Truth

THE TRUTH ABOUT TRUTH

Ok, I'm spewing A LOT here. If you need a break, follow some of the links and check them out. Everything I say is verifyable. Either by looking at it and thinking: is that true for me? Or by looking up some piece of video or googling some term.. Truth can ONLY exist in a context. Change the context and any truth disappears. If you don't name your context, that is a recipe for suffering.

It can make it seem you are speaking an ultimate truth, something worth believing in even without context. There is NO SUCH THING.

There is judgements and opinions, facts don't exist. (except in a context and contexts aren't real..) What REALLY is there is mostly your judgements about yourself and your opinions about your opinions..

To make it a little less abstract: 1+1=2 is only true in the context of math and almost nowhere else. In the context of a heterosexual relationship -to name one at random- 1+1 is how babies are made and used to become an unplanned 3 before birth-control. I could name another 10 different contexts that don't have 1+1=2.

The truth about discussion or people disagreeing on anything

In any discussion one person will be in all up in one perspective, one context and the other will be up in another context, You are using your truths as battlement to hide in and chuck arguments at each other that don't seem to be logical or 'real' to the other party.
And this is strange, because if you have any sense of humor, you will know about switching contexts for humorous purposes. Which is one of the most healthy brain-exercises anyone can do. So if you were sharing a joke and didn't need everything to make sense right of the bat and were even expecting a litte friction, I can imagine you would totally agree within minutes.. Or better yet, the idea of disagreeing wouldn't enter your mind. You hardly hear anybody say: "That's not true..." or "Yes, but..." at the end of a joke.

Jokes

We could look at why arguments don't work, but let's look at why jokes WORK.
In a joke you switch the context to deliberately confuse the other person. "Did you hear about the crook who stole a calendar? He got twelve months."
Ok, so this seems logical, but it must be a joke. You can ONLY get the joke, if you switch the context from judicial-system to calender.. And we find these relaxing, why?

Everything changes, CONTEXT CHANGES, so truth changes

That's because all contexts are subject to time.. Any truth I perceive, is just a context I identify with at that moment, next moment, something else becomes true. I just identified with something else.. Seeing this reflected in a joke is relaxing. Seeing it in real life is stress. Why? With a joke.. the tension is expected and not minded, even invited..

Maybe we can learn to treat real life as a bit of a joke?

So, why do we keep trying.. if it can't be done?

Why do we communicate at all? If we cannot actually understand each other? If we get it wrong SOOO often?

Because we want to connect. We don't want to be alone. (Right?)
When you get down to it, we all say the same thing, all the time, point to the same thing, want the same thing.
We point to our suffering and we want to be free of it. We suffer because we don't feel connected.
We blame others or we feel a loss and try to fill that void in any way with any addiction. Be angry or be sad, that seems to be the choice. Why does life suck so much? First, how to deal with others in this.. That's the easy part.. Then how to deal with YOURSELF..

How to NOT MIND, if somebody is stuck in a truth

Even the westboro-baptists-church people do this (they point to their fear and call it love and truth and think it's the way to get into heaven and be free) and it's good that they do and that Russel Brand exposed them like he did in the video in the link, because we can learn that we shouldn't take ourselves that seriously.
We should probably not be too passionate about any perceived truth, if we want to avoid suffering. We can -in stead- realize that we (as all reasoning) can only be subtly wrong about anything and appreciate, nay celebrate, our mutual inadequacies, our delicious inability to express ourselves even inwardly.

Because all those subtle ways to be wrong connect us all. It's what we have in common with anyone, even Stephen Fry, when taking the moral highroad with soaring intellect, making us feel small. It's an invitation, to smile and lovingly recognize that anger, that passion as my own, to reflect if I ever made anyone feel small.

The only other thing that connects us at any given time is: we are perceiving any differences in exactly the same measure. Your point of view is as far from mine as mine is from yours. You are exactly as many centimeters taller as I am shorter (you'd even be inches shorter, so there goes that truth..). We should be able to smile when anyone is being too serious about such a thing and where possible, lovingly expose them for the good of all.

Lovingly, because there is no such thing as 'tough love'. That's just imposing patterns on people or being impolite to get a person to be more polite and then selling that to yourself. That's not love, it's just a milder form of violence.

YEAH, but WHY AM I SUFFERING at all?

