truthloop

Disclaimer: I am not a lifelong student of philosophy. In fact, I'm very new to its study. I don't think the term "discipline" fits into the landscape of my philosophical knowledge at all.

That being said, I was surprised the other day to stumble over what I think is an interesting trend, and I made an observation: Humanity is in a loop.

Long before humanity grew exponentially in knowledge through many amazing technological steps (fire, tools, the wheel, steam and combustion engines, flight, supercomputing -- you know, the usual discoveries) faith was the foundation for life. Societies were built around religions, some so complex that many gods were believed to touch a person's life several times daily. Rituals honoring and placating the different deities permeated life. Rarely did people question faith in their gods. After Christianity overtook Rome with monotheism, gods were ousted in favor of God. Still, faith remained unquestioned.

Even in Descartes' day, faith in God remained (for the most part) unchallenged. When people were increasingly turning to reason from superstition to explain life's ups and downs, God remained, by and large, unquestioned. While some of his (unnamed) contemporaries said that God did not exist based upon our uncertain existence, Descartes refused to agree. In other words, God's existence would go unquestioned, but he would use reason to explain that God does, indeed, exist and is involved in daily life.

As we advanced along an intellectual and inventive timeline, our once unflappable faith began flinching. Today doubt is more common than faith, and logic dictates we start our exploration of reality outside of God. After all, if humanity can split the atom and travel to the moon and back, we no longer need to rely on religion to explain daily phenomena. Yet thinkers throughout generations -- from Plato until present-day philosophers -- have searched for truth beyond what we can see or do on our own.

The goal of our search has remained truth for as long as we could put two words together in an intelligible sentence. I noticed the other day that it seems, in our search for hidden truth, we've been digging around the perimeter of the same mountain. I say this because many of the ideas expressed by different generations, cultures, and disciplines -- be it philosophy or science -- are reworkings of the same ideas. The following is by no means an exhaustive collection of ideas, but a general chronology of thought that I've looked at and have found remarkably similar in content.

• Plato taught that reality lies beyond the sensory information we receive from our eyes, hands, ears, etc. Thus, he uncovered a spiritual realm -- a different dimension from that in which we live our daily lives.
• Hinduism teaches that there is the One that is greater than individual self, and that all life is interconnected within this Brahman, or the One. Hinduism goes on to explain that humanity's highest goal is enlightenment -- Moksha -- which is unity with Brahman, and freedom of consciousness from limitations of our physical reality.
• A Jewish prophet had a vision, recorded in the Old Testament, of God's relationship with the world as a "wheel within a wheel." God is in everything, and everything is in God. The Bible also teaches, "In Him we live, move, and have our being." In other words, God is everywhere always and at every point in time, all at the same time, rather than leading a sedentary life seated on a throne deciding who gets into Heaven, and who gets punished while on Earth. When one believes in God and the teachings of the Bible, it follows, since God made humanity in His image, humanity exists in the same way -- across dimensions, so to speak -- only we haven't escaped our limited physical senses in order to realize or experience this multifaceted existence.
• String Theory, while still not agreed on as an empirically-sound theory by physicists, describes a reality split into different dimensions from what we can physically sense or observe. (It's interesting to note that several contemporary Christian teachers are beginning to link the Bible's teachings about God to quantum physics.)

I find this a remarkable thread of commonality running through all of these thoughts, which were conceived of in different cultures, different times, different disciplines. If, in fact, thoughts are essentially reframed across generations and geography, could it be that the truth that has always been sought hasn't changed, and our need for this truth is, also, unchanged? That, in fact, the questions all thinkers of all cultures and generations have asked have already been answered?

Governments and authorities have orchestrated favorable evolutions of religions, philosophies, and even histories to serve their purposes. Despite these rewritings, people seem to come back to at least similar thoughts of a multifaceted reality, existence after our physical lives end, the nature of Deity, and other big concepts. Humanity's capacity for confusing the truth is pretty amazing -- but then, so is our diligence to continually uncover it.