Truth is not what you think
Truth is not what we think
Thinking is to life as a condom is to sex...
2018 has been quite a year. As the dust settles and I emerge from the rubble my sense of liberation grows daily. The liberation I feel is not from circumstances or people. They were never the problem. The problem was always my thinking about circumstances or people. The easiest way to tie myself in knots was simply to think about what other people were thinking about me or my circumstances!
Trying to make sense of what was happening I would often seek the truth of a situation. I even read a book called Radical Honesty (a useful read), trying to establish "my truth" but this was just thinking thinking about thinking (that's not a typo, thinking is the object, subject and verb. Thinking thinking about thinking is what causes most wars).
Surely I could trust my emotions? But outside of the present moment my emotions were just flip sides to thought. "Good" emotions arising on the occasions when reality matched thoughts of how things should be or which made me "right" and "negative" emotions when life and ideas didn't align and I was "wrong".
As inevitability and life took charge, I lost resistance to all that was happening and with it any idea of how things should be. It had become obvious that I could never "find" the truth through thinking. In fact thinking could only obscure the truth.
The first thought about what is happening puts a barrier between me and reality. It dulls my experience, justifying itself with the false assumption that I need protection. From that perspective thinking is to life as a condom is to sex. Of course thinking hates that idea!
Present moment feelings are of a different nature to the much revered emotions. They arise free from the interference of thought, they are the language of reality, expressions of our interaction with truth. They are the result of intimacy with reality.
Truth is reality. It is what is happening in the present moment. Attempting to make sense of that moment is the first step in an attempt to control it, or more accurately control the next moment. Oppose reality all you like, it wont shift for anything, certainly for anything as flimsy as a thought or your opinion of how it should be. Your opposition to reality will exhaust you and lead you further from any chance of liberation. In fact, exhaustion is one of life's tactics in its attempt to liberate you.
Much of our thinking is a reactive attempt to re-frame reality within our personal narrative. We take reality and try to interpret it in a way that makes sense to our version of the world. Our version of the world is not even our own. It is the one we were programmed or educated into in an attempt to ensure our survival. That programming forms the benchmarks for our interpretation of reality, otherwise known as beliefs. They are a bunch of assumptions, largely false, upon which our thinking depends.
Reasoning based on false assumptions inevitably leads to wrong conclusions. When reality presents itself, as it does in every moment, it often contradicts our idea of how it should be. However much we may dislike it reality is never wrong. It is our idea of how reality should be that is at fault because our thinking has arrived at wrong conclusions based on flawed beliefs.
As Adyashanti teaches, liberation is simply not believing any of our thoughts.
Life is a wonderful, loving teacher. It is guiding us in every moment towards liberation. Pay attention to life rather than your thoughts about life, you may be pleasantly surprised to find out how good life can be.
Go easy, tread lightly, stay free,
Bill