Getting an Outside View

If you are human, your perspective probably starts with yourself.

How do I feel? What do I want? What is in my future? What makes me happy?

But what if… What if there were a bigger, grander perspective?

Are my feelings and my comfort the most important things? Or are there truths and virtues and causes beyond what originates within me?

Photo by Lucas Gallone on Unsplash

If it might be possible that there are things bigger and more important than what my feelings, intellect and desires crave…where might I turn to discover what these bigger things are?

Would I look inward to what I think? That doesn’t make sense: the whole exercise is about discovering what might be bigger than myself. Looking within myself is not a good way to discover things that are bigger than me.

To discover the important things that are bigger than myself requires that I look outside myself.

So where then might I look?

…Intermission. I’ll return in a few minutes. If you prefer to remain in orbit around yourself in your own little mini universe without considering anything bigger, continuing to read this story is probably a waste of time. Feel free to leave and get on with whatever narcissistic endeavors you desire for the day. No offense taken.

Where might I look for the big, important things in life?

Detailed answers to this question will take some time to flesh out and will need to carry over to future stories. But we can start here by looking at some general ideas.

1. You are not the only person in the world. The people around you might have some ideas. But the problem is…most of those people around you are probably inwardly focused on themselves too. Trading your own inward focus for someone else’s inward focus is not helpful.
2. The contemporary people as a group that are living now might have some shared collective ideas. But the problem is…most of the contemporary shared ideas are really shared ways to please self. Just because 2, or 2,000, or 2 billion people or more have some common idea about what is best for self does not mean that is a big, important thing than is bigger than self. Red or blue, conservative or liberal…in the current times these really are differing ideas about the best way to please self.
3. There were people that lived before the people that are living today. It is possible that many of these too were inwardly focused and primarily concerned about self. But while time may not heal all, time does have a way of washing away the unimportant. Kind of like cleaning out a house of a loved one after they pass away: you can’t keep everything, but you probably do try to keep a few things of significance. This leads to the principle that older things that have survived from the past until now are more likely to be big and important than the current trend-of-the-moment that enslaves inwardly focused contemporary individuals and groups.
4. There is a natural world around us. This world has laws: laws of physics, laws of biology, and so forth. The natural world not only demonstrates order but imposes order to a certain extent. The natural world is tangible and real in a way that a self’s inwardly focused ideas are not. The natural world is by definition much larger than any self, and to the extent that the natural world supports the life of everyone, it is more important than any self, if only because many “selves” depend up on it.
5. When considering the natural world and natural law we see order and intelligence. Order and intelligence cannot arise from randomness. Order and intelligence can arise only from intelligence. This leads to the principle that the ordered and intelligent natural world must have arisen from an intelligent source. The cause of the ordered and intelligent natural world must be bigger and more important than the result of that cause: the intelligent source must be bigger and more important than the natural world.

In the spirit of being succinct, there are only two places to look for important things: within yourself, or outside yourself. Looking inside yourself means you will never find anything bigger or more important than yourself. To find something bigger and more important than yourself you must look outside yourself.

If you want to get outside yourself and the chorus of self-focused voices of today you must look to the past and what has survived until today, and/or you must look to the natural world and/or the intelligent cause of that natural world.

So how about it?

Are you content with your own self-focused perspective? Or are you open to bigger more important things outside of yourself?