We Shouldn't Stop Trying to Find the Truth
The hard part is seeing past what we think is true to what actually is true
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Before we get into today’s article, here’s what I’ve been up to lately on both Substack and Medium (all non-paywalled links)
The Koan of the Christian Monks
The Rabbit Hole I fell into after I was given Counterfeit Money
Tradition Is Just Peer Pressure from the Dead
It’s time to change up the newsletters too, as you’ll see below, I’ve played around a bit with the usual format. I’d love to hear some feedback with the poll at the bottom.
I’ve only written once about Miyamoto Musashi on this website so far. Although his name had popped up occasionally, I didn’t really get around to learning about him until about a year ago.
His “The Book of Five Rings” is an incredibly impressive piece of work. Although written as a treatise on swordsmanship, its teachings are also applicable to daily life and philosophy.
I guess it’s a bit of a paradox that a book that’s supposed to be about winning a daisho fight to the death also applies when it comes to living a good life.
But then again, I’ve finally come to accept that the truths of life lie in its many baffling paradoxes.
If you’d like to read my previous article on Musashi, here you go:
Let’s have a look again at the quote that began this article:
“Truth is not what you want it to be.
It is what it is.
And you must bend to its power or live a lie.” — Miyamoto Musashi.
Let’s break it down a bit.
“Truth is not what you want it to be.” No, it’s certainly not. We can probably all agree on that. Truth doesn’t give a fiddler’s about our opinions, our desires, our preferences, and so on. Try as we might, we cannot shape or distort the truth of reality just because we want it to be different.
We can lie, cheat, and twist things to suit our ends, but what’s true remains true.
“It is what it is.” What is true is objective. By its very nature, it has to be. The problem for us is that our conditioning and previous life experiences mean that we don’t always see what’s true as being true because we cannot, or don’t want to, accept it. Saying ‘it is what it is’ can seem somewhat flippant, but the truth in it is that it’s true. Things are what they are because that’s how they are.
“And you must bend to its power or live a lie.” In accepting what’s true, we learn to accept reality as it is. We cast off our aspersions and desires and see things as they properly are. To behave in any other way is to live in denial and self-deception, and, well, that’s a road that leads nowhere but into a downward spiral.
Continues below….
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Here are a few things I’ve been reading/watching of late:
Rupert Sheldrake usually gets talked about as the banned Ted Talk dude but his ideas are fascinating and while they might seem a bit mad and out there now, it wouldn’t really be surprising if he ends up being totally correct. He’s a bit of a maverick.
I’m on a bit of a rabbit hole that’s a bit, well, risky. Looking at the worst aspects of myself to try and come to terms with them. While I bloody detest faceless YouTube channels, this one explains Carl Jung’s idea of the shadow very well.
Something a bit more fun, although there are some rather chilling psychological aspects, I’ve been watching Netflix’s Ripley. It’s a longer version of The Talented Mr. Ripley from 1999, which, of course, was based Patricia Highsmith 1955 book of the same name.
The new Netflix versions has Irishman Andrew Scott in the Matt Damon (*insert obligatory South Park accent) role and Dakota Fanning in the Gwyneth Paltrow role.
It’s all moody and black and white and shot very well. Well worth checking out, Scott’s always worth watching in anything he’s in.
Right, let’s get back to the article…
What the bloody hell is truth anyway?
I think it was back in 2017 when Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson attempted to do a podcast together. It was a giant Hindenburg disaster of a podcast; the two lads couldn’t even decide what the word ‘truth’ meant.
If you ever want to give yourself an extreme case of embarrassment for other people — do we have a word for that? I bet the Germans have a word for that — give it a listen. It’s excruciating to listen to, BDSM-levels of cringe for the ears.
But the whole question of ‘what is truth?’ goes back an awful long time.
Obviously, Plato and his student Aristotle banged on about it in Ancient Greece, and in more recent times, the likes of Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and David Hume all took it on.
Most recently, though, there’s Thomas Nagel, an American philosopher who, unlike more philosophers, isn’t dead yet. Nagel’s idea is that while we’re always experiencing the world from a certain point of view, looking for what we call objective truth means that we have to take a step back and look at the world ‘from nowhere’ or, in other words, from a place with no subjective stance.
I’ve written on these pages previously about the pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles. What’s fascinating about them is that they were saying the same thing well over 2,500 years ago.
Isn’t it mad that ancient philosophers said the same thing that our best are saying now? These dudes taught the same thing back then as the best of our minds teach now, and it all leads me to wonder why the bloody hell we didn’t pay attention and learn it 2,500 years ago?
We’re not very smart are we?
No, I think we are. I’m just being a tad harsh. Call it poetic license if you want to.
Old Parmy was adamant that we couldn’t rely on our senses to know what is true but that we could use our senses to find our way to truth. Paradoxical? Yes. True? Certainly so.
It all comes down to awareness. We can trust our senses to tell us what to be aware of, but we stop trusting at that point and examine fully what we become aware of.
Empedocles came along soon after old Parmy and taught that change happens all the time, but behind that change lies the truth of all things.
It’s the same as what our Japanese Samurai master was saying, too. Truth is real, but we often don’t see it because we’re distracted by what we want to be true, or think is true. However, what’s true remains true regardless of what we believe is true.
Inner work
Where’s all this coming from, you might ask.
Well, when you embark on this weird journey of self-improvement or self-discovery, you’re going to have to face some pretty hideous things about yourself.
The worst part is accepting that certain things happened and that there’s no escaping their consequences. They may have been acts carried out by you or things done to you, but either way, they happened.
Then there’s the realization that we carry issues that come from these experiences and that we often carry these traumas because, at the time, we couldn’t see the truth of what was happening. We couldn’t see that a so-called ‘damaged’ person did the damage and so we yoke ourselves down for years with an almost unbearable weight, and it both colors and shades our living experience until we can muster up the courage to look at the experience objectively, see the truth of it and attempt to be able to live with the experience by accepting it as a truth.
They say that truth doesn’t care about your feelings. And, yes, they’re correct. But your feelings can be mended when we see things as they correctly are.
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Previous article on the Pre-Socratics: