On my walk this morning:
– I realised that truth, reality, and illusion, are completely relative and self created
– the truth of a religion is truth for that person, it is made real by the stories that are told, and because each moment is in a way timeless, these truths are eternally real
– yet when truths are examined from different layers, from groups, from societies, from species, from planets, different truths, realities and illusions are illuminated.
– the Truth is in the Whole, which no part within can ever know.
– because each person is defining their views in relation to the views of people around them, and each generation is defining their views in relation to the generations around them, it is possible to miss big chunks of data that haven’t yet been noticed. We repeat cycles of the past without knowing we are doing so. We evolve in a historical setting, often without recognising the evolution. We do not realise that our knowledge of the world and way of being in the world is dependent upon this historical context.
– we have no way to truly relate to different ways of being, eg for a Western person to understand Eastern or Indigenous ways of being in the world is very difficult. We interpret others’ ideas outside their contexts. We act as if everything is static. In the now, in this very moment, it is static. Yet in time everything is always changing, is always in process.
– we are missing something. I can’t put my finger on what it is.
– Nāgārjuna wrote about “The Middle Way”. This is something I want to read more about. A middle way looks at the two extremes – for example the ideas that everything is real and everything is illusion, and negotiates the two in dialogue to see everything is both real and illusion. Yet even in this there can be something missing. I don’t know what I’m getting at.
– in time things get more complex – like a tree branching out and branching out again; the ends become more numerous and plural; yet all come from the same single source
– the scariest thing is how the nicer the ideology – the more conducive to interconnection, to long-term sustainability and peace – the more likely the people with that ideology have been to be exploited. Western invasion of Indigenous and Eastern lands.
– Western left-brain dominated ideologies of separate and conquer, has successfully separated and conquered. Right-brain connectivity and holistic being has been trampled. The freedom of short-term pleasure-driven egos to take what they can from the world, has left us in the ugliest of all situations for the long-term future of the Earth community. It needs to be reversed.
– we need to use the left-side of our brain for planning and actioning a future in defined by the right-side brain’s vision of unity.
