Wisdom or truth?

When Rav was taking leave of his uncle and teacher, Rabbi Ḥiyya, upon his return from Eretz Yisrael to Babylonia, Rabbi Ḥiyya said to him: May the Merciful One save you from something that is worse than death. Rav was perplexed: Is there anything that is worse than death? He went, examined the sources, and found the following verse: “And I find more bitter than death the woman, etc.” (Ecclesiastes 7:26). Rabbi Ḥiyya was hinting at this verse, and indeed, Rav’s wife would constantly aggravate him. When he would say to her: Prepare me lentils, she would prepare him peas; if he asked her for peas, she would prepare him lentils.

When Ḥiyya, his son, grew up, he would reverse the requests Rav asked him to convey to her, so that Rav would get what he wanted. Rav said to his son Ḥiyya: Your mother has improved now that you convey my requests. He said to Rav: It is I who reverse your request to her. Rav said to him: This is an example of the well-known adage that people say: He who comes from you shall teach you wisdom; I should have thought of that idea myself. You, however, should not do so, i.e., reverse my request, as it is stated: “They have taught their tongue to speak lies, they weary themselves to commit iniquity, etc.” (Jeremiah 9:4). If you attribute such a request to me, you will have uttered a falsehood.

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The seal of the Holy one

--> God is righteous; be ye also righteous. Righteousness means love of truth, hatred of lying and backbiting. The seal of the Holy one, blessed be He, is Truth, of which actions of man should also bear the impress. Hence let thy yea be yea and thy nay, nay. He who is honest in money transactions, unto him this is reckoned  as if he had fulfilled the whole of the Torah.



from the Talmud

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed
up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I
fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of
spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I
am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than
there; for there is no reason why here rather than there,
why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By
whose order and direction have this place and time been
alloted to me? 

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

How many kingdoms know us not?


Why is my knowledge limited? Why my stature? Why
my life to one hundred years rather than to a thousand?
What reason has nature had for giving me such, and for
choosing this number rather than another in the infinity of
those from which there is no more reason to choose one
than another, trying nothing else?


The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the
play is; at the last a little earth is thrown upon our head,
and that is the end for ever.

We are fools to depend upon the society of our fellow men.
Wretched as we are, powerless as we are, they will not
aid us; we shall die alone. We should therefore act as if
we were alone, and in that case should we build fine houses,
etc.?

 We should seek the truth without hesitation; and, if
we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more
than the search for truth.

Pascal

Knowing Truth and Being Truth

God is love. If God is love, love is most sacred. To utter this word without meaning, is a vain repetition. The lips of a person to whom it means something, are closed. He can say little. For love is a revelation in itself. No study is necessary, no meditation is needed, and no piety is required. If love is pure, if the spark of love has begun to glow, then there is no need to go somewhere to gain spirituality. Then spirituality is within. One must keep blowing the spark till it turns into a perpetual fire. The fire worshippers of old did not worship a fire which went out; they worshipped a perpetual fire. Where is that perpetual fire to be found? In one's own heart. The spark that one finds glowing for a moment and that then becomes dim, does not belong to heaven, for in heaven all things are lasting; it must belong to some other place. Love has become a word from the dictionary, a word which is used a thousand times a day, which means nothing. To the one who knows what it means, love means patience, love means endurance, love means tolerance, love means sacrifice, love means service. All things such as gentleness, humility, modesty, graciousness, kindness, all are the different manifestations of love. It is the same to say, 'God is all and all is God,' as to say, 'Love is all and all is love.' And it is to find it, to feel it, to experience its warmth, and to see in the world, the light of love, and to keep its glow, and to hold love's flame high, as the sacred torch, to guide one in life's journey. It is in this that the purpose of life is fulfilled. According to the common standard of life, a man with common sense is counted to be a right and a fit person. But, by a mystical standard, that person alone can begin to be right, who is beginning to feel sympathy with his fellow man. For by the study of philosophy and mysticism, by the practices of concentration and meditation, to what do we attain? To a capability that enables us to serve our fellow men better.

