Jed McKenna's Theory of Everything: The Enlightened Perspective

by Jed McKenna

By exiting the rabbit-hole, I did not discover who and what and where I really am, but who and what and where I’m really not. There’s no knowledge involved, so it’s not the kind of thing that can be forgotten.

The Evil Demon

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Agrippa’s Trilemma

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Philosophers may or may not agree with Plato’s definition of knowledge as justified true belief, but no belief is true and there is no justification for believing otherwise. Nothing can be known or discovered or figured out beyond I Am. No other knowledge than I-Am/Consciousness is possible. The God of Wildest Imaginings could not know more.

Any structure must have a foundation to hold it up, but when we look to see what’s holding up the structure of our reality, we find three logical impossibilities; Infinite Structure, Self-Supporting Structure, and Magic Structure.

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And those are the three horns of Agrippa’s Trilemma – infinite regression, circular reasoning, the axiomatic fallacy – which falsify the very possibility of objective knowledge. The trilemma part is that, unless you can completely ignore the question of being, like my dog does, you have to settle for one of the three, and then employ doublethink to forget the fact that everything you know is based on a lie.

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The Difference Between Us

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Moonlight Sonata

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If you think about it, you’ll agree that nothing could make less sense in the lucid dreamstate than doing what I do. If you became fully lucid in your dreams, would you want to spend your time telling dream characters that their reality isn’t real? There are only two reasons for doing something so pointedly pointless; either you’re programmed/destined/ordained to perform this function, or you’re only dreaming that you’re lucid; a strangely not uncommon phenomenon.

I didn’t really begin to understand it until ten years after Done, but I was a smaller part in a larger something, and that larger something, once seen and understood, brought context and meaning to all the smaller parts. The books were that larger something, and once I understood that, the rest made sense. Truth-realization did not make much sense in the story arc of me as a person – or of anyone, since it is impersonal/apersonal/transpersonal – but once the books made themselves known, my life made sense. As much as anything can, anyway.

I wouldn’t try to translate my understanding of things into words any more than I’d try to express the Moonlight Sonata in words.

Truth has nothing to recommend it except that it’s true. U-Rex has everything to recommend it except that it’s false.”

I’m a function, a part in a machine. I exist to perform one simple task, and I do my job. I play my role. I experience myself as a person, but I understand myself as a function. I resonate with my function, but I don’t resonate with my personhood at all.

Science: Our Blind Torchbearers

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Science is a structure and requires the support that only a false paradigm can provide.

Religion,

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is a defining aspect of life in any society. Even self-professed atheists reside within a religious ethos from which their rational minds cannot free them, which may be why so many feel the need to self-profess instead of self-shut up.

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Scientists put so much emphasis on reproducible results for experimental validation that they sometimes mistake non-reproducibility for non-validity. Reproducibility may validate, but irreproducibility does not invalidate. Nor is something disproven, as is frequently insinuated, just because it hasn’t been scientifically proven.

I enjoy science as much as the next guy who doesn’t care much about science, but here’s the thing; science isn’t representing our interests. Not mine and probably not yours. It could, but it isn’t.

One of the amusing things that comes with the C-Rex model is a reversal of respectability. Now all the fun, weird stuff moves from lunatic fringe to front-and-center, while science, philosophy and religion take up their rightful place on the blurry outskirts of human interest.

Religion: The Magic Turtle

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we don’t need to cite elements of quantum theory to bolster C-Rex so it can then invalidate quantum theory.

And that’s what they don’t know in the swamp. They don’t know that truth exists – that they don’t have to make it up.

Philosophy West

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The paradigm I call C-Rex might be known in Western philosophy as Monistic Idealism or Subjective Immaterialism or somesuch. If we had to give the C-Rex model a proper philosophical title, it might be Idealistic Antimaterialistic Monism; IAM.

Solipsism, the theory that only the self can be known to exist, is sometimes called the third rail of Western philosophy; if you touch it, your reputation and career die. This makes sense because solipsism is a philosophy killer.

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Philosophy dwells in the halflight of shadows and mystery, and ceases to exist in the full light of truth where everything is plain and simple, and where no mystery remains to be philosophized about.

