In retrospect, I now know what it was about reading “Open Secret” that stunned me into total bewilderment. My sensations told me that his words had given me a glimpse into the heart of “The Big Picture,” and that this glimpse cast serious doubts about the nature of reality. If consciousness is the context for truth, then amnesia obscures 90 percent of what truth is all about. We occupy a small slice of what the truth might be, using amnesia to send the rest of the story to the back of the mind where we can dismiss it because it raises serious questions about the view we defend as “the truth.” If you look at consciousness as the whole story, we occupy the end product of consciousness, the part that features the sum of what we do to dismiss truth as false. TAG, or “The Anti-Truth Game” describes how we fill time ‘at war with the truth’ about truth, in order to maintain our preferred rendition of what we want truth to be.
If you can consider that truth is unitary, then truth is consciousness, featuring us playing TAG with it. This puts truth in the driver’s seat. If it is what consciousness is, then it is the author of TAG, and amnesia, and how we fill time pretending we can prove truth is false. Truth, in other words, authors us engaged in its rebuttal. Consciousness is truth featuring us playing TAG with it. Amnesia shields us from the architecture of the game. TAG requires amnesia to keep us in the dark so we can fill time pretending we can prove truth is false. If truth exists as a constant, then the option to prove it is false is zero. This means truth authors us engaged in a no win parody. Time features us stuck in the fiction we can prove truth is false, which is patently absurd if truth provides the context for its own rebuttal.
The sudden seeing of this forced me to take a brand new look at my profession. I had doubts about it anyway, but amnesia made it impossible to get a good look at the rest of the story that resides on the other side of amnesia. Was anyone really not okay, or were they busy playing TAG with truth to defend the fiction right now is really real? Amnesia prevents us from even entertaining thoughts like this.
Wei Wu Wei’s synthesis of Buddhist philosophy made the architecture more than clear. Truth exits, and it includes us mostly filing time trying to prove truth is false. Truth includes who we are, the truth of which resides on the other side of amnesia, and who we pretend to be, the defense of which is impossible. We can only be who we are, displaying where we are with who we are (TAG), mostly filling time dismissing truth so we can defend who we insist we are. Who we are never changes no matter how much energy, conviction and drama we bring to who we insist we are. What stands between the truth of who we are and who we pretend to be, is amnesia, which ranges from a slight fog bank, to fog that locks us into the fiction the parody we occupy is who we are.
Before I read Wei Wu Wei, I was aware that clients relied on their story to play the part of some kind of a person, more often than not, a victim. After I read Wei Wu Wei, “The Big Picture” he illuminated revealed why no one has anything wrong with them. This news should be cause for dancing in the streets, but such is not the case. Amnesia successfully obscures why nothing is wrong with us so we can use our story to play the part of some kind of a victim.
Irony suggests that what we can’t stand is why there is nothing wrong with us, and why we rely on story to carve out the parody we occupy, in which we play the part of a less than okay person. No one really wants to know why “The Victim Parody” occupies center stage in our reality. We are prepared to accept the fact victimhood is our fate in life. It certainly works to maintain the assumption that something is fundamentally wrong with us. If you factor this out, what we are at odds with, and amnesia successfully obscures, is that there is nothing wrong with anyone.
The parody we occupy keeps the fiction in place we are flawed, tragic figures who are ‘doing their level best to endure this difficult life.’ In defense of the lie we are who we pretend to be, these ideas are, understandably, treated as heresy. We work as a vast team, thanks to our collective amnesia, to defend the assumption that what makes reality real is suffering. Long before I got a glimpse of “The Big Picture,” I was well aware that clients relied on the suffering that goes with their story to define who they insist they are, but the scope of this realization was still on the other side of amnesia. The truth is, what my clients and I shared in common was our determination to keep truth out of sight and out of mind. The pursuit of truth is a gigantic push/pull; it entices you to unravel the mystery, even as you suspect you already know at some pre-conscious level of knowing, why we are all inclined to treat truth as “the enemy.” Truth is the enemy of the lies we depend on to defend our preferred view of reality. Truth always threatens to remind us, in the form of ‘fear,’ that what we defend as “the truth,” is only a tiny slice of what there is to know. As the context called “consciousness” comes into focus, what we defend as “the truth” turns out to be what we depend on to play the game of TAG with truth.
