Showing posts with label certainty principle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label certainty principle. Show all posts

Sunday, May 15, 2011

The Great Truth Just Moved

"There is in truth deception, and in deception, truth." -- a Simple mind

An old story about Mara, the evil one, goes like this: One day Mara and his disciples came upon a man in the road. His face glowing, they curiously inquired into the cause of the man’s pleasure. It seems the man had just discovered something of the Truth.
Upon reporting this to their master, Mara, the disciple was perplexed at his reaction. You, Mara, the One of Deception, does it not perturb you that this one has come into a moment of Truth? Mara replied that it did not.
You see, Mara opined, that no sooner do people discover a part of the Truth, a moment of the Whole, then they make a belief out if it.

The great Hindu Master, Sri Aurobindo once stated that no sooner does one discover that there is a certain truth, that, then, they often chase after it. They lose their common sense. For Truth was about them all the while; they have only just noticed it! Whether you recognize or understand Mara, Quan Yin or any other sage, at any time in your life, is no matter to anyone else; the sages have always been about you.

In her book, Waking Up to What You Do by Abbess Diane Eshin Rizzetto, she writes about the “Certainty Principle.” Certainty is seductive. She says that often we desire to feel safe and comfortable via certainty. Sureness may arise out of personal experiences, but impermanence may alter the sum of those experiences. Things do change. Thus the Buddha emphasized that we must not believe the teaching alone; we must go out and discover it for ourselves.

Rizzetto writes, “truth [just] won’t be pinned down. Truth will not be pinned down with the word, the.” Truth defies definition because as soon as we try to grasp it, it changes. In this way it shares a close connection to reality. Reality is many faceted. There is no single valuable reality. Instead there are many parts of the whole. So what does this notion leave to us? It seems that we can trust, be truth, moment to moment. We can be as we are, as we find ourselves to be. This is awareness that the great masters speak about. It is just this moment, every moment together forms what we know about reality, about truth and about our selves.