It was the famous philosopher René Descartes who announced to the world:
“I think, therefore I am.”
I am going to expose it now, because whoever utters these words is either a liar or a fool.
So you can make your own conclusion which one of those Descartes is. I think he’s a liar and deceiver, because I find it hard to believe anyone is that stupid.
But let’s look at it — I am going to dismantle his philosophy right before your eyes now.
What was he trying to do?
First of all, what is the purpose of saying this “I think, therefore I am.”?
What was he trying to do here?
Descartes tried to answer the question of how one as an individual can be sure of his (or her) own existence. The question he tried to tackle was:
“Do I really exist?”
And also more subtly he tried to answer:
“As what do I exist?”
But the conclusion “I think, therefore I am.” or “I think, therefore I must exist.” is plain wrong. Let’s examine this fallacy together. I am going to approach it from every possible angle so that there can be no room for doubt or argument in what I say.
“I think, therefore I exist.”
First we translate Descartes’ I am to mean I exist, because I believe that is the way he understood it.
However, there is already a fundamental error in this, which you actually have to make, because being aware of this error you could not utter such nonsense in the first place.
The error is:
Being and existing are two separate (often superimposed) states.
Please examine this in your own experience and see whether it is true:
In deep sleep you have no perceived existence, but that doesn’t mean you cease to be. Sometimes you awaken from sleep remarking on how extraordinarily good that state was.
My question is: Who or what enjoys deep sleep?
It is not that you wake up from sleep and have to study your bed sheets in order to know how you slept, isn’t it? No. You just know.
If someone tried to deny that you slept soundly, they could never convince you, because the subtle joy that goes on even during deep sleep is knowledge beyond form and thought — you know it as yourself.
Yet, you can’t remember deep sleep, because no existence in that state means no memory. Memory can only happen once you awaken from sleep into existence and your mental activities are present again.
This shows that being and existing are NOT synonymous.
Then what is existence?
Existence is a body.
In deep sleep experientially you have no body.
It doesn’t matter if somebody else could see your body, because that is not in your experience. As far as only you, the individual, are concerned that is not the truth.
There is no continuation in existence or of existence outside of your experience.
This is a fact that many, many people on earth have not yet come to fully grasp. We all think there is a life beyond my experience — and that is not true. That’s imagination.
So we have established two aspects of you:
Beingness, and existence.
Out of the two, the beingness is fundamentally more real, because it goes on even when existence is interrupted — such as in deep sleep or death.
The point of this is:
I am means to be and NOT to exist — that is a fundamental difference. If you would know the difference, you would not utter that nonsense, because in deep sleep there is no existence, no mind, no thought, yet you still are.
So the conclusion “I think, therefore I am.” is wrong.
Thinking does not give rise to being.
The knowledge of the joy in deep sleep is beyond thinking, and as such it is also beyond doubt. There can’t be any doubt, because you know it as yourself — all true knowledge is self-knowledge.
Another fundamental error of humanity is to equate thinking with knowing, which is part of the reason why people buy into Descartes’ nonsense.
That is plain stupid. Thinking is not knowing.
Thinking is only thinking and will never lead to knowing.
Knowing and thinking are again two superimposed aspects of you, like being and existing are. Knowing is always going on, but thinking is not.
To assert that thinking will ever lead to knowing is like saying, “If I keep walking long enough, one day I will run.”
No, buddy.
Walking will always just be walking and will never lead to running. There is only one way to run, and that is to run.
I know all the professors in the universities of course insist that thinking eventually leads to knowing, but they’re all fools, because that’s not true. Hence why they are professors — they are only professing to know, while never actually knowing anything.
But as human beings we can’t see that, and part of the reason is because Descartes has inflicted this fundamental ignorance into our collective psyche.
Let’s continue.
Putting Descartes right once and for all
I will finally put right what Descartes has got wrong, and hopefully he will turn in his grave.
The correct statement is:
“I think, therefore I think I am.”
This is real logic.
Thinking is always just thinking and will never constitute knowing — which was Descartes main attempt in the first place: “I want to know I am.”, which he thought was the same as “I want to know I exist.”
But you must be already to even ask the question, isn’t it?
Now as what do we really exist then? And what are we?
What we are must be also that, which is still here when we sleep — otherwise there would be an interruption in your being, and that can’t be, because who or what would notice that interruption?
So it can’t be our bodies, it can’t be our mind, our ideas, our memory, or any of that stuff, because that all disappears every night.
What we are is consciousness.
Consciousness is knowledge beyond form, which also means it is knowledge beyond the mind and thinking — like the joy you know when you sleep.
