“Truth is indeed the sweetest taste. Life is the best for one living in wisdom, they say.” – Nikāya Buddha in Sutta Nipāta, Verse 182.
The human capacity for fabricating is extraordinary. Consider this example, from Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. According to one French soldier wounded in the World War I, the war was ‘”… make-believe. It’s not a real war, just an experiment.” If a soldier next to him got wounded, it was just that he injured himself while throwing a grenade. And the flattened houses? “It’s a local custom each year to pay certain communes to put on some real shooting on their land.”
Psychologists have a mass of data showing that we often lie to ourselves to produce less disquiet about the contradictions we have in our experience (‘reducing cognitive dissonance’). If something doesn’t make sense, then tell yourself a story about it.
There are, broadly speaking, two ways to know something – taking a fresh whole-body approach, or through the already finished categories. There is the knowing by feeling into the living situation, and there is knowing conceptually. Also called the intuitive, and the analytic. We need both, but usually our experience is dominated by the activity of representational, analytic part of us.
The logical part, then, is driven to make sense by imposing its categories on experience; and given that the mere existence of the universe doesn’t make sense – it isn’t a logical happening – then one way that we can do that (or that some people can do it) is to invent ‘God the Father.’ (Religious males have been known to assert this with a vehemence. Funny that, heh?)
Buddhists do the same, in their own idealizing way. We take ‘the pure land,’ or ‘nibbana’ as literal places that we can go to after death. Another example of this fabricating is the gambit: “The Buddha said…” Do we truly know what the Buddha said? Of course, not. It’s a story-telling device, meant to convince ourselves and others that we believe comes from the historical Buddha, It, at best, is said to lead the conversation in a positive direction, for the speaker. It is for the speaker, so that she or he feels that their universe makes sense.
So, we are prone by biology and training, to fool ourselves. It takes a dedication to freshly-uncovered truth, to change this; and, to take the species on to another level; a level which includes, but is bigger than, logic.
The universe clearly exceeds sense or logic, if only for the reason that it gives rise to logic. Right? What comes first – natural process or human logic? The intelligent universe gave rise to our reasoning. But, logic can’t contain, limit, or define, the process that gives rise to it. This delusion that conscious thought is super-right about reality, appears to be a left-hemisphere predilection.
“Truth, for [the left hemisphere], is coherence, because for it there is no world beyond, no Other, nothing outside the mind, to correspond with.” That is, it’s enough for our logical thought apparatus that our statements cohere – they don’t have to have consistency with the more-than-logical aspects of human experience; not for thought to be happy.
So, when an ice-addict once said to me: “I can do anything.” He meant, any time, any situation. He was supreme.
Deluded thought – thought which cannot refer to non-conceptual experiencing – is really satisfied with that statement. If the person is unable to listen to their body (that intimate wilderness of primordial and creative belonging), then our thinking can have no other, higher, wider input into our situations. (Remember how I often talk of the zig-zag – the zig-zag between thought and the visceral knowing in the middle of your body?)
Whether I die today, or tomorrow, I vow together with all beings: When I am vigorously defending something, to ask: “Can I be sure?” And, to check in with this open, organic, intuitive bodily intelligence.
In terms of the brain correlates: “The right hemisphere prioritises what it learns from experience: the real state of existing things ‘out there’. For the right hemisphere, truth is not mere coherence, but correspondence with something other than itself. Truth, for it, is understood in the sense of being ‘true’ to something, faithfulness to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves.”
It’s my experience – having made a life out of talking to all kinds of people about experiencing, knowing, being, and loving – that in most people there is an inordinate fear of a non-fabricated universe – a raw, wild universe. To face it is to know we will die; yet, to avoid it is to be plagued with fabricated meanings which shut out our real state of existing.
“But I do not mean only that the right hemisphere starts the process of bringing the world into being. I mean that it does so because it is more in touch with reality, and that it has not just temporal or developmental priority, but ontological supremacy. Whatever the left hemisphere may add – and it adds enormously much – it needs to return what it sees to the world that is grounded by the right hemisphere.”
– Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
That is, we need to zig-zag between thinking and our body, checking that they are each okay with the other.
The lack of this skill accounts in part for the resistance I get when asking people to look into experiencing, to question whether we can really say that things are as they appear to our linguistic habits. Even to question what death is, seems crazy to some.
The Nikāya Buddha’s foremost student Sariputta says: “The difference, friend, between intuitive wisdom (pañña) and discriminative consciousness (viññāṇa) – these states that are conjoined, not disjoined – is this: intuitive wisdom is to be developed, discriminative consciousness is to be fully understood.” MN 43, Mahāvedalla Sutta. Translated by Christopher J. Ash.