I enjoyed reading your response to one of Christopher’s other blog this evening on baby boomers … What is weird is after reading what you wrote I realized that there is something about Harold Camping I can appreciate … At 89 he is doing his calculations and putting himself completely out there following something he believes in strongly … when really at 89 he could kicking back and relaxing …. It’s seems easy for us to poke fun at him … we’re not doing what he’s doing. What can I say, I’m a sucker for people who march to their own drummer … even if he seems weird, and dare I say it … a tad creepy. That’s just it though, people like him seem to incite a passionate response in others, even if contrary. When I was in Seattle last weekend, it was delightfully wicked to see that someone had left clothing careful arranged on the sidewalk to make it look like the person in the clothing had simply evaporated … others organized Rapture parties … others, not normally given to zesty humour, had a sparkle in their eye. For me it was a glimpse at something I haven’t noticed here on the West Coast before … that dark humour that comes out when the shared ship is going down … the kind that breaks the back of bleakness … It kinda gave me hope that people here on the West Coast would cope with a disaster …. Yup, now I know what I’ve just written here is a bit odd …

I’m back to trying to figure out what it means when we talk about the truth. When people say, for instance, that they are seeking the truth, what are they really saying? What did Jesus mean when he said “I am the truth”? The definitions in online dictionaries don’t seem that helpful.
Your comment, however is … You wrote ‘I actually said: “because the IDEA is more important than …truth”.’ … Maybe that’s where the problem lies … the idea of truth is not the same as truth.
Is truth the same as frank … “Open and sincere in expression; straightforward”? for instance. But that doesn’t seem to cover what Jesus was saying when he said “I am the truth”. So … what did Jesus really mean? My sense is in this context it doesn’t mean Jesus was saying we should all be brutally frank … It would be helpful to have Jesus’ definition of truth … is there one? I’m thinking that if our picture of Jesus is filtered by the writers of the Bible and we are missing some of the picture … eg. the Books of Nag, for example, Jesus’ teachings still stand up above the filtering … maybe it’s because his teachings were pointing to a universal truth which makes common sense, not matter what the context …

Back to definitions … I’m good with the definition Paul gave in Corinthians of what love is … but I kinda think it’s missing something … at least for me there’s a stepping block missing … which takes love from being a tedious list of qualities we have to strive for and will invariably fail at doing well unless love is an outcome rather than a list of action items …. it’s kinda like love starts with an appreciation of everyone and everything around me and expectation/understanding of the best outcome … no matter what form that takes. When I can remind myself to see it that way … rather than insisting that everyone should be a certain way to fit my vision of the “truth” then love comes more naturally. That’s what I mean by poetry wins … it’s not so much poetry in words … words have a life of their own and end up meaning something different with an agenda of their own …. it’s more like poetry in life … something beyond words …. the way life unfolds naturally the way it’s supposed to … no matter which way it unfolds …. It’s kinda like poetry is a baby step towards love ….. so I guess if poetry is truth … I guess I can accept that idea because it’s a different kind of poetry and a different kind of truth … Sorry if this sounds more obscure and complicated than it is … but I don’t know how else to express it …

truth in love is the yardstick..Paul says speaking the truth in love is what counts.

hmm I am wondering..if people have a disagreement maybe that is truth announcing that the idea each has is only a piece and that we need to go beyond our idea .Sometimes we are not ready for that.

“Because the idea is more important that the person and the truth I suppose” … Why is it that we are programmed to be so focused on the truth at the expense of the person, do you think, Jaqueline? …

Nowadays I find myself tending more towards a sense that the truth is subjective and dependent on the person talking as well as the person listening and can change as circumstances change over time … yet it is still tempting to hold truth up as though it’s the most important yardstick, more important than love, for instance.

Sometimes it’s kind of like that mantra if a bell rings in a forest and there’s no-one around to hear it … does it make a sound? … If I relate a story about something that actually happened to me and the person hearing what I say doesn’t believe me, am I telling the truth? The person might say if I can prove it is true with hard and fast evidence, or if I can provide other people to verify what I’m saying, he or she might be convinced I’m telling the truth. But that doesn’t make an iota of difference to the actual event which happened … it relies more on my ability to influence the perception of the person listening to the story. What if I don’t have any hard and fast evidence at hand, or if no-one else is around to provide a first hand witness account? On the other hand, what if I omit certain pertinent information, either deliberately or not realising it is important … or through not knowing about it …. that could change a person’s perception too … perhaps even my own perception after the fact.

In that tv drama House, MD, Hugh Laurie’s character starts off with the assumption that everybody lies …. and if they don’t they ought to … like the goal justifies the means. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I can see his point. I’m more inclined to think we perceive our truth based on our own inclination at the time, whatever that means.

Being cursed with one of those heads that tends to evaluate the logic/impact of whatever is being said, the bottom line question I keep having to remind myself to ask is … in the great scheme of things what is more important? The truth or the poetry? As long as I remember to ask the question … poetry invariably wins. I guess, Jaqueline, this is a long, roundabout way of saying, I don’t agree the truth is all important … it just doesn’t hold as much weight for me as it once did … at least I’d like to think it doesn’t

There are lots of reasons for that happening but the three that come to mind are:

1)sometimes because people don’t have the time or energy to continue -which is the case for most people I think . ( I might seem to have more of that but that is because this is the only place I regularly am able to engage about spiritual things – I do not have a home group for instance, nor do I have lots of people around who are just dying to talk about this stuff , nor do I engage in this in my everyday ; and those who do might be a bit tired of it by the time it gets to this blog and don’t really ‘need ‘ it.)

2)sometimes things are too complicated to write about..and might need a real life conversation..(again something I do not have much access to) an alternative conversation or another venue is offered-. Christopher did that once. When we started to talk about trauma on Facebook, he moved it over here. You can always tell if this is the real reason- especially if the person saying it is too complicated writes very well..otherwise it is a safe way of…

3) copping out…if you are more attached to what you think is right than to truth, you do not like to be challenged. Those who love truth value being challenged even if they do not always enjoy it, because it provides a chance for their vision of truth to be more illumined through confirmation or adjustment. Also I find that those who are confident about their truth are able to present it; not just by telling you why yours is wrong..and even if they think yours is wrong they are able to explain that instead of just saying theirs is right. ( which is why I decided to take John up on his challenge to explain my reservations for Anthroposophy for instance..until I did that all I was doing was saying ‘I don’t agree’ while keeping myself under cover. )

4) the other possibility I thought off is they don’t give a toss about you personally and couldn’t be bothered..but then why engage and get a disagreement going in the first place? Because the idea is more important that the person and the truth I suppose…which brings us back to…. DOH!