During a family gathering many years ago, when I was a young man, my uncle said something to me that struck me as rather noteworthy and possibly quite observant.
He jokingly called me a, “Coconut”.
To which I enquired the meaning, feeling rather confused.
“Ah!”, he said, “You are white on the inside with a hard brown exterior shell!”
Of course I instantly ‘knew’ what he meant by that. After all I had been sent to boarding school in England as a young Indian boy, aged 8 and stayed there till after finishing University, getting a job in London and finally being naturalized as a British Citizen. In the process, I had metaphorized from a freshly roasted coco bean into a semi-mature coconut.
However it has taken me perhaps nearly two decades since to truly understand what my uncle really meant that day. And though I do love a good tender coconut, I relish its sweet nectary waters and the soft pulpy white meat, second heaven really, I realized, that in some way there was deep insight in what my uncle said and a grand opportunity to use it for further creative psychological growth.
To explain this, we probably need some context. We are currently living in seriously challenging times. Mid way through 2020, there is a pandemic apparently raging and a massive earth shatteringly proportioned election in the USA on the horizon. Worldwide economies have been artificially closed, unemployment is globally greater than anything seen in a 100 years with no sign of abating and vast number of businesses, entire industries are on the brink of collapse. People are “protesting peacefully” by burning and pulling down every statue or building they can find. On top of that there is a cultural war, cancellation of any dissenting voices, talks of reparations, moral challenges to nationalities and the meaning of a nation itself. Gender roles, sex, the meaning of truth, medical interventions such vaccinations are all being questioned. There are new cold wars developing amongst great powers and spreading wild like a disorganized spiderweb, fake news is more bountiful than the pollen count during peak sakuran blooms of the Japanese Cherry Blossom and… am I missing anything? Ah… yes, the AI revolution is going head first towards a singularity, genetic engineering is getting scorchingly CRISPR, biotech is on the loose, transhumanly out of control, geoengineering is seriously being considered in an attempt to control nature itself and a whole host of other things of equal importance and too numerous to write down, let alone tackle in some meaningful or effective way are cocurrently going on.
The modern media has made us all attention whores or pimps and if you have come this far I really got to start delivering on some insight or you will be away back to your Facebook feed before we get to the next sentence. However my task is difficult for what I want to say is elusive, it is like having to convince a deep ocean fish about the reality water, air, about the sun and the stars. It is difficult because the waters surrounding have always been crystal clear, practically invisible, currents have been explained away as mysterious forces caused by invisible ‘fields’. Light is so diffuse that it is difficult to convince any fish that it comes from a spherical point source and without that, the concept of stars is so cognitively distant that any approach seems impossible.
You my friend are that fish. I was too. And moving from Fish to Philosopher is no easy task but let us commence, please spare me a little patience for the rewards are enormous.
The story continues with my cousin, son of the above-mentioned uncle most coincidentally, on another night in another year. It is evening, I am still young and fit, going to gym and enjoying the party scene. We are at his house for a soiree, wine has been poured and he is talking about philosophy. I dismiss him, saying that I could never understand this gobbledygook with its highfalutin words and pretentiousness. I am more interested in MTV and where to get the next drink. He responds, with a book in hand (Roger Scruton’s Short History of Modern Philosophy) and says,
“Give it a go, you might find it more logical and easier to comprehend than you think”.
I take the book home and the rest is history. I am entirely gob smacked. Years of in-depth philosophy leads to mathematics. I want to understand what numbers really are. I dive into set theory, category theory, homotopy type theory and more. The mathematics leads to physics and into the quantum mechanics. I want to understand what the universe itself is made of and how it began. I read college level texts, popular science, watch lectures on String Theory and wrestle with the mathematics. Always struggling with the math, something doesn’t make sense, or I am stupid. I assume the latter. Furthermore the studies lead me to investigate Evolutionary Theory and Darwin, to genetics, population sciences, history, anthropology etc.… I devour everything, my collection of books is getting into the thousands, my hours of YouTube videos off the charts. I convert from my younger years of innocence and wander into a form of hardcore atheistic materialism. Christopher Hitchens would have been proud; for he had a devout and loyal fan. No more “woo woo” for me, no need of gods or magic, no need of flying spaghetti monsters. I am part of the elite who understands the world, in fact, I start to look down at anyone who doesn’t have as much knowledge as me. I have understood the origins of the Universe, how it exploded, expanded and condensed. I laugh at my father and his parochial ways. I have understood how our particular circumstances on the 3rd rock, off a nondescript Sun in an ordinary galaxy, lead us a special self-replicating chemistry. I have fully grasped how blind natural selection in an environment caused by variation due to probabilistic genetic mutations that are inherited in organisms has ended up with all of us here now. In fact I have surpassed Darwin himself. We are just cosmic cum, accidental excretions.
