Our Eternal Quest

- Why ultimate wisdom can be an impossibility.


I wanted to come up with a simple depiction of what we actually do, when we try understand the world. Here is my best trial.

Goal: Understanding Reality. Reality being the structure that comprises everything. Once one understands this, s/he will no longer have any un-answered questions. Quite ambitious eh?? :)

The process is something like bettering our wisdom by gaining knowledge and checking if the wisdom that we gained is in accord with Reality. Coz if they are equal, it means we have understood Reality which is the goal.

But since we don't know what Reality is, the comparison to see if it is equal to our wisdom cannot be done. So, what we end up doing is approach this in an indirect way. Through understanding causes and effects of nature. Since they are inherent part of Reality, it is safe to assume that they should follow the laws of Reality (or nature) if there are any. So understanding how the causes and effects are affecting each other should be an indirect way of understanding Reality (not bad at all so far:)

So we set out to understand the relationship between causes and effects. But isn't our experience limited only to a very small part of all the causes and effects? (though the picture shows the experience covering a big area).

Not being able to understand the cause-effect relationship in totality should basically mean that we won't be able to understand Reality. Good! logically this seems to be the place where one would stop. One should easily realize that it is pointless to try. But there is more :)

When our effort (powered by our wisdom) gets introduced into the process, things get complicated. What ends up happening is that we get to see some results that suggest we are capable of controlling some effects by changing some causes (orange circles). Part of the orange circles fall outside our experience since there could be un-conscious effort changing some causes and some effects that we create, can end up affecting things that don't concern us.

Apparently, the introduction of our efforts and the partly controllable causes and effects does not bring us any closer to understanding Reality. But it sure does create an illusion that most of causes and effects are controllable (so predictable). Also, this illusion is magnified by our reluctance to widen our field of sight any further than our own experience. Just like how the picture shows it... our experience taking up most of the real estate :) which is far from how it is in reality.

So whenever we are unhappy, what we basically do is try to digest the dose of wisdom that is being served; which sounds something like 'there are things that we cannot control'. We add this to our wisdom bank and move on, starting the same process again (but in a little wiser way) and sooner or later, we hit the same truth again . .. and the cycle goes on.

Yeah it kinda looks like boxing against a rock wall... but.. . Isn't our experience circle (atleast as a species) getting bigger with time? So would it engulf everything eventually?.. .including Reality?

Is Reality finite?