The Project 3: The World We Cannot Know

Is that it? Can we go now. Important things to do, you know…. No. That’s not it. IT is worse, and worse, IT is inescapable, necessary, and to most people very very unwelcome. IT is the fact that our mental process, our vaunted thinking, our choosing and deciding and preferring and believing, is nothing more than surface evidence, on a surface that is on the inside and therefore only visible to the ‘person’ who is even further inside; surface evidence of the events, the processes, the things that cause it. All-we-are is part of the world, part of reality, if it is anything at all. And like that world, there is the face that it shows to us, and there is the reality behind that face, about which we know one thing: it is not the surface. It could be anything, although some things are more likely than others, and at least our mind, being one step at least further removed from reality, can be managed on one more, and one very useful, level, because we at least know the quite intimate details of some of the processes that go on in that place where the mind lives. But what we can not escape, although no doubt we’ll go on trying, is the fact that things in the world, things of the world, REAL things (shorthand!) do two things. Close to the surface, when they are busy being LARGE things, they do their job of being the effects of their causes, and we’ve been over that, in a limited and simplified way, and oh! yes, believe me, we’ll be going over it again. And beneath the surface, way down there where those little tiny things live and move and have their being, if ‘being’ is the right word for the naughty way they keep appearing and disappearing, being and then not-being and then, pop!, being again, but perhaps not the same ones each time … those things do what things of that kind do, and our brilliant theory, that causes cause the effects of which they are the causes, does its best to evaporate in front of our eyes.