The Painful Truth

A nihilist might say "There is no truth but everything is real" and not be jabbed for inconsistency. It sounds accepting of possibilities others call 'futility' and therefore kinder than we usually witness in pessimistic or romantic idealists (every thing's illusion or it was god's and My idea) and the experts who actually own reality (the priestly class, clerics of clarity, safely sipping claret from clerestories in ivory-tower sanctuaries) but have never seen it up close or personal (or if they did, escaped, having read their Hobbes & Plato). More objective than the rest, they admit to no ideas, only facts – they're often authors of our dictionaries or build machines to not only think for us (not unlike the old-time school teacher who invented the precursor to the electric drill: "Repeat after me!") but experience life so we can stay safe in our exclusion. That's the nature of democracy – it's always for the greater good and that entails a certain sacrifice from every neighborhood and no one ever hears words like slavery and the settled-in confuse the youthly 'angst' and boredom with the show for 'apathy' and need for tightened leash so they will go as slow.

There's no doubt everything is real (even a dumb idea or error – someone surely makes a wrong turn now and then somewhere) and even science, when not inclined to make machines to cover up the inconvenient, admit they're only out to disprove everything in pursuit of what is left and that must surely lead to truth. Unfortunately, all such roads go on for ever into outer space or circle back on the home-bound and kick you in the ass with a boot called déjà vu – weren't we here already? It's the nature of a wheel to spin in circles – everything else seems to wobbble and then peter out.

But there is a kind of truth which happens all about. It is always painful and so imp-active to our senses (it inaugurates ego defences), it must be excluded from any view. It's the sort of truth that makes us stupid and to cling to it would lead to actions most consider sanguinolently suicidal. To explore them without replacing the man-hole cover (it's invisibility cloak) or have a kindly accomplice hold you by the heel is to get a free ticket to the local facility for mental health or jail if you are young enough.

More than merely inconvenient, which suggests an eventual work-around or final solution, the painful truth is exposed whenever exploration steps off the map and gets immersed in the territory. They used to point out places on maps with the admonition: "There be dragons". We know they're true because they can't be known or tabulated – they're fenced off, they're excluded. To even find them requires an advanced degree in spontaneity. To mix a little Tao with dialectics, we find pleasure and pain as choices but more an excuse to go nowhere expecting one to come without the other – this way one could wait forever.

A really good adventure, literally "against the wind" or "through a rip or rupture", might just illustrate in Timbuktu there's way more fun than torture. To simultaneously stay on guard while getting carried away some used to say "all things in moderation" just to play it safe. But that excludes all peak experience. To have your cake and eat it too needs practice in altering states of consciousness. That is adaptation and avoids committees set about for your committal. All institutions, if not just shared patterns of habit in a circle of interests some call a habitat, require a commitment and that's the end of flexibility – it's the place of rigid truth, and that's more grave than dangerous morality.