So why is there suffering, why is the world so cruel, why is there 'bone cancer in children'..?
And what to do about it?
Bone cancer in children... Yeah, that sucks, from the standpoint of the individual, who has the bone cancer. And like a lot of things in life that I don't personally experience at this time, it still SUCKS enough for me to temporarily forget to be thankful for being alive and having empathy. So... I'm just complaining for sport.. as it were. I'm fighting someone else's fight and they didn't ask me to. I'm not speaking from personal experience.
A clear sign I'm avoiding even thinking about my real suffering.
The suffering of my empathy, my feeling of loss of connection, despair even. If you actually have bone cancer.. If you feel pain, that sucks.. But it will pass one way or the other. This is a happy thought if you have pain. Too much pain will make death seem quite ok, and how many people will be able to say that at the end..? It's only when you think of abstracts like fairness that you ad to your suffering. So don't do that. Fight what can be fought. If you don't feel pain.. Well, it's still somebody else's fight then.. It's just "you-in-the-future", or "you-in-the-past"..
You might die. Well.. that's kind of built in and kind of true for everybody. When we were born, we were bound to die and feel some pain. Nobody knows before hand how much and if this is it..
I know it sucks, but read on.. There's more.

So I should be thankful? To whom? God is a bastard for making the world like it is.

OK, it's true: evolution and entropy are cold bastards, if you try to anthropomorphize them into a Creator. So it's only lucky, they can also be random processes, which are by the simple math of staggering numbers able to produce this amazing 'chaotic attractor', we call consciousness, which can then form a personality that can bitch about life being so unfair and can even conceive of something like fairness or bitching and get irritated by these concepts it just created, which have no basis in reality.

<breathe>

When you anthropomorphize any organizing principle of LIFE, you have to hate it, like Stephen pointed out. Germans called this "Weltschmertz" (the suffering of experiencing the world) in the 19th century and boy, do we have a much broader horizon to suffer today. Viewed like that, there is undeniable cruelty to life and therefore to God or any causation of life. So if you don't want to live in hate for the organising principle or in 'weltschmertz', then just don't anthropomorphize. Don't identify with THAT context, it's not good for you, it's not productive in this case. Save that tool for other cases, where it's apt. For this problem, find a new context. Some theologians got that at some point and said "God's is ineffable, inconceivable and incomprehensible", to unburden his fellow man from Weltschmertz (which is a great bit of dogma for that purpose, but rather irritating as a general "shut up, I'm right", which is how it's more commonly used)

But I want to STOP my suffering..

Not suffering ANY circumstances is quite easy (and quite hard, because it is soo easy, you'll overlook it many times). But it won't make sense for a while if you just start out. It didn't make sense for a long time for me and still doesn't always.

But what you basically need is to learn the trick of being the anthill and not the ant, so you don't suffer the fate of the ant..
But an ant isn't an anthill, no matter how much he believes he is.. Right?

Ok, so let's examine that logic.
How many ants make up an anthill? Well more than one, but how many? Let's pick a number, let's say 10.000. So what if one dies? Then the anthill isn't an anthill anymore by that definition. OK, that can't be right.. But it will work for ANY number.. OK, so let's assume it's not a numbers game, it's about single and plural.. What if they all die and there is only one left? What if that one is the queen, or becomes a queen? (yeah, that really happens) So, we have to conclude a single ant could be an anthill, if we let go of the idea of any narrow definition of anthill that excludes this. Logic allows for this. Because the words anthill and ant are actually a lot less defined and a lot more fuzzy than we think.
Something similar you can do with yourself. You can be one of the people, the human race, you can be life itself.

You are life itself

If you learn to identify with the process or organizing principle of life itself, instead of identifying with any particular expression of this (past, future, here and now, body, mind, soul, emotion, suffering etc), you have a shot at feeling real immortality, real and demonstrable indestructibility and stop ANY suffering or insecurity.
I know, that seems like ANY religious pep-talk ever. I'm NOT talking about any religion, sect or cult.
I'm talking about something the old greeks named: Pantha Rei.
It's also called monism, solipsism, non-dualism, advaita vedanta etc etc. It's at the heart of all religion, but it's not a religion in itself. In a way it denies the existence of religion, because it's a truth, and we know about those..

A bit about ANTS

Ants seem to know how to do it... An ant will happily take ITSELF to the colony's graveyard, if you make it think it's dead through the magic of chemicals. It actually tries to lift itself up, like it would a dead ant. It's not that it doesn't care it's dead, it just doesn't mind. It IS the anthill, it's the colony. Tough breaks for that particular ant, great for the colony that this principle is built into every ant.
Don't want to suffer? Just realize you are an expression of the colony, that just happens to take the form of an ant right now. Stop your attachment to the ant by realizing you are only an anthill thinking you are an ant, for practical purposes..

You can do this in the invitation offered by Mooji. Do it, until it works. And eventually you'll find we are ALL one. You are the universe and you are God. Heavy stuff, I know.

I'm not saying it's all true. I'm not saying that we are really all one at some level, that science hasn't found a way to measure yet. I find that hard to believe, like I find it hard to believe anything for very long... I'm just saying that I've experienced that it's a feeling that can help me, when I let it.. As long as I don't turn it into anything else than a feeling. And that I will do that when I feel I need it. When things get rough for the individual me, either physically or mentally. And to be sure that I can do it in my hour of need, I practice this daily.

