Autolysis II

Autolysis is about proving that what you see, feel, hear, smell, taste, think, believe and experience, is really true or actually untrue. You do this through writing down, revising and rewriting that which you believe to be absolutely true and eventually remove everything from your thought-system that turns out to be untrue.

The Theory.

You will determine ruthlessly if everything around you is what it actually is and not just what you believe, think or want it to be or what your environment, your upbringing or your culture tells you it is.

For example:

You seem to know for sure that certain food tastes 'sweet' — but is that true? You think you know that something tastes 'sweet' because someone told you after you've tasted it for the first time, or just before you were going to taste it, that it is 'sweet'. From that moment on you call everything that tastes the same 'sweet', but in reality you don’t really know what 'sweet', is, you have only acquired and taken for granted the definition from someone else.

Where is this 'someone elses definition' based on? Perhaps on the definition his or her parents used, but where is his or her parents definition based on? What if that definition is not correct? Is there such a thing as absolute globally exepted perpetual sweetness which all definitions of sweetness are based on?

Unlike the assumption based on what someone else has told you, whose assumption is based on what someone else has told him, whose assumption is based on what another has told him — and so on, ad infinitum — you have no reason to believe that this taste is 'sweet'. There is no justification to connect 'this taste' and 'sweet' with each other and to believe that 'this taste' actually is 'sweet'. And therefore the knowledge 'this particular flavor is sweet' is untrue.

What Is True.

With Autolysis we start from the following rule:

Truth exists.
Untruth does not exist.

Something is true if it is true under all circumstances and above all it is identical for everyone and everything. That which is true cannot be 'this' now and 'that' later on, not 'so' to you and 'such' to me. By rigorously examining what is really true for everyone, what is the absolute truth that applies to everyone, you will come to the core of the reality in which you believe to be living.

A 'belief' is never true, an 'assumption' is never true, a 'conviction' is never true and an 'opinion' is never true. They are all colored by your thoughts and colored by the beliefs, assumptions, convictions and opinions of everyone around you and all who came before them.

The present is made up of beliefs, assumptions, convictions and opinions from the past, it is color on top of color on top of color — one assumption reinforces the next belief and emphasizes the following convictions and forms a distorted view — and at some point you are left with an ugly brown gunk of fake truth and nobody knows where the heck it ultimately originated.

You cannot rely on past results, you should start with a clean slate and rely on what you know and what you can prove, and for that you need to remove all the falsehoods, remove all the brown gunk. Autolysis is a good method to do this.

Something is not necessarily true because a majority thinks or decides it is true. Something is not necessarily true because it is written in a holy book, a spiritual classic or an encyclopedia. Something is not true because you think or feel that it is true. Something is true because it is undeniably true, because it has always been true and will always be true.

If something is true then it must be provable. Not by scientists, philosophers, priests, gurus or Frits Spoelstra, because then you would only adopt someone elses definition, but by you and by every man and woman for him- and herself.

Choosing a Starting Point.

It doesn't matter where you start. You can start with everything you see around you, because eventually you will examine everything in your immediate surroundings. Including yourself, what you believe, what you are convinced of and your physical existence in this physical world.

Take a wooden chair, for example. Is a wooden chair a chair, or is 'chair' a name for something that we created. Is a wooden chair not really just 'wood' in the form of a chair? But is wood really 'wood', or is wood just 'tree'? Is a tree really 'tree' or is that a name we have made up for it? Does the tree itself believe it is a 'tree'? What is 'tree' then? A living organism? What is an organism? What is living? Who decides that? Where is it based on? Et cetera.

The concept is as follows: if you cannot prove the basis of something, on what it is based, then you cannot prove what that something is. For example, how can you prove that you are standing on solid ground before you have proven that there is such a thing as 'solid ground'? Or something like a 'you' that can stand on 'solid ground'? How can we prove that a universe exists if we have not really proved how or even whether it ever originated?

You can also start with yourself. What do you believe in? What are your absolute convictions? Are your beliefs and convictions irrefutably based on provable truth? How many are just assumptions? Dissect yourself, doubt everything in you and around you, until you end up with something you cannot prove to be untrue.

No Answer.

When in the end you cannot answer the last remaining question, if you cannot prove whether something is true or untrue, than you do not know what it is and you cannot know if it's true. If you cannot prove it a 100% true then it's not really true.

If something seems to be 99.99% true it still is only 'possibly true' as there is not a 100% certainty about the truth of that given. The credit of being true given to something that is true for 99.99% is believing it is true and every belief is not true.

The main feature of this examination is to write down what you think or believe to be true so you can view it from a distance and you can approach it as if someone else has written it. You can read it again the next day, question it and rewrite it.

As Jed McKenna wrote:
"The brain, unlikely as it may sound, is no place for serious thinking. Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin' match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides."
If you keep it in your head you cannot seriously think about it and you can never adequately prove it to be true or untrue.

In Practice.

Write down what you believe. Write down what you think is true. Write everything down and ask yourself the following questions:

What is this?
— Write down the answer

Is that true?
— If necessary: rewrite your previous answer

Am I sure it's true?
— If necessary: rewrite your previous answer

Am I absolutely sure that this is true?
— If necessary: rewrite your previous answer

Repeat step 4 until you think you have found the correct answer and ask yourself the following question:

Why do I believe this to be true? Where is that belief based on? Is that on which it is based really true or is there an assumption behind that?
— Use the answer for a new round of Autolysis

If you cannot go any further and you conclude there is no answer that is a 100% true, then it is not true. It is something that you can delete from your system as being something you only assumed to be true, but you do not know and have never known if it was really true.

The freedom is this:

Maybe you still don't know what is true,
but at least you know what is untrue.

The Gift of Autolysis.

Most people believe 99% of the time in things that are simply untrue, but these things cause a lot of hassle and misery when they are believed. This varies from material things to emotions and beliefs based on nothing more than stuff people repeat and rehash year after year, century after century.

I cannot say it any simpler, but something that is untrue is not suddenly true because everyone repeats and believes it century after century. Bullshit is bullshit and remains bullshit, even if you call it 'a nice turd' a 100,000 times.

Imagine that you could base your decisions on things that really matter without having to worry about things that are not true? Imagine that you do not need to bother with every thought that comes to mind or with every sense and feeling that flows through your body? Imagine that you are free from any indoctrination of the past?

That is the ultimate gift of Autolysis, it is the freedom of being who you really are in a dreamless reality. It is freely available to everyone by refuting and removing everything that is untrue.