Truth Has No Againstness
by Leslie Sann
Truth has no againstness.
~ John Morton
Look around the room you are in and make a mental note of everything that is the color green.
Don’t read further until you have done it.
Did you find lots of green?
Now, without doing another thing, as soon as you finish reading the next sentence, close your eyes. Bring to mind everything in your environment that is red.
Okay, open your eyes and look around. How’d ya do?
If you’re like most people, you didn’t identify many of the red objects at all. That’s because there are something like 4 billion bits of data inundating our brains every second. We humans can only process about 2000 of these bits. Since you had been looking for green, red was ignored.
Yet red was in your environment the whole time.
We are limited in the amount we can process. How we are programmed in the moment, or how we are situated, influences how we sort incoming data.
Let me give you another example. Let’s say we are sitting in my kitchen facing each other at the table. From your vantage point you can see the fireplace in the den. I can’t see it at all because I’m looking out the kitchen window which you cannot see. I tell you there is a window and you say, no there isn’t. You tell me there is a fireplace and I tell you that you are nuts. In my view of reality, my point of view, there is no such fireplace.
Who is right?
We both are and not really. Neither one of us can see 360 degrees in any one moment. We each see only a piece of the whole. If I allow that you may be seeing something I do not, I may turn around and look and voila — there is a fireplace. How did that get there?
Now my world is bigger because I allowed for your point of view. My world now includes a fireplace. This is the new math: 1+1=3.
What we are seeing in the media, on the streets, around the kitchen table is a different calculation: 1-1=0. A situation where we are diminished by our points of view. Rather than allow our differences to expand us we choose instead to set ourselves against one another and play the who-is-right and who-is-wrong game, spinning our wheels going nowhere.
We are each entitled to our point of view. You don’t have to agree with, align with, resist, or oppose anyone else. We can choose to be a space of allowance, a place where all is welcome. From this place we may discover an inclusive way of viewing what is.
This Age of Information it is also an Age of Misinformation. It is filled with opinions and points of view masquerading as truth. Yet, truth has no againstness.
13th-century Persian poet Rumi’s quote may have relevance here:
“Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”
Truth, Love, Peace have no againstness.
Blessings,
Out Beyond — A Vision of Possibility
Out beyond blue and red
past argument and againstness
there is a field
where there is a blending of all
revealing itself as a purple hue
A field where differences meld together
becoming something new
more beautiful, kinder and
compassionate than before
Voices coalescing into a song of unity
a harmonious forwardness
Lifting us up together
into wholeness
as Oneness
Leslie Sann