The Unraveling of Untruths

Truth eludes you not because you can't see it but because you don't want to

“Shiv - you have said many times that the “truth is obvious”. In the same breath, you also talk about the ‘spiritual process of discovery’. If the truth is obvious, then what is there to discover? Doesn’t this path of discovery exist precisely because the truth isn’t so obvious to us? Hoping you can shed some light on this conundrum for me…!”

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Spiritual discovery has nothing to do with ‘finding truth’.

Truth IS obvious. But is it acceptable? Is it palatable? Is it desired?

These are the real questions we must ask. For most people, the answer to each of these questions is a resounding NO.

It is this unwillingness to accept the truth for what it is that causes us to willfully obscure it. And so, the path of spiritual discovery is not about finding ‘truth’, but rather about discovering all the ways in which we have learned to deny its existence. In other words, it is the unraveling of untruths. It is the discovery of all the ways we have learned to lie to ourselves.

Our minds have the power to distort the reality we perceive and to present a more psychologically acceptable version of it. A reality that is more personal, more pleasurable, more beneficial, less painful, less harmful, less threatening. And using this power of distortion we construct a network of psychological preferences and biases that we call conditioning. Conditioning is a long-term strategy of the mind which is perpetually changing the rules of the perception game in order to maximize the odds of existence in our favor.

The entire content of your consciousness is a response to conditioning. The thoughts you have, the emotions you feel, the ideas that spark in your brain, the attitudes you hold towards various aspects of your life, your moods, your opinions, your cherished beliefs, your values, your morals, your sense of ethics. At any given time of day, your conditioning is playing an active role in translating the reality you perceive with your senses, back to you in an altered form.

When you look at a tree, all awareness perceives is a wordless experience, but your mind translates this into a thought accompanied by a sentiment, “that’s a beautiful tree.”

Is it?

What is “beauty”? What is “a tree”? Are these foregone conclusions or are these complex interpretations of a much simpler occurrence that your mind has created in order to manufacture a pleasurable experience of living in a world with ‘beautiful trees’.

Or when people hear of some heinous murder on the news, they are quite content to brand the convicted individual as “evil”. The mind feels safer disassociating itself from the likes of such people by creating as much moral and existential distance from them as possible. For, to even entertain the idea, that we might have more in common with such a person than not, is to open up a pandora’s box of cognitive dissonance and psychological crisis.

Our minds are perpetually augmenting and enhancing the reality we perceive. Like an existential photoshop program that can’t be turned off, we have no choice but to highlight what we want to see, fade out what we don’t, magnify the things that we believe to be of significance and minimize what we think to be unimportant. And we do this every minute of every day, from issues of the mundane to those of great importance.

My wife often comments on this uncanny ability I seem to have of stepping over items in the house that ought to be picked up - a scrap piece of paper, a stray sock, a dropped teaspoon etc. She says she will sometimes just leave the item there, even though she means to pick it up, just to see what will happen if she doesn’t. And sure enough, I walk through the room and step right over the item, on my way to wherever it is that I am going.

Reflecting on this phenomenon, I told her that it isn’t that I don’t see the item there. It’s that the item doesn’t register in my brain as something whose existence is of relevance. As a result, it gets faded out in my mind’s eye even as my actual eyes can clearly see it. Which brings me to another aspect of the mind’s conditioning - the hierarchy of priority.

We are conditioned to constantly prioritize the objects, events and people that appear in our lives from moment to moment based on how they make us think, act and feel. Circumstances that produce neutral thoughts, feelings and actions are typically lowest in our priority. These we call “mundane” phenomena. Circumstances that produce negative thoughts, emotions and actions are prioritized urgently because we perceive them as “threats” to our well-being. Circumstances that produce positive thoughts, emotions and actions are prioritized more than mundane events but less urgently than threats (although they are the most important to us) and are seen as “opportunities” to enhance well-being.

We are biologically and socially conditioned to prioritize threats over opportunities because threats typically require immediate action to mitigate, whereas opportunities require more long-term investment and attention. Building a family, a career, a home, a community, a healthy body, financial stability and so on bring a great sense of well-being but require consistent and long-term attention. Infidelity, job loss, a house fire, illness or injury and so on are threats that could single-handedly destroy all that we have worked to build and thus, we are conditioned to respond to these scenarios with much greater urgency.

So, the mind’s conditioning doesn’t just distort the reality we perceive on a horizontal axis of pleasure vs. pain, benefit vs. harm, gain vs. loss etc. But also, on a vertical axis of priority that rates every experience on a scale as an opportunity, a threat or as neutral.

The next time you observe yourself moving about your day, notice how this process of preference and prioritization is always happening in the background on autopilot. Every choice you make as you go about your day is a calculated one. Which seat you occupy on the bus, whether you choose to say “hello” to the cashier today instead of “hi”, how close the parking spot you want is to the store you plan to go to. Notice how the reaction you have to an event is the result of a background analysis your mind has already performed on how to increase the odds of reality working in your favor.

When you react to political news either positively or negatively, you will notice that your reaction is designed to make reality more palatable to you. Whether you are responding with enthusiasm or disgust, in both cases (just as in the examples of the tree and the murderer) you are attempting to create a version of reality which is more congruent with how you believe reality should appear.

