YEARS ago, in a psychology seminar, I was asked: What are the next three numbers in the following set: minus-2… 0… 2…? — and, the instructions went, work out the rule behind the sequence, test your hypothesis by suggesting a few sets of numbers, then tell us when you’ve got it.
Our lecturer said she’d tell me whether I was right or wrong, then let me know when I’d worked out the rule correctly.
Me (thinking, ‘this is sooo beneath me’): “4… 6… 8?”
Correct.
Me (remembering where I am, and suspecting a trick): “8… 10… 12?”
Correct.
Me (gaining confidence): “20… 22… 24?”
Correct.
“Ahhm… it's an ascending sequence of three even numbers?”
Wrong.
Me: “Add two each time?”
Wrong.
Me (losing it…): “There’s got to be a negative number?”
No. Wrong.
Ummm… wrong?
I gave up. The rule was simple, simpler than I’d been prepared to think. It was: any succession of ascending numbers. They didn’t have to be even numbers; there could be any gap between them and there didn’t have to be three of them.
Once I’d fixed the idea of twos and even numbers in my head, in sets of three, I hadn't thought of challenging my assumption to see whether I might be wrong; my rule described what I heard. I’d let my mind blank out other possibilities. Once I’d seen a pattern, I’d locked in, stuck with it and the more affirmation I got, the more confident I got. And my dread of smart-ass little tests like this, especially when they’re sprung on me out of the blue, encouraged me to cling to what I’d thought was my way out. To then be told I was wrong in front of the class… well, that pissed me off, to be honest.
Most of us fall into the same trap… try it out on someone.
The topic of that seminar was stereotyping. And, by the time it was over, I’d been persuaded that the stereotypes I’d formed about other people had nothing to do with other people… like my leap to end the sequence puzzle, they were my untested assumptions, all mine, and they were dangerous.
BUT it’s far bigger than that. Our culture has fanned innate inclinations to see patterns, seek order and attach ourselves to predictability wherever we think we see it; we crave predictability, we are easily bilked by fortune tellers and betting “systems”, and the simple logic of cause and effect suits us very nicely. As a species, we’ve spent most of our relatively short history as hunter-gatherers, depending on regularly cycling seasons and the predictable habits and habitats of prey. We’ve inhabited a food chain in which indecision can be fatal.
It was a way of life, relying on a few perceptual skills, quick reactions, teamwork and sharp weapons, together with a bit of luck, that’s left us too impatient for results, overly eager for immediate answers, too quick to conform and too easily led into simplified two-dimensional worlds of false dichotomies and persuasively closed categories. And we get pissed off far too easily when things don’t meet our expectations.
We define categories by their apparent boundaries, forgetting that the boundaries are our inventions… the reality is that, far more than categories, the world we know is typically composed of continuities and their interconnections. Reality’s not a production line; it’s more like a weaving-in-progress.
Few categories have unbreached boundaries; almost all are blurred. Despite its having tried, biology has produced no boundary markers for race. “Race” is an illusion… a false category made of sloppy thought and careless stereotyping. There is sexual differentiation but there’s no gender “gap” either. Sexual differentiation is a physiological continuum. Species are nowhere near as clearly defined as once they were thought to be. For various reasons, medical diagnoses (and the prognoses based on them, of course) are notoriously unreliable. The closer we look at the world we think we know, the fewer boundaries we find and, blunder by blunder, we come to see that “clear” differences are usually mistaken, culturally discerned and constructed, and exaggerated.
Then, when we go looking for enduring certainty and solid permanence, we discover that everything is in motion. The seasons cycle, we age and die, new lives begin, our cultures come and go, new ideas replace old ones, species and empires rise and then vanish. Our little blue planet — with its history of climatic, magnetic and atmospheric variability — rotates daily as it circles around the sun at a speed of 30 kilometres a second. And the sun, in turn, is traveling at more than 15 kilometres a second around the centre of the Milky Way, carrying us with it. Our Milky Way galaxy is, at the same time, moving at a speed of around 600 kilometres per second against the background radiation of the expanding universe. Where it’s headed, nobody really knows
Meanwhile, back on Earth, tectonic plates are shifting, bumping and grinding into each other, at average speeds of between two and ten centimetres a year, inexorably changing the shapes and elevations of continents and islands… all of our cities, towns and creations will one day be erased: their ruins sunken under oceans and subductions of the Earth’s crust, or heaved and broken upwards to form mountain ranges.