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Why something instead of nothing? Why is there creation at all? It’s always valid to question the question. How do we know there is something? And what is this something we know there is? Of course, this just loops you back to consciousness and the inevitability of C-Rex. The unstated assumption in this question is that nothingness, or non-existence, is a primal state, or at least a possible one.

Consciousness Is. With time as a subset of consciousness instead of the other way around, there is no longer any question of alternatives to Is-ness. There is no before or after, beginning or end, then or now – there is only the infinite is.

Another common question is, why are we conscious at all? This is like asking why water is wet. Wetness is what water is. They’re inseparable. Consciousness is what I am; essence, not attribute. To ask why I am conscious is to assume a distinction between self and consciousness, to assume the possibility of one without the other, like assuming the possibility of dehydrated water.

Just as truth exists and untruth does not, consciousness is and other-than-consciousness is not. Being conscious is not a facet of some larger, independent me, it’s my very me-ness and there is no larger anything. It’s not that I am conscious, it’s that I am consciousness. I-Am/Consciousness.

It would be much more interesting to see Science vs Logic, where science would be pressed to state its assumptions and be revealed for the baseless belief system it really is, most akin to a fundamentalist cult. We’d never see that bout though, because it wouldn’t go past the weigh-in. Ponderous, lumbering Christianity is about all that science and atheism can handle.

Philosophy East

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The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi; the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is. Aldous Huxley

The real fool’s gold is found in the pockets of the drowned.

Brahman is without attributes and therefore precisely synonymous with any term we define as without attributes, such as truth or consciousness.

Brahman is Atman, Atman is Brahman. That’s the whole deal. Truth has no teaching, requires no guru, and is not a spiritual pursuit. That bears repeating: Truth is not a spiritual pursuit. A guru may be necessary to follow a teaching, but to make a journey we must cut everything away, gurus and teachings included. We can sit together, but we must travel alone. If you think you see more in Advaita, or any teaching, then look down and watch those vines wrapping around your ankles.

All forward motion depends on release, not gain. Only that knowledge which destroys knowledge facilitates progress.

Philosophical Zombies

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I might treat you like I believe you possess I-Am/Consciousness, but I have no idea. Here in the rabbit-hole, I’m just going along to get along. I have learned that if I don’t kick big rocks, I don’t suffer the ill-effects thereof. When in Rome, and all that. Assuming for the moment that you do possess I-Am/Consciousness, then I am to you as you are to me; a perception, the appearance of a person, a Philosophical Zombie.

For me, the main argument in favor of other people, other I-Am/Consciousnesses, is that infinite intelligence, which I allow myself to wink at, strongly suggests it. So, if I’m pretending that infinite intelligence is true, and since I’m speculating the apparent world anyway, and since it doesn’t really matter, I might as well pretend that other conscious entities exist. Outside the rabbit-hole, away from Maya, there is absolutely no you or me or anyone else, but in the rabbit-hole, life is a whole lot more comfortable if you relax and play along.

The Great Objection

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Not only is the C-Rex model irrefutably true, it’s infuriatingly irrefutably true. In response to Bishop Berkeley, Dr. Samuel Johnson refuted it thus: He kicked a rock and declared: “I refute it thus!” That’s what I think of as the Hissy Defense, like toppling a chessboard and declaring checkmate.

I said in one of the books that if professors of philosophy understood the cogito, they wouldn’t be professors of philosophy.

We don’t have to publish for peer review or worry about tenure and funding, all we have to do is go where honest inquiry leads.

Song of Childhood

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Theory & Practice

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In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. Yogi Berra

Consciousness is Truth and you are Consciousness.

Realizations aren’t the final destinations they’re often promoted as, they’re just another kind of belief, like a depiction of a place. If the place doesn’t really exist, then a depiction is the best version of it, but if the place does really exist, then a depiction is the worst version of it. We settle for a depiction on the assumption that the place doesn’t really exist, or that we can’t really get there, but if the place is true, then it does and we can. And truth, it does not go without saying, is true. It’s not a realization. It’s the one thing that is not a belief.