Meno's Loop

Help is available.

"Let me help". A hundred years or so from now, I believe,
a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme.
He'll recommend those three words even over "I love you."

-Star Trek TOS, City on the Edge of Forever

In Plato's dialogue Meno, Plato's old teacher Socrates is challenged by Meno with what has become known as the sophistic paradox, or the paradox of knowledge:

Meno: And how are you going to search for [the nature of virtue] when you don't know at all what it is, Socrates? Which of all the things you don't know will you set up as target for your search? And even if you actually come across it, how will you know that it is that thing which you don't know?

Meno is saying that you have to know about virtue already in order to discover virtue. If you don't know anything about it, you won't recognize it even if you are staring it in the face. Conversely, if you already know about it, you don't need to find out about it. This is called the Paradox of Knowledge.

In response, Plato (or Socrates) develops his concept of anamnesis. He says that individuals are reincarnated, but before they come back to the world (and this is part of the larger Greek mythology), they are somehow compelled to forget what they have learned. In Greek mythology, souls drink from the river Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, before they return to this world. So for Plato/Socrates, learning is not so much the acquisition of new knowledge, as the remembering of knowledge you already have in some sense, but forgot.

While Plato might have a point, it begs the question of how the knowledge ever got into anyone's head to begin with. At some point, someone has to know something they never knew before, and that no past life of theirs ever knew either. Of course, Meno's paradox is a false dichotomy. We can know enough to know that we don't know as much as we would like about something, and we go seek that knowledge from someone who does know more. Happens all the time.

And yet, in a larger sense we can very easily get stuck in Meno's paradox. We know what we know, and what we know shapes what we can know. Certainly, people willfully choose only to believe what they want to believe; only learn what they already think they know. Meno's Loop, as I would like to call it, threatens to enclose everyone.

In spiritual matters, the only way to break Meno's Loop is to realize that you don't know what you need to know. That you need help. You have to realize that you don't have the answer, and you have to realize that on your own you will never have the answer.

You have to realize that you yourself don't have the resources that you need, and open yourself to help from above. The information I am speaking of is not information from this world. Information from this world can help a great deal, and people can help (and also hinder), but ultimately we need information from God or God's agents (angels) or something of that nature. We need help. We need to surrender to the fact that we need information that we ourselves cannot get to alone.

How do we ask for that help? In a way, the Christians have something to teach us in that regard:

"Dear God, I am a sinner. I have tried to run my own life and I have failed.
I have tried being in control of my life and I only screwed it up.
I turn my life over to you."

This kind of statement is very common in Christian circles, and it expresses a real truth. A truth that Christians themselves far too often fail to heed. As long as your greatest good is your own self, you will always believe what the Self wants you to believe, and there will be no room for God's truth. You will be too full of your own truth, to see the truth. You have to irrevocably give up on the idea that you can save yourself by your own unaided efforts, from the fate you are in. You have to surrender yourself to something higher. You have to find a God outside of your default god, which is the Self. Otherwise you will be thoroughly trapped in Meno's Loop.

After that, you can get help. Knowledge from outside yourself, knowledge from outside this world. Knowledge to one day free yourself from the trap of this world.

I don't know exactly how that help works. What I do know, is that there is help.