Monday, August 3, 2015

The Importance of Being Alive

The most important thing in Life is Being Alive. Being someone who is able to seek the truth. Being able to share the truth. Being able to reflect on the truth. Being able to restate the truth and explain the truth. Being able to act based in that truth.  Being able to reflect on your actions.

Once, you have stopped living or even died, leaving the mortal world behind you, then your truth becomes fiction. It becomes fiction as stories are told of you and your exploits. Your truth is shared through the minds of others as it has affected them. These people add, subtract, distill, hypothesize based on their experiences, such that your truth then becomes their interpretation of your truth.

Their interpretation of your truth comes from juxtaposing their experiences with their reflection on their actions, and the communal stories and understanding of what you did. You are not there to explain yourself, thus the person affected by your truth has to guess, deduce, intuit and/or analyze what has been passed along as your words and stories of your actions as they think, reflect and allow your truth to feed the development of their truth.

Simply put, time interferes with the direct understanding of what you did, what you said and the context in which this all occurred. No one can say that they were there when Jesus drove the moneychangers from the temple, how he did it or why. We can only put our life experience over the story that has been passed from generation to generation and person to person in an attempted understanding. There is not anyone involved in the event who is available to ask questions of.

This layering of interpretation over time turns your truth, actions and words, in to a fiction told by another without you to establish finer points of clarity. When you stop being alive,  you are not present to refute someone stating that you did or said something.

The veracity and validity of any truth you may have discovered lies in the ability of another to process and reach conclusions based on their interpretations. That person's interpretation becomes their truth infused with your truth.

All this happens once you stop living, stop interacting and stop connecting with people. Yet while you still draw breath, while your heart still pumps, while you mind is still present can you still discover your truth, share your truth and refine your truth, so that it may be your definition of you that can be passed on to others for their active use.  

1 comment:

alex-ness said...

At some point in existence truth and falsehoods, however much they mean much to us, individually, matters only to to us. For Example, a teacher in China who was teaching English was running out of lessons to use so that he could speak English, while speak about something that his students might have an interest in. He thought that WWII was a safe subject. He was wrong. He told them about Nagasaki and Hiroshima ending the war, but found that the Chinese students had been taught that the Soviets beat the Japanese. They believed a lie, and it worked for them despite being absolutely false. I prefer the truth, and I know you do, but sometimes people exist in a setting where falsehood is the standard.