Positive Thinking

It's a bit like positive thinking. That helps you, not because the universe is tripping over it's legs to give you stuff, like those laws-of-attraction-people will have you believe. That's nonsense and it's just forming a belief from a very simple psychological principle. It works because you indulge and revel in patterns in the privacy of your own mind, that make you more open, more sensitive to the possibilities at hand. Possibilities that were there all along, but you were unconsciously, but quite actively ignoring before. It's just how our senses and mind work together to be able to see what is important and therefore to see at all. It's like when you give up looking for something, that's when you find it. Because you let go of the image that you had of how you would find it and make room for just pure observation, which is a much better tool for finding things. When you let go of your own obstruction, life gets easier.

Pantha Rei

And yoga, non-dualism, advaita, monism, Pantha Rei (or being the ant-colony), whatever name people have given this 'truth' through the ages... works! Because it too is just how our brain works. You identify where you put (most) of your attention. (Usually job, social function, body or mind in our society, none of which will make you reliably happy) This inner working of our brains may be the doing of a loving entity out there, that is made up of us or accidentally created by cold evolution and entropy fighting for supremacy, or some monotheistic creator, like Allah, God, anything. Or even something completely different. (It's bound to be something different, ain't it?) But the important point is: it works, if you let it. If you commit to it. If you believe that you are MORE or LESS, but not just you, but don't give it ANY shape or concept or at least don't believe in that shape or concept..

That only works for religious people

If you need proof that it can work for anyone, religious people, atheists, agnostics and skeptics alike, than look at it like this: What I'm talking about is all about where you identify, what you think of as YOU.

We humans can identify with anything quite easily, within minutes and without any special training.. (Don't believe me when I say this! Google the 'rubber hand illusion' or 'rubber arm experiment', or better yet, get a rubber arm and do it yourself after you google it, it's a laugh at parties.

You'll see people accepting a rubber hand as their own and anticipating or -in extreme cases- actually feeling it's pain as their own..) And identifying with something other than yourself can cure the depression we are all trying to distract ourselves from and apparently it can even cure addiction (which is just another way of distracting yourself).
So it's healthy. It's self management. It's common sense. As long as you don't start believing you have found any truth. Because then you will get in to trouble sooner or later.. You'll be making the same mistake just about everybody else has made down history.
Believe it with all your heart, but ALSO be convinced you are completely wrong about it!

I can't do that!

It's a lot easier than you may think now. You may think you have to do a lot of mental work, or meditation, to ultimately, maybe one day, see that it's easy..

That may be true. That's what all the people who did a lot of work, before getting there, would certainly like you to believe, else they did it all for nothing, right? But I tell you, it isn't hard, it's just tricky, fiddly. It's a knack. You can do it through religion, but more people get it wrong through religion, than actually get it, because you are supposed to believe in religion and it's quite hard not to and get along with religious people using this method. So I'd personally try another way. There's plenty. Just don't give it up. It can be easy and still take a while. Mostly because it's breaking bad habits. One way is to listen to Mooji or Gangaji and try to believe what they are saying.
Open yourself up to this context and then find your own.
Or start with the skeptic, like Stephen Fry.. You can get enlightened through secularism as well. It's just really, really hard.

And don't mind the suffering for now.

Because the deepest part of your despression... that's the moment when you usually find it, out of necessity.. When you have nothing to loose. When the alternative is no longer livable.. When you need to take the plunge and depression or suffering is actually what empowers you to give up ANY ego-ic truth.

Fighting other peoples battles and hating it? you are there..!

For instance when you feel the need to bitch about bone cancer but don't know anyone with bone cancer, and don't have bone cancer yourself and at that moment bone cancer might be a myth for all you know and you still find your self bitching about it. That's a good starting point. Just think: Is it the ant complaining? And what is it actually complaining about? Why has it lost it's connection with the anthill?

Find this sense of not being you, that you have ignored most of your life. Like the feeling of your feet on the ground or your bum or back on the seat or bed. If you've read this far, you probably totally ignored that, wasn't aware of it. But it was undeniably there all the time. Just cease all activity, and identify with nothingness or everything or whatever. And it will be there, waiting, your truth. Become the observer. Life looking at itself, the anthill, looking at the ant. But don't dismiss the poor ant's rantings, by giving it tough love. Don't tell it it doesn't matter. Respect it.. Feel genuinely sorry for it, accept it's pain as your own and thereby comfort it and love it from the perspective of the anthill. Appreciate it's suffering as necessary, proper and part of the whole and THEN create a safe environment in which the ant can ultimately see what's going on (if it still needs to, some ants are easier than others).

A happy life

There you are.. The secret of a happy life as I understand it. Probably totally wrong. It can't be the truth, but it seems to work for me as my truth, for now.
I see the same things, but I can feel like I get the joke now..