Nietzsche Thinks Some Might Be Less Eager for Truth

"Sometimes"? Freddy, seriously?

We live in a world devoted to pretending (essentially a massive playground for self-dramatists), where one avenue of pretending is to feign a thirst for truth. To shift metaphors (though none of this is as metaphorical as you'd imagine), it's a multiplex filled with movies, any number of which are about the swashbuckling  effort to transcend cinema! This is why I spend so much time distinguishing seeming from reality.

Almost no one genuinely wants genuine truth. I don't mean 10%, or 1%, or .1%. It's more like .0001%. A handful of perverse kooks genuinely thirst for truth, even if it's not good news; even if it doen't make them look good; even if being a "truth-knower" brings more punishment than reward.

Why punishment? Because being a truth-knower firmly associates you with the thing 99.9999%  desperately recoil from. We say we want a breath of fresh air, but we run berserk with the caulking gun at first sign of a draft.

I hope you understand that, by truth, I don't mean "That dress is ugly" or "you're fat". "You'll never get a raise" or "your wife hates you" or "that moustache makes you look like a porn cameraman". I'm not talking about being a dick, I'm talking about understanding deep things about who we are and what we're doing here, and offering these truths to those we see suffering to help them feel better...and then being crucified for it.

Why crucified? I once wrote:

Those who've shifted perspective and tasted some truth may feel poised to heal the world. But such people have historically been swiftly slated for crucifixion. Because if you imagine that the truth really heals, the joke's on you. You’re like the lunatic in the audience who rushes to the stage to protect Caesar from the stabbing knives. There's no denying that falsehood would be thus dispelled, tragedy prevented, and the sham nature of the enterprise entirely illuminated. Good job on that. However, you'll have ruined the experience for all present.

In a MMORPG world, eagerly devoted to drama and affectation, the truth - with all its vaunted power of illumination - is as welcome as glaring house lights suddenly switching on mid-show, shocking dark-adapted eyes and spoiling the deliberate suspension of disbelief.

I deliberately flipped viewpoint midway through this posting (this one here, not the posting I just quoted). I started off describing everyone as ditzy hair-on-fire lunatics, defiantly rejecting truth. Which is true! But then I concluded that those trying to add some truth to the equation are worse; spoiling all the fun. Which is also true!

So what's the sane thing to do? Best is to join the fun and be a ditzy lunatic and enjoy it. You don't enjoy it more by "winning" more on whatever daffy terms your cohorts have arbitrarily defined (one of the rules is that winners don't win, though we pretend not to have observed this 10,000 times). You enjoy it by remembering it's a game. A rave. An acting out. And the really best way - the post-grad Cordon Bleu Unesco World Heritage sine qua non move - is to summon passion while remaining blithely amused. It's not actually hard, but you have so few models that you'll need to "roll-your-own", framing-wise, which is tough because you don't realize it's even possible (note: I've just buried the lede of the grand unifying proposition of my entire Slog).

If you forget yourself, and begin taking it too seriously, and life turns torturous, and you're not the type who derives pleasure from screaming and weeping and gnashing your teeth about the hell you deliberately foisted upon yourself, and you don't sink into an enduring depression, you will likely be drawn to two activities. First, you'll start paying way more clinical attention to what’s actually going on than any of the other participants, eventually recognizing that none of it really stands up to close scrutiny. If you're courageous and clear-headed and can find some spaciousness in which to frame a bit more lithely, you will experience threads unwinding and truth revealing itself (which, along with four dollars, will buy you a cup of coffee, because, per this very posting, the truth is not popular). The second activity is meditation, which clears your head and creates the spaciousness to frame more lithely (I use this very stripped-down system, and strongly suggest skipping the rest of the web site).

But if you conjure a glorious movie about your spiritual quest, you're just ditzing another way. Which is perfectly fine, because - again! - the best activity is to relish the drama (but wear it all lightly). If you really want to know truth - not just as a well-lit theatrical production, but soberly, with glaring house lights turned way up so it's no longer the least bit sexy and captivating, then do what's necessary to achieve spaciousness and clarify view, then go back in and try again. Dip your toe into the drama with clear cognizance that it's only a game. A rave. An acting out. And you can ratchet up the zealousness for more intense gameplay, but do so via passion rather than sweaty clenching. 

And then, eventually, get lost again. Rinse and repeat. This is the tidal cycle of the universe; the inflow/outflow of framing. Spirituality is a pit stop for the slow children.

The Toddler and The Steering Wheel and...
Jnani Train


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