During the transition from childhood to adolescence, followed by adolescence to adulthood, many changes happen, often at the same time. I’m currently in the latter phase, and I’ve realized that humans, including myself, are so caught up in the hectics of these changes that happen in our daily lives. We are forced to move on from one thing to the next so quickly, without the chance to process them all. And what I’ve noticed is that whenever I stop moving, I start to think about things I don’t like to think about, like reality, death, and my purpose in life. No matter how hard I think about them, I just can’t arrive at the ultimate answer, and that doesn’t satisfy me. But despite this, I’ve formed my own beliefs regarding these over the course of years. Although I know that my beliefs are probably not the truth, they provide consolations to my scattered thoughts.
According to Plato, two realms exist. The world of forms, which has the primary existence, and the world of material, which has the secondary existence. Then there exists a Demiurge who constructs the world of material such that everything in it are replicas of things in the world of forms, making the material world dependent on the world of forms. But they’re not perfect replicas because of limitations of materials available to the Demiurge.
However, Aristotle disagrees with Plato regarding the dependency of the material world to the world of forms. Every material thing exists independently, and they are what constitute the real world. The property of an object belongs to the object, and an object is perfect as it is. It’s not the imperfect replica of the world of forms.
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I resonate better with Plato. I too feel like there’s more to reality than what my senses can perceive. After all, what I ‘sense’ is just the result of a series of chemical processes occurring inside my physical human body. When I ‘see’ an object, I don’t see them as they are. What I ‘see’ is just an image conjured up in my brain, as the result of light energy being processed to sensory signals. Humans are going through the same reality, but if all there is to reality is only what we can sense, why do I and colorblind people see differently?
I’ve always embraced the concept of reincarnation, which is a direct influence from my Buddhism-rooted family. The idea that we, human beings, will die and be reborn over and over again, each time with different bodies until we reach the end goal, Nirvana, intrigues me. Hence my personal beliefs align with Plato’s proposition that we are indeed souls imprisoned in bodies.
Our soul never dies. It’s just manifested into a different physical body every time the physical body dies, and start a new cycle of life. My soul knows more than my physical body does. My human brain doesn’t have the capacity to process everything my soul knows. But deep down, I believe that I know. This is because when I’m in a tricky situation and I don’t know what to do, I just decide to follow my gut. And I realize that most of my best decisions to this day were the ones that I made without thinking, but just by following my intuitions.
Although I believe that the soul has the ability to interact with the world of forms as Plato said, I don’t believe that the soul knows everything yet. The soul can only remember what it has encountered and learned in its previous lives. So that means that even though the soul possesses a bewildering amount of knowledge, it’s still learning too. Having read Andy Weir’s The Egg, I believe that the soul will have to continue to go through the cycles of life until it reaches a certain point and become the demiurge itself.
The cycle of life will stop when the soul has reached the perfect balance. This can be illustrated by Tung Chung-Shu’s Yin and Yang theory. The theory states that heaven and earth have Yin and Yang, and so does man. The Yin and Yang of the earth, heaven, and man are always trying to balance each other. This is the balance that has to be attained by the soul for it to escape the cycle of life. The balance between darkness and lightness has to be achieved not only within the soul, but with heaven (the world of forms), and earth (the world of material) as well.
Thinking of nature in this way has given me solace during tough periods in my life. I consider everything that happened to me as a lesson for me – both my physical self and my soul, to learn. Things, good or bad, are exactly what they’re meant to be. It’s how I deal with it, how I heal from it, and the lesson I learned for it, that matter the most. It encourages me not to dwell on things so much, and help me survive through hardships.
At last, I’ve made peace with the fact that I will never know everything about reality, nature of human beings, and ultimately nature itself. They will always exist as they are, independently, regardless of what I and other people think what they really are. I’m aware that my beliefs and assumptions will always change as I learn new things, and I’ve got my whole life to learn. Quantum physics has been making notable signs of progress, and I’m excited for what’s to come.
But ultimately, I feel if there’s an answer to how the universe truly works, life wouldn’t be special. It would just be an appliance delivering its heavenly design. But since a lot of things don’t make sense, when I find something or someone that does make sense, that’s happiness right there.
