You are in a narrative too↗
You imagine stepping outside every narrative to examine them. But what would you use to do the examining?
By now, a certain superiority may be tempting. Doctrine is a finger, not the moon. Scripture involves understanding and transmission, rather than truth arriving untouched. Even emptiness can become another concept to grip.
From that height, everyone else seems caught in a story. You have seen through it: it is all narrative.
An uncomfortable question remains.
The framework used to see through those stories also needs examining.
Seeing through one thing with another↗
“Narrative” is used broadly here: not only a story, but a framework for organising experience, explaining events, judging right and wrong, and answering “Who am I?” This is the essay’s usage, not a claim that every perception or thought must first become a story.
“Religion arises from human fear” offers a psychological explanation.
“Religion pacifies people on behalf of a ruling class” offers a political explanation.
“Religion is an evolutionary by-product” offers an evolutionary explanation.
“All narratives are constructed, so there is no absolute truth” takes a further philosophical position.
Each has a scope that needs defending. A new label does not explain every religion. Being interpretations does not make them equally credible, or equally implausible.
An explanation can have a perspective and still have evidence. Acknowledging frameworks does not end comparison.
Examining one framework through another does not automatically supply eyes untouched by any conditions. Yet examination need not merely exchange stories in place. Questions can become more precise, evidence can grow, and mistakes can be found.
Water is what has gone unquestioned↗
Consider a fable.
The fish asks, “What is water?”
The water replies, “You are swimming in it.”
The fish is confused. “I do not see any water.”
In this fable, water goes unnoticed through familiarity, not mystery. It has always been there, so it no longer seems a condition that needs explaining.
Narrative resembles humanity’s water.
Learned words, familiar stories, habitual causal explanations, and accounts of self and meaning help shape the world that later feels natural.
That does not prove narrative creates consciousness, or rule out perception, learning and judgment beyond language. It draws attention to explanations that recede into the background until they look like the way things have to be.
You may be choosing among stories without noticing which possibilities the story has already excluded.
That can sound bleak. If no wholly unconditioned position is available, why pursue truth?
But limitation is not futility. Nor can the water metaphor prove that reality must remain unknowable.
A fish realises that it is in water. What changes?
It still swims. The water has not vanished, and the fish has not escaped. Yet the transparent background has become a condition it can ask about.
What lies beyond remains unknown. The fish can keep the question without claiming to possess a complete account of the outside.
That loosening can be a kind of freedom.
Not freedom already secured through escape, but freedom from mistaking the familiar for the only possibility.
Four ways of standing↗
Returning to religion, imagine four positions. They are not survey portraits of four groups.
The first person is Christian and treats a personal reading of the Bible as unquestionable truth. The target here is an interpretation closed to scrutiny, not every Christian.
The second follows no religion, trusts science, and expects science eventually to explain everything. The first commitment can rest on particular evidence and methods; the second is a stronger philosophical expectation. Unanswered questions do not make scientific methods another faith. A person’s dogmatic use of the word “science” does not establish that science can operate only dogmatically.
The third says, “These are inventions. Nothing is true.” This appears to escape all narratives. Yet declaring every explanation untrue also needs reasons. Sounding disenchanted cannot exempt it from scrutiny.
The fourth says, “Understanding has conditions, and my account is incomplete. I will use it seriously, compare alternatives, and notice what evidence would make me change my mind. I can be confident where reasons warrant it, and still admit on some sleepless night that important questions remain unsettled.”
Has the fourth person acquired a view from nowhere? No.
But the water is becoming visible.
That is already a distance travelled.
Is truth still there?↗
Does truth exist at all?
The question can remain open to philosophical argument. Knowing through frameworks does not, by itself, establish either that nothing exists beyond them or that reality can never be known.
The question worth retaining here is narrower: has a complete, unconditional account of reality already been obtained?
I do not know. Seeing through one account is not enough to declare oneself free of every condition.
There may be no final panorama, yet particular things can still be known, corrected, or separated from questions previously confused with them.
“Not knowing” can be honest, where knowledge is actually lacking. Handing every question to uncertainty can also let a posture take the place of judgment.
A dried shit-stick↗
In case 21 of the Gateless Gate, a monk asks Yunmen, “What is Buddha?”
Yunmen replies, “A dried shit-stick.”
The reply is crude and seems not to answer. Read through this essay’s concerns, it can work as an interruption.
“Awakening” might become something to grasp. So might “emptiness,” or “yourself.” A word that refuses the expected form can bring the machinery of explanation briefly to a halt.
But this is not a psychological experiment with the same result for everyone. It does not guarantee a glimpse of truth beyond concepts. Someone might simply find it baffling, or collect the strange answer as another sacred concept.
A pause can do something.
Whether anything becomes clearer afterwards remains a question.
This essay is water too↗
This series is also a narrative.
Words used to discuss the limits of explanation still make choices. I point towards the moon and say, “Do not look only at the finger.” I cannot look up on the reader’s behalf.
What can be admitted here is that everything just read also invites questioning. Not because it must all be wrong, but because exposing someone else’s limits grants no exemption from scrutiny.
Turning these words into a new dogma, a final “So that is the truth,” or a weapon against others might merely exchange one cage for another.
If something loosens instead—a little uncertainty, a sense that it may be this way or another—and prompts further discernment rather than a permanent pose of doubt, the words may not have been entirely wasted.
Seeing the water is not seeing through everything. It makes what had gone unquestioned available to question again.
The fish has not left the water.
But it has seen the water.
For a beginning, that is enough.