Right vs. Truth

[trenton]

I am seeking clarity on this distinction.  One source of fear is the discomfort created by the possibility that everything we think is true is wrong.  Comfort is created when we think we are right.  That is we think our beliefs correspond to truth.  The problem is the nagging possibility that we are wrong which puts us in a hard spot when being right does not lead to knowing.

Letting go of my idea that I am right leads to not knowing and a weird shift in awareness.  My mind becomes quieter, but I don't see much Beyond that.  I don't think my mind can understand truth if it is converted into a belief leading to the idea of an idea being right.  Everything I type here feels right.

This is hard.  How would you distinguish right and truth?  How do you seek truth instead of being right?  What is the difference in method?  I feel like thinking does not work if my thoughts feel right.

[Lenny]

@trenton

I will try and answer your questions  

1. How would you distinguish right and truth?

Being right takes a positionality, e.g. there needs to be a perspective. Imagine a scenario where a tree falls in the forest and two people are watching it fall. The person looking at it from one direction says: "the tree fell left, this is my truth", the other person says: "the tree fell right, this is my truth".

The "truth" they are referring to is their "right", which is not the real truth. 

A "closer" truth could be the statement: "a tree fell". A closer truth to this is one that includes all perspectives and therefore does not have any perspective. The truth is that nothing happened and everything happened.

When you become enlightened you almost automatically discover truth. The truth that does not need a positionality/perspective.

2. How do you seek truth instead of being right?

You do not know what truth is, therefore, you don't know the direction that you need to go to find it. Even if you have found it you would not know what it looks like. So, if you try and be "right" you will not find truth. Understand that Truth is there before you were right. So, try to see what is already here.

3. What is the difference in method?

Being right comes from you. From your position/perspective. Truth is you. You are Truth. 

A method you could use: try and be ok both knowing and not knowing. Try and see how your life unfolds with an openness that allows for all positionalities and none. Allow yours and the positionalities of others, even animals, even trees, even atoms. What is the perspective of an atom? Of a white blood cell in your eye right now? You can get creative with this process and maybe even meditate on it.

Personally, I found that self enquiry helped a lot. 

Sit down one time and try to discover what truth is. Use your attention to look at the silence and wait for the truth to reveal itself to you. Then watch yourself trying to find what truth is. Can you catch yourself trying to find truth? When you catch yourself trying to find truth, are you the catcher or the one who gets caught?

This is a little fuel for potentially bringing on an enlightenment experience. You may find that you get a strong sensation or a feeling of tightening between your eyebrows (almost like when you are doing the action of being extremely confused but there is just blank). It may start as a confusion and then an emptiness or silence prevails. If you run into some trouble let me know and I will try and help.

I hope that this helps and sorry if some of my response is a little unclear or confusing.

Good luck dude  

Lenny

[trenton]

@Lenny you have a lot of good pointers so far.  One thing that baffles me is the perspective of an inanimate object.  I tend to assume that they don't have emotions, thoughts, opinions or anything like what I would think makes a perspective.  If it is not conceptual it seems that they have no perspective and just do what they do.  I appear to be stuck in the human perspective of what a perspective is.  You have given a pretty helpful response so far.

[Jacobsrw]

On 12/06/2020 at 0:13 PM, trenton said:

I am seeking clarity on this distinction.  One source of fear is the discomfort created by the possibility that everything we think is true is wrong.  Comfort is created when we think we are right.  That is we think our beliefs correspond to truth.  The problem is the nagging possibility that we are wrong which puts us in a hard spot when being right does not lead to knowing.

Letting go of my idea that I am right leads to not knowing and a weird shift in awareness.  My mind becomes quieter, but I don't see much Beyond that.  I don't think my mind can understand truth if it is converted into a belief leading to the idea of an idea being right.  Everything I type here feels right.

This is hard.  How would you distinguish right and truth?  How do you seek truth instead of being right?  What is the difference in method?  I feel like thinking does not work if my thoughts feel right.

Right and truth is beyond the self. Anything that empowers or aggrandises the self is pretty much illusion. Why? Becomes the self is solemnly predicted on survival not truth. 

I’ll tell you this, for me when I had a deep realisation sometime back I was shown the very opposite to what I thought was right. My self dissolved and the realisation arose almost as if I was the empty spectator to it. It’s very hard to explain, but real deep realisation and truth perse, goes far beyond the self.

Watch yourself like a hawk. When you get the urge to agree or make arguments to support or refute something this is often delusion. Truth and realisation is independent of the self. When you truly realise the truth of something you will feel no need to defend it because what ever you do it still remains unaffected.

