What It Feels Like When One Rejects The Truth
We are not born with all the truths of life. In fact, assimilating new information, learning and growing is a life-long journey – if we were born with all the facts then living would actually be rather dull! So life is about new truths coming to us; stuff which we didn’t previously understand.
As children we are designed to seek out and absorb new information so we can understand the world, survive better in it and so pass on our genes. But as adults our approach to new information changes. We don’t like to appear that we don’t understand stuff as that seems to be stupid and weak, un-sexy, and this image threatens our potential to pass on our genes. So we reject truth in order to maintain our public image. We reject truth to protect our egos. This is the first reason.
The second reason we don’t like the truth is that it often exposes our bad side. We know that if the truth gets out that really we are not as good as we should be, then that too is un-sexy. We would then run the risk of being punished for being bad. So very often, rather than actually changing and becoming good, we will attack the truth which is exposing our inner badness.
In both reasons, truth is attacked by people who do not want to grow spiritually, either to protect their lack of understanding, or to hide inner badness. A spiritually grown person understands things clearly and also does the right thing.
So…what does rejecting the truth actually feel like?
We all do it. Even supposedly spiritually advanced people.
A new truth comes to us.
There is a brief moment of confusion in our minds.
“What?”
More clarity is sought on what has been introduced to us to make sure we have understood it correctly.
Very rapidly, subconsciously, we identify that the new information is disagreeing with what we previously thought. So we ask more questions to find if there’s a way to make the new truth agree with our previous incorrect notions. But it doesn’t.
We begin to feel embarrassed. We don’t like the feeling that our wrong preconceptions are about to become public.
We may rapidly feel resentment, anger and even aggression towards someone exposing the truth, and that often turns into persecution of the truth, and of the person exposing the truth.
Very often we choose not to learn, grow and change, but instead we choose to attack the new truth. Here are some tactics which we use to persecute the truth.
Avoidance. We can easily walk away from a person who is disagreeing with us. We can easily not visit a web-site which is exposing our inner selves with the truth. It appears to be easier not to think, and to stay the same. We may pretend to be in a meeting not to talk to someone who represents the truth. Or we may pretend we never received an email. Or we might switch off a television programme which shows images of starving people in Africa.