Artfully Mindful

Can We Handle The Truth?

• D. R. Thompson • Season 2 • Episode 28

Share episode

What if everything you believed to be true was merely an illusion? Inspired by the iconic line, "You can't handle the truth," from "A Few Good Men," we embark on a journey to unravel the complexities of truth. We explore the human craving for certainty and how it leads to conflict and war. Through the lens of Buddhism and mindfulness, we discuss the concept of truth as an understanding of delusion and balance, rather than something tangible or ultimate. By sharing personal stories and teachings, we highlight how minor grievances can spiral into significant conflicts and reveal how recognizing these delusions can foster harmony and justice.

In the second part of our exploration, we shift our focus to the enigmatic realms of death and the afterlife. We delve into various perspectives—scientific, spiritual, and religious—to ponder the continuity of consciousness and the ripple effects of our lives. We navigate the murky waters of absolute versus relative truth, considering how different frameworks and theories can coexist. We also touch on the dangers of dogmatic beliefs and the potential for other dimensions with different physical laws. Join us as we advocate for a more open-minded approach to understanding our world and the mysteries that lie beyond.

  • Website: www.nextpixprods.com
  • PLEASE READ - Terms of Use: https://www.nextpixprods.com/terms-of-use.html

Note that Don Thompson is now available as a coach or mentor on an individual basis. To find out more, please go to his website www.nextpixprods.com, and use the 'contact' form to request additional information.

Speaker 1:

Colonel Jessup, did you order the Code Red? You don't have to answer that question. I'll answer the question. You want answers? I think I'm entitled to them. You want answers. I want the truth. You can't handle the truth, don't want to know what you are thinking, don't have to hear what you believe, don't need to read what you've been reading To know what's fake. This is a random podcast thought today and I thought I would explore what I consider to be an interesting subject area, that is, the truth. Now, I've gone into this subject area in other podcasts, either directly or tangentially, but I thought I would approach it again today. But I thought I would approach it again today.

Speaker 1:

I had a sudden inspiration this morning, driving to get a cup of coffee and a Starbucks cafe mocha will oftentimes inspire you to want to seek the truth because as you linger your taste buds over the delicious cafe mocha, thoughts about the truth may arise. Now I'm being a little bit flippant, of course, and kidding around. Maybe some of you remember the 1992 movie A Few Good Men and the famous Jack Nicholson speech about the truth and within the courtroom setting. He was very adamant about saying you can't handle the truth and within the courtroom setting. He was very adamant about saying you can't handle the truth, and that was his take on the truth you can't handle it. Now, I've spent quite a few years in my life contemplating the truth in a very serious way actually, and you might say there are various aspects of the truth. That's what I've sort of concluded. You might say there's emotional truth, there's spiritual truth, there's intellectual truth, there's various types of truth, and I've studied Buddhism and mindfulness. Of course that's what this podcast is about, at least it's supposed to be about that. I know I veer off of the mindfulness track a little bit sometimes, but the truth relative to Buddhism has to do with what's called the middle way, or emptiness, and I've talked about that quite a bit. Or emptiness and I've talked about that quite a bit In my survey of the truth. I think that Buddhism comes the closest as far as I can tell, because ultimately, what the Buddhist philosophy is telling us or at least it's telling me, that's my interpretation is there is no real ultimate truth. You can't grasp onto the truth and say you know, this is it? You can't hold it up and wave it around and say this, is it?

Speaker 1:

People love to have tangible things, they love to have certainty. This is what people seek in life. They seek consistency, certainty. They want to know I have the truth, I own the truth. People go to war over these kinds of things the ownership of the truth. One person knows what the truth is, the other doesn't, and you go to war because you want to prove that the other person you know doesn't know what they're talking about. Or maybe the wrongdoer doesn't know what they're talking about, or maybe the wrongdoer has done something wrong to you, and you then go after them because they've wronged you. And so this is the way of the world. I mean the way of the world is conflict oftentimes because people believe that they have been wronged. Conflict oftentimes because people believe that they have been wronged and that the truth is been somehow breached.

Speaker 1:

Now an old boss of mine, back in the day many years ago, used to say to me he would say don't sweat the small stuff, don't sweat the small stuff. So in my view, in my adult life, my advanced adult life, my aging adult life is, I believe that people sweat the small stuff a lot, you know, and that if they sweat the small stuff, the small stuff can become the big stuff. Because if they sweat the small stuff and hang on to it a lot, ultimately it can evolve and escalate into the big stuff, and the big stuff involves things like, you know, killing people, right? So war, you know. The small stuff can evolve into the big stuff, and this is the downside. The negative aspect of sweating the small stuff is it can evolve into something more dangerous and then it becomes a matter of life and death.