Further more I have understood history, and how the rich have subdued the poor, I am liberal socially, solidly left of the aisle economically, a human rights promoting, Catastrophic Global Warming believing kind of hero.
Yet, I have some dirty secrets. Firstly, I am an absolute mess in every way. I am mentally and physically exhausted. Psychologically unstable, I keep having severe panic attacks. I am no longer fun. I am terrified the world is falling apart. In fact, I am Greta Thunberg, version 0.1 alpha, a soon to be discarded release. I don’t have the required pony tails and can’t muster scathing speeches.
I am also getting increasingly desperate, like a drowning man I splash around furiously, I expel vast amounts of energy only to get into deeper murkier waters. I have truly begun to feel there is no way out. I am in a vortex. The more I study, the more it looks like the world is coming to an end, the universe is going into the winter of a thermodynamically powered heat death. However, the hedonic treadmill no longer works, chemical euphorias are lackluster, I can’t sleep even with help of a little something and nothing else matters.
I have been reduced to a pathetic nihilist who is losing his mind.
But then some magic does happen due to the help of two octogenarians. I stay with one in London, the father of a dear friend and I get treated by another, a psychiatrist who brakes the spell of my self-inflicted hell in three short sessions. He compares me to Spinoza, someone who was punishingly excommunicated for what he believed, I understand immediately. Night turns to day and I am cured but there is a long treacherous way ahead.
Some years later, I watch Rupert Sheldrake’s and Graham Hancock’s “banned” Ted lectures. I encourage you to do too and follow the scents they lay. I start to read writers like Thomas Sowell, Michael Behe and many, many others. I cast my mind back to God and the Spiritual. I am like a fish that’s beginning to see water but unable to communicate my findings with anyone. I don’t have the language or the instruments to prove it.
I sit with Native Indians and Amazonian shamans (and their American students that introduced me) and experience a philosophy so deep that they make everyone from Aristotle to Vivekananda look insignificant, amateurs. In meditation, I become pure consciousness. This is direct experience, not book knowledge.
Yes, deep in the forests, half naked peoples with feathery head dresses have ancient sophisticated knowledge that makes us postmodern, jet setting, iPhone attached supermen look like Neanderthals.
But it goes further, I read Gödel’s Mistake by Ashish Dalela and immediately understand that Kurt Gödel was wrong, he had made a semantic error. A monumental mistake at the beating heart of our civilization. I start to absorb the works of C K Raju and the understand the entire edifice of mathematics and science is wrong.
Mathematical problems I always struggled with, like the continuum hypothesis, the axiom of choice in ZF set theory, tensor analysis, etc… I now understand are metaphysical nonsense. I couldn’t understand them because they cannot be understood, not without twisting the mind beyond comprehension. Our entire Physics is in question. Have you ever though how a magnet actually works or how we get action at a distance? No one knows and yet we pretend to.
Entire Histories had been revised by victors of Empires, we study and are taught fake History, in short, I realize my mind has been completely colonialized by untruth masking as truth and that is why I am breaking. The more I study the great the cognitive dissonance. Can you now understand the problems we face as a society right now?
How is it possible that we can send men to moon, develop quantum computers and advanced telecommunications if our foundations are wrong. I cannot describe it to you in one simple article, but I tell you it is possible. You have to have the courage to find out. In short, we can get the metaphysics blindingly wrong, while getting some impressive practical results.
I think there is no easy way out, our minds, and collectively the world, like the caterpillar is ripe to metamorphize into something truly splendid. To get there, you have to understand where you are now, get humble and awaken. You must search for the truth with sincere heart, or otherwise, we choose a darker path and have a Soviet style seizure.
To steer the world, we need more individuals to make the brave journey. When you open your eyes, you will find so many resources, like magic they will appear before you. There are countless people to help (and some vultures to take advantage too).
I may have been a young coconut. No shame in that. I loved my childhood and I love England. However, I have now understood, that we can be much more than a colonized mind, we can become a veritable fruit salad, or better yet, an entire banquet and attend as both dinner guest and feast.