TLDR
We (or indeed others) don’t have all of the answers, so try and take care of yourself, other beings and the planet as altruistically as you can whilst enjoying your allotted time as much as possible.
Desmet Mattias
I’m still processing the @DesmetMattias interview with @TuckerCarlson.
You should watch the video too if you can.
Towards the end of the interview Mattias describes the conflict between rational thought and the mysteries of life and the universe (“the real”).
Rational thought is useful as it enables us to make some sense of the world around us and, indeed, a technocratic society, built on rational thought, has delivered major benefits to society over time (including mountain bikes and paraglidersπ).
Furthermore, it offers beguiling gifts such as the cure to cancers, the ability to miraculously lose weight or to improve longevity, to create artificial intelligences etc., etc.,
And renowned mathematicians and physicists, such as Neils Bohr and Max Planck have used rational thought to further reveal the mysteries of “the real”.
We don’t have all the answers
But they also recognised the limitations of rational thought.
And we haven’t yet been able to use rational thought to decipher our human experience or unify quantum mechanics with the common laws of physics.
Bohr said “when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry”
And Planck said.. “Yet in the whole of the universe there is no force that is either intelligent or eternal, and we must therefore assume that behind this force there is a conscious, intelligent Mind or Spirit. This is the very origin of all matter”.
Furthermore, Mattias says that “complex dynamical system theory” shows that the essence of life is irrational and will never be described by rational thought.
But it gets worse.
Because rational thought can also be used to build walls around ourselves, perhaps of some comfort to the confusion of the human experience and a result of a need to understand and control the reality that we find ourselves in, but a prison nevertheless.
Mattias eloquently sums up what he thinks below (53.14 in the video).
“The mystery of life transcends rational understanding and if you continue to build that wall around you, of logical reasoning, because logical reasoning is really building a wall around you, you connect the one logical idea to the other and in this way you isolate yourself from your environment, but as soon as you start to become humble enough, as soon as you start to become aware of the fact that your rational understanding is limited, it is as if literally all these logical building blocks slide away from each other a little bit, and as if the eternal music of life can go through the holes of the wall and can touch the strings of your body and your soul and it is at that moment that you can start to resonate with the mystery of life around you, with the eternal spirit of life, and it is exactly at that moment, and I experienced that in my own life, that you can start to tolerate the idea of death and dying and that’s the most elementary disease of our society, because we believe, we are so obsessed with rational understanding, we don’t know any more what to do with the idea of death, dying, suffering”
For me, because I’m a much simpler soul, Mattias has described my “meaning of life” journey which I tried to articulate here, where I have gone from agnostic to atheist to “my frame of reference is immaterial but I had a great time”.
