13 November 2007
Dancing with Fairies
I
once wrote a definition for “truth” in a dictionary I began to draft as I
worked through metaphysical ideas. The definition I came up with is as follows:
Truth is choice.
Thus, everything is true.
It’s not an either/or world where one truth knocks out another person’s
mistaken idea about how things work. Whatever anyone wants to believe is true.
It’s true that it’s a safe world. It’s also true that it’s an unsafe world.
It’s true that love abounds. It’s also true that there’s a lack of love. All
things are true because whatever you choose to believe becomes your experience.
In that sense, there is no absolute truth.
When I began blogging on NWV, I had one intent in mind. It was to add another
perspective, my own. My intent is to “add to,” not to try to prove that my
perspective is right. My intent is not to try to persuade anyone to believe
what I believe. My perspective is only right for me, and my perspective is also
in a state of change. I don’t like the idea of homogeneity, and I certainly
wouldn’t want anyone to think that I’m promoting such a concept.
I believe that everyone’s perspective will automatically differ because that’s
the nature of reality. It’s to give birth to diversity. That’s why there’s a
moon and a flower. They’re different. If everything was the same, then nothing
would exist. Differences are fundamental. They’re what make life exciting. What
new idea is about ready to take shape? You never know. It’s right there in the
next moment.
Our culture, however, promotes the idea that everyone should agree. Yet, that’s
an impossibility. It has never happened. It’s not happening now. And it will
never happen. In a diverse world, you will always have diverse perspectives.
Always. I think it’s natural to let other people choose to say, do, and think
things that I don’t like even if they don’t want to grant me that same freedom.
That’s okay because what another person thinks about me is irrelevant. They
cannot live my life. I cannot live theirs. Thus, neither is qualified to make
decisions for the other. Neither can make decisions for the other. Only
the individual can choose, and what the individual chooses is the individual’s
experience. It’s completely valid and totally true. Until such time as the individual
chooses another truth, of course.
So truth changes as individuals change. For example, it was perfectly true in
the middle ages that people could not talk over long distances by speaking into
pieces of metal. Today that’s no longer true. Cell phones are fact. It has been
said that it’s true that you can’t jump out of an airplane at cruising altitude
without a parachute and live, and yet it has happened. It’s fact. People have
stated that a person must be taught information in order to know it, and yet
there are many, many cases of people sponanteously knowing things, including
knowing how to read without being taught at age two with a severe handicap.
It’s fact. Ideas change, and then so does experience. As people make new
choices, truth changes.
But what is choice really? What are we doing when we choose? Well, here’s how I
define choice:
Choice - Choice is your ability to make something that's probable,
actual. It’s your ability to turn an idea into an experience. Your choices are
unlimited. Your freedom hinges on your ability to know that the choices you
want exist. Thus, you will expand the pool of choices you see available as you
expand your ideas about what's possible. In other words, as you expand your beliefs
you, will see more choices.
I think what causes the most confusion in our world is that people think that
they are their body. The individual is not the body. The body is a result of
the individual. The body is an experience of the individual. The individual
is something else. The individual does not start at birth and end at death. The
best way I can phrase it is thus: The individual is a chooser and experiencer.
That’s what an individual is. And what the individual does is to choose
ideas and then experience those ideas. That’s the substance of life. It is my
opinion, then, that all power lies in being able to see a vaster array of
choices.
In order to see more choices, it’s important that individuals express their
perspectives because these different perspectives give birth to a wider array
of ideas. They add to the pool of possibilities by being recognized. The ideas
already exist. But often we deny them because we don’t know how they fit into
old paradigms. The shift in perspectives is about getting comfortable with new
ideas, with the unkown, with potentials. It’s about becoming comfortable with
change.
With that, I’ll say this. All perspectives count. All perspectives are true.
Now, this is all backround. I was asked in a comment how I could say that
everyone is worthy no matter what they do, and didn’t that render the word
“worthy” meaningless. And my answer is that this line of logic only works if
you believe you’re a fixed entity in a fixed world that consists of definite
beginnings and endings. Since I don’t believe I’m a fixed body in a fixed world
of definite (unchanging) beginnings and endings, as such then that line of reasoning
doesn’t work for me.
