In 2005, writer David Foster Wallace began a commencement address at Kenyon College with a tiny story about fish. [jamesclear.com], [en.wikipedia.org]
Two young fish are swimming along when they encounter an older fish coming toward them. The older fish greets them and asks how the water is. The youngsters continue on their way until one finally turns to the other, utterly puzzled.
Water? What's water?
Wallace's point was wonderfully simple: some realities are so pervasive, so continuously present, that precisely for that reason we have difficulty seeing them. [jamesclear.com], [en.wikipedia.org]
I have been thinking about those fish.
Because I am beginning to wonder whether one of the most serious problems facing humanity is not simply that we believe things that aren't true.
It is that we don't recognize many of our beliefs as beliefs at all.
We are swimming in them.
And perhaps our task should begin not by arguing about the fish.
Perhaps we should begin by learning to see the water.
We See With It
Think about the strange predicament in which we find ourselves.
We can examine a chair.
We can examine a rock.
We can examine another person's religion or politics and identify all sorts of assumptions underlying them.
But our own deepest assumptions are considerably harder to examine because we don't merely look at them. We look through them.
They are the lenses through which the world becomes intelligible to us.
And you cannot see a lens simply by looking harder through it.
I found myself thinking recently about "magical thinking" as one of humanity's great problems. By magical thinking, I don't mean merely believing in supernatural beings or miracles. I mean something much broader: our capacity to confuse the meanings we create with reality itself and eventually expect reality to conform to those meanings.
But I've come to think there is something even deeper beneath magical thinking.
Invisibility.
The meanings through which we understand the world can become so familiar that we cease recognizing them as meanings.
They simply become the way things are.
And that may be where some very dangerous things begin.
The Things Everybody Knows
Every society has things that "everybody knows."
Competition is simply part of life.
Nations need armies.
Economic growth is necessary.
Some people deserve to have vastly more than others.
Punishment is the natural response to wrongdoing.
Human beings stand apart from the rest of nature.
Our side is basically good.
Their side is basically bad.
There is no realistic alternative.
That's just the way the world works.
Perhaps some of these propositions are true. Perhaps some are partly true. Perhaps some are disastrously wrong.
That isn't my point.
My point is much simpler:
When did we examine them?
When did we consciously decide that these things describe reality rather than the particular human world into which we happened to be born?
Most of us didn't.
We inherited them.
And because everyone around us inherited many of the same assumptions, they ceased to look like assumptions.
They became reality.
That is what concerns me.
We Are Meaning-Making Animals
There is nothing wrong with creating meaning.
Human beings could hardly live without doing so.
We create languages, religions, governments, economies, marriages, universities, corporations, laws, rituals, currencies, calendars and nations.
These things organize our lives. Some of them enable astonishing levels of cooperation, beauty, knowledge and care.
Meaning-making is one of the magnificent things human beings do.
But there is a danger hidden inside this extraordinary capacity.
We can forget that we are doing it.
A meaning we have created can become so familiar that it stops looking created.
Our map becomes the territory.
Our interpretation becomes the world.
And eventually we no longer say:
"This is how we have chosen to organize things."
We say:
"This is how things are."
That is a profound change.
Because once a human construction has become invisible, changing it can begin to feel not merely difficult but impossible.
The Water Defends Itself
There is another problem.
Our invisible assumptions aren't merely ideas inside individual heads. They are shared.
And belonging matters enormously to us.
Questioning a deeply shared assumption can therefore carry a price.
Question your religion and you may threaten your religious community.
Question your nation and you may be called unpatriotic.
Question your economic system and you may be dismissed as unrealistic.
Question accepted ideas about punishment, success, work, masculinity, wealth, authority or war and you may discover surprisingly quickly where the permitted boundaries of thought lie.
This need not involve conspiracy.
Nobody has to be secretly controlling anything.
We accomplish much of it ourselves.
We reward agreement.
We become uncomfortable with questions that threaten our shared meanings.
And when someone asks a question that reaches too deeply, we sometimes stop considering the question and start diagnosing the questioner.
Naive.
Radical.
Unrealistic.
Troublemaker.
