Truths are not truths to you unless…
by Jennifer ·
Truths are not truths to you unless you realize them within yourself. Without realization, they are just ideas. For spiritual perception, spiritual consciousness, lies not in vague theological ideas, but in the acquisition of Self-realization.
We have long been taught that the truth will set us free, and that seeking the truth is a worthy goal. What if there is no absolute truth? What if there are just degrees of truth (or lies) that we tell ourselves? What if, as some insightful, anonymous person once purported, “People tell themselves stories, and then pour their lives into the stories they tell”?
Meaning is created in life. Neutral events are made subjective by interpreting them through the lens of perception. “Truth” is merely a product of perceptions; perceptions are colored by experience, which is then filtered through the current state of mind and altered even further. By the time the neutral event is processed in this manner, it is little more truth than fiction. Yet personal truth is accepted wholeheartedly.
In an excellent discussion on being wrong, Kathryn Schulz states, “The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is. It’s that you can see the world as it isn’t.” The point of her talk is that we are often not only wrong, but completely unaware of it. She grasps the idea that reality is filtered through perceptions and biases; and that it comes out the other side distorted but believed to be truth.
Now, if you are willing to suspend your truth for a moment, and to even momentarily accept that much of what you believe may only be your version of the truth; or that what you believe is not the absolute truth, you may wonder how this is helpful to your state of mind. After all, this is Psychology Today. Posts here are designed to help people, not discourage them. Despite an initially discouraging reaction to finding you are not as in touch with truth as you had believed, the benefit to this understanding is substantial. First, when you can apply it to daily personal interactions that have heightened emotion, you can slow down the reaction by understanding you and the other individual are simply buying into your truths about the situation. This can diffuse the tension.
For example, in her TED discussion, Schulz describes what she calls “a series of unfortunate assumptions.” The first occurs when someone disagrees; it is assumed they are just ignorant of the facts. The solution is then simple, the facts just need to be presented, and the conflict will be resolved. Everyone can relate to this. Unfortunately, we are often stunned when that doesn’t work and the person continues to disagree with us. Often this results in repeating the “facts” in a different way, hoping the person will then understand.
This leads to Schulz’s second unfortunate assumption, that the individual must be an idiot; now they have the pieces to the puzzle, “but they are two moronic to put them together correctly.” When we realize that the other has all of the same facts and they aren’t idiots, we resort to the third assumption, that they are evil. She humorously says, “they know the truth, but they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes.” These assumptions are detrimental to improving personal relations. So in this way, understanding that a particular version of the truth is not the only one (and that other versions exist) can be very helpful to interpersonal relations.
Understanding personal perception may be flawed allows one to question thinking. Questioning thinking can be helpful by realizing events are neutral; then neutral events are provided personal meaning. With this knowledge one can question why a certain meaning was given. For example, when things do not work out as planned, questioning the given meaning allows that a mistake was made in interpreting the events. This is certainly better than believing that one somehow screwed up destiny.
