinction: what was experienced, and what was concluded from the experience?

Someone can experience what they understand as the presence of God and continue believing it was God. Nothing needs to be taken away. But the experience and the explanation do not have to become the same thing.

That distinction allows belief to remain without requiring the mind to defend it as established fact.

There is freedom in that.

No belief has to be joined, and none has to be left behind.

So is this actually a new philosophy?

I could say I don’t know.

But perhaps the more accurate answer, by now, is:

I submit to not knowing.

Many of the individual observations in How We Are Here are certainly not new. They can be found in different forms throughout philosophy, spirituality, psychology and contemplative traditions.

But perhaps a philosophy does not need completely new ingredients to make a different proposition.

The unusual proposition here is the refusal to rush toward closure.

Again and again, when the mind wants to take one more step and turn experience into a final account of reality, we stop. Not forever, and not dogmatically. We stop until there is something more than our need for certainty to justify taking the next step.

And there is a reason for that restraint.

Every unnecessary explanation can become another thing to hold, another thing to defend, another invisible brick between us and the immediacy of life.

Meanwhile, life continues.

The body breathes. Thought appears. Emotion moves. We love, argue, work, grieve, laugh, repair things, get frightened, become defensive, notice it, and sometimes return.

There is already an enormous field of life here before we explain what any of it ultimately means.

Philosophy does not always have to give the mind somewhere to stand.

Sometimes peace is better served by leaving the door open.

So I submit to not knowing. And I trust enough to stay there.