The Bottom Line
The Bottom Line
By Jed McKenna
Whadda ya know?
Seriously. With absolute certainty, what do you know? Put aside
all opinions, beliefs and theories for a moment and address this
one straight question: What do you know for sure? Or, as Thoreau
put it:
"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward
through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and
tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which
covers the globe... through church and state, through poetry and
philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks
in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no
mistake; and then begin..."
In other words, let's cut the crap and figure out what's real.
The cogito does exactly that, and it's very simple. The question
is: What do you know?
The answer is: I Am.
All other so-called facts are really non-facts and belong in the
category of consensual reality and relative truth, i.e., unreal
reality and untrue truth.
::: Cogito Ergo Sum
Cogito ergo sum is the equation that proves the fact. But first,
before we go on, let's ask what else we know. What else can be
said for certain?
Nothing. We don't know anything else. And that's the real point
of the cogito. The importance of I Am isn't that it's a fact,
but that it's the only fact.
I Am is the only thing anyone has ever known or will ever know.
Everything else, all religion and philosophy, is nothing more
than dream interpretation. There is no other fact than I Am. The
cogito is the seed of the thought that destroys the universe.
Beyond the cogito, nothing is known. Beyond the cogito, nothing
can be known. Except I Am, no one knows anything. No man or god
can claim to know more. No God or array of gods can exist or be
imagined that know more than this one thing: I Am.
We can't avoid letting this topic drift briefly into the
Christian realm. When Moses asked God His name, God answered, "I
am that I am." The name God gives for Himself is I Am.
Note that I Am is unconjugatable. It allows of no variation. God
doesn't say, "My name is I Am, but you can call me You Are, or
He Is." The cogito, the I Am equation, does not extend beyond
one's own subjective knowing. I can say I Am and know it as
truth, but I can't say you are, he is, she is, we are, they are,
it is, etc. I know I exist and nothing else. Understood thusly,
I Am, aka God, truly is the Alpha and the Omega; the entirety of
being, of knowledge, of you.
::: The Line Is Drawn
The cogito is the line between fantasy and reality. On one side
of the cogito is a universe of beliefs and ideas and theories.
To cross the line is to leave all that behind. No theory,
concept, belief, opinion or debate can have any possible basis
in reality once the ramifications of the cogito have fully
saturated the mind. No dialogue can take place across that line
because nothing that makes sense on either side makes sense on
the other.
We all think we know what the cogito means; this is an
invitation to challenge that assumption. If professors of
philosophy truly understood it, they wouldn't be professors of
philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead said that all philosophy is a
footnote to Plato, but all philosophy, Plato included, is
rendered obsolete and irrelevant by Descartes. Nothing but the
subjective I Am is true, so what's the point of prattling on?
The cogito isn't a mere thought or an idea, it is an ego-eating
virus that, properly incubated and nurtured, will eventually
devour all illusion. Once we know the cogito, we can begin
systematically unknowing everything we thought we knew, and
unraveling the self we aren't.
::: Life is but a Dream
There is no such thing as objective reality. Two cannot be
proven. Nothing can be shown to exist. Time and space, love and
hate, good and evil, cause and effect, are all just ideas.
Anyone who says they know anything is really saying they don't
know the only thing. The greatest religious and philosophical
thoughts and ideas in the history of man contain no more truth
than the bleating of sheep. The greatest books are no more
authoritative than the greatest luncheon meats.
No one knows anything.
::: Disprove it for Yourself
Anyone wishing to deny these statements about the meaning of the
cogito need merely prove that something, anything, is true. By
all means, give it a try, dash your head upon it, but it can't
be done. Cogito ergo sum, however, isn't the endpoint of
inquiry, it's the starting point; it's a tool that helps us see,
without intermediaries, exactly what is true and what isn't.
How great is that?
-Jed McKenna