How do you decide when you are wrong about a person or situation?
Imagine you believe with everything you have that you are right, that you have rational justifications for everything you believe and that you have no direct evidence to the contrary. BUT everyone you know is of entirely the opposite opinion, and is quite happy to tell you so. When every time you try to defend your point of view there is someone ready to shoot it down, and even though you could respond you become so weary of trying to fight an apparently losing battle that you just give up trying.
How do you decide if you are right and everyone else is deceived, or if you need to get more realistic about the situation? How do know that you aren’t being fooled? How do you know you haven’t driven yourself insane wondering about it all the time?
We’ve all grown up with all kinds of beliefs, things that turn out true, things that turn out false, all of which, I think we come to know as true as we test the things we believe against reality and experience. I think this may be what Freud called “reality testing,” though I haven’t actually ever read Freud, but have gathered this second hand mostly through reading the literary critic Harold Bloom. It’s similar idea, I think, that the Buddha was getting at. We can’t really know what’s right or true until we test it against experience. Of course, the real trick brings us back around to something similar to your initial questions: What does the experience confirm? We could have been deceived. We could, even if discovering something is true, not accept it, and continue on with our false beliefs, especially if those beliefs somehow comfort us. (I think this is why religion is so effective; there is no real way to “test” or validate the experience of faith.) Then again, I could be all wrong.
Todd
Thanks Todd
I was really talking about a more personal, small scale situation.
But I think you have a point, what does you’re ability to test an idea actually prove? Simply that you have found certain aspects to be true, and it is perfectly possible for another observer to find different aspects to be true.
Taking it to entirely the other end of the spectrum, I believe some of this is seen in Quantum Mechanics!