Heretic.
Unpatriotic.
Not a team player.
And suddenly something fascinating has happened.
We no longer have to answer the question.
The water has disappeared again.
This Is Not About "Those People"
There is an enormous trap here.
The moment we begin noticing invisible assumptions, we can imagine ourselves as the enlightened people who have escaped them.
Everyone else is swimming in ideological water.
We see clearly.
And there it is.
Another invisible meaning-system.
So let me make the Opthēan position as plain as I can:
We are the magical thinkers.
We are the ones swimming.
I am.
You are.
Religious people are.
Atheists are.
Conservatives are.
Liberals are.
Socialists are.
Capitalists are.
Scientists are.
Theologians are.
And Opthēans certainly are.
The question is not whether we have lenses through which we see reality.
We do.
The question is whether we can occasionally become aware of them.
Can we stop long enough to ask:
What am I taking for granted here?
And even harder:
What do WE take for granted because everyone around us takes it for granted too?
Making the Invisible Visible
I am beginning to think this may be one of the most important tasks before us.
Not proving that everyone else is wrong.
Not replacing one unquestionable worldview with another.
Not finding the final ideology that will explain everything.
Something both humbler and more radical:
Making the invisible visible.
Looking at ordinary things again.
Looking at our institutions.
Our religions.
Our economic assumptions.
Our political identities.
Our relationship with the Earth.
Our assumptions about violence.
Our ideas about success.
Our ideas about one another.
And asking:
Why does this seem obvious to us?
Did reality teach us this, or did our culture teach us this?
What evidence would cause us to reconsider it?
What happens to people who question it?
And perhaps the most unsettling question of all:
What if this isn't simply the way things are?
The Courage to Be Corrected
There is one more step.
Seeing the water isn't enough.
We need to become people capable of discovering that we are wrong.
That is harder than it sounds.
Being wrong can feel threatening because our beliefs aren't merely intellectual propositions. They become entangled with identity, community, dignity and belonging.
So perhaps learning to live faithfully within reality requires something more than critical thinking.
It requires grace.
We need communities in which discovering that we were mistaken is not humiliation.
We need relationships in which another person can say, "I think you're wrong," and our first response need not be defense.
Perhaps we might someday even learn to respond:
Show me.
That would be an extraordinary human achievement.
And it requires something central to Opthē:
agape-gratia.
If we are loved only when we are right, we will fight desperately to remain right.
If our belonging survives correction, we can afford to learn.
We Are Swimming Too
Opthē does not possess some place outside the human condition from which we can examine everyone else's illusions.
There is no dry land from which to conduct this investigation.
We are swimming too.
That means Opthē itself must remain open to the same examination.
Its language.
Its rituals.
Its assumptions.
Its understanding of meaning.
Its understanding of reality.
Everything.
If reality corrects us, we listen.
Because the purpose is not to be right.
The purpose is to become more fully engaged with what is real.
Real spirituality is not escape.
It is engagement.
And engagement means allowing reality to speak back.
What If This Is Water?
So perhaps we can begin very simply.
Look around today at something that seems utterly normal.
Something that "everybody knows."
Something about which people say:
"That's just how things are."
And instead of immediately accepting it or rejecting it, stop.
Look again.
Ask where it came from.
Ask what assumptions make it seem inevitable.
Ask who benefits from our accepting it as inevitable.
Ask what questions about it are considered unacceptable.
Ask what happens to the person who asks them anyway.
Ask what evidence could cause us to change our minds.
And then ask one small, dangerous question:
What if this is water?
We don't have to know the answer.
Indeed, perhaps believing that we already know the answer is part of the problem.
We only need the courage to notice.
To look again.
To listen.
To allow ourselves to become uncomfortable.
To allow one another to be wrong without exile or humiliation.
And above all, to remain willing to be corrected by the world we actually inhabit.
Perhaps that is where awakening begins.
We gather to awaken.
Not because we have escaped the water.
Not because we finally see reality exactly as it is.
Not because we possess some truth unavailable to everyone else.
We gather because we know something much simpler about ourselves:
We are already swimming.
And perhaps, together, we can learn to notice the water.