What I now call “origination” is a concept I have wrestled with as long as I can remember. I have characterized it in many ways, but recently I have been able to concisely define it as my beliefs regarding the nature of my existence. It is the foundation for everything I believe, value, want, and do in my life.
I grew up without religious or spiritual instruction. For good reasons, my mother decided that her children would be raised independent of the church. I can see the outlines of origination in my early yearning to believe in something. I desperately wanted to know what my life was, so I could make sense of what I was supposed to do.
Without a religiously-oriented origination, a secular origination took root. Given that origination is the soil in which my values, desires, and actions grow, under the influence of secular convictions, I aspired to wealth, success, and social validation through achievement. I became narcissistic and materialistic, and viewed life as a consumer. Like Romans 1:25, I worshipped the creation, not the creator.
Origination is a set of convictions. They can be any shape, color and size. It is how I make sense of the world I awaken into every day, and determines what I value, want, and do. While I was deeply committed to secular origination by the time I left public school, I still knew that I was missing something. I felt that I had been rushed into decisions I had not had enough time to consider. And that is precisely what the secular education camps are designed to do; set my course for me.
Not long after high school I began to form a question: what do I want? Though I had already broadly decided that I wanted material and social success, and had designed a life to achieve it, somehow I knew that I wanted something else. Free of the indoctrination camps, I was free to begin exploring and articulating it.
I began to sense that the answer I sought was a matter of perspective. I suspected that there was some sort of mask bolted to my head which prevented me from seeing some truth. I believed that if I could just get my fingers underneath it, I could pry it away and see what I wanted.
I was right in believing that I had some sort of parasitic mask bolted to my head. My entire life up to that point was oriented toward consumption and aspiration. Yet I knew somehow that was not what I truly wanted. This is best illustrated in a story I remember hearing when I was a young teenager. In it, a hermit monk who lived simply and alone and died unknown was compared to a celebrity spiritualist who enjoyed world-wide renown and fame. The takeaway was that the hermit monk who wanted nothing was more spiritually advanced, despite his obscurity and seeming unimportance in the world.
My entire life was geared toward aspiration and achievement. Every day I wanted more possessions and validation and experiences. Yet when I thought about that hermit monk, content with his uncelebrated life spent sweeping his courtyard, I knew that I was on the wrong path. How could I give up all my desires? What did he know that I did not?
In my early 20s in the Himalayas I discovered a trick of my imagination. While I had learned and believed that there was a larger universe outside of my direct experience, I realized that proposition depended entirely on my agreeing to it. I could never directly validate anything outside of my direct experience; what would happen if I did not agree to this version of reality? Was that the mask?
I knew that I had found something fundamental and wrote extensively about, what I would learn later, was effectively “solipsism”. But no matter how much I contemplated it, I could not find a practical strategy for integrating this idea into my daily experience. I wanted something tangible I could act on; not more intellectual exercises. Unable to surmount this divide, I left my contemplative life and rejoined the world within four years.
It remained a conceptual curiosity until my late 30s, when I woke up one morning in a small Himalayan village in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand with a message to myself: the purpose of this life is to get back to where I came from. I had experienced a major professional disappointment over the past two years, and I had been carefully preparing my death checklist.
This message to myself pulled me back from the edge, reminding me of my earlier mission to understand my existence, not give up. I allowed my inner voice to lecture me, writing: “your goals are not to be rich and famous; your goal is to wake up. That is all you need to do. Carry on… but be mindful daily and it will work itself out”. And with that, I resumed where I had left off nearly 15 years earlier.
Only this time, approaching middle age and with the valuable professional experience of a system architect, I intended to go beyond intellectualism and actually implement my understandings in my life. With a new determination, I once again had purpose and resumed my search. But this time I proceeded systematically, deconstructing my existence one step at a time in the same way I built complex software systems.
I pulled out my notes from my 20s and honed in on the questions I could not answer. Back then, I had termed this divide between what I believed and what I could directly validate as “experientialism”. I had theorized two potential perspectives based on one’s belief of the “fixed position of the absolute”. By “absolute”, I meant the center of everything — or, as I would say now, the origin of existence.
My working theory was that by plotting my own perspective on this continuum, I could stand back and see what I believed in terms of what was possible. In doing so, I could slip that metaphorical finger under that mask attached to my face, and with some effort, loosen and eventually pry it off, exposing the answer I had always sought.
On one end of this spectrum was the standard perspective that I was a microscopic observer of a universe containing me. Every day I awakened into this infinitely-massive world that pre-existed me and would exist long after I was gone. I had labeled this extessentialism, and had decided that this was the mask.
On the other end of the spectrum, was the notion that existence was within myself. Rather than awakening into a wider world I was temporarily observing and insignificantly influencing, I was somehow creating this existence. I had called this intessentialism, and I suspected that this was the perspective that would give me leverage over the mask.
It was a messy, verbose definition, full of poorly-defined and overlapping terms. And despite hundreds of pages and hours of contemplative effort, I had not been able to overcome my own hardened beliefs. And so they remained words in documents, and ideas I would occasionally chew on in moments of concentration over the next two decades.
Looking back, I can see that I was trying to express what I now call origination. However, I was approaching from the wrong angle: I was seeking an answer without first knowing the question. Without the right question, the right answer cannot be found. I was lost, looking for the answer without knowing the question that had always confounded me.
