Well, one of our first jobs was for a German or Austrian contractor who took advantage of us right across the board. We built a stair set from the street down along the side of the garage to the main house. We had it up but only loosely tacked together before setting bolts. Someone came along and tried to walk down the stairs to the house. The stairs collapsed, the old man caught wind of it and fired us. That whole day we"d worked without having eaten anything. All we had was a coffee maker and a half pound of coffee...but he paid us our pittance and we went an ate about a dozen hamburgers.
So, I guess it is The Project that commands. Though with Lorne (the young carpenter) it was my personality that 'commanded'. Back down in the States, where he should have been successful and prosperous, he got back into drug use and pandering! I've often wondered what became of him.
There is a great attraction, and a certain amount of sense, in conceiving of ideas independently of the person concocting them. But I suggest that it is an error to do so. Since you have expressed interest in 'Ultimate Reality', and unless you were to stay strictly within a materialistic scientific approach with its mathematical langauge for describing it, to wade into any level of 'answer' to your question will involve you, quite directly, in religious systems of thought; cosmological systems for understanding just what is this 'reality', and the ethical systems that derive from those conceptions. You will be, with all that, not in a realm (of thought) comparable with abstract mathematics, but with social systems, long human histories, philosophies that derive from specific places and natural conditions, and systems of organizing thought and perception that are very often reactions to previous ones! So there is an element of struggle, even of battle! The old Chinese Zen folks were, by and large, in a tooth and nail struggle against their context, the system they were brought up in. Buddhism is said to be a reaction against an overwhelmingly vast and confusing conceptual system that entered into decadence, and in this sense (though it is intimately related, indeed built upon, what came before it), it is in a struggle against 'it'.
I suggest that when we 'answer' these questions, we do so as persons, within certain contexts, having the base in a certain language, in a specific time, with specific goals and aspirations that are hard-wired into us. The first question, then, for the formulator of such a Grand Question is (I suggest): Who Are You? What has made you what you are? There is a great deal to this question, a great deal that can be said about that process (of knowing oneself).
No man who speaks can speak from outside of his context, his formation, his idea-structure, his time-frame, as well as his physical body with its relationship to all that surrounds him. It is very attractive to certain minds (minds conditioned in certain ways I might add) to imagine it possible to either see or describe 'Reality' from outside the perceiving structure, that is to say our own self. There is a great attraction to attempting to see, or of believing, that there can be such a thing as an Absolute Reality, some sort of catechistic list, like a Credo, that once we see and describe 'it' in that way, that we have apprehended it, hence Life, hence ourself, hence meaning, hence present and future (and everything in between). You can ('one can') throw up vast nets of ideas, tome upon tome, cosmology upon cosmology, metaphysic upon metaphysic, but at a certain point (though we have to use idea-structures and can't really get away from them) they all either vanish into thin air...or turn to dust in our hands. (I mean this in the sense that all our idea-structures are like relics, or images reflected in mirrors, or old ruins lost in time).
Anyway, just for the record and so you know that I understand you: My whole presence here and raison d'etre is more than anything about 'who'. I take very strong stances against the Absolutist formulations that drive many thinkers here, and very specifically with the persons who have formulated the ideas that got this forum off the ground (the Founders as they are called). And while I agree that ideas and ethics and 'models' of reality can and should be discussed, I suggest quite strongly to beware of those who tell you (and who themselves believe) that they have access to some sort of Absolute Truth and can provide it to you, or give you a little recipe book or a Life Guide to getting it.
It is much more about the Questions. A good
question is infinitely more valuable than...a half-baked answer.
Gary wrote: "Going to other people doesn't help much, it seems most of us has the same problem. Which is why I am here."
There is a certain irony in this, I note. I will use it to support my previous statements: there is no one here who is not such a person as you describe, with all the problems and contradictions you seem to have noted. But, even if one remained within books (scripture, story, cosmology, myth) you would still in fact be very much with 'persons'. Perhaps if one went into the forest like an old Taoist forest-dweller and stared quietly at the swaying leaves, the rushing water, the flight of the raven, the spring flowers, maybe 'all that' would have something to teach? Ah but we are still social creatures, within a social language.
If you were to describe 'the problem' that we all have, how would you do it?
---The Alexians