What is true?

Some of my favorite humans (whom I’ve never met in real life) like to ask this question. You may have heard of / read things by them:

Byron Katie
Brene Brown
Michael A. Singer

What is true?

It’s the most basic yet insanely complicated question ever, because we can know the answer…and not know the answer…at the very same time. And both are correct, depending on how you look at it. But really neither one is “real,” because truth itself is kind of a fallacy.

Yeah, this one’s about to go deep.

I’m re-reading one of the books that was most influential at the beginning of my meditation/mindfulness/spirituality journey a few years back: The Untethered Soul, by Michael A. Singer. If you’ve never picked it up, I highly recommend it. Although I will warn you—it’s not a light read. Bring a highlighter or a pen, don’t get precious about the margins, and prepare to digest the text slowly. It’s only 181 pages but may take you a month to fully absorb. And then chances are you’ll still need to read it again.

At the core of The Untethered Soul is this: you are not your thoughts, you are the seer of your thoughts. And if you are only the seer, then you don’t have to believe everything or anything you see/think.

For example:

Imagine you’ve been working on a big, complex project proposal for a month. You’ve spent nights and weekends on it, making sure everything is just right. But when the big day comes to share it with your boss, and you’re beaming with pride as you wrap up your presentation, they thank you for your hard work, and then immediately shut it down. In less than a second, you go from feeling accomplished to feeling engulfed in rage. Your heart starts beating faster, your body temperature rises, you start to sweat. All you can think about are the swear words you want to lob across the room. You wish you could storm out of the office, but because you’re a grown-up, you quietly grab your things, say “thanks for your time,” and curse like an MFer under your breath as you stomp back to your desk.

You. Are. Pissed.

But are you? Is that true? Or are you only “thinking” you’re pissed?

What Michael A. Singer proposes is that if you are the seer—the observer—of your thoughts, then it’s not true that you’re pissed. You can’t be the object that’s seeing, and the object that’s being seen, at the same time. If you sit back and recognize “pissed” as a thought rather than a condition of who you are—you can simply let it go. And then it’s not true that you’re pissed. You’re simply watching and noticing the emotion…and letting it go.

Byron Katie talks about this same kind of thing in The Work. She poses four questions to ask yourself whenever you get caught in a thought spiral:

1. Is it true? (Yes or no. If no, move to question 3.)
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true? (Yes or no.)
3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
4. Who or what would you be without the thought?

This process is designed to separate you, the thinker, from the object, the thought. Brené Brown does the same thing, but in a less spiritual way, with her Shitty First Drafts (SFD) concept.

The first story we make up is what we call the “shitty first draft,” or the SFD.
• Capturing your SFD means putting those initial thoughts on paper, so that we can better examine the story we are telling ourselves. This version includes all of our fears, insecurities, and worst-case scenarios.
• What we often discover by writing down our SFD is that we have filled in the story with false information—suppositions, confabulations, and conspiracy theories.
• We use the rumble process to figure out which parts of our story are true. This often involves fact-checking with other people.

What Brené Brown, Byron Katie, and Michael A. Singer all have in common is that they’re asking us to re-examine and question what we believe is true. Our brains are wired to make up stories. And if we want to not get caught up in those stories, we have to practice recognizing that just because we think or believe something, doesn’t make it real. In fact, by definition, a thought isn’t real. It’s just…a thought.

I’ve been thinking (ha!) about this a lot in the past few days, especially in the context of how stagnant and blah I’ve been feeling lately. Stagnant and blah are both thoughts. But are they true? If I am noticing them, I can’t also BE them. I am the seer. If I separate myself from my thoughts, can I recognize that they’re not solid, not permanent? Can I accept them as passing clouds and not make them mean anything more than they need to?

What if I am not stagnant, or blah, or numb, or “dead inside,” or sad, or confused?

What if I am just a person who is witnessing all of these things?

What if I stop believing my SFDs? What if I ask myself the four questions of The Work?

What is true?

I am a human. Sitting on a couch. Typing a blog. Drinking coffee. Having thoughts. Watching them come and go.

That’s all there is.

And instead of following the thought that maybe there’s something wrong with that, maybe I just notice that thought, turn it around like an M&M on my tongue, and let it dissolve.

Maybe what’s true is that it’s all fine, and that it’s just all part of the human experience.

This may be the biggest thing that I will need to keep learning, over and over and over again: I am not my thoughts.

I am love, and light, and kindness, and a consciousness who is still in the infancy of understanding all the big mysteries of the world.

And that, just maybe, is true enough for now.