Truth is simple. But for the very reason that it is simple, people will not take it; because our life on earth is such that for everything we value, we have to pay a great price and one wonders, if truth is the most precious of all things, then how can truth be attained simply? It is this illusion that makes everyone deny simple truth and seek for complexity. Tell people about something that makes their heads whirl round and round and round. Even if they do not understand it, they are most pleased to think, 'It is something substantial. It is something solid. For, it is an idea we cannot understand, it must be something lofty.' But something which every soul knows, proving what is divine in every soul, and which it cannot help but know, that appears to be too cheap, for the soul already knows it. There are two things: knowing and being. It is easy to know truth, but most difficult to be truth. It is not in knowing truth that life's purpose is accomplished; life's purpose is accomplished in being truth.

Inayat Khan

Which truths are most useful to us

In order to be always disposed to judge well, it seems to
me, only two things are needed: •knowledge of the truth and
•a dependable practice of remembering and assenting to this
knowledge whenever the occasion demands. But because
nobody except God knows everything perfectly, we have to
settle for knowing the truths that are most useful to us.

(1) The first and chief of these is that there is a God
on whom all things depend, whose perfections are infinite,
whose power is immense and whose decrees are infallible.
This teaches us to accept with a good spirit everything that
happens to us, as expressly sent by God. Moreover, since the
true object of love is perfection, when we lift up our minds
to think about God as he is we find ourselves naturally so
inclined to love him that we even rejoice in our afflictions,
through the thought that he wills that they should come to
us.

(2) The second thing we must know is the nature of
our soul: that it •doesn’t need the body in order to stay
in existence, •is much nobler than the body, and •is capable
of enjoying countless satisfactions that aren’t to be found
in this life. This prevents us from fearing death, and moves
us so far from caring about the things of this world that we
regard as negligible anything that fortune can do to us.

(3) We can be greatly helped towards this ·frame of mind
or condition of soul· by judging the works of God in the way
they deserve and by having the capacious idea of the extent
of the universe that I tried to make conceivable in the third
book of my Principles. For if we imagine that
•beyond the heavens there is nothing but imaginary
spaces, and that
•all the heavens are made only for the service of the
earth and
•the earth is made only for man,
this ·has three bad effects on us·. •It inclines us to think
that this earth is our principal home and that this life is the
best life we will have. •Instead of knowing the perfections
that we really do have, we get a sense of our perfections
by comparing ourselves with other creatures to which we
attribute imperfections that they don’t have. •With preposterous
self-importance we want to be in God’s confidence and
to join him in running the world—which causes an infinity
of pointless anxieties and frustrations.

(4) After acknowledging the goodness of God, the immortality
of our souls and the immensity of the universe, there is
one more truth that seems to me to be most useful to know,
namely this:
Although each of us is a person separate from others,
and therefore with interests that differ somewhat from
those of the rest of the world, each of us ought still
to think that he couldn’t survive on his own, and
that he is really one of the parts of the universe, and
more particularly a part of this earth, of this state,
of this society, of this family—to which he is joined
by where he lives, by his oath ·of allegiance·, by his
birth. And the interests of the whole of which he is a
part should always be put before his own individual
personal interests.
In a measured and thoughtful way, however; for •it would
be wrong for him to expose himself to a great evil in order to
procure only a slight benefit for his relatives or his country,
and •if he on his own is worth more than all the rest of his
city, it would be wrong for him to sacrifice himself to save
it. But someone who saw everything in relation to himself
wouldn’t shrink from greatly harming other men when he
believed that this would bring him some small benefit. Such
a person would have no true friendship, no fidelity—quite
generally no virtue. On the other hand, someone who
•considers himself a part of the community takes pleasure
in doing good to everyone, and isn’t afraid of even risking
his life in the service of others when the occasion demands;
indeed, he would be willing to lose his soul, if he could, to
save others. So this way of •considering oneself—·namely as
a part of something larger·—is the source and origin of all
the most heroic actions men do. ·But let us be careful about
what we identify as heroism·. Someone who risks death for
reasons of vanity (he hopes to be praised) or out of stupidity
(he doesn’t see the danger) is to be pitied more than prized.
Now think about someone who risks death because he thinks
it is his duty, or suffers some other harm in order to bring
good to others. It may be that when he thinks about it he
doesn’t think he did it because he owes more to the public
of which he is a part than to himself in particular, but
that is why he acted as he did, and this reason has become
confused in his mind. A person is naturally drawn to have
it—·i.e. this thought of being part of a larger whole·—when
he knows and loves God as he should. For then, abandoning
himself completely to God’s will, he strips himself of his own
interests and has only one passion—to do what he believes
would be agreeable to God. This brings him satisfactions of
the mind, contentments, that are worth incomparably more
than all the transient little joys that depend on the senses.

