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Today's
quotation:
Have
confidence in the Truth, although you may not be able
to comprehend it, although you may suppose its sweetness to
be bitter, although you may shrink from it at first. Trust
in the
Truth. . . . Have faith in the Truth and live it.
the Buddha
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Today's
Meditation:
I believe
that most of us must revisit our ideas of what
"truth" actually is. That is, we need to
do so if we want to feel a bit of peace with the concept,
and not drive ourselves crazy thinking that other people
should be defining truth exactly the same ways that we
define it. The Buddha here is telling us that there
is a Truth, and that if we trust in Life's Truth, as
opposed to what we've "learned" to be the truth,
we'll be in pretty good shape.
I
believe that there is a set of truths for life, but I also
see that most of us want to apply our personal set of
truths to life instead of allowing the real truths to
guide us. We want to convince ourselves that we know
the truth, and that other people are wrong if they don't
see the Truth in the same ways that we do. This,
though, is a pretty flawed way of looking at things.
I think that what the Buddha is saying here is basically
"Trust life," for life knows what it's doing and
it follows a very clear vision of truth that we would do
well to trust instead of trying to impose our ideas of
truth on life.
I can
honestly be sure of absolutely none of the
"certainties" that I've composed during my
life. I know this because almost all of the things
that I've been certain of in my lifetime have become
uncertainties, or simply untruths. In a way, I've
given up searching for any sort of truth, and I've left to
life the sorting out of truth and untruth. I don't
try to know the "Truth" because it really is
beyond my comprehension. What I need to do is live
my life as honestly and compassionately as I can, and let
life worry about what's true or not.
I
can't teach anyone else what the "Truth"
is. I can teach them what other people think to be
true, but when I do so I also need to point out that other
people disagree with that Truth, so it really isn't a
Truth with a capital "T," but simply a truth
that I'll probably find out someday isn't really a truth
at all. And that's just the way things go-- this fact
will bother me only if I desperately want to believe that
my "truths" are universal-- and I simply know
that they're not.
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