Consciousness arises intuitively as the sense I am.
I am and consciousness are actually synonymous. So that answers the question, which Descartes could never answer for himself.
But how do you know this is true?
You must see it in your own experience — that is the only way.
And the only way to do that is to become stiller and stiller. When you stop thinking, knowing still is — such as when you stop existing, being still is. Knowing is always there, because what you are is consciousness. You must find this out eventually.
When you stop holding your mind’s hand all the time, you are simply left with knowledge that is beyond any doubt, because doubt is merely in the mind.
Doubt and thought are actually the same thing.
All thought is doubt.
One final remark
Someone out there is going to look at “I think, therefore I am” in the mathematical, “logical” sense and claim that it is true.
This chapter is dedicated to them, because again it is wrong.
You will say:
“How can it be wrong? If I think I clearly exist already, and since existing is contained within the greater experience of being I deduce that I really am as soon as I think.”
But no.
‘I’ does not equal ‘I’.
There are two I’s in the statement “I think, therefore I am” and they mean two different things (which Descartes knew nothing about).
The I that thinks is not the I that is:
The I that thinks, the ‘I think’, is an idea in your mind — a thought.
The I that is, the ‘I am’, is what you are — consciousness.
A thought will never be consciousness or even conscious in its own right.
This is how Descartes deceived himself and us, even though it is so obvious once you get some clarity into your life.
Whether Descartes really tried to deceive us or not, I don’t know. But I think it’s an interesting viewpoint to consider, because for all we know it might be possible.
I’m thinking maybe he was paid to make that statement.
Or maybe he simply wasn’t intelligent enough to see the truth of it.
Either way he’s either a liar or a fool.
In any case you should never utter that ignorance “I think, therefore I am.” again.
If you think you are going to refute now any of what I have said, please, go ahead and try.
There is only one rule: You must not use your imagination.
If you are honest, you will see it is impossible to argue with any of what I have said so far, but the ignorant, human part in you is probably going to try, because it takes a long time to get rid of one’s own ignorance.
I know, because I’ve done it.
Thank you for reading.
I want to give you a final short chapter remarking on how Descartes might be the most evil man in history. It’s merely for entertainment, but there is some truth in it.
The most evil man in history
For many of you what I have said may be new and revealing.
But for me it is the most obvious thing. I am baffled by how humanity fails to recognize the reality of this everyday.
And so I find it hard to believe that Descartes didn’t realize this also, after all he’s a great thought leader, right?
The suspicion that now arises is that he uttered those words intentionally to deceive mankind and make them subject to enslavement. Because:
Once you believe “I think, therefore I am” it is possible to make you believe literally anything.
If this is true, then certainly Descartes has to be considered the most evil man in human history. It is this sentiment that enabled Hitler and anybody else you would think bad — Descartes started it all by turning away from reality into imagination, where you can justify anything at all.
Also this is where the whole “enlightenment” thing (the 18th century thing) started where we could use our reasoning — the thing between our ears — to work it all out and turn away from religion, which had enslaved us also.
Well, there are more cruelty and world wars than have ever happened before: great enlightenment.
To state that it is thinking, which justifies your existence is actually a satanic statement.
By this I mean it is a turn away from God.
Thinking is man-made. It is an act to try to overthrow God’s rule, but humanity in its ignorant state does not know what God is.
God is the reality.
There is no thought in God’s creation, because all thought is doubt and His creation is perfect and cannot be improved upon — everything that could ever be was already conceived as God’s original creation.
But Man wanted to build a world for himself.
99.999% of humanity is now so far removed from reality that you are not yet ready to hear this, so I’m not going down this road. Nobody really appreciates the word God anymore since the Christians have messed it all up.
I don’t believe in God by the way, because it makes no sense to believe in reality. Why would you need to believe in it? That is for fools.
“I think, therefore I am.” is what I call the original derivation. It marks the beginning of intentionally turning away from what God has made in an attempt to build your own world based on “logical” thought.
It is not logical, however — I only use that word for humanity, because humanity does not know the difference between logical and rational. All logic is of God. It comes from logos — the original word that was with God.
So Man built a world based on rational thought, and that’s how Western society started and got into full swing. The whole world went Western by now, of course.
The only thing is: there is no love in rationality
— and that’s what the world we have built looks like today. Well,
we built it, now we got to live in it. That’s justice, isn’t it?
Thank you for reading. If you are interested in the nature of the human mind, read this article by me.
Please share, ‘follow’, hit the *clap* button below, and I see you next time. Thank you. inner-reality.com
