The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Conclusion

There is no one above to blame for your life, and no one up there coming to fix it. That is not the bad news. It is the moment your life finally becomes your own.

In brief: In this conclusion I stand back with you, at the top of the last hill, and look down the whole road once. I gather what the book has tried to say about truth, about what is real, about the mind and about living with other people. Then I set down the one thing all the rest depends on: no one above is steering your life. I hand you the controls, and the accounts that come with them, and I let you go.

We have come a long way together, you and I, and this is where I have to let you go. Before I do, let me stand back with you and look at the whole shape of it once. I mean the way you would turn at the top of the last hill and look back down the road you have climbed.

Here is the oldest picture I know for what we have been doing. A handful of people stand in the dark, each with a hand on a different part of an elephant. The one holding the trunk is certain he has hold of a snake. The one with a leg is sure it is a pillar. The one with an ear swears it is a fan, and the one holding the tail will fight you over whether it is a rope. Not one of them is lying. Each is reporting, honestly, exactly what is under his hand. And not one of them has the animal.

That is us. That has always been us. We each get a hand on one part of what is real. We get it through the religion we were handed, the schooling we were given, and the small slice of the world we happened to be born into. Then we mistake the part for the whole, and then we go to war with the man holding the ear. The whole of this letter has been one attempt to get a few more hands onto a few more parts of the elephant. And I have tried to do it without pretending, at the end, that I am the one who has finally felt the whole animal. Nobody has. The work is to keep reaching, and to stop killing the people reaching from the other side.

Almost every place we go wrong, when I trace it back, comes from getting one thing backwards: how things cause one another. We picture cause and effect as a straight line running back and back to some first push. And then we cannot rest until we have set something, someone, at the start of it to do the pushing. But the line was never straight. It bends back into a loop, with the end quietly feeding the beginning. There is no first cause waiting at the back of it, and no empty space where a maker has to stand. Reality is not a thing that was switched on. It is a thing that keeps turning itself into something else, endlessly, with no beginning behind it and no end in front of it. And it holds itself in order as it goes. Once you stop needing a first push, most of the old confusions quietly fall over.

The cure for those confusions is not a better story. It is knowledge: the plain, slow, checkable kind. Enough of it, honestly come by, and you can walk yourself out from under every capricious authority that has been making your decisions for you. By capricious I mean the kind that changes its rules on a whim and answers to no one. With enough knowledge you can stop pouring your one life and your one store of energy into feeding their demands. And there is one thing the clever people have made sound harder than it is. There is no one road to the truth, and it does not belong to the people in the white coats. Different kinds of truth are checked in different ways, and the way shifts with the situation. Nearly all of it can be done by an ordinary person paying honest attention. You do not need a laboratory to tell a story from a fact. You need the willingness to look.

You also need to make your peace with never quite arriving. The truth behaves like tomorrow. It is always a day further on, and every time you think you have laid your hand on it, some better information shifts it again. That is not a defeat. It is the shape of an honest mind in a world that runs on likelihoods and not on certainties. Whatever you conclude is your best approximation for now, your closest honest guess so far. Hold it firmly enough to use, and loosely enough to drop the day the world hands you something truer.

Underneath the thousand different things there is one thing. The same small handful of unchanging rules, working on a single kind of energy, throws up every shape there is: the star and the stone, the sparrow, the hand turning this page. They are not separate substances. They are one substance wearing a thousand names. Most people never feel this, because they are looking at the names and not at the thing underneath. And the not-feeling is expensive. It is most of what lets a person treat another person, or an animal, or a forest, as a stranger to be used.

Feel it once, all the way down: feel that you and the thing across from you are the same old energy in two different costumes. Do that, and something opens in you that no argument could open. You begin to love the whole of it. That is the quiet end of all the metaphysics in this book. By metaphysics I mean the second part of the book, about what is really there underneath the names. It was never knowledge for its own sake. It was knowledge in the service of a wider circle.

Which brings me to the thing this book was named for. It is the thing I have to set down now, at the end, because the whole of the rest rests on it.