Speaker 1:

And, of course, life and death is ultimately a battle that we all fear. None of us want to fight it, but sometimes we feel we do need to fight it. Sometimes we feel we do need to fight it and as a country, as a people, as individuals, sometimes we feel we need to battle something, to go to war with something, to prove something that we're right, that we know the truth and that the other person does not know the truth. And this is the nature of the battle for justice right, the battle for justice, the battle for truth. What is the truth? And this is the court system that's set up to get to the bottom of well, what is the truth?

Speaker 1:

And oftentimes, when I was younger, I would watch a show called Divorce Court and you would listen to both sides of the divorce case and you would conclude that one of them had to be lying. You know, somebody's got to be lying. Either that, or they're both deluded. They're both deluded, in other words, both delusionally feel that they have a grasp on the truth and that the other is somehow wronging them, and that that's the nature of the situation. They're both delusional.

Speaker 1:

In a divorce situation or in some kind of a conflict situation, I would say that's closer to the Buddha's attitude towards these kinds of things is that both sides are delusional and the middle way is striking a chord, a balance between the right and the wrong of both sides, saying neither side is right, neither side is wrong. Both sides are, in a sense, caught up in delusion, and this is the nature of truth. It's not so much that you grasp the truth but that you grasp the nature of delusion. But you grasp the nature of delusion. You grasp the nature of the fact, or the reality of the fact, that once you enter into the world of language and thought and concepts and ideas and philosophies and ideologies and all the Gs, all those things, you step into the world of delusion. And that's really what the Buddha was trying to tell us.

Speaker 1:

In my mind, and I've gone over this in other podcasts, in terms of talking about the nature of delusion and the two extremes according to the Mahayana school, the extremes of eternalism and nihilism, for example. Those are really the way it's laid out and people tend to fall into these traps. The eternalists oftentimes, will you know, go to war for their various eternalist philosophies. You know, one side against the other. In essence, that's what they're warring over. They're warring over well, my eternalism is better than your eternalism. And then the nihilist, you know, usually doesn't care and they're just trying to exploit the situation and make a buck. And the arms dealers that are selling the arms to both sides of the conflict, of the eternalists, you know, the arms dealers are selling to either side of the conflict and making a buck. And that's the nihilist.

Speaker 1:

The middle way says, you know, let's get together and have a group hug, let's forgive each other, let's have compassion for the fact that we've got caught up in a sort of an illusion or delusion of truth being some fixed thing, being some absolute thing. We have to have it that way or else it's not the truth. But if the nature of truth is always has to do with the framework. You might say, truth is relative to the situation, that's, you know, to philosophy or philosophers. That's often associated with what's called postmodern thinking, relative truth and relative truth and postmodern thinking is not, you know, the favorite thing of the eternalists, the Christians, the Muslims, the religious people of all stripes.

Speaker 1:

They don't like this kind of postmodern thinking about relative truth. They want a fixed truth. They want an absolute truth. They want an absolute truth usually because they want to go to an absolute place when they die, maybe like a heaven that's eternal, that lasts forever, and they want to be there with the other truth people you know that believed like they did and therefore they go to that place. And you know, strangely enough, I don't say that they shouldn't have that I mean maybe they can go to that place and maybe they can continue there in eternal bliss with all the other people that believe in the same eternal thing that they believe in. I'm not saying that that's not possible, because if you really open up your mind, you can open up your mind to the fact that there can be parallel truths, perhaps there can be multiple truths existing in parallel at the same time and we don't have to have one truth, and that the delusional people can hold their truth. You know, in a delusional fashion they can do that. But I think that realizing that is really the middle way. You know, in essence it's emptiness, it's realizing that there is no fixed truth, there's no absolute truth.

Speaker 1:

This is a sort of precarious situation for some people because it really brings up a lot of fear, because at the end of the day, when you die, what's left? Is there anything left? Are you going anywhere? Are they going to accept you? Will they love you? In some Buddha world, you know, or some realm, some divine realm you don't know? You sort of throw your lot in more with the scientists.