(5) In addition to these truths that generalize over all our
actions, we ought to know many other truths that concern
more particularly each individual action. The chief of these,
in my view, are the ones I mentioned in my last letter, namely:
•All our passions represent to us the goods that they
incite us to seek as being much greater than they
really are;
•The pleasures of the body are never as lasting as those
of the soul, or as great when we have them as they
appear when we are looking forward to them.
We should carefully take this in, so that •when we feel ourselves
moved by some passion we’ll suspend our judgment
until it calms down and •we won’t let ourselves easily be
deceived by the false appearance of the goods of this world.

(6) I have only this to add, that we ought to examine in
detail all the customs of the place where we are living, so as
to see how far they should be followed. Although we can’t
have certain demonstrations of everything, we ought to make
choices and (in matters of custom) embrace the opinions
that seem the most probable. Why? So that when there’s
a need for action we won’t be irresolute; because nothing
causes regret and repentance except irresolution.

Finally, just this: As I said before, if one is to be disposed
always to judge well, one needs not only •knowledge of the
truth but also •habit. ·Here is why·. Suppose that in the past
we have been convinced of some truth P by clear and evident
reasons; we can’t keep anything—·e.g. those reasons·— in
mind continually; so in the course of time we might be led
by false appearances to turn away from believing P; and our
protection against that is by long and frequent meditation
on P to imprint it in our mind so ·deeply· that it turns into a
•habit. In this sense the scholastics are right when they say
that virtues are habits; for our failings are indeed usually
due not to lack of •theoretical knowledge of what we should
do but to lack of practical knowledge—i.e. lack of a firm habit
of belief. 

Descartes

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Evil

An elephant was led to a well to drink. Seeing
itself in the water, it shied away. It thought it was
shying away from another elephant. It did not
realize it was shying away from its own self.

All evil qualities—oppression, hatred, envy,
greed, mercilessness, pride—when they are within
yourself, they bring no pain. When you see them
in another, then you shy away and feel the pain.
We feel no disgust at our own scab and abscess.
 But if we see a tiny abscess or half a
scratch on another’s hand, we shy away from that
person’s food and have no stomach for it whatsoever.
Evil qualities are just like scabs and abscesses;
when they are within us they cause no pain,
but when we see them even to a small degree in
another, then we feel pain and disgust.
Just as you shy away from your brother or sister,
so you should excuse them for shying away
from you. The pain you feel comes from those
faults, and they see the same faults. The seeker of
truth is a mirror for their neighbors. But those
who cannot feel the sting of truth are not mirrors
to anyone but themselves.

Truth and Peace

The heart is not made peaceful by lying speech, (just as) 
water and oil do not ignite (lamp) light. 

(But) there is peace for the heart in words of truth. Truths are 
the seeds of the snare for (the tranquillity of) the heart.


RUMI

Method for Truth

just as a state is much better governed when it has only a

 few laws that are strictly obeyed than when it has a

great many laws that can provide an excuse for vices,

so I thought that in place of the large number of rules

that make up logic I would findthe following four to

 be sufficient, provided that I made andkept to a

strong resolution always to obey them.

(1) The first was never to accept anything

as true if I didn’t have evident

knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid jumping

to conclusions and preserving old opinions, and to include

in my judgments only what presented itself to my mind so

vividly and so clearly that I had no basis for calling it in

question.

(2) The second ·was· to divide each of the difficulties I

examined into as many parts as possible and as might be

required in order to resolve them better.

