A Blog About Telling the Truth

I’ve thought a lot recently about the value of uncertainty. As a culture (and maybe as a species, I’m not sure), we’re so easily tempted to grab for certainty — to think we know what “the truth” is. I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone — maybe more so than many! I remember my mother once said to me, “You’re always so sure you’re right, even when you’re wrong.” She was speaking about my authoritative way of acting like I knew how to get where I was going, in a literal sense (we were in the car trying to get someplace), but this has been true of me in a figurative sense, as well. I know where I get it from; my father’s famous line was, “Oh yes, I was wrong once… I think it was sometime back around 1963.” Very funny. But as readers of my essay “Anniversary” know, my father’s attempt to be, or at least appear, “right” (and strong, and invulnerable) all the time, contributed to his drug addiction, leading to the loss of his medical license and his life as all of us had known it.

So thinking one is “right” all the time clearly contributes to disaster on a personal – and relational – level. But on a much larger level, I believe it’s also responsible for most of the group massacres we call “wars,” between tribal groups, nations, blocs of nations… In the July issue of The Sun, Thich Nhat Hanh is quoted as saying, “If you have a gun, you can go out and shoot one, two, three, five people. But if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions.”

So how can we manage to live without falling into that trap? Many of the people I know have a history of grappling toward truth in various ways… thinking we’ve found it… then realizing we were wrong. That realization is often shattering — yet without it, we can’t keep growing.

My partner Michelle was a fundamentalist Christian in her teens because she wanted the world to be that black and white – it seemed so comforting to her. When she realized she was a lesbian, that path no longer worked for her, so she became a scientist instead, thinking the “objective truths” of scientific discovery would provide her with the sense of certainty she sought. Eventually, that worldview ceased to be big enough for her, too, so she went to seminary, hoping to find a ministry whose theology she could wholeheartedly subscribe to. Not surprisingly, she didn’t; she seems to be more of a confirmed spiritual eclectic, as I am, but that’s a harder ground to stand on…

We have another friend who used to be a radical lesbian separatist. Recently, falling in love with a man – along with her Buddhist practice – has caused her, too, to rethink much of what she used to think she “knew.”

As for me, when I began studying with a very powerful therapist and spiritual teacher some years ago, I experienced a lot of healing, and had a sense of making tremendous breakthroughs in my understanding of life and spirituality. Some of the time, though, instead of making me more open and compassionate to others, those experiences had the opposite effect — I felt distant from other people not on the same path, or whom I judged to be “not as far along” as I thought I was. This arrogance, of course, was a poison which negated whatever truth I might actually have grasped.

Yet “Uncertainty Now!” is not exactly a catchy slogan. It’s hard to cleave to. Maybe we need more formal and explicit ways — support groups, sanghas? — to support each other in the real truth of not-knowing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 7:17 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.