Suppose you discovered something that makes all of life worthwhile. Something that makes all suffering bearable. How would you go about spreading this knowledge? Where would you even start. Suppose you “saw the light” one day. How did you get there? “I don’t know, it all just started to make sense.” That’s kinda how most of life goes. Stuff happens and then (after a lot of suffering usually) there’s a Aha!-moment. And you’re then wondering how you didn’t see it all this time. Why did it take so long to click? Wouldn’t anyone have been able to make you see this sooner? You mean: Before you were ready? I think not. That’s not how it works. Carl Rogers didn’t think so. John Cleese doesn’t either. Understanding something requires a mental leap to a new place in your mind. But you can’t make the leap before the new place has crystallized. So how do you teach anyone? You can’t force learning upon anyone else. You can only hand them building blocks. You can’t make them see the point. You can only tell them to take a look at what you’ve looked at on your personal journey. You’ll then have to leave it to them to go look (Most of the time we don’t go look at the source. We go by hearsay.). They’ll have to think for themselves. They’ll have to distinguish between good and bad ideas. And boy are there a lot of bad ideas out there. It doesn’t help much that bad ideas are such compelling life-fillers.
Suppose you wanted to prevent people from finding happiness. How would you go about it? You’d want to fill their lives with as much undirected activity as possible. A healthy person sets their own goals and pursues them. An unhealthy person is incapable of setting goals or sets the wrong ones or is unable to pursue them. How would you derail a person? By inverting that which is good, true and healthy about them. Even better, by letting them do that to themselves, that would be ideal. And one way to do that is by teaching them that the truth is something to be upset about, and a lie something to be glad about. In essence, you tell them that they are unable to judge for themselves, that their point of view is wrong. That there is such a thing as objectivity and that it lies outside their own capacity to judge. Once you’ve inverted their inner world, they’ll waste most of their productive time on things that if they had been healthy wouldn’t be important to them. But they’ve forgotten the truth of their own existence.
The truth cannot be erased. It can only be distorted. Distortions kick up a lot of dust. People then spend their lives kicking up more dust. If you let the dust settle, however, you’ll see that the truth was always there. It’s right there, in front of you. Hidden in plain sight. And most importantly, the truth doesn’t hurt. You’ve been conditioned to think that it does. But it doesn’t. It’s the lie that hurts, it’s the truth that merely exposes the lie. Your leg was already broken, my telling you isn’t the cause of the pain.
How do we free ourselves? Look at what you were trained to get upset, angry or indignant about and you’ll find things to rejoice at because you can finally let them go. Look at things you were conditioned to be ecstatic about and you’ll know what is wrong with the world and you can let them go. Exit the funhouse, step away from the distorting mirror. And don’t panic when the dust settles and things seem to get very empty. When the frenzied activity drops away, that’s not meaninglessness. That emptiness is also called “space” or “room to breathe”. It’s the place where peace of mind is found. Hold the space, don’t fill it. There’s no need to. The truth is right there, in that emptiness. Some people pay good money for meditation retreats in the hope of clearing their mind. And here you are, panicking because you were trained to fear the space that opens up when you let go of falsehoods. There’s no need to fill it up. That emptiness is truth. It doesn’t need bells or whistles, it doesn’t need to shout to be heard or grabbed and put into service for anything. Here you were, searching for truth, and you find emptiness. What a shock. But here’s the thing: Light is not the opposite of darkness, it’s absence of darkness. When all the lies drop away, that’s not where you find “meaning” or “fulfillment” or any other label you’ve been looking for. You can let go of labels, or your need to search for them. You find that you don’t need them. Truth is not the opposite of lies, it’s their absence. The lie can never make truth disappear, any more than a drop of ink can drain the ocean.