{"id":7926,"date":"2023-08-25T09:40:05","date_gmt":"2023-08-25T13:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7926"},"modified":"2023-08-25T09:40:05","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T13:40:05","slug":"1995-truth-and-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7926","title":{"rendered":"1995: “Truth” and “Self”"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is was written during the time when I was having a bad time with the noise<\/a> of small planes, especially the ones that towed gliders up from the Franconia Airport. I wrote this after a particularly bad day. I’m posting this because it shows how I use my journal to explore important issues in my life.<\/p>\n

From my journal for September 30, 1995<\/p>\n

The truth is that when the planes come that often, I lose all my skills for effective living, I become emotionally paralyzed, unable to make the simplest decision, even one to get away from the noise that\u2019s driving me out of my mind \u2014 literally!\u00a0 <\/span>I feel driven out of my mind as I\u2019m driven out of my house.\u00a0 <\/span>Well, it won\u2019t be forever.\u00a0 <\/span>Winter\u2019s coming, the cold weather will stop them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very painful to be blasted out of my mind.\u00a0 <\/span>I see that\u2019s what I identify with, my thinking self, and when conditions make it impossible to think I feel painfully lost, abandoned, at the mercy of hostile and disruptive forces.\u00a0 <\/span>It makes me think of the therapy session when I said I was afraid if I relaxed and gave in that \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be able to fight.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>That surprised me when I said it, but it also let me know how constant was the sense of attack, I saw that I was always \u201cfighting\u201d all through my childhood.\u00a0 <\/span>What was I fighting? not a clear danger on the physical level, not a physical fight, but a fight to maintain my \u201cself\u201d and my values against a barrage of emotional sabotage and invalidation.\u00a0 <\/span>And I see that my \u201cself\u201d is not what\u2019s important to me, I\u2019m not concerned with the image I present to the world, or even with maintaining some consistency of personality.\u00a0 <\/span>What I am concerned with, what I most fear to lose, is what I value, and I\u2019m afraid that if my \u201cself\u201d dissolves, as it did yesterday, what I value will dissolve too.\u00a0 <\/span>As though I constructed and maintained what I value through the use of my consciousness and if my consciousness is disrupted then the things I value collapse back into the void and disappear forever unless I can laboriously build them up again.\u00a0 <\/span>My goodness!\u00a0 <\/span>Is that what I believe?\u00a0 <\/span>Obviously I feel that the things that I value have no existence apart from me, that I am \u201cletting them down\u201d if I\u2019m not alert every moment to fight for them and maintain them.<\/p>\n

I say \u201cthings that I value\u201d and what are they, and the one that stands out is \u201cTruth\u201d and all the rest are connected to it: honesty in relationship, authenticity of artistic expression.\u00a0 <\/span>There\u2019s also beauty, and I\u2019m not sure if\/how beauty is connected to truth.\u00a0 <\/span>But I see that it\u2019s not just \u201ctruth\u201d that I value and will fight to maintain, but the truth of truth, which I why I was never content to accept received truth from the experts and authorities but was always searching for what I could accept as truth.\u00a0 <\/span>And that search has led me to see that there is no objective, monolithic truth, there are only an enormous number of relative truths all contained within a much larger truth.\u00a0 <\/span>(That is to say, that the truth that there are relative truths is itself a larger truth, a larger container, that holds paradox and mystery as well as \u201cestablished facts.\u201d)\u00a0 <\/span>So I see that what I value is what I \u201ccan accept as truth.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>This means that it\u2019s my truth that I value and will fight for.\u00a0 <\/span>And my \u201cself\u201d is the instrument whereby I detect truth, and this \u201ctruth\u201d is not an object, but a path through the shifting realities.\u00a0 <\/span>This is why my \u201cself\u201d is so valuable to me, and why it needs to be kept in condition, honed sharp as a razor, tuned up to concert pitch.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019m as dependent on my \u201ctruthsense\u201d as any pilot depends on his instruments when he is flying blind.\u00a0 <\/span>And just as that pilot\u2019s survival depends on the existence and accuracy of his instruments, so my \u201csurvival\u201d depends on my \u201ctruthsense,\u201d not in a physical sense, but in the reality that only my awareness of truth, that is my awareness of my next step, makes it possible for me to go on living.\u00a0 <\/span>But unlike the pilot whose loss of instruments may result in a crash, I\u2019m more like the sailor in irons, I have only to wait and the wind will rise again, the sky will clear, and I\u2019ll have something to help give me a sense of direction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reading this, I find it too intellectual, I think it’s too easy for me to get caught up in thoughts, in verbal expression, and lose the sense of experience. In the present, I’m still concerned about Truth, but I acknowledge that all that I really know is true is what I see with my own eyes, or hear from someone who saw it, and whom I trust. And even then, I can see incorrectly! Back to the Book of Job, and God saying<\/a> “My universe is beyond the comprehension of the human brain.”<\/p>\n

I’m intrigued by my description of being like the sailor in irons \u2014 which means the boat is caught facing into the wind, and so can’t use the wind to move. I also thought it meant when there was no wind at all, which is how I’m using it here. I say that the sailor only has to wait and conditions will change. But unlike the sailor in irons, I have no faith in changing conditions. My belief that I have only myself to change things comes from childhood when if I asked for help, my parents would make me wrong for asking. I believe that there’s no older, wiser being that I can count on.<\/p>\n

By the way, the word “truthsense” comes from a science fiction novel, Dune<\/a>, by Frank Herbert.<\/p>\n

Reading this over, yet again, I am struck by a sentence in the second paragraph: “Obviously I feel that the things that I value have no existence apart from me, that I am \u201cletting them down\u201d if I\u2019m not alert every moment to fight for them and maintain them.” I do question whether I really believe that, but don’t go any farther to examine it. Ah! An earlier sentence says “a fight to maintain my \u201cself\u201d and my values against a barrage of emotional sabotage and invalidation.” The only thing I don’t say clearly is that that barrage comes from my parents. I have to defend my values against constant invalidation by Mom & Dad.<\/p>\n

I see that I have no faith at all in external conditions changing in a way that will help me out.\u00a0 <\/span>When I\u2019m lost and without direction or motivation, I can\u2019t believe that anything will change that except my own efforts, and so I\u2019m unable to wait patiently but begin to thrash around, trying to change what can\u2019t be changed.\u00a0 <\/span>This doesn\u2019t mean that my own efforts aren\u2019t important, but that I can\u2019t do it all by myself.\u00a0 <\/span>And even in the case of the airplanes, there are some powerful forces fighting on my side, darkness and winter can be counted on.\u00a0 <\/span>And I can count on my \u201cself\u201d to come back once it\u2019s clear that the noise has stopped for the day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s now clear that my “self” is much more complex than I think in 1995. Work with the “parts”<\/a> has shown me how complex my “self” is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is was written during the time when I was having a bad time with the noise of small planes, especially the ones that towed gliders up from the Franconia Airport. I wrote this after a particularly bad day. I’m … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-trauma","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}