There Is No Truth But Your Own
Stop "thinking" about what is right or wrong - or you end up like Sisyphus
There are pages upon pages of images of Sisyphus rolling a big bolder up a mountain - most of them look pretty dramatic. Like this one:
Almost all of them are muscular males. That’s why I chose the more casual one depicting what appears to be a woman.
All women who got upset just now should relax. I don’t mean to indicate that women predominantly do this stupid task. I want to suggest that it is done by everyone, independent of gender, race, and whatever other criteria that assign people to certain imaginary groups. (I come to the “imaginary” part)
I also want to counter the perception that the metaphoric story of Sisyphus is only about physical suffering. It is mostly about mental and spiritual suffering.
Almost all of us are pushing heavy mental truth boulders up an imaginary pyramid-shaped societal mountain.
I couldn’t find a man-made pyramid so the above has to do. Man-made would be much more accurate because nothing so stupid exists in nature. Nature does not waste energy. But personal mental processes do.
The Wikipedia version of the Sisyphus tale is dramatic, colourful, fantastic and open to all sorts of speculations and interpretations.
Everyone seems to agree that Sisyphus was a nasty, deceiving, killing tyrant who—after his death—was ordered by Hades, the God of the Underworld, to roll a boulder up a mountain only to be rereleased by laughing Zeus just before the top over and over again.
Somehow, this old tale caught on with the generations to follow:
Through the classical influence on modern culture, tasks that are both laborious and futile are therefore described as Sisyphean
So what does that have to do with finding your truth, you might ask?
Everything.
First and foremost, it tells us how we can’t find the truth.
To me, it is the perfect metaphor to describe the futile and laborious task of finding “truth” by intellectually rolling ideas up the public mountain of discourse and opinion in the hope that our boulder of “being right about something” will be officially sanctioned and permanently lodged on the top - for eternity.
It is even bigger than that.
It is the perfect metaphor for exposing the futility of all mind work to find anything of lasting value. Full stop.
All ideas are transient, fleeting and the worst material you can think of to build a moral or spiritual foundation for yourself or society.
One interpretation of the story expresses what I mean:
The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for Sisyphus due to his hubristic belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus himself.
Hubris […] describes a personality quality of extreme or excessive pride[2] or dangerous overconfidence and complacency,[3] often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance.[
It reminds me of myself and everyone else when caught up in heated, useless, energy-wasting Sisyphean “right” or “wrong” discussions.
Zeus, the God of Gods, is a symbol of the highest form of spirituality. Sisyphus is a symbol of where relying solely on the personal egoic mind will lead to—clever, destructive and deceiving behaviour.
This article was triggered by a long Substack titled "The Art Of Being Wrong" that I saw in Notes.
I only scanned it, but I think I got the core message: If you did wrong, repent, and you will be saved. Without using the C word at all, it is one example of the successful Christian cultural appropriation of the past 2000 years.
What is wrong with repenting your “wrongs”, you might ask.
Nothing except that there are no “wrongs” or “rights” in reality. All wrongs and rights are mental boulders that are destined to roll back to the graveyard of failed ideas one day.
Failed in the sense that ideas, ideologies, science, religions, moral norms, rules, and laws can never provide us with a solid, trustworthy, permanent foundation or truth. I am talking about you and me—individual people.
Not societies or subgroups. They are just mental constructs. When did you last meet “your society”? All tens of millions of it? In one place? All agreeing to one truth?
It is all intellectual garbage that keeps us mesmerized and attached to grand ideas. Except on paper or in speeches by ambitious politicians, there is no such real thing as a “society”.
The only real thing there is is you.
As Nisargadatta puts it: “Where is the world if you are not there to perceive or conceive it?” You have to be there first for anything to exist. The existence of anything starts the moment you perceive or conceive it.
There is a real world out there, of course. Trillions of events happen in that real physical world as we speak. Planets are crashing into each other, trees are growing and falling over, storms are raging, and life is happening.
Of all these trillions of events, our minds and bodies can only perceive or conceive an incredibly and unimaginably small number. And there it is: Our extremely limited and separated personal mind-world is born, and we each live in our own. There are as many worlds out there as individual minds perceiving them, and each one is different.
Good luck finding lasting truth, lasting “right” and “wrong” for all of us through this mind-based approach.
These ideas don’t sit well with many people, especially in the “dissident community”, which has very strong ideas about what went “wrong” in the past four years. And I am and was not different. When I operate from my mind, that’s where I end up.
Obviously, the same goes for the opposition, who are sure that their little and distorted totalitarian world is “right” and “freedom” is wrong.
The rest comes down to power and violence in all its open and hidden manifestations to “push through” their “right way.”
Even now, when arguing against the personal mind as our blindly accepted default way of being, I use the “right” and “wrong” mental paradigms.
It is tricky. When I communicate through language, I need to use my mind, and using the mind can never convey truth.
That’s why Ramana Maharishi, considered one of the great non-dual teachers, hardly ever talked. These fascinating conversations explain, step by step, why silence is the only way to transmit truth. Some excerpts:
Clear? That which cannot be expressed through words is expressed in Silence. And That which cannot be expressed in words is immensely important. […]
That day I was saying, “If you want to say something, then use words. But if you want to say everything, then remain silent.”
Words can only communicate this much, a small portion. They can never take the totality of your Being. You are too large, and words are too small.
