Truth

A cartoonist by the name of Ashleigh Brilliant, who was popular a decade or so ago (and still active, I find when I discovered his website just now), once wrote a comic I cut out and saved, the tag line of which was, "I have abandoned my search for truth and am now looking for a good fantasy." I think he may have been on to something.

I had a conversation with a man the other day who was adamant that there are not only rules that should be followed by everyone but that it is his moral obligation to point out to others when they violate those rules. He seemed rather miserable to me. Things weren't going his way. No wonder.

I think it's quite possible that the very definition of freedom is moving beyond the "ought" and "should" to an understanding of the sheer inscrutability and complexity of the human experience. I have had an inner conviction for most of my life that there is something called Truth which is incontrovertible, immutable, and knowable. I still think the first two may well be true. I am not yet prepared to concede that Truth is relative to each person's experience; rather, I think of it as more akin to the blind wise men and the elephant. You know the story: each wise man grabbed a different part of the elephant and then began pontificating on what an elephant Is—the one who got the tail saying it's like a rope, the one with the trunk like a snake, the one holding the leg like a tree and so forth. No matter what the wise men say, there is still an elephant standing there. But the last part, that Truth is knowable, of that I am no longer so sure.

"As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, we feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We deserve something better than resolution: we deserve our birthright, which is prajna [wisdom], an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity."—Pema Chodron.

"Sometimes spiritual matters are discussed in a cut-and-dried manner, as thought there were clear principles and one need only follow these principles, whose application is always precise, and all will be well. But life isn't theoretical, theological, or precise, and things are not usually as simple and clear as we would like them to be."—Norman Fischer

No matter what the truth of Truth may be, we must abandon our search for lasting meaning and plump instead for the joyful luxuriance of curiosity and Not-Knowing. But there is one thing I know to be true, and which was also pointed out to me in the writings of Pema Chodron: we must pick a spiritual path and let it take us where it leads. A woman I know is studying the dharma and Christian mystics and nondenominational enlightened beings and other spiritual masters, all at the same time. While I find this admirable in one way, I also recognize the impulse to seek answers everywhere and thus to find them nowhere. Since the only journey worth taking is inward, one must pick a guide and just go there. It's no use choosing a path and then looking for a different one as soon as the first becomes uncomfortable. Of course it's uncomfortable. That's the nature of the inward path. If it were cozy, we would never have left its comforts to begin with.