The rules that run the world are not awake. They do not know they are working. They want nothing, intend nothing, and have never once noticed you. Between them they have built a world that is not perfect and was never meant to be, because there was no one to mean anything by it. This is hard to hear at first, and then, slowly, it becomes the most freeing sentence there is. There is no one above to blame for what has gone wrong in your life. There is also no one above to petition to put it right, no one to plead with or bargain with. The destiny you kept hoping was being steered for you from somewhere overhead was never being steered by anyone at all. It was yours.

I told you, at the very start, that when God signs out the controls do not vanish. They come home. Here, at the end of the letter, is where he actually signs out. Not with a fight, not with thunder. Only the quiet closing of a door that was never holding anyone up. And the strange light that comes into a room when you finally stop waiting for a voice that was never going to answer. The control room you spent your life imagining was somewhere above you turns out to have been inside you the whole time. Your own hand was resting on the panel. That is not a loss. I know it feels like a loss for a while. It is the opposite. It is the first morning of a life that is finally your own.

Now hear the other half of that, because it is the half people drop on the floor. No one watching does not mean nothing matters. It is not a permit to do as you please and let the wreckage fall where it falls. It is the reverse. With no one keeping the accounts above, the accounts are kept down here, by the plain machinery of cause and effect. And they are kept in your name. Every thought, every word, every act goes out into the world and finds its way back to you in time. That is your karma, the only judge there ever was. Every moment is you meeting the world and laying down the causes whose effects will be your tomorrow. No one is writing your future for you. You are writing it, all day, whether you bother to watch your own hand or not.

And yet I have spent a whole book owning up to how little of us is free to write at all. The mind you were handed has been pushed around since before you could speak. It has been pushed by what you were born with, by what was poured into you, by the long weight of all you have already done. So the freedom I keep promising is a particular and a modest thing. It is the slow work of loosening those grips, one at a time, until the will is finally yours to aim. Knowledge is what does the loosening. And a will set free that way does not run wild. It turns, almost on its own, towards doing its share and harming nothing. It turns towards carrying the whole human project a little further, without trampling the rest of the living world on the way out.

The nearer your inside comes to how things actually are, the steadier you grow. The further from it you drift, the more you suffer. And the suffering is not a punishment. It is the world's blunt way of turning you back towards balance, and the turning, every single time, leaves you a little wiser than it found you.

Most people believe a low ache shot through with the odd bright patch is simply what a life is. It is not. Joy is not a thing that happens to you when the conditions happen to be kind. It is a state you can reach on purpose, and hold, and deepen. But you can only do it once you have woken up out of the long sleepwalk most of us spend our days inside.

I have told you this already, and it is worth one last telling. When life leans on you hard, it is usually telling you that you are walking the wrong way. It is not like the voice in the navigation app, which only ever tells you where to turn. Life answers both ways. It leans on you when you stray, and it rewards you when you are going the right way. And the leaning is the more honest teacher of the two. Take the lesson, change direction, and the joy comes in behind the change. You are enrolled in that school for as long as you are alive. There is no graduating. There is only a new lesson, most days, if you are awake enough to take it.

What is true for one person is true for a whole people. A culture worth living inside is both clear-eyed and warm. It is scientific enough to keep checking what it believes, and meaningful enough to make the ordinary days worth getting out of bed for. It should be crowded with different ways of living: different foods and tongues and festivals and arts. All of them should be quietly competing for the affection of the people in it, and the ones that actually turn out a better human being are the ones that should win. Do not let the differences melt down into one flat sameness. The point is a culture that stays varied and alive.

People will tell you the variety is a weakness, that difference is a danger. They have it exactly backwards. The variety is the strength. It is the reason the species did not all go under together when the conditions turned hard. And it is the reason a culture can keep adapting to a world that never once holds still. What holds within a single culture holds between whole peoples too. The arrangements in which every side comes away with something are the ones that last. The ones where someone wins by making someone else lose come apart in the end, and they bury the winners in the rubble.

So keep your culture curious. Let it revise what it knows the moment better knowledge arrives. From every tradition, your own among them, keep the parts that make the people in it kinder and wiser, and put the rest down without apology. A culture that refuses to change cannot outlast a world that will not stop changing. A culture that keeps learning is the one that lasts.

