It’s mostly the last half of the second link that just had me shaking my head.
Why is that everyone claims to have “the answer”, and that anyone who doesn’t follow them is deluded?
The price of truth is everything. Or so he says, but what if after giving everything you don’t have the truth, only what you believe is the truth since you gave up everything. There is just too much certainty about how to “get there” and not enough questions about whether or not “there” is actually the truth.
People think that if you strip everything you know and everything you have been told in your life that you get to truth, but that is just something we tell ourselves. There isn’t a guarantee that that is what it is. Then they follow with “you just know, you see it clearly”. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that phrase I would pay off my student loans.
Our senses don’t even pick up objective reality and yet there are dozens out there claiming to see truth, to be awake. To me it’s just them caught in their own bubble, and the other drones that they manage to convince through their words.
It just annoys me how certain people can be of what they believe, and yes I understand the irony of my saying that.
The bit of the second link I was able to get through seemed to indicate that they were talking about spiritual truths. Spiritual study in general hasn’t been very good about finding any universal truths. Someone claims to have the truth, and you better not question it.
I kind of like truths that can be checked out. Like mathematical ones. Science doesn’t even claim to have the truth, just an approximation, but at least you can reproduce them.
People are looking for “Truth” as if it was some sort of epiphany that would change their lives and make everything right. But there is no single Hallelujah moment that will suddenly make everything right. There is no instant Kundalini moment.
I’ve experienced three events in my life that one could associate with this. The first was stepping outside myself, but still being my infinite self and looking at everything that made up me, <insert name here>, from the outside. It was a very powerful moment, but it was NOT instant enlightenment. It was a mere second or two of seeing myself and all that I was, objectively and from the outside.
I’ve had two experiences, one in a dream and one while waking, of incredible knowledge filling my head. It was awe inspiringly amazing. They were both very much the kind of event that G’kar (in Babylon 5) speaks of as moments of clarity where you could spend the rest of your life describing what you see there. The problem I found is that they are dissolving moments. You can get lost in them and forget your self, forget who and what you are if you let them go too far. And on the other side of it, once you grasp something you need to know or see, it all fades very rapidly from your head, in such a way that mere seconds later, I was struggling to retain the memory of what I had gained from it, and today, years later, I couldn’t tell you a damned thing that I experienced and “knew” in those moments.
These are the moments that people are after, and having experienced these, I can tell you that they are not the be-all, end-all of enlightenment. I’ve been considering doing one of those ayahuasca trips to see what they’re like. I know there are a couple of people on this board who have experienced it and could tell you.
But again, from the dawn of time people have been searching for “truth” as if it was a single thing, a singular experience that would permanently change their lives and be something they would hold and know every moment to know the truth at all times.
Ain’t no such thing.
Going back to my answer in your other thread, they’re looking for one big thing to change everything and ignoring the million little things that point them that way.
People like this guy are all over, a dime a dozen, from TV self-help gurus, to store-front church preachers, to David Koresh, to Donald Trump. They don’t have anything of actual value to offer, (let alone “the truth”)–just words, with whatever rhetorical appeal can dupe certain types of the feeble-minded.
There is and there isn’t. The Work is more about stripping away the falsehoods that you believe about the world and, far more importantly, yourself. Our brain tells us a lot of things based on our experience, based on social expectations, based on what other people have told and taught us, and what we have chosen or decided; that just aren’t true. You can’t really be whole and complete while holding those illusions, those false ideals. You also can’t hide from them or deny them. You have to face them, reason them out, work through the emotions and the ribbon grass roots that connect them through everything else in your mind, to get to who and what you really are underneath. It isn’t easy.
I’ll tell you from personal experience that you cannot tear out the parts of yourself that you don’t like. Because all you will accomplish is to tear yourself apart. And it can take a long time to put yourself back together. You have to face those parts, see what they are, see WHY they are, and work them out. In the end, you have to accept what is, even if you don’t like it and want to be something else. But I’ll also tell you that some of those things aren’t really you, they’re what other people have told you is you, have insisted is you. That doesn’t mean that everything everyone else thinks about you is a lie, it just means that if there’s pain there, you have to be willing to really dig at that wound, to understand it, to ask yourself the hard questions and accept your responsibility for yourself. Which in some cases, you might find that you’ve been hiding from yourself or denying.
That’s the crucible of the Alchemist. To burn away the dross to what is your truth within. Your truth, who you really are, which is yours alone. I can’t teach you based on my truth, I can’t tell you which path to take, because your road is your own.
And prayer? Who are you praying to? God? Many versions of The Work insist that “God” is your true, immortal self, connected through your unconscious mind. Then go on to say that your unconscious mind is a fierce master, Jehovah at his worst, but you have to make yourself worthy of the “holy marriage” of the conscious and unconscious mind in order to be whole and realized. Having been in an abusive marriage, my immediate response is “Oh fuck that noise” and to realize that The Work is really about your whole mind, since the dross you’re clearing out is mostly in the unconscious mind. And on some level, you’re training your unconscious mind to stop behaving in shitty ways, creating bad patterns in your life and sort out the little complexes and ideas deep in there that you didn’t even realize were affecting your behavior.
