Searching

I have a folder of “philosophy” notes going back more than 40 years and I started re-reading it yesterday. I was actually surprised to see how long I have been thinking about the philosophical issues and the influences I have had. The whole mind, body, spirit thing has been occupying me for as long as I have been on the journey and I was reading about religions and philosophies looking for (what I now know to be) Cartesian dualism for a large proportion of that time - but even when I managed to find what I thought I was looking for, I couldn´t make it fit with what I felt to be true. After all that time and reading, I eventually come to what is the ancient Hindu thinking on Advaita Vedanta - the philosophy that basically says all that exists is consciousness, of which we are a part, but that everything else is a product of that consciousness.

All that time where I tried to work out how to reconcile "matter" and "spirit" (basically dualism), but could never quite find an answer with which I was happy, but now I am. I haven´t become a Hindu, but I now understand my personal philosophy and am happy to use their term for it.

It comes as a bit of a blow to find out the answer has been around for about 2500 years though. I was just not aware.