And, when we turn to cause and effect for consolation, we discover that a cause usually involves coincidences of many circumstances, each with its own sets of causes, while an “effect” embraces a range of outcomes, some bad, some good.
There are no stationary points… and we are fleeting. Even our sun, five billion years old, is expected to burn out in another five billion years but, long before then, it is certain that humans will have vanished from the Earth.
So where, amongst all of the continuities, undivided measures and constant motion that reality provides, not to mention the assurance of extinction, do we locate ourselves, and find our own being? Our own being is our entire universe because we exist only to the extent that we allow ourselves to. To fully exist, we need to discover and explore of our own existential truth… all of it, if we can.
There’s no one single truth statement: even if its essence was reducible to one single little word, where would you find two “selfs” who’d understand it the same way? Truth is a river, a flow… a dynamic that resolves, not in one time or place, but everywhere, at all times and forever. It is both closer and further away than our “good sense” allows. Does it exist? Of course it does. Can I tell you what it is? Only truth itself can do that.
We find “our” truth in the gap that lies between who we are and what we experience. We are engaged, like it or not, in an exchange of life for experience. That process of exchange is the “eternal” truth. That’s the deal. And, ultimately, we do it alone. If that’s frightening to you, you haven’t understood. It’s what we’ve each been born to.
My wife is my dearest, most closely known reality: my closest companion and my most preoccupying, most complex, best known and certainly most deeply loved realm of reality — but I can not know for sure what even she experiences as real, nor can I experience it in the same way, no matter how close we are. And, no matter how much we share or how deeply, our real worlds remain uniquely our own. None of us comes to be fully known by another person, nor any other person by us.
We’re all inclined to take a tour bus approach to our “selves”: a bit of affirmation-seeking sightseeing by day, followed by some familiar food and a cosy bed at night… we know what we like. But affirmation tells me nothing: affirmation is how pet take over people’s lives. The comfort of affirmation anaesthetises me against reality; it helps to dig me deeper into whatever holes of ego-absorption I’ve fallen into… 2, 4, 6, 8… perhaps it’s time to hesitate?
My “self” needs to be prodded and pushed into being. So, I TRY to read a proportion of books that contradict my thinking or lie on the edges of my interests. And, as opportunities come along, I love to plunge into unfamiliar experiences, places, cultures, food, music, ideas… I do all I can to stoke the flames of my curiosity: to me, curiosity is a moral imperative.
Without curiosity, I can’t imagine being able to achieve the emergence of self that meets and meshes with experience in encounters with truth. And I need those encounters… I think we all do. Truth is our place of liberation… a kind of spiritual release that feels a bit like that last thrust of the plunger that clears the pipe and drains away the gurgling sink-full of tired, grey, dirty dishwater. Then we experience the feeling of filling with freshness and peace and energy.
We know that it’s true because it rings with an unalloyed voice that impels us to strength, purpose and fulfillment; it’s a new day and we’re not entirely sure why, but with feel in love with life… and we somehow are made to know we're worthwhile in ways that don’t forever sniff after us for affirmation. We sense a blossoming being released through us, a fitness of intention and effort, an awareness of meaning.
To have traction on life’s journey, it’s essential to have some guiding principle in mind, some sense of quest, a vision. That’s what our “truth” enables. That’s what it’s for.
To experience our truth is to become woven into the one certainty we can lean on for reassurance: that all of the majestic motion around us is what brought us into being. It fills us with the curiosity to learn about its workings, and rewards that curiosity with apprehensions of beauty and awe that become growing points... like buds after winter.
So how do we reach that point of realisation?
That it’s to be expected doesn’t stop most us from spending an awful lot of a lifetime making mistakes of one sort or another. So it’s not a good idea to patter along, puppy-like, after somebody else because, from where you are, you’ll have no way of knowing whether that other person is making a mistake or a discovery. Similarly, we don’t arrive at our truth by reading holy books or self-help guides, anymore than we understand the differences between, say, Marakesh and Kobe by reading travel guides. It’s not a “head” thing, or an information thing. It has to be lived. The travel guides can certainly help… but it’s being there that changes your life.
And, because the way we “are” is of such consequence to other people, we have an absolute responsibility to undertake the journey.
All I can offer is an observation: in the case of my own journey, I have found the most present, most steadfast and most usefully communicative beacon to be beauty. And I have always found my way into its beam by following my curiosity.
Truth is the source of beauty’s light, the light itself, and all that the light illumines.
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