No way to know anything, so what's the point?

Q: There is no way to know anything in my opinion.

A: Well then you must be wrong about that... haha! Get it?

I have found that when people are challenged to rethink their opinions about the nature of reality, they often come up with this idea that "nothing can be known" and therefore they need not take the challenge into consideration. This happens to me all the time, but less now than it used to. 

In fact, to say that nothing can be known, aside from being an oxymoronic statement, means that there is no point in trying to liberate ourselves, since the path to freedom cannot be known. However, if we look at those who have attained the deathless, we see that most (all?) of them have used the mind to know the path out of mind (and thus out of suffering). 

Buddha said that all of the teachings must eventually be left, just as one who crosses onto shore leaves their raft on the beach, but if one leaves the raft of logic while still in the ocean, they are in for some trouble.

Here is a post regarding how to view the mind practically, in a middle-path kind of way.

And here's a useful snippet I snagged:

And as Kyle Dixon quoted,

"…The process of eradicating avidyā is conceived… not as a mere stopping of thought, but as the active realization of the opposite of what ignorance misconceives. Avidyā is not a mere absence of knowledge, but a specific misconception, and it must be removed by realization of its opposite. In this vein, Tsongkhapa says that one cannot get rid of the misconception of 'inherent existence' merely by stopping conceptuality any more than one can get rid of the idea that there is a demon in a darkened cave merely by trying not to think about it. Just as one must hold a lamp and see that there is no demon there, so the illumination of wisdom is needed to clear away the darkness of ignorance."

Napper, Elizabeth, 2003, p. 103

This post is also very useful on the three modes of knowing reality.

Q: We, you, I could wake up tomorrow and realize all of this is wrong or different.

A: Perhaps, but then I doubt that our realization would make any sense. In other words, dependent origination is logical. To say that it is wrong, means that logic is wrong, meaning that there is no order and thus no beings nor thoughts or anything like that. 

Think about it. You have experienced many different realities already. In which reality does logic seem to make sense? I find that during dreamtime, either with drugs or without, logic often no longer makes sense. Also, as children logic doesn't make much sense. It requires a lot of effort to make our minds function logically. 

So we could easily wake up tomorrow thinking that everything is blue cheese, for example. But if we did wake up with that understanding, wouldn't it mean that perhaps we are dreaming, or brain-damaged? If everything is blue cheese, that means that I can eat my arm, because my arm is blue cheese. Soon I'll be dead, because nothing makes sense anymore. Right?

In fact you and (almost) everyone else do have enough logic now to survive at least. Otherwise we would all be doing insane things like eating our arms, or stabbing each other with paintbrushes. So on a very fundamental, survival level, we trust our lives to logic all day, every day, even if it operates beneath our conscious awareness, even if we are just borrowing the logic that others share with us without critically examining it (i.e. "You go to work so you can make money so you can buy food so you can survive, because without food you will die."). 

...

Now, perhaps what you meant is that we may wake up with some new sense of logic that still works for practical purposes but shows a truer path to liberation. To me, if that were possible, it would have already happened for somebody in this world. Yet as far as I can see, there is only one system of thought regarding salvation from suffering which even claims to function based on logic and the examination of direct, ordinary experience (phenomenology), and that is the school of dependent origination (generally subsumed under Buddhism). Other soteriologies say that logic is unimportant or cannot show us the way out of suffering, and we have to merely take some grandiose religious claim on faith. Yet they can't explain why their faith is more accurate than other faiths. And furthermore, once their initial illogical, non-phenomenological assumptions are taken on, they go on to talk in logical terms about how one should practice the faith, as if logic then does have value after it doesn't. For example, "If you REALLY believe Christ is your savior, then why are you not worshipping him wholeheartedly?" See how that is mixing illogical, non-phenomenological assumption with logical analysis?

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Of course, as Buddha said, dependent origination is extremely deep and subtle, so my understanding of it is like a kindergartener's understanding of algebra. I actually did do some algebra in kindergarten, but it was pretty simple stuff. It wasn't that I was doing it wrongly, but just that if someone thought that was all algebra was, then they would be wrong about that. But it was the basic fundamentals of algebra needed to learn further levels of it.

This topic is continued on this post.