And if you’re praying to an external god, to what end? To ask for a miracle in your own head to make you better? Yes, I’ve prayed for that many times. The use in it that I’ve found is to prepare your mind to find the hole in the hedge, the hidden truth in your head, to have that “Aha!” moment where you realize something that matters in your own life and your own self.
Because in truth, as I had said for many years before I started walking this particular path; Our brains are incredible Inference Machines. As a programmer and problem solver, I would work to get the details and requirements of an issue in my head, then walk away from it and let it stew, trusting my brain to figure it out. And then I’d have those “Aha!” moments on a regular basis - in the shower, driving to work, taking a walk - where it would suddenly click and I’d know what I needed to do, without spending 80 hours wracking my brain to come up with the solution. It would just “come to me”, because I’d properly laid the groundwork, turned it over to my unconscious mind, and allowed it to do the work of solving the problem.
But how do you know those are illusions and lies? How do you know what is the truth? It seems like a lot of vague terms that are ultimately meaningless. Like saying it’s personal, that tells me nothing. It seems to me like we just arbitrate what we think are illusions and truths and just believe what we want.
In the sense you are the same person I have issues with just like the guy in the links. How does he know what isn’t true? What criteria is there for that? What if he’s wrong? Then what? How do you know where to start, how can you be sure?
Seems to me that people who “question everything” just stop at a point that feels right, which is just wrong to me.
“There is no truth” is the statement of the person who refuses to look themselves in the mirror and finds truth too difficult to face. Those aren’t words of wisdom or honesty, they’re words of denial.
Start with the things that cause you the most pain, the most confusion. Ignore what others say, look within yourself to see how it affects you, what you really believe deep inside, what you believe is right and wrong. Be open to change, to being wrong. Throw your ego and your pride out the door, they’ll give you bad advice.
Be ok with being wrong. Not because you know you’re wrong, but because you’re being as right as you can be in the moment and you may find later that you are wrong. When it happens, accept it and make changes without making it about your ego and your pride.
Oh, and don’t put too much credit into what your average person believes. Your average person is a moron who believes what they believe because they were taught that as a child or because their identity politics require it.
If you see yourself as a Southern Christian Republican, well that comes with an entire pre-packaged set of beliefs. It doesn’t require any thought, any worry, any consideration of whether it is right, wrong or completely absurd.
Likewise if you see yourself as a Super Liberal Atheist, that comes with it’s own set of pre-packaged beliefs.
Which is another thing to look at for yourself. How do you see yourself, how does that affect the things you believe in, and how do you face or ignore the dissonance in those beliefs. Do you believe things because they’re what you should believe as that identity, or because you’ve carefully considered the issue and decided on your own, based on what you think is right?
That seems to be rather superficial stuff. I think by truth they refer to no self, the death of the ego, the emptiness of everything in existence and how anything of meaning requires effort to maintain said meaning and once you stop it no longer has meaning.
To say there is no truth would be an honest assessment especially in the case of right and wrong. There isn’t really an objective rule about that. It seems to me that when people talk about truth they mean belief. They believe the ego is an illusion, that it doesn’t exist. They believe existence is inherently empty. They believe insert apparently groundbreaking truth. They tell you to look within and find out yourself, and you know what I saw…BUNK.
There’s no guarantee you’ll know what truth is if you go seeking it, maybe you’ll just stop along the way at something that seems like it. Maybe what you are doing is wrong and can’t see it, lord knows there’s been more than those kinds of folks in history than we like to admit. There isn’t really a vetting process for these “spiritual truths”.
It’s seems to me that anything beyond science, and even that is imperfect, is chalked up to belief. Belief in “oneness”, in “no self”. These people question everything except their findings. They think awakening is painful so their minds make it so, they think it’s bliss so the mind makes it so. The mind and brain will shape your experience based on what you believe (to a degree). I can say that from experience. Yet none of that yields any truth about existence.
You are always going to be looking at yourself through your ego, in Freud’s use of the term.
And realize that if you toss some things about yourself you don’t like, you might also toss some of the things you like, which can be joined to them.
Not to mention that some of them may be genetically determined or printed deeply onto your brain through your early upbringing.
How do you feel about the statement “wisdom is accepting greater levels of paradox”?
Humans can only comprehend so much. We know we exist and that Humans have existed for a while, and we know we have inner lives as individuals and on collective Beliefs.
Beyond that, all bets are off. Individual Consciousness and Collective Truth and Morals remain undefined in any objective way. Philosophical noodling that tries to arrive at The Answer (“Truth is this exact thing!”) is fun, but much more about the process than actually finding an Answer that Humans can grasp. Philosophical noodling that focuses on “How should Humans manage the paradoxes that exist in our lives” is ultimately far more productive.