As a side note, there is also a very lovely summary regarding the meaning of will and “free will” in a spiritual context.
When a saint talks of ‘will’, he is not referring to ego’s desire. He is referring to ‘free-will’. Free will is not yours. Spiritual activity is Grace shining upon you – that’s all that is meant. Spiritual activity is the will of the beyond, otherwise you can’t move into spiritual activity. You can move into lots of other activities – eating, sleeping, all these things you can do out of your own desire. But you cannot go to the scriptures, or to a Guru, out of your own will. For that, divine Grace is needed.
The thing with grace is that it is freely available the moment we humble ourselves. Humbling ourselves is nothing else but recognizing the futility of all egoic actions. All egoic actions are caused and based on unaware personal mind activity. There is mind activity that is not egoic, of course. We can’t function without a mind. This non-egoic mind activity only happens when we are gone.
With that, I mean the dissolution of any sense of personal self as described here.
Ok, let’s bring it home.
There is only one lasting and valid truth. The truth of discovering who you are is a concrete, simple discovery granted by grace. This doesn’t mean it is an entirely passive pursuit, and there is nothing we can do about it from a personal mind-based platform.
While our personal minds and actions can’t actively “find” reality and truth (and trying it would be detrimental as it re-enforces the personal mind, creating a spiritual ego trip), we can actively discard what is not the truth. In other words, our personal mind can’t know what is true, but it can understand what is false.
By discarding (withdrawing attention) from what we identify as false, we remove the obstructions that veil the truth, which is always there, unmoveable and unchangeable.
This truth is beyond the personal mind. As long you consider yourself and identify as a separate entity with a body and mind, a particular name, shape, and personal history, there is no way to find lasting truth.
I know this is a lot to take in and will alienate many of my readers who enjoy the entertainment this character occasionally provides. But that is just insignificant bait to reel you in, to get you to read this and get intrigued.
To get intrigued and interested to reassign your mind to stop looking for lasting truth that will put you at peace. That is simply impossible. The mind can never find lasting truth and peace. By definition, the mind is restless, always seeking, always curious, and always investigating.
We don’t reassign our minds to look deeper, seek harder, and understand better.
No, we reassign our minds to investigate itself. One part of our mind, the witness or observer, can be trained to observe the rest of our mind. It needs determination born from suffering and intelligence that motivates us to do this earnestly and prioritise it.
Our suffering also creates the necessary humbleness to invite grace.
Psychedelic substances and even marijuana, when used in sacramental, intentional and spiritual ways (and less is more in this context), can be great accelerators of the process. These substances have been used for spiritual purposes for millennia worldwide.
Only recently (in the past few hundred years) have the combined forces of rational materialism and religions abused, prohibited, and gaslit them. However, many other methods and techniques support eliminating the personal mind as the false master in our own house.
Eliminating our personal mind sounds scary and mad, no doubt, almost like suicide and death. And that’s how it feels sometimes to the strongly identified egoic mind. Ego death has become hip again. But it is often misunderstood and re-enforcing the ego through the back door.
There is nothing to kill because there is no ego in the first place. The ego is an illusion, a mirage. You can’t kill a ghost.
Think of a real mirage. You are in the desert, dying of thirst, and suddenly, you see a green oasis in the distance. It feels authentic, so you walk towards it, seeking relief. But as you move closer, the oasis stays the same distance. It is an absolute nightmare that will kill your body in the end.
What is your only chance to escape death? To realise that this oasis is a mirage, an illusion, and unreal. How? By being acutely aware of what is happening in real-time and in the real world, not in your mind. This awareness will soon tell you that the oasis is not coming closer and therefore it is a mirage.
Is a permanent, lasting truth that settles your mind ever coming closer by seeking it through your mind?
These are all metaphors, of course, slightly more suitable than logic words to convey the unconveyable and express the inexpressible—just carrots to dangle in front of our personal minds to distract them from looking for an impossible peace and truth within themselves.
The carrots serve only one purpose: to use the mind to dissolve itself. Only the mirage of a personal mind, a personal identity, keeps us from seeing the truth. It is a veil.
The truth doesn’t and can’t be found. All searching and finding happens within the personal mind only.
The truth doesn’t need to be found. It was never lost. It was and is always there. Right behind the curtain of mind that is obstructing the truth. Remove the curtain and the truth is right there to see and experience.
As I just discovered, it is profoundly simple and ordinary. Only our personal minds make this seemingly complicated.
Good luck. It is absolutely worth the effort. Very few will realise the full importance of this, but this doesn’t discourage me because there is no effort in writing this. It pretty much writes itself.
I hope it gives hope to believers in an outside spiritual source who are just coming down from that high. There is nothing wrong with seeking out Gods and praying to them for a while. It is part of the path for some. Some people's faith is so strong that they might even become the Gods they seek.
But if we are not blessed with this unfaltering faith, there are many other paths to finding spiritual truth - the above being just one of them. Only if it inspires you sincerely should you follow it.
But nothing has to be decided. Only minds fool themselves into believing that they decide. Grace will guide you in often mysterious ways.
Embrace anything that feels mysterious. It is a sure tell sign that the personal mind isn’t involved. Minds can’t do mysterious.
"Grace will guide you." Yes, indeed.
Interesting, pause worthy!