(3) The third ·was· to direct my thoughts in an orderly

manner, by •starting with the simplest and most easily

known objects in order to move up gradually to knowledge

of the most complex, and •by stipulating some order even

among objects that have no natural order of precedence.

(4) And the last ·was· to make all my enumerations so

complete, and my reviews so comprehensive, that I could be

sure that I hadn’t overlooked anything.

Rene Descartes

How Levin discovered truth

Working on till the peasants’ dinner hour, which was not long in coming, he went out of the barn with Fiodor and fell into talk with him, stopping beside a neat yellow sheaf of rye laid on the threshing floor for seed.
Fiodor came from a village at some distance from the one in which Levin had once allotted land to his co-operative association. Now it had been let to the innkeeper.
Levin talked to Fiodor about this land and asked whether Platon, a well-to-do peasant of good character belonging to the same village, would not take the land for the coming year.
“It’s a high rent; it wouldn’t pay Platon, Konstantin Dmitrich,” answered the peasant, picking the ears off his sweat-drenched shirt.
“But how does Kirillov make it pay?”
“Mitukha!” (So the peasant called the innkeeper in a tone of contempt.) “You may be sure he’ll make it pay, Konstantin Dmitrich! He’ll get his share, however he has to squeeze to get it! He’s no mercy on a peasant. But Uncle Fokanich” (so he called the old peasant Platon) — “do you suppose he’d flay the skin off a man? Where there’s debt, he’ll let anyone off. And he’ll suffer losses. He’s human, too.”
“But why will he let anyone off?”
“Oh, well, of course, folks are different. One man lives for his own wants and nothing else, like Mitukha, thinking only of filling his belly; but Fokanich is a righteous old man. He lives for his soul. He does not forget God.”
“How does he think of God? How does he live for his soul?” Levin almost shouted.
“Why, to be sure, in truth, in God’s way. Folks are different. Take you, now — you wouldn’t wrong a man . . .”
“Yes, yes — good-by!” said Levin, breathless with excitement, and turning round he took his stick and walked quickly away toward home. At the peasant’s words that Fokanich lived for his soul, in truth, in God’s way, undefined but significant ideas seemed to burst forth, as though they had been locked up, and, all of them striving toward one goal, they thronged whirling through his head, blinding him with their light.Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in his thoughts (he could not yet disentangle them), as in his spiritual condition, unlike anything he had experienced before.
The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like an electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind. These thoughts had unconsciously been in his mind even when he was talking about the land.
He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully tested this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.
“Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And could one say anything more senseless than what he said? He said that one must not live for one’s own wants, that is, that one must not live for what we understand, what we are attracted by, what we desire — but must live for something incomprehensible, for God, whom no one can understand nor even define. What of it? Didn’t I understand those senseless words of Fiodor’s? And understanding them, did I doubt their truth? Did I think them stupid, obscure, inexact?
“No, I understood him, and exactly as he understands the words. I understood them more fully and clearly than I understand anything in life, and never in my life have I doubted nor can I doubt about them. And not only I, but everyone, the whole world, understands nothing fully but this, and about this only they have no doubt, and are always agreed.
“Fiodor says that Kirillov, the innkeeper, lives for his belly. That’s comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can’t do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the same Fiodor says that one mustn’t live for one’s belly, but must live for truth, for God, and, at a hint, I understand him! And I and millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now — peasants, the poor in spirit and the sages, who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing — we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by reason — it is outside it, and has no causes, and can have no effects.
“If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects — a reward — it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.
“And yet I know it, and we all know it.
“And I sought miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle which would convince me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!
“What could be a greater miracle than that?
“Can I have found the solution of it all? Can my sufferings be over?” thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass.
“Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand,” he thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of goatweed. “Everything from beginning?” he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goatweed out of the beetle’s way and twisting another blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over to. “What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered?
“Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this grass and of this beetle (there, she didn’t care for the grass, she’s opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the aspens and clouds and nebulae, there was a process of evolution. Evolution from what? Into what? — Eternal evolution and struggle . . . As though there could be any sort of tendency and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spite of utmost effort of thought in this direction I could not discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and yearnings. And the meaning of my impulses is so clear within me, that I was living according to them all the time, and I was astonished and rejoiced, when the peasant expressed it to me: to live for God, for my soul.
“I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found the Master.”
And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his ideas during the last two years, the beginning of which was the clear confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother hopelessly ill.
Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death and eternal oblivion, he had made up his mind that life was impossible like that, and that he must either interpret life so that it would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil, or else shoot himself.
But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many joys, and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.
What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly, but thinking wrongly.
He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual truths that he had sucked in with his mother’s milk, but he had thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but studiously ignoring them.
Now it was clear to him that he could live only by virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought up.
“What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own wants? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.” And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.
“I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not give an answer to my question — it is incommensurable with my question. The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all men, given, because I could not have got it from anywhere.
“Where could I have got it? Could I have arrived through reason at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover, because that is unreasonable.

