In the dim light of dawn, better than fifteen years ago, I sat stunned by what I read in Wei Wu Wei’s book, “Open Secret.” As a Psychologist, my level of upset made it clear what I read was profound. In retrospect, it is clear consciousness is superficially divisible into what the truth is, and what we defend as the truth. Truth seems to reside in the ‘unconscious’ part of consciousness, and kept out of sight and out of mind via amnesia. Truth exists, and amnesia tries to dismiss it because it always threatens to remind us that what we defend as ‘the truth’ resides in the conscious part of consciousness.

Time displays how amnesia works, more or less successfully, to reject truth as false, so we can defend what we want truth to be. Because we can only obscure truth with amnesia, it contradicts everything we defend as the truth. The fiction we defend as “the truth” is false, and what we reject as false is the truth. We live, in other words, at the mercy of truth, always threatening to come out of hiding to remind us that nothing is what we insist it is.

The disparity between the two can be as much as 180 degrees out of phase, which is sufficient to explain what makes us anxious and insecure. Fear provides indirect proof that ‘we know,’ at some pre-conscious level, that what we defend as the truth is a lie. In this sense, insecurity makes perfect sense: truth bleeds through amnesia to remind us that the conclusions that run our life are understandably fragile. Reality, in this light, displays how we live a lie as if it is the truth. The stance we assume in life is always at risk. Our collective amnesia defines the box we occupy. The box we occupy is always under siege because as long as we dismiss truth as false, we are impostors. Reality is the setting in which we impostor who we insist we are to dismiss the truth of who we are. We live a double life, and it can be argued that every problem we endure stems from ‘living a double life,’ as if that’s not true.
» Read more: Truth According to Wei Wu Wei