There are two things I want to share up front. One, I am a little sour, maybe annoyed is a better word, and not in the greatest mood. Second, I want to start this story at the end and not the beginning. I’ve got to start with my innocent attraction to Zen, because it somehow managed to meld my heart and mind. My approach to this story seemed backwards to me from the beginning and I knew it, so here we go.
Over the past couple of years, fact and fiction have seemingly come together, solely to satisfy our innate bias, a kind of self-fulfilling gumbo, making us feel better about ourselves, always able to find justification and credibility, as long as we continue to stir the pot of possibility.
While I am eternally grateful I missed the contagion of mind manipulation during the rise of the Nazis throughout Europe, I can feel its breath on my neck. All of us are incredibly vulnerable regarding our feelings, effortlessly crowding out the facts that may contradict them.
The Big Lie was pure genius, even though it was darker than dark. Being a victim requires the least amount of effort, ceding control to outside forces, while claiming a kind of innocence that is blind. It is a time when feelings take precedence over facts, engendering biases that serve as blinders, seeing only what we want to see.
I know facts have gotten a bad name in recent years, primarily because they keep changing, creating a distrust that is so easily misconstrued as insincerity. I don’t know if the world is simply moving more quickly, or we are struggling to grab information that is actually gestating, ink not even dry. The explosion of social media has created a shotgun of facts, some on target and others, sometimes only a fraction off the mark, but just enough to be sponged up by empathic feelings.
Trust is gone and suspicions reign supreme. There is so much out there, regardless of what you think about anything at all. You will easily find very credible corroboration, enhancing your bravado to insinuate your rightness into any situation imaginable.
Oh my, I nearly forgot to get back to the beginning and why the Buddha crossed between the supposed, non-porous boundaries of beliefs and facts. Believe me, I am no expert, not even close. He talked about change, the kind that is unquantifiable, because it is so fast, the idea of measurement is a joke. Impermanence may be the only truth. Thousands of years later, science has “discovered” what he knew all along. Quantum physics is an effort by the mind to measure what defies measurement, because it can’t be done. In the end, you are stuck with faith in the truth of existence.
I don’t think we are capable of dealing with the incomprehensible, because we have always taken comfort in facts, regardless of the package. What we can’t understand, we relegate to the cellar of misguided truths. We are so reluctant to look in the mirror and see who we are and who we have always been. Thousands of year ago, the Buddha saw who we are and tried to show a way for us to be more than the sum of our parts. I guess you could call it faith, but I don’t mean it in a religious sense at all. It’s like you are given a choice of what to believe, hopefully, the mind finding harmony with the heart.
There was a time, when we all fell in love with mind and its capabilities. I suppose you could say there was a naïveté about it all. There was a comfort in knowing how and why, a mental love affair. Facts became very powerful and our belief in them was unwavering. Walter Cronkite was even the most trusted person in the world; if he said it, it was true.
I am pretty gullible and easily the butt of a joke, because my first reaction is to believe what I am told, because why would someone lie to me? There were mad men, long before Mad Men. Who knows when the first person realized you could twist the facts to get someone to believe what you want. It was certainly long before advertising came into existence. Before money, it was all about power.
So, while the Buddha is really the end of this story, although historically first, where we are today is actually where this story should have begun. While the concept of the truth has always been kind of tricky, it could probably be removed from the dictionary, because it has become meaningless, just another word manipulation.
Today, we are surrounded by facts, electronically delivered to each of us, based on what we already believe in, a numbing corroboration, entrenching many of us into a deeper and deeper ditch of righteousness.
I have taken great consolation in having no idea what I’ve been doing all along. Nothing has changed. Winning arguments of the mind are worthless without a harmonious heart and that is where trust roots. Feelings and beliefs bring us together, the mind always falling prey to feelings. It has certainly become increasingly difficult for me to find my way and that’s what I actually want to share with you.
Today, you can find an encyclopedia of facts to support most any position about most anything. I guess you have to think about who you are, what kind of person you want to be and how you want to embrace others. Optimism is a bitch to put in your pocket these days. The voice worth listening to is the one that whispers the words of the heart. Who are you? You are who you want to be, it’s that simple, ignoring the noise of manufactured facts.
I work at being Larry, even though, half the time, it feels like I’m running after him, tackling facts that clutter my path, getting in the way of who I have always been.