The famous philosopher and mathematician René Descartes coined the phrase: “I think, therefore I am” in the 16th century. We must reflect on this in order to understand from what point of cosmology in human thought this phrase is situated as a maxim of understanding. Recognising ourselves as thinking beings gives us the capacity to understand our surroundings and thus to accept that we physically exist on a three-dimensional plane in physical matter.
The search for truth, as a principle of existence, becomes a rhetorical question that human beings have tried to answer life after life in order to find the true meaning of it. Descartes generates a current of thought in which he affirms that truth can only be found through reason. In today’s world, where the primordial values of contact with spirituality and the traditions of our ancestors are considered only in the background, reason reigns as the only way to understand the tangible world around us. In this sense, everything is reduced to the mental world through which the sensory world is accepted.
Descartes offered the leap from limiting superstition based on beliefs imposed through dogmas of faith, to the possibility of considering the external world through reasoning. Tempelton (2022): “Religion has long been a way that individuals find meaning and comfort in their lives and how one views oneself”(p.1). At the time, this form of awareness from the mental world made it possible for many people to take control and power of themselves through the logical-mental understanding of events. They did not need a preconceived dogma like a religion to accept a palpable reality as understandable to thought. In this direction Tempelton (2022) clarifies that: “Our thoughts and beliefs inform our reality, including our experience of the world that includes our behaviors and emotions” (p.17)
Today we should reflect on the way we direct and orient our lives as we understand our mental body with which we work on a daily basis. People in the 21st century have completely incorporated Descartes’ sentence to such an extent that they have forgotten to exist as consciousness, maintaining their existence solely from thought. Fortunately, the world is changing. I mean that the consciousness of the human being is being modified by the opening of the inner vision. Humanity is advancing and moving towards the connection with the awareness of its own existence and for this Descartes’ sentence needs to be reversed: “I am, therefore I think”.
In these moments it is absolutely essential to accept that our mental body has limitations since the tangible world that it offers us in understanding of thought is subordinated to the collective experience. Individual thought is part of a collective consciousness in which it is encompassed. Thus, we understand that each culture has its own way of conceiving its reality according to its system of beliefs encompassed in its ways of thinking. Humanity is currently seeking the unification of its different enclaves of thought, for which we have to resort to a much deeper system that is situated in the recognition of ourselves as beings with extrasensory capacities aimed at the common good.
Existence is thus understood as the connection with our own soul which dictates its course and its experiences (in matter, emotions and thought) in the life it chooses to lead. Everything is interconnected. Each one of us exists because we have a direct or indirectrelationship with the other, thus we generate and accept the pacts of learning, evolution and commitment with ourselves and with others in order to generate an existence with the supreme sense of Being. In short, we are beings that embody a spiritual soul manifesting itself in the density of physical matter to transcend it and reach understanding in the enjoyment of the very manifestation of vital energy.
Descartes, R. (2022). Discurso del método. Literatura pública (Ed.)
Templeton, M. H. (2022). I Think, Therefore I Am Not: Integrating (Doctoral dissertation, Georgetown University).