Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Truth Be Told, We're All Liars


Are you tired of listening to people lie? I would rather listen to a schizophrenic person's skewed perception of reality than a normal person's attempt to control my mind with their exaggerations and distortions of the truth for the purpose of making me think that they're cool and exciting. And while I'm impressed for a second about their 2 year stint in jail for stabbing a person with a surgical knife on 1st and A, or how they smoke 3 ounces of weed each day, I feel deeply upset and slightly stupid when I realize later that this person must be full of shit. 
I understand that it is almost impossible to be truthful because the truth is something outside of what we see. When we tell the truth, we are not actually exuding truth. Reality is being filtered through our individual perception of it and is therefore no longer the truth. My friend might tell me that he met the coolest dude at his job the other day, but then when I meet him I think he's a douchebag. Is he cool or is he a douche? Nobody really knows because it is really a matter of perspective. When a schizophrenic talks about a person who is not there or a paranoid person thinks everyone hates them when they really just think they're kind of annoying, they are not telling lies either. These are merely that person's dramatically incorrect interpretation of what they think the truth is. But it is still the truth in a certain context. It is that individual's truth. Now shrink this down to a smaller level and you may realize that everyone's accounts are spoiled with tidbits of false information that they honestly thought were the truth. Like, "I was run over by a green car", when in reality the car was more blue than green. Or "I was beat up by a gang of midgets", when really they were beat up by a group of small children.
However, when a person perceives something and then retells the account in a different way, knowing they have shifted the truth, this makes me irate. I can not stand for this any longer. Sometimes I feel that everyone has a motive when they talk about almost anything, and that motive is what distracts all of us from the truth. But it doesn't change reality. The truth is still there, that person has merely forced us all to be ignorant of it. People's stories will change over and over again, but the truth is always the same, and that is what I want to hear. 
It is time to put away motives and selfish desires to be cool and seek the truth. If everyone tells it as they honestly and actually think it is, I believe we will start to see that everything is much different than we ever perceived it to be. As long as we keep being distracted by small, selfish trivial things, the bigger picture will continue to remain out of our reach and we will continue our pointless quests to figure out what needs to be done about everything.

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