Can You Know This Is True?
There are so many things to give thanks for in life but when I’m making my own gratitude list quite high on that list is gratitude for the fact that I’ve had very little to do with the justice system. I’ve not been arrested, I had good enough reasons not to sit on a jury when I was called to do so, and I’ve never had to give evidence as a witness in a court of law. Do you think you’d be a reliable witness? Years ago when I was working as a teacher I was asked to observe a history lesson. The lesson was all about the unreliability of witnesses and the difficulty of reaching a consensus about what really happened just a few minutes ago, never mind times past long ago.
The teacher, unbeknownst to me and the class, had arranged for a fellow teacher to come bursting into the room at some point and start arguing about some issue, some wrong that the first teacher had allegedly committed. When this happened it was a real shock – especially as the angry teacher who stormed into the room at one point was so annoyed that he picked up a pencil case from the desk and waved it in a threatening manner, before shouting an unpleasant threat and marching out of the room, slamming the door as he went. The first teacher apologised to us all for what had just happened then went on teaching the lesson as before. It was a good ten minutes before she stopped and asked us to write down what we had witnessed earlier. What had been said, what had been done, what was the angry teacher wearing? When we all read out our replies the point of the lesson was obvious – even just ten minutes after an incident, that we had all witnessed closely, our accounts of what had happened varied greatly. And what was most noticeable to me was that we all believed our varying accounts to be true. He was wearing a tweed jacket. No, it was made of denim. He made a physical threat. No, he simply picked up his own pencil case that the other teacher had taken without asking. And so on.
Psychologists have much to say about the ways we humans remember events and how very easy it is to implant false memories in someone’s mind. A recent experiment found that up to 50% of us could be convinced that we have had an experience when we really have not. In a study called, ‘A picture is worth a thousand lies’, Kimberley Wade and colleagues used a doctored photograph of a fictitious balloon flight to implant false memories (Wade, Garry, Read & Lindsay, 2002). When shown a faked photo of themselves as a child on a hot air balloon trip with family members – half of the people questioned started to remember that they’d been on that trip.
We humans are easily fooled and few of us prove to be reliable witnesses when put to the test. And if we struggle to give accurate accounts of dramatic events and can be convinced by a photograph that our own memory is false then we have to question our ability to witness accurately our own lives, or the lives of others.
Our lives are indeed patchworks of stories and interpretations and much of the personal growth and development work that is so popular today revolves around the search for these stories and their source. Who told you that you were no good at …….? Fill in the gap here for yourself – for most of us have been told at some point, or have told ourselves, that we cannot, or can, do certain things. Families share such stories when they label one child the quick one, or the sporty one, or the artistic one, or the funny one, or the clumsy one. Teachers and friends add to the picture and by the time most of us are adults we have a pretty clear and usually quite fixed idea of who we are. And we do the same for those around us. Our friends, our partners, our parents or children, our neighbours, our politicians – it is part of human nature to think that we know who these people truly are. We treasure our judgements of them – we hold them as truth.
But can we really know that this is true? This is one of the questions asked by an inspirational woman called Byron Katie who leads sessions around the world on a method of inquiry called The Work. Her own life experiences led her to that question. In her 30s she was gripped by a major depression and for several years was barely able to crawl from her bed. In the depths of her despair she came to a realisation that it was her thoughts that were troubling her rather than the reality. When she thought that something should be different from how it was (“my husband should love me more”, “my children should appreciate me”) she suffered and when she didn’t believe these thoughts she felt peace. She realised that what had been causing her depression was not the world around her, but what she believed about the world around her. Our attempt to find happiness is often backwards – we hopelessly try to change the world to match our thoughts about how it should be when we can instead question these thoughts and meet reality as it is.
Byron Katie’s method then is a “way to identify and question the thoughts that cause all the suffering in the world. It is a way to find peace with yourself and with the world.” The problem that she identified in human thinking is the way we struggle with what is. We find it hard to accept reality. Katie describes this as a bit like trying to teach a cat to bark. You can try all day to teach that cat but in the end it’s going to look up at you and go ‘miaow’. “Wanting reality to be different is hopeless,” says Katie.
I wonder if you have any of these sorts of thoughts? People shouldn’t drop litter. The government should be kinder to poor people. There shouldn’t be wars, I should be … thinner, more popular, more intelligent, younger, healthier, happier, richer, more successful – you fill in the gap. On the card you were given earlier you’ll find the four questions that form the basis of this method of inquiry. You take a statement such as these – a statement that may well include a should or an ought – and question it.
Is it true?
Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without that thought?
Finally Katie suggests we experiment by turning the thought around; by saying the opposite we may well experience a sense of peace, a feeling of lightning up, of humour even.
There are some handouts about The Work if you want to explore this further and an excellent website to explore (www.thework.com) where you can download worksheets and a booklet to help you make your own inquiries. This method of course has ancient origins. Old Socrates standing in the market place of Athens was renowned for his methods of inquiry – using what later became known as the Socratic method of questioning. People would come to him, it is said, with one question and leave with dozens more to ponder.
And I think Socrates would be intrigued by our post modern society that continues to prize truth with a capital T yet is painfully aware of the plurality of truths that exist in our world today. Going back to history teaching for example, children are now taught that truth is often relative, that history tends to be written by the more powerful, by the victors in any battle. Truth in this sense does not exist – we cannot find it. Rather there are ‘truths’ and these multiple truths are created by language, by societies, by individuals, by cultures. All we can then say is that this is ‘true for you’.
This sort of inquiry is the stuff of philosophy classes and we could, and probably will, spend the rest of our lives exploring the nature of truth, one way or another. I’ve come to think that yes truth is relative, but that exploring the nature of truth – both my own and other people’s, is an important spiritual practice, and that such practices can take us to a deeper level of truth – beyond hope, beyond fear, beyond any need to be ‘right’. It is then too simple to say that there is no one truth. Better perhaps just to keep exploring and questioning – both alone and in conversation with other people – with humility and ever open minds. This is the spiritual path of Zen Buddhism and Sufism and contemplative Christianity – a paradoxical path that encourages us to unlearn all that we think we know, all that we hold dear, all that seemingly identifies us, in order to search within for a sense of a deeper truth, a wisdom that is there to be discovered when we let go of our minds and their ever busy theories and ideologies – releasing that oh so human and oh so desperate need to find the answer and for that to be the right answer. And at this deep level of inquiry I come to believe the possibility that perhaps “you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free”. Amen.
Rev. Sarah Tinker
Sermon – 15th January 2012