I Will Find Where Truth Is Hid, Though it Were Hid Indeed Within the Centre.

Anger arises...or hatred...or loving feelings. These emotions may seem connected to a story, to owning the story...but it's possible to feel something and just not poke it with a "why" stick. No one feels it; it's not so far removed; the anger simply is. This goes for every apparent emotion, feeling, intuition, thought, sensation. There it is. It is.

Sometimes the story unfolds, and the identity seems the most important thing. Who we are, our point of view, our role, our very being and existence as manifested by a body and a mind and thoughts and feelings and actions, seems the most important thing - perhaps the only thing. It can seem important to get to know one's own persona, the truth of it, the bare essential bones of it, uninterfered with by the comforting stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. It gets confusing. Surely those stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are an important part of our conditioning, part of the self-hypnosis that effects our essential reality? Surely it's impossible to disentangle all the stories, impressions, transference and projecting? Know yourself, some preach. Your persona is not important, preach others. Disenchanted with this conflicting advice, we try to develop our intuition, so as to know the right action to take, the right thing to do, the right way to feel, the right things to think, the right way to perceive reality - the TRUTH. We seek the unadorned truth of existence. We seek to strip away all filters of perception. We seek the fundamental answer to the fundamental question. The question: Why? Why me, why this, why anything? The answer: because it is.

The mind is a tricky, wondrous thing; perhaps it isn't the only thing, perhaps it isn't the be-all and end-all. Perhaps figuring things out isn't possible; in duality, the essential quality of manifested reality, co-existing mutually exclusive concepts are the norm. The mind can't fathom such chaos. But perhaps, if we stop trying, the truth is revealed. Maybe the truth is simply that it all exists, in an apparent motley jumble, full of hope and tragedy, comedy and despair, having and wanting, just as it does, in exactly the way it must. This could be labeled acceptance; but there doesn't even need to be something so far removed. What if there is no one that needs to accept? What if the identity, with its judgments and labeling, is simply an illusory, albeit it interesting, extra added bonus? Here we are, struggling or not, living life, coping, dying, praying, succeeding, trying to ease the burden of others, or retracted into a temporary perceived enclave of relative safety. We have been doing it right all along.


This clip is one from Lumet's The Verdict, my favourite performance by Paul Newman. As I stated above, here we are, living life, coping, dying...yet I find it hard to believe that Mr. Newman has died. He is my absolute favourite - and here's the conditioning behind it: he reminds me of my grandpa, who is 90 and looks after himself, bowls, fishes, keeps house, has all his marbles...despite having already died, at least conceptually, I find the hope arising that I've inherited his genes! The scene is the character Frank Gavin's summation, after a sticky trial taking a hospital to task for covering up a bad anaesthesia decision. Gavin was a washed-up alcoholic ambulance chaser before this case, and finds himself reborn in fighting for the comatose patient's family. A tour-de-force, and it almost makes me want to have such a concrete philosophy of life. We all seek truth. Enjoy.