Here is a thing to carry out of all of it. Life is not, in itself, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. It is none of those until a mind decides what to make of it. The same day is a gift to one person and a sentence to another, the kind a judge hands down, and the difference is not in the day. So take that decision back into your own hands, the way you have taken back everything else in this letter. Decide to be well. Do not hand the power over your own happiness to other people, or to your circumstances. They will spend it carelessly if you let them hold it. And carry your own karma: all of it, the debts and the credits both. It is yours, and it was always going to be.

We begin, every one of us, with the self drawn tight around the body: grabbing, guarding, doing whatever looks like our own advantage, with a reason or without one. That is the setting we shipped with, like the factory setting on a new phone, and there is no shame in having been issued it. The whole of the growing-up I have been describing is the slow letting-out of that boundary. It goes on until the self has widened so far that it shuts no one out, and there is nothing left over to fight. A person who arrives there does not have to try to be good. There is no longer anyone outside to be bad to. Their self has gone clear, and they live in plain agreement with what is true. That is the far end of the circle I asked you, all through this letter, to keep widening. Almost none of us reach it. It is still the direction that counts as up.

If there was ever only one war worth fighting, it was never the one across the border. It was the one I pointed at near the very beginning: the small daily fight inside a single person between the better thing and the worse. It is the one where the hero and the villain both turn out to be you. You win it the same way every time: by feeding the right side. So let me leave you with the five things I would most want you to feed. They are the whole of this long letter, folded down small enough to carry in a pocket.

Go after the truth, always. Build the better part of yourself, a little, every day. Make peace wherever it can be made. Love all of it, without conditions and without waiting to be loved back first. And harm nothing: not other people, not the other creatures, not yourself. Five plain things. Keep them, and most of the rest takes care of itself.

Let me say, one last time, what this book is and is not, or I will have failed you at the very end. It is not a path. It is not a set of instructions to be followed to the letter. I do not know your life. I cannot. What I have given you is the direction of the search, and one worked example of a single man doing it. It is no more than that, and no less. Take it as a template. Lay it over your own life, keep what fits, and build the rest yourself out of your own experience, the way you were always going to have to in the end. Use your pain. It is the best material you will ever be given. And do not, whatever else you do, hand the work back to me, or to anyone. The work is yours. It was yours all along.

That is the whole of it. The door is open, the controls are in your hands, and the road in front of you is no one's but your own. Good luck on your journey.

Words to Keep

• the elephant in the dark: the old picture of people each holding one part of what is real and taking that part for the whole.

• the loop of cause and effect: cause and effect bent back into a circle, the end feeding the beginning, so no first push and no maker are needed.

• knowledge: the plain, slow, checkable kind of knowing that lets you walk out from under authorities who decide for you.

• best approximation: whatever you conclude for now, held firmly enough to use and loosely enough to drop when something truer arrives.

• one substance, a thousand names: the single kind of energy, shaped by a few unchanging rules, that the star, the stone and you are all made of.

• when God signs out: the moment you stop waiting for a voice above, and the controls of your life come home to your own hands.

• karma: the accounts of cause and effect, kept down here in your name, as every thought, word and act finds its way back to you.

• freedom: the slow, modest work of loosening the grips on your will, one at a time, until it is finally yours to aim.

• joy: not luck from kind conditions but a state you can reach on purpose, hold and deepen, once you wake from the sleepwalk.

• the widening circle: the slow letting-out of the self from around the body, until it shuts no one out and has nothing left to fight.

• the five things: go after the truth, build the better part of yourself, make peace, love all of it, and harm nothing.

• template: what this book is meant to be, a direction and one worked example to lay over your own life, not a path to follow.

Sources and Further Reading

• This conclusion gathers up the whole book. It comes from my own observation and practice, and from the chapters before it, not from any one book.

• The parable of the blind men and the elephant, an old Indian story told by Buddhist, Jain and Hindu teachers. It is the picture I open this conclusion with.

• The Udāna, a book of the Buddhist Pali Canon. It holds one of the earliest written tellings of the elephant story, with the Buddha telling it.

• Rumi, Masnavi. His telling, "The Elephant in the Dark", puts the people in a dark room feeling the animal, much as I do here.

• The Indian idea of karma, shared in different forms by Hindu, Buddhist and Jain thought. I use it in this book's own plain sense: cause and effect, kept in your name.