Understanding

We decide our own truths, which we call “beliefs,” and knit them into a story, an internal narrative we repeat to ourselves endlessly, silently. A self-referential Möbius strip of perception. A closed loop. Then we empower these “beliefs” with an unjustified culturally referenced reverence.

We deceive and seduce ourselves in order to spare our ego, our fragile self-construct, from what feels like the imminent threat of complete destruction - a primal threat. A threat to survival.

But I didn’t die when my wife repeated to me, without any comic irony, something inappropriate I said at a party. Hearing my own words replayed out of context was suddenly embarrassing, but not fatal. And so I advance unmasked.

I struggle valiantly against truths about myself which are self evident to all onlookers as if these ideas were essential to life itself, when the actual truth is that to be disabused of illusions is a liberation that opens enormous possibility.

Unfortunately, most of these struggles occur below the waterline – deep in the unconscious – with the result that after an awakening, a comeuppance, a satori, a slapped face, I am often flabbergasted that I ever saw, and lived in, such a stilted, crippled world.

In this way, I am so typical, so unextraordinary, so pedestrian. But that takes me back to square one – it’s another variation of the same problem for the ego.

Our definitions of truth and beauty are determined by what we decide to value, and revolves around the need for recognition and validation.

The soul’s deepest need is to be understood.