Sometimes we discover a terrible truth.
Sometimes we feel justified to treat somebody harshly, yet afterwards we may discover these justifications were wrong, and so we learn a terrible truth. This truth completely eliminates any rational reason or justification for our actions and we have to admit we acted terribly.
If you are brave enough to understand ‘the end of all things’, it is such a terrible truth that the only response is what we call ‘the cosmic joke’ – it is kind of funny, perhaps as the only way to deal with a terrible truth that reduces everything we thought we knew, to utter meaninglessness.
You see, our problem is that we think ‘things’ are real. It is not really our fault. We cannot know that ‘realness’ only arises through the act of perception, and is not a quality that is intrinsic to our world. We get a sense of something being real when our mind creates an ‘object’ out of what it senses. Our mind finds patterns within our sense fields based on previous learning. Remember as a child we even had to learn the names of colours, and it was only when we ‘got the names’ could we label this thing red or that thing blue. These labels are necessary before we can invoke ‘the red car’ or ‘blue pencil’. Likewise ‘car’ and ‘pencil’ are more labels that are necessary before our minds can know what they are looking at.
When our minds create an object they simultaneously create the ‘subject’, that which perceives the object. This is what creates our sense of reality. We know this happened because it was perceived by ourselves. Think about things we don’t believe, we often say ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’. Those that believe in ghosts or the supernatural often do so because ‘something happened’ and they personally had an experience.
If reading this is making you uncomfortable then it means that you are starting, on the deepest level to recognise that you might be approaching a terrible truth. Only proceed if your curiosity is strong enough, this certainly isn’t for everybody.
We fall into a hypnotic delusion once we become addicted to knowing things. You see, we tend to think ‘things’ are real. We cannot know that it is our minds that makes them real, just after we have constructed them out of labels. Our labels are arbitrary. This is why we fight each other over definitions. One person sees their thing, which seems real, yet another sees what appears as a different thing, also seeming real. We cannot recognise we are dreamers arguing about separate dreams. We all think it is the same dream and get frustrated, angry and even hostile when others tell us our dream isn’t the same as theirs.
Are you feeling the terrible truth yet?
Things are not real, but the mind makes them real. Objects, events, places, even actions that we label and arise as ‘things’ are merely labels, that our mind, through the act of perception, brings into reality. We can become really entangled and suffer greatly until we recognise this.
And when we do recognise this, we awaken. We might awaken with some disorientation; our very foundation of being is now meaningless. We cannot grasp any more onto what we recognise as ‘just our labels’ and we become like children once again. We have lost our blind faith in the basic building block of cognition – the thing – this doesn’t mean we cease to think, but we no longer take our thinking seriously. We become confident in our uncertainty; with no desire whatsoever to regain it. We become kind and understanding to others, who we recognise still think things are real.
We become liberated.