Reality in itself is unsensational. We sensationalize it in order for it to mean something.

Trump running for president is on par with an acorn falling from a tree in the grand scheme of things. But to most people, they are not equally significant or desirable events. The acorn falling from the tree would be deemed neutral on the preference axis and of low significance on the priority access. But Trump running for president is likely to skew to either extreme on the preference axis and would be considered an event of high significance almost unanimously by voters on both sides of the political divide, either as a tremendous opportunity or as a monumental threat.

You see, there is no difference between Trump and the acorn. The difference is manufactured by our conditioned minds that seek to place us in a world filled with meaning and gravitas. The more polar the extremes, the more meaning we have the potential to generate.

It is like an electrical circuit in which the potential difference between the positive and negative electrodes determines how powerful a current will flow through the circuit, as per Ohm’s law. If the potential difference between the poles is small or negligible almost no current will flow.

Similarly, if the world you live in is not filled with dichotomies, if you do not perceive opportunities and threats everywhere you look, if there are not at least a few events in your life that demand extreme urgency or attention, then you will find that your life lacks ‘meaning’. If there are no good guys and bad guys, no beneficial and harmful events, no worthy and unworthy goals, no desirable and undesirable choices - then what is your life about? What will the narrative of your story be if there is no basis for a plot? How will there be any depth to your story if there are no character arcs to follow?

Everything you think, feel and do is motivated by one thing and one thing alone - the desire to maximize the significance of your existence. But is your existence any more significant than that of any other being, no matter how small?

Your brain is not designed to perceive reality accurately. It is designed to perceive reality in a way that makes reality seem to favor your existence.

Truth is like that stray sock lying in the path. You DO see it, but you do not register it as significant. What is of far greater significance to you is your mind’s interpretation of what you see.

Spiritual culture tends to romanticize truth as something otherworldly and transcendental. And in the pursuit of this otherworldly and transcendental “truth”, we begin to adopt otherworldly beliefs and transcendental rituals and practices. But this is only more conditioning. More ways in which we seek to maximize pleasure (expansion, oneness, bliss) and prioritize opportunities of well-being (liberation, peace, equanimity).

The reality is that truth is mundane. So staggeringly mundane that it sits at the exact ZERO POINT on both axes, the horizontal and the vertical. It has no polarity and so manifests a zero potential difference between the poles. And thus, can manufacture no current. This is why the truth is fundamentally meaningless. No meaning can be generated from perceiving it directly without adding in some form of distortion.

Do you REALLY want to see truth? Then, simply look. It’s there right in front of you at all times. Front and center. It is not affected by what you think about it, how you prioritize it, how it makes you feel… it just is.

This.

That’s all there is to it. It is so insignificant to the mind that you might find yourself going,

“This? Just ordinary this? Nah, this can’t possibly be it…”

There is nothing to hold on to. Nothing to use. Nothing to benefit from. Neither an opportunity nor a threat of any kind. Just kinda….this.

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Once a young and enthusiastic monk in search of realization visited a well-known Zen master. He asked the master,

“What is the truth’s real face?”

The master replied,

“It can be seen but not shown. You tell me what it is, and I will confirm or deny your answer.”

The monk decided to meditate on it. He returned a month later and said,

“It is bliss.”

The master responded,

“Incomplete. Come back when you have learned more.”

A month later, the monk returned and said,

“It is suffering.”

The master responded,

“Still incomplete. Return when you have discovered more.”

Yet another month passed. The monk returned with a new answer,

“Peace”, to which the master gave the same response.

Month after month, the monk came to the master with a new response - “pleasure”, “pain”, “oneness”, “multiplicity”, “joy”, “grief” and so on. But the master’s response was consistently the same: “Incomplete.”

Eventually, one day the monk didn’t return. A few months passed and the master decided to check in on the monk by visiting his hut in a nearby village. He found the monk in the doorway, sweeping the floor.

“You have not returned with an answer,” said the master. “Have you seen truth’s real face?”

To which the monk shrugged without looking up,

“It is too ordinary to speak of.”

To which the master smiled and nodded. Then turned around and left, never to be seen by the monk again.

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The truth is obvious, but it is too ordinary to speak of. It is too ordinary to accept. It is too ordinary to digest. It leaves you nowhere. No better or worse than you already are. No happier or more miserable. It provides you with absolutely no advantage.

Then, why would you possibly want to see it? What motivation could there be for you to perceive reality in a way that does not enhance the significance of your own existence?

The only reason you believe in the existence of some capital T, “Truth”, is because you have been convinced by others that there is something profound to be gained by realizing it. But that is just more conditioning for your mind to construct its elaborate fantasy.

This is why the spiritual process is not a movement towards truth but an endless unraveling of untruths, one layer at a time. There is no end to the unraveling because there is no such thing as an ‘unconditioned mind’. The mind will always present its version of reality. Yet, the obviousness of truth always simultaneously stares us in the face.

There is an eternal conflict between the images presented to us by the mind’s eye and by our human eyes. And we live in favor of the mind’s images and in denial of what our human eyes can perceive. Yet, gradually through the uncovering of untruths, that balance may shift - where we begin to increasingly mistrust our mind’s versions and place greater faith in that which is clear and present.

This is the spiritual process.

Gradually abandoning the fantastical in favor of what has always been utterly obvious.