Speaker 1:

In that way, the scientists, the atheists and oftentimes the nihilists don't believe there's anything after death. There's nothing, it ends. And in a way the Buddhists believe this because the Buddhists are very scientific and the Buddhists believe that once life is over, that's it. Consciousness ends, there's nothing else and consciousness might continue in the sense that there's sort of like a ripple effect of water. You know, when you drop a stone in water you have ripples. So in a sense you could say that your consciousness, your life has a ripple effect, and the materialist will think this ripple effect is through their children. I mean, that's the way that they see it. The children will have their ripple effect. That's why they want to have children. They want to have children because it gives them a sense of eternality, of continuing, of continuance, and there's nothing wrong with that. And that's oftentimes the desire to have children is to continue you in some fashion, in a material sense, in the sense of having a body that continues.

Speaker 1:

In a spiritual or consciousness sense, it could also be said that life or consciousness continues, and this is what the spiritual theorists might tell us. You know, they'll tell us that there's future lives, that in essence, this life will lead to another life. A term list might say there's a soul. Right, that's a typical thing within the church or religious world. Is that there's a soul, and I should do saving your soul, making sure your soul is saved, so that you can continue in some more pleasant realm with other people that believe in the same kind of truth that you do.

Speaker 1:

And again, I'm not saying that this can't happen. I don't know. You know it might happen, who knows? I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. The scientists might say adamantly it can't happen. I don't know, you know it might happen. Who knows? I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. The scientists might say adamantly it can't happen, that there's no way it can happen. I'm not quite there with the scientists. I leave myself open to the possibility that we don't know, and this takes us back to Socrates, of course, and the Greeks. We don't know. We know that we don't know.

Speaker 1:

So the truth is really that we don't know the truth. We can never really grasp the truth. It's very disabling in a way. But what we can understand is frameworks and theories and concepts and ideas, and they can all fit together in a very beautiful way. And scientists do this really elegantly. Physicists do this very elegantly in their equations. They make it all fit together in a beautiful way, even though oftentimes they will contradict themselves.

Speaker 1:

But in the hard sciences they say you know, look at this. I mean, you put these two things together in a chemical way. It's always going to happen. You're always going to get this reaction, you're always going to get this result. And that's why, of course, we can make things. We can create things because we have fixed laws, fixed physical laws that work. And therefore your idea, don, that truth is relative is stupid because look at this, the sciences prove that you're delusional. You are delusional, mr Thompson, because you believe that truth is relative. But I don't know. Still, philosophically, there might be other universes and other places out there that have completely different laws of physics. Who's to say we don't know? You could say that there are universes and dimensions that completely turn inside out what we believe to be true in terms of our physics. We don't know. I think it's philosophically possible, and if it's philosophically possible it may indeed be possible in reality that there might be different dimensions. The physicists do tell us this, that there's different dimensions.

Speaker 1:

I'm not trying to torture you or torture myself in all of this, but I'm trying to hopefully create a sense of a couple of things. One is, you know, perhaps we can lighten up a little bit about the truth and our adamant feeling sometimes that we have to have it and that we do have it. You know that we do have it and that we, since we have it, nobody else can have it. Or we have to group together with people that share our truth and eliminate everybody else that doesn't share our truth. And that's, you know, maybe not the way to go, because oftentimes that results in war and we've seen a lot of that lately, haven't we? We've seen a lot of war. You see a lot of times where people feel that they've been wronged, and maybe they have been wronged, but the root cause of that wrong may come from another wrong that their opponent felt that they were, you know, victim of. So these cycles of violence, oftentimes the root cause is clinging to this idea that I have the truth.

Speaker 1:

The truth to the capitalist is, of course, we know the market the numbers. If you have the numbers, that's the truth. If you don market the numbers, if you have the numbers, that's the truth. If you don't have the numbers, that's not the truth. Whoever has the most market share has the truth. Therefore, if the capitalist, the market, is the truth, whoever has the most numbers, that's what it is. And so, in that case, maury Povich, the talk show host, maury Povich, has much more of a lock on truth in this podcast because he's got much better numbers than I've got in this podcast. Unless you change that and share this podcast and try to propagate it out there which I don't know, maybe you'd want to, maybe not, I don't know but Maury Povich at this time, you know, with his yelling and screaming people on his show has much more of a lock on the truth in this podcast, according to the capitalists, because his numbers are there and mine aren't. So I'll leave it at that.

Speaker 1:

This is a little bit of a. You know, I'm trying to joke around a little bit here and I don't know if you know. Hopefully you took it in the right way. I'm not trying to be arrogant or disrespectful, but I'll leave it at that and let you go on with your day, and I appreciate you listening Until the next time. I'll look forward to talking to you soon. Bye-bye. To get to the truth, guitar solo. Thank you, nothing but the truth. Give me the truth. Nothing else to do. It's all I want from you. To get to you the only real truth, just the old truth, the absolute truth. Thank you.