In the 1992 film, A Few Good Men, a memorable exchange takes place when Navy Lt. Kaffee asks Marine Col. Jessep: I want the truth! and Marine Col. Jessep forcefully responds: You can’t handle the truth!
In a number of ways, it is true that most of us can’t handle the truth. Looking directly at truth can either be totally frightening which means that it is something we want to avoid at all costs or looking at truth can, literally, be enlightening. In both cases, it takes courage to face the truth.
Handling the truth about ourselves and our world takes a long time—some never manage it. Many new to Buddhism have a hard time handling rebirth, that after a person dies, they will be reborn into some other form. Other Buddhists I have met over the years, can’t handle the truth that within us is the unconditioned which is eternal and undying. When it comes to Zen, many Zennists I have met can’t handle kenshō but believe sitting in zazen is the natural unfolding of Buddha nature.
Eventually, it gets down to a battle, a contest of wills, in which a preponderance of evidence, like in the film, does matter and makes Navy Lt. Kaffee’s arguments better than Marine Col. Jessep’s persuasion argument.
But also, evidence can be untrustworthy especially in science where evidence is derived from models or when correlations are confused with causation. After all, science fundamentally deals with causation, not with hypothetical models or as if causation.
In Buddhism the truth is in us which we have to realize. It is Buddha-nature which, essentially, is no different than the ātman (the animative principle) or Christianity’s, “God [is] Spirit/pneûma]” (John 4:24). But this truth has to be seen face to face—really seen. We have to go through the crucible of transformation out of which the truth is finally realized and accepted. Can we handle it? Most can't.
Yes, it is easier to look the other way. Our negative state tends to make us so uncomfortable that we so desperately do not want to see it. But once we take the full focus of our consciousness and really look at what is happening, satori indeed can follow. Sometimes out of the blue. A strange but illuminating feeling.
Posted by: Olivier Devroede | October 03, 2019 at 01:33 PM