One of the curious things about the human mind is it’s seeking to be right. But seeing the world in black and whites of right and wrong automatically pits one against others, even against oneself. We often place our need to be right above everything, even human life.
The news is a litany of who’s wrong. Much of our conversations are dominated by stories and gossip about others in a continual discriminatory judgement of who’s messed up. All in a lame attempt to make ourselves feel right and thus feel in control. Here’s a site that lists several hundred “-isms”, all inherently constructs of the mind, used to divide us from others.
This does not at all mean discrimination is bad. Being able to distinguish one quality from another is quite necessary. For example, I have greying hair and blue eyes, a certain height and some skills and gifts. This is useful to know. But do these distinctions make me better or make them more right than someone else? Not at all. Without other variations, these details would actually be meaningless.
The problem arises when we use these details to make ourselves better than and divide ourselves. Absolutely none of that brings us to the truth.
You will not find the truth in a newspaper or on TV. You will not even find it in an encyclopaedia – that’s just facts. To find the truth, you have to let go of being right and learn to just be.
Truth is what we discover underneath the story of our lives, underneath all those ism’s and variety. It is found in discovering who we really are, the nature of our being and origins.
The only absolute truth is the absolute itself. And even that is relative to our stage of development and resulting perception of it.
Life is a process of discovery and growth. It is radial, not linear. As soon as you start to hold fast to any given position, you stop growing and stagnate. And as we all know, what stagnates, rots. 😉
Davidya
Last Updated on December 8, 2015 by
I think the “need” to be right is hardwired into our brains from our cave dwelling days. If I didn’t pick the right cave to sleep in one rainy night, I might not live to hunt and eat and procreate another day! Being a successful human is mostly a matter of fuller and fuller brain development rather than digging out psychological pathology.
I don’t think we have to learn how to be. We just have to relax about, well, pretty much everything (-:
Hi Share
While I understand your points, I can’t say I’d agree. That simply because that tendency to need to be right falls away over time after we let go of ego identification. Thus, I’d say the need to be right is an effect of that, of the mind trying to control.
And it’s certainly ironic to suggest learning to be. Being isn’t something we do. Yet telling someone to “relax” isn’t effective unless they learn how. But we only become aware of being and thus the ability to favour it when we learn to settle the mind and emotions. So in a sense we learn how to be by learning how to settle doing. Then being reveals itself.