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This is a brief follow-up to my post “Redirecting one’s own taxes as an effective altruism method.” Since I wrote that post:
In my fantasies, if I ever were to get that god-like glimpse at how everything actually is, with all that is currently hidden unveiled, it would be something like the feeling you have when you get a joke, or see a "magic eye" illustration, or understand an illusionist's trick, or learn to juggle: what was formerly perplexing and incoherent becomes in a snap simple and integrated, and there's a relieving feeling of "ah, but of course."
But it lately occurs to me that the things I have wrong about the world are probably things I've grasped at exactly because they are more simple and more integrated than the reality they hope to approximate. I think if I really were to get this god-like glimpse, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I probably couldn't fit it in with anything I think I know. It wouldn't mesh. It wouldn't be the missing piece of my puzzle, but would overturn the table the incomplete puzzle is on. I have a feeling I couldn't even be there, intact, in the way I am now: observing, puzzling over things, trying to shuffle and combine ideas. What makes me think I can bring my face along, face-to-face with the All?
And then today I read this: “We yearn for the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and pure, but in picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we then realize to be contingent particulars, just things among others here below. If we destroy these idols in order to reach something untainted and pure, what we really need, the thing itself, we render the Divine ineffable, and as such in peril of being judged non-existent. Then the sense of the Divine vanishes in the attempt to preserve it.” (Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals)
I like to phrase it as "the path to simplicity involves a lot of detours." Yes, Newtonian mechanics doesn't account for the orbit of Mercury but it turned out there was an even simpler, more parsimonious theory, general relativity, waiting for us.
How to best break out of this loop?
According to Seigen Ishin (Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin):
"Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters."
(D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, 1926, London; New York: Published for the Buddhist Society, London by Rider, p. 24.)
What loop? They are all various viewpoints on the nature of reality, not steps you have to go through in some order or anything. (1) is a more useful viewpoint than the rest, and you can adopt that one for 99%+ of everything you think about and only care about the rest as basically ideas to toy with rather than live by.
I don't know about you (assuming you even exist in any sense other than my perception of words on a screen), but to me a model that an external reality exists beyond what I can perceive is amazingly useful for essentially everything. Even if it might not be actually true, it explains my perceptions to a degree that seems incredible if it were not even partly true. Even most of the apparent exceptions in (2) are well explained by it once your physical model includes much of how perception works.
So while (4) holds, it's to such a powerful degree that (2) to (6) are essentially identical to (1).