Tolstoy in Anna Karenina

Discrimination is a quality that is always hidden
in a person.
Don’t you see that an insane person
possesses hands and feet but lacks discrimination?
Discrimination is a subtle essence within
you.
Yet, day and night you have been occupied
with nurturing the physical form that does not
know right from wrong.
Why have you devoted
all your energies to looking after the physical,
entirely neglecting that subtle essence?
The physical
exists through that essence, but that essence in
no way depends on the physical.


The light that shines through the windows of
the eyes and ears—if those windows did not exist,
the light would not stop.
It would find other windows to shine through.
If you bring a lamp before
the sun, do you say, “I see the sun by means of
this lamp”? God forbid!
If you did not bring the
lamp, the sun would still shine.
What need is there for a lamp?
This is the danger in associating with kings.
It is not that you may lose your life—we must lose
our life in the end anyway, whether today or
tomorrow does not matter.
The danger arises from the fact that when kings enter upon the
scene, and the spell of their influence gains
strength, becoming like a great lamp, the person
who keeps company with them, claims their
friendship, and accepts money from them will
inevitably speak in accordance with their desires.
That person will listen to the kings’ mundane
views with the utmost attention, and will not be
able to deny them.
That is where the danger lies, it leads to a fading
respect for the true source.
When you cultivate
the interest of kings, that other interest which
is fundamental to the spiritual life becomes a
stranger to you.
The more you proceed down the
path of kings, the more that direction where the
Beloved dwells becomes lost.
The more you make
your peace with worldly people, the more the
Beloved turns away from you.
Going in their
direction renders you subject to their rule.
Once you have turned down their path, in the end God
gives them power over you.


It is a pity to reach the ocean, and to be satisfied
with a little pitcherful from the sea.


After all,
there are pearls in the sea, and from the sea come
a myriad of precious things.
What is the value in
just taking water?
What pride can intelligent people
have in that?
This world is a mere foam fleck
of the True Sea.
That Ocean is the science of the
saints, and within that Water is the Pearl Itself.
This world is but foam full of floating jetsam.
Yet, through the turning of the waves, and the
rhythmic surging of the sea in constant motion,
this foam takes on a certain beauty.
But this beauty
is a borrowed thing coming from elsewhere.
It is a false coin that sparkles to the eye.
People are the astrolabe of God, but it requires
an astronomer to use the astrolabe.
If a vegetableseller
or a greengrocer should find the astrolabe,
what good would it do them?
From that astrolabe, what could they know of the movements of
the circling stars and the positions of the planets,
their influences and so forth?
But in the hands of
the astronomer, the astrolabe becomes truly valuable.
Just as this copper astrolabe reflects the movements
of the heavens like a mirror, so the human
being is the astrolabe of God.
“We have honored the children of Adam.”
Those who have been moved by God to see the
one reality and learn Its ways through the astrolabe
of their own being, behold moment by
moment, flash by flash, the testament of God.
Indeed, it is an infinite beauty that never leaves
their mirror.
God has servants who cloak themselves in a
wisdom, knowingness and grace invisible to others.
Out of their excessive jealousy and love for
God these servants cloak themselves, just like
Mutanabbi says of beautiful women:
Figured silks they wore, not to beautify
But to guard their beauty from lustful eyes.

Rumi