Truthful Thinking

TRUTHFUL THINKING
By Bill Cottringer

“Success is what we get from what we do to get it.” ~ The Author.

Which is more satisfying—week-old, cold apple pie out of the refrigerator or hot, freshly-baked apple pie with cold French vanilla ice cream on top? If Mary wants chocolate cake for her wedding reception and her husband-to-be John wants vanilla cake, is a marble wedding cake the best answer to satisfy the couple? Is there a creative compromise to making enough money to live comfortably without having to be a 24/7 workaholic with a Blackberry or PC phone embedded in your pocket?

In my first book, I explored the reasons for and the way through of a central paradox in life—“you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” But admittedly, I didn’t fully capture the essence of the primary problem and best solution. I really only scratched the surface. This is because it is very hard to step outside the very process that determines what we ‘know,” which of course is how we think in the first place.

To think about thinking is not an easy thing to do. You are trying to objectively use the subjective thing you are trying to think about. Some say you can’t possibly do that. It is like trying to interpret non-verbal behavior, verbally. That is like a mathematician using numbers to communicate with an artist who speaks in pictures. Two very different games. Much different rules of each game.

Regardless, there is an inevitable conclusion from those who have figured out how to do the impossible—thinking about thinking. This conclusion is: Although we think we are trying to get to the real truth or falseness of something, such as the validity or disproof of our cake paradox, the very thinking process we use can be highly flawed and result in a false sense of certainty about what we think we know for sure. This all has to do with the gift vs. curse nature of self-awareness and which direction you are leaning towards at any given point in time

Self-awareness—the very real sense there is a ‘me’ apart and separate from everything else—starts out as a gift. It is what gives us the sense of satisfaction and success in finding the truth, so we can act upon it to be even more satisfied and successful. But stop and re-read the quote at the top. Truthful thinking defines an important idea, such as ‘success,’ in circular terms. This reality takes us to a better understanding of how our self-awareness then moves to become a curse, before it returns full-circle to being the gift it started out being, mainly to increase our sense of satisfaction and success in finally moving towards knowing the whole truth (and nut’n but the truth!).

We are getting into the abstract realm of thinking where we can easily get lost without some caution. Let’s bring this invisible thinking thing back to visibility. This sense of a distinct self being separate and different from everyone and everything else around us gets strengthened by all the ‘truth’ and things we do and achieve from knowing it, and gets so extreme that we completely forget the original connection and union that our growing sense of self-awareness separated us from.

But sooner or later, our self-consciousness leads us to discover up to half of life we don’t like, get satisfaction from or otherwise appreciate. That becomes very annoying to a self searching for maximum success, satisfaction and appreciation. Imagine using perfectly good thinking and getting something you don’t want.

Part of the growth and decline of this self-awareness journey is the dualistic thinking we engage in—dividing everything into this or that categories. Of course the ultimate category everything eventually falls into is true vs. false. Other variations are yes vs. no, right vs. wrong, okay vs. not okay, correct vs., incorrect, smart vs. dumb, good vs. bad, and useful vs. useless.

When we finally manage to take things to the extreme with this dualistic thinking and end up dividing the whole world in half, we begin to question what we think we know as not necessarily so. How can things be either true or false, useful or useless and good or bad, when we have experienced them to be both, neither, or somewhere in between at times? This is the start of self-consciousness returning to its gift nature, finally leading us to truthful thinking that deals with the whole picture. It also has a funny way of validating itself without any doubt. The leap of faith about the certainty of something no longer exists.

The key to understanding and correcting untruthful thinking that eventually leads to losing and failure, is in knowing that the brain isn’t designed to capture and know the whole truth all at once. You have to digest both sides of the equation in life by being there—all the yangs and yins—before you can see how untruthful thinking has created artificial extremes in polarities of things that really aren’t so. They are just imaginary.

The degree to which we have polarized such things as war or peace, life or death, good or evil, and rich or poor, and then compounded the problem further by the words we use to communicate our truth versions and the connotative interpretations of those versions that we have created—all with untruthful thinking—makes them nearly impervious to discovery. But they are like oil on water and eventually surface.

This whole truthful thinking process is very obvious, but only after one has experienced it’s full circle—it is the conclusion you get from doing what you do to get it.

“The obscure takes awhile to see, but the obvious even longer.” ~Truthful Thinker.