Knowing oneself

Decisions are made the moment you know what you will do. Decision making is a process of knowing yourself. To know yourself, you must know the world, because you are connected and immersed in it.

We all basically know what we want. The root cause of indecision is not due to lack of knowledge per se, but fear. Fear makes us unable to decide. Spiritual knowledge is always with us. The answer is clear – all paths are valid, and free will is a gift to us to do whatever we want. With freedom comes constraint, as things come in pairs. One we have chosen we cannot choose the other paths. At least not simultaneously.

The optimizer says we must choose the best. Whatever the objective function, the optimizer purports that there is a best choice, and thus all else are invalid.

The fallacy of the optimizer mindset is that we do not know the objective. The optimizer mindset presupposes that we know – and in many social contexts, that is partially true (for example, businesses optimize to make money).

But in life, we do not know the objective function. (If we knew, there is no free will.) We can only take one step at a time, look back, and realize in retrospect what the objective actually was (if there was one that we understood). (This is, basically, what Steve Jobs tried to say in his famous Stanford Commencement Address.)

For those uninitiated, spiritual knowledge is very subtle, and often goes unnoticed. It must be so, because here free will reigns supreme. Spiritual forces cannot dominate any decision we make here by free will. If we freely decide to fear, basically fear that we will have made a wrong decision, then we will not know the decision to make.

Fear is always fear of death. If we could relive and retry, will we really fear taking a wrong turn?

Whenever we fear, we cannot know. To know, we cannot fear.

From the spiritual perspective, learning, whether through studying texts or through lived experience, is merely a worldly ritual to manifest the information. It’s kind of optional once you realize that knowledge (in gnosticism it is called “gnosis”) can be obtained through other means. One crucial step is of course eliminating fear.

When fear is truly dispelled, the ego disbands as well. What remains is knowledge that does not have an apparent source.

But we chose to be human, which “unfortunately” requires having at least a bit of ego. So the practical method of actually going out and acquiring knowledge is often the more effective way to go about doing things.