Also, right and wrong are a duality. Truth of existence surpasses both of them.

Edited June 14, 2020 by Jacobsrw

[PlasmicProjection]

On 6/11/2020 at 9:13 PM, trenton said:

I am seeking clarity on this distinction.  One source of fear is the discomfort created by the possibility that everything we think is true is wrong.  Comfort is created when we think we are right.  That is we think our beliefs correspond to truth.  The problem is the nagging possibility that we are wrong which puts us in a hard spot when being right does not lead to knowing.

Letting go of my idea that I am right leads to not knowing and a weird shift in awareness.  My mind becomes quieter, but I don't see much Beyond that.  I don't think my mind can understand truth if it is converted into a belief leading to the idea of an idea being right.  Everything I type here feels right.

This is hard.  How would you distinguish right and truth?  How do you seek truth instead of being right?  What is the difference in method?  I feel like thinking does not work if my thoughts feel right.

I don't really know what you mean by "everything we think is true." I mean do you mean us here at actualized or humans in general, or what Leo talks about?

I think perhaps your thinking of this in a inefficient way. IMO there are two types of truth. There is individual truths such as my favorite color is blue, and I choose to believe universalism. Then there is The Truth with a capital T. The truth is true whether you believe it or not. Such as the earth evolves around the sun, the sun emits photons, I live in the USA, etc.

Now you may have heard Leo use the term the map isn't the territory. Well it could be said that my truth would be the map. But the The Truth would be considered the territory. You shouldn't confuse the two.

It's OK to embrace uncertainty and mystery in your spiritual growth. Don't think that you have to be "right." That is perfectly fine and normal. All you can ultimately do is hold on to the beliefs and truths you have now then as you grow  replace them when new and better ones that come along. Pure awarness is almost something else completely. You can certainly use imagines and your inner and outer voice to change the way you think.

One of the ways to align your truths with The Truth is to study and believe what is real and true. Use the scientific method as much as you can in discovering the truth. TED talks are great. Leo is good, but I've learned some very interesting things about what motivates us and the power of persuasion through these talks.

Also related to what your talking about I think is why TED talks don't change us. You may want to look into that.

[EnlightenmentBlog]

On 12.06.2020 г. at 5:13 AM, trenton said:

How would you distinguish right and truth?  How do you seek truth instead of being right?  What is the difference in method?

Absolute Openmindedness. Exploring a lot of perspectives.

[allislove]

@trenton great insights 

Always trust your feeling - that's how you can distinguish right vs truth.

Also, make sure you understand the difference between relative truth vs absolute truth.

Godspeed ?

 

[Lenny]

@trenton

On 14/06/2020 at 10:40 AM, trenton said:

@Lenny you have a lot of good pointers so far.  One thing that baffles me is the perspective of an inanimate object.  I tend to assume that they don't have emotions, thoughts, opinions or anything like what I would think makes a perspective.  If it is not conceptual it seems that they have no perspective and just do what they do.  I appear to be stuck in the human perspective of what a perspective is.  You have given a pretty helpful response so far.

I think we should approach this in another way because, what if your perspective is correct? And we might be "tricking" ourselves "out of" Truth. What if your perspective is True? We wouldn't want to then try to change it just because it doesn't seem right. The Truth, when it is exposed, may be very radical and therefore, it might not feel good. Different from this, it might not even register in our awareness  (as humans, we might not have the necessary sense organs to detect Truth) so we don't want to dismiss things that are right in front of our nose either. 

So, we don't want to give validity to this idea of being "stuck" in a human perspective of what perspective is. Because, we don't know what Truth is yet. What if human perspective on it was the True perspective?

So, we don't want to adopt any belief system about what Truth is because it might be taking us further away from it.

Let's find something here and now that enables the perspective and beliefs to arise in the first place. Can we go to before the perspective or belief arises and see what is there?

For the idea about inanimate objects: inanimate objects are not separate from you. You are Truth. You are reality. And so it that rock. 

How many different parts of you "think"? Here when I say "you" I mean your body & mind. How many parts of your mind engages in thinking? A few? Or just one part? Does your heart have thoughts separate from "you"?

I don't know if a rock can think or have feelings. Just like I don't know if my heart can think or have feelings by itself. But, I can also not prove that I am not that rock. I cannot prove that my existence is independent of that rock.

I'm sorry if I went off-track here a bit lol I hope my response helped.