Here’s how I see it. The word “worthy” means valueable or useful. Everything is
valuable and useful. Period. You don’t earn your worth, and it’s not on a
spectrum (as in kind of valuable or sort of useful). It’s like
electricity. Electricity is. It’s not on a spectrum. The individual is. Both
are useful. Both are worthy. You can use electricity many different ways, but
it is what it is, and really it’s gibberish to say that it has to earn its
worth. Its existence presupposes its value. It’s no different with the individual.
Now, many people don’t know all the uses of electricity. Some people might not
want it in their house, for instance, and might say it’s a nuisance. That
doesn’t detract from its value. The same goes for humans. You might label
another human as useless, but that doesn’t detract from the worth of that
individual. That individual continues to be worthy. You, however, are failing
to see the worth of that individual.
Just because you don’t like the behavior of another being doesn’t mean that the
person is not worthy, and here’s why. It’s because the individual is a chooser
and not the individual’s choices. A chooser can’t add to his or her
self. The chooser is already complete. Existence is about discovering the
potentials within that completeness. There are infinite potentials. It’s limitless.
In other words, there’s a lot to disover. What we call physical life is really
just an arena in which the individual learns to choose within a specific format.
And some individuals suck at it. That’s natural because life didn’t start here,
and it doesn’t end here. It’s a format for experience, and as you try it out,
you get knocked about a bit.
We’re like babies really. A baby doesn’t get born and stand up and walk across
the room and pour itself a drink. It has to get used to the environment and its
form and the coordination involved in all of that. As adults, we’re no
different. We don’t know everything already. We try out different ideas to see
how they work. In order to know if we like those ideas or not, we have to
employ them. We have to experience them. That’s how we find out what we prefer.
If we already knew how every idea worked in this format, we wouldn’t be here.
However, our culture pushes the idiotic idea that we’re all supposed to already
know everything, and that if we don’t know everything then we’re supposed to
work to develop this “perfection.” We’re supposed to stop making “mistakes.”
This is just another way of saying that we’re supposed to earn our worth. So
most individuals go through life feeling incomplete because they’re attempting
an impossibility. They’re attempting to be in a state that doesn’t exist--the
state of knowing the answer to everything. If all the answers were already
known, then the universe would be static, and then we might as well all pack
our bags and go home. But the universe is anything but static.
If we already knew everything, in those terms, we wouldn’t be here. That’s the
beauty of this environment; we don’t have all the answers. That’s part of the
challenge. It’s like learning to play a new instrument. The “new” part is that
you don’t already know how to play it, and that’s where the fun and excitement
is. It’s in the challenge of trying something different. It’s in developing
your skills. Physical life is a wonderful opportunity to hone your skill. That
skill that you’re honing is your ability to choose your ideas consciously
instead of being buffeted around by mass ideas that may or may not be what you
want.
Despite all the dogma to the contrary, there are no hierarchies. There are no
masters. There are simply perspectives. Perspectives vary. The view from a mountain
top is not the view from beneath the ocean. One is not better than the other.
They’re just different. I might not know what it’s like underwater. I might ask
a diver to get some tips so that I can try that persepctive myself, but I would
never say that the diver is better than me or that the diver is more worthy
because the diver has experienced a perspective that I have yet to experience.
Rather, based on her experience, the diver has a different perspective, one
that’s available to me if I wish.
Life in the larger sense is no different. No-one is earning their way to
anything. We are all trying out different perspectives. We’re learning about
ourselves, our abilities, and our preferences. In that sense, we are
unfinished, but being unfinished does not imply a lack. We are exploring our
abilities. As explorers, we are meaningful, worthy, wonderful beings. Every
last one of us. And that’s the truth because it’s what I choose to believe.
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About Samantha
Samantha Standish is a writer and a former intellectual property and corporate law lawyer. She received her B.A. in history with honors, and her B.A. in Spanish with honors, in 1989 from the University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to get her law degree Cum Laude from the University of Maine School of Law. In her legal career, Samantha worked in government and the private sector, most notably in the financial planning and software industry. In her personal life, she’s been married for twenty years and has a fifteen year-old home schooled son. Samantha resigned from the bar in 2005 and has devoted herself to bridge writing (making complex ideas about space/time easy to understand for the average reader) ever since, focusing mostly on self-help articles for artists and writing bridge books on the side. In her words, “The first forty years of my life were fact finding; the next forty years are about applying, expanding and exploring what I’ve learned.” Her books can be found at samanthastandish.com. Samantha’s NWV blog is titled The Magical Life.