What is this first question? I find it easiest to understand by imagining a very simple situation. Imagine one day that I wake up in a strange, cold room. I fall asleep and leave the room. But I keep waking up into this room. What is my first question?
Where am I?
This period between my awakening and my falling asleep is the strange room. No matter how familiar this room has become, it is and will always be the strange room I awakened into. No one here has ever told me where I am in any way that I can myself directly validate right now. Instead, they have told me stories that I am supposed to take on faith.
The counterpart to this question is my conviction that I can directly know the answer myself without relying on the words of other people trapped with me in the strange room. So not by reading a book, or asking experts. Or studying arcane theories for a decade. But right here, right now, I can know. None of the stories that I have been told about where I am allow me to know this answer right here, right now. They lead me down an endless path to more unanswered questions, trapped in a state of dependence and ignorance.
Since I never knew where I was, I could never fundamentally make sense of the activities I was supposed to participate in. This explains my entire childhood of constantly feeling unmoored; as if there was something unresolved. A memo or instruction I had lost. I had friends, socialized, and was engaged at school to a point, but early on I realized that something important happened when I was alone, free from any outside social or academic demands. I nurtured and protected my time alone, penned all manner of mundane and fantastical thoughts and dreams. I treasured “my notes”, as I called them. But it wasn’t my notes that were objectively important; it was my time alone searching for the question I was missing, and the answer I knew I could have.
Despite all of my searching, the demands of the strange room kept me busy and unable to focus throughout my first two decades here. I was hustled and coerced into various activities. I spent long hours in smaller rooms learning how to imagine people, places, and things I could never directly know or experience.
I was taught that my own direct experience was “subjective”; one of billions of other subjective experiences. I learned that my subjective experience was less real and important than an “objective” consensus decided by countless others. In this perspective, I could not know anything. For I was just one of billions of unimportant people. But with the right beliefs and actions, I could participate in the crafting of this objective consensus, become an expert, and influence the shape of this whole room.
I was taught that no matter how much I learned, I still knew nothing. And embracing this idea of my own supreme ignorance was a badge of honor. But the most limiting diversion of all, was the one that kept me from asking the right question in the first place. I was given many existential questions to choose from: why am I here? What is my purpose? What do I want to do? What makes me happy? What is life? Debate on these questions was encouraged.
But if I ever asked “where am I”, I was given an address — I was at a specific geographic location on a revolving orb, revolving around another orb, which was revolving around a cluster of orbs, which in turn were revolving around a large constellation of clusters of orbs. All of this inconceivably vast and old and totally unknowable. It was observed, hypothesized, and decided by people much smarter than me. “Where am I”, in other words, was a question that had already been answered, and would draw blank stares.
If I did not accept that answer, then I was lost, insane, or both. In other words, this was the one question I could not ask.
I bought this for 18 years. But once I left the rigid structure of high school and family life, it began to crumble. Despite declaring my intentions of achieving social and financial success to all who would listen, I knew something was amiss. I began to suspect that all these things that I said I wanted were not actually what I was looking for. That was the fracture that gave rise to the doubt that sent me careening off the prescribed path.
So, nearly four decades into this experience, I pushed all my answers aside, and finally asked the right question: where am I? And with that question, I resumed my journey. I had one criteria for the answer: I can directly and instantly validate and experience the answer to this question. I did not accept answers that I could not myself directly and instantly validate. If an answer took time, or led me to places I could not know or experience, I knew it was the wrong path. If I had to read books and study, or rely on someone else’s imagined experience, I knew that was the wrong path.
Origination is my decision about the origin of existence, and is both the question “where am I”, and its answer. Origination is the first question and the last answer. It starts with the simple question, “where am I?” My first decision is whether I can directly know and experience the answer to this question. I have always believed that I could know the answer, and was never satisfied with any answers that robbed me of the agency to know myself. It was clear to me that answers trapped in dusty books written by imaginary dead people, or entangled in complex in incomprehensible formulas, were not going to lead me where I wanted to go. The nature of the last answer is that it is instantly and directly knowable.
In this way, there are two categories of origination. The first category, which I previously had named “extessential”, is the conviction that the origin of existence is somewhere outside of what I consider “myself”, and I cannot necessarily know it. I now call this inessential origination.
The second category is the conviction that the origin of existence is within what I consider “myself”, and I can know the truth directly and instantly. I now call this essential origination.
Ever since I took an interest in the big questions of life, I have been trying to escape various forms of inessentialist origination. I stubbornly refused to accept the answers of the authorities around me. I knew there was an answer, and I knew that I could know it. That persistence and chronic dissatisfaction with answers I found was the hallmark of essential origination fighting to come to the surface. I never settled for answers that were incomplete, contradictory, or robbed me of my agency to know. Whether creation myths invested in imaginary historical figures, or secular theories invested in the narratives of experts, all effectively reduced me to indirect observation and faith.
Without being able to express the concept as clearly as I can now, the idea behind essential origination has been with me from the very beginning. I always knew there was a truth, and I knew that I could directly know it. That is why I rejected every truth I encountered, and never stopped contemplating it.
When I finally did begin to see the outlines of essential origination, everything came into focus. All the answers I had ever wanted became clear to me. I learned how to ask the right questions. I could see how preposterous and nonsensical were the questions I had once asked, and the answers I had once accepted.
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