Lenny

[trenton]

@Lenny this is a problem that comes up for me a lot on this site.  It becomes hard not to create beliefs about what is true and I feel like it creates a delusional affect where really I don't know what is true.  I think this can really interfere with my efforts to seeking truth.  I don't want to create beliefs about nonduality that prevent me from knowing for sure if it is true or just a story the mind could spin.  Maybe this is a cause for me to not spend too much time on this site.

After my own contemplating I questioned how do I know inanimate objects don't have feelings.  I can compare a curtain to cat and see a clear difference.  The cat purrs and hisses while the curtain only changes shape when acted upon by a person folding it for example.  It appears to have no judgement, but unless I am the curtain, I can't tell for sure if it has feelings or not.  I assume it has no perspective because of the initial comparison between inanimate objects and animals.  I want to be careful not to change my beliefs just because it seems wrong.

As for thinking, an example of a body part being unable to think on its own would be a dead person.  The body may still have living cells, but the body becomes like a curtain that just sits there until a creature moves it.  I feel like there is a voice in my head, and I have a hard time hearing a voice in my feet or hands which suggests that thoughts come from my brain.  My body is connected to my mind because I think of words to type and my fingers move accordingly.  The movements of the body are learned because I practiced typing and I do not consciously think "I will move this finger to this letter then the space bar.". My mind might associate these words with letters which are associated with particular positions on the keyboard which then causes me to automatically move my fingers in this way.  Maybe this is a simplified thinking process of my brain which I associate with these movements allowing my fingers to do this quickly just like tying my shoes.

The voice in my head can be acted upon if I cause it to say "I am a rainbow butterfly with 17 wings who likes to tap dance on a pot of gold.". This suggests that the voice is the thoughts and beliefs but I am manipulating what they say.  My thoughts are also habitual just like my finger movements.  If I have the same thoughts all the time, then I am on auto pilot because my behavior never changes.  In order to know what is doing the thinking, I would want to see what is prior to the thought.  When I try my mind silences and I do nothing.  I then find nothing prior to the thought.  The thing which thinks my thoughts is that which causes this body and mind to do things when acted upon.  I might be the brain doing all of this, but I would need to see my brain and perform surgery on myself while conscious in order to make sure I am the brain thinking.

I did my best with my contemplation.  I don't know how to define progress in the context of truth.

[Lenny]

@trenton Have your ever heard of the saying "You cannot know Truth, you can only be Truth"?

The way I see it, it would be imposible for us to understand all of reality on a conceptual level (because reality {that which we can also called Truth} is not a concept), I might be wrong. But it makes sense that that which is the basis of "me" (reality/truth) cannot be known in its entirety by me as the conceptual mind.

Aslo, I wanted to clarify, when you say "Truth" what do you mean? What is your definition of the word?

Lenny

[ArchangelG]

On 2020-06-12 at 4:13 AM, trenton said:

I am seeking clarity on this distinction.  One source of fear is the discomfort created by the possibility that everything we think is true is wrong.  Comfort is created when we think we are right.  That is we think our beliefs correspond to truth.  The problem is the nagging possibility that we are wrong which puts us in a hard spot when being right does not lead to knowing.

Letting go of my idea that I am right leads to not knowing and a weird shift in awareness.  My mind becomes quieter, but I don't see much Beyond that.  I don't think my mind can understand truth if it is converted into a belief leading to the idea of an idea being right.  Everything I type here feels right.

This is hard.  How would you distinguish right and truth?  How do you seek truth instead of being right?  What is the difference in method?  I feel like thinking does not work if my thoughts feel right.

First you'd probably wanna make the distinction between relative truth and absolute truth.

Relative truth and right is the same thing, at leastin my mind. For example 1+1=2, the grass is green, the capital of the US is Washington DC, and so on.

The absolute truth is something completely different, and has nothing to do with knowledge. It's basically a state of not knowing.

 

[Lenny]

@ArchangelG Good point  I didn't even think about this very important distinction and how important it could be.

[trenton]

@Lenny ArchangelG summed it up pretty well.  I see how humans operate under different belief systems and it can lead to killing each other because from our point of view our ideas are true.  When talking about truth it means something outside of any particular belief system labeled true.  In this sense the truth transcends the labels true and false which leads to not knowing.  I have done more self reflection and contemplation, but I have a hard time telling when I actually understand truth.

  I also notice that it is easy to convert not knowing into being right where there are true beliefs about truth which isolates me from further understanding.  The distinction is important because it is easy to fall back into the default way of thinking due to interpretation about what is experienced.  I also need to watch carefully for my mind holding itself back in this way.  In this way maybe truth is the experience of not knowing and right is everything else outside of experience and is completely conceptual.

I don't know how to tell when I am being the truth because that would be my not knowing.