Just a short post to note that I’ve been thinking alot about truth lately, especially in light of a message from a friend who mentioned how loaded that word can be. What I think is becoming much more clear is that Truth is not really a thinking/cognitive thing but it’s really a heart thing. The truth is best determined by our hearts. Our hearts can know what’s true, but our heads can only believe what it thinks is true. There may be other forms of truth and confirmation, but so far, in all this pondering and writing, I find it’s the only thing I can really believe in.
I’m leaving for a trip to visit my father for Thanksgiving. Haven’t seen him for 4 years. Working hard to dispose of pre-suppositions / beliefs / structures so I can just let our relationship be whatever it is in the moment, rather than having it be tinged with past disappointments and frustrations.
Oh, and I also want to write briefly on the fact that “I Don’t Know.” Spent the day with my good friend Tom last weekend and noticed how I had know idea what was going to happen in 10 seconds. That’s really the truth of life, that we don’t know. Interesting that perhaps that’s really the only truth in this life – that we don’t know. We don’t really know anything, anything, yet we go through life believing that we know so much. There is still that realm of the heart that I believe has an innate intelligence which I’m sure I’ll flush out in future posts.
Pay attention to your heart (rather than your head) and it’s capacity to believe and to know. I’ll be curious about your experience too.
Don Juan wrote:
Every warrior on the path of knowledge thinks, at one time or another, that hes learning sorcery, but all he’s doing is allowing himself to be convinced of the power hidden in his being, and that he can reach it.
2 replies on “The Heart’s role in Truth and “I Don’t Know””
So I read a few of those Carlos Castaneda books in college and after. And they did a lot for me – opened me up to a lot of new ideas and possibilities. And there’s a lot of those Don Juan teachings at the heart of my beliefs. My favorite quote was “Nothing tests the spirit of a warrior like dealing with impossible people in positions of power.” And he referred to those people as “tiranitos,” or petty tyrants.Anyway – I recently read that a lot of Castanaeda’s supposed “anthropology” was fiction and before his death, there were some strange goings on around his cult of personality.So I found out that a lot of what I accepted as truth was based mostly on fiction, and sometimes even lies.But the truth in my heart from those books remains despite the lies that my head now recognizes.Good luck with your time with your Father. I look forward to hearing about it. I think I told you my parents have been popping up in my dreams lately. So maybe I need to put some effort in there again. Then again, the Holidays are coming up again, and that doesn’t seem like the best time to do it since that’s the time when things fell apart two years ago.So maybe I’ll wait for Spring.
There’s truth in this somewhere…http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2007/11/30mcglaughlin.htmlHOW TO BE LIKE ME.BY TOM McGLAUGHLIN JR.– – – –Whenever I am asked the question “How can I become like you, Tom?,” I am compelled to confess that this is not a question I get asked very often. If you had asked me instead “How did you get like this?,” I would have been better prepared to answer your question. But regardless of my obvious discomfort with extemporaneous rhetoric, I’m going to let you in on a little secret.My identity is centered around my Sweater-Based Wardrobe. Most people immediately say, “What about the Khaki + Sneakers combination?” But I have to be honest. I don’t think Khaki + Sneakers has anything to do with it.A lot of kids these days are looking for answers. And whether or not they see me as someone who has these answers, they are looking for a role model. And maybe that’s what you’re thinking. And I am someone who successfully manages to have a Sweater-Based Wardrobe, so I am qualified to speak on this. And this wardrobe is a good and important thing to know about. So I am happy to tell them about it, although it’s not easy for me to say this. I sit them down, I give them a cold drink of water, and I say, “Who am I? Who is God? How are we to live?”These are difficult questions for people to ask themselves, and to most kids these questions probably seem like a lot of boring nonsense. But on the answers to these questions rests, young cousin, your entire fate. I first encountered them in a Houghton Mifflin religion textbook we used in grade school. If you are thinking of these questions in the context of the Sweater-Based Wardrobe, you are on the right track. Just write the questions down in your best penmanship, put the loose-leaf pages in a letter-sized file folder, and put the file folder in a box in the basement of your mother’s house.And then forget, at once, about ever answering these questions.Go back to playing video games, listening to adult-contemporary stations on your Walkman, crying, and hiding from people. And start realizing that you will never be able—I mean never really be able—to talk to girls, or anybody, for that matter. If you don’t know what I’m talking about now, just wait for the day to come when you do know what I’m talking about. For on that day you will be on your way to the Sweater-Based Wardrobe lifestyle of your dreams.Life … wonderful, mysterious, and sad. We have a plan for ourselves, and for a few months at a time things seem to work out fine. We’re going to learn and improve, study, grow, and one day instruct ourselves and others. But there’s no fooling Time. Time is the lecturer of truth. And pretty soon you’re back to that Walkman and to those songs that fat women sing to themselves as they’re falling asleep. And pretty soon you, too, are back to crying.What you’re going to find, kid, is that there’s no heaven anywhere. And all of a sudden you’re in the sweater aisle at JCPenney looking for something to go with the baggy pants you wear to work all the time. You’re going to wear the same sweater every day in the winter because it’s warm, and warmth will be the only reliable reality you have. You’re going to have to pull up those pants a lot because of the weight gain, but the sweaters help because they cover things. There will be takeout, Blockbuster nights, and the lifelong ambition for things just to get quiet in your mind.