Morbid curiosity got the better of me last Thursday night: I watched Trump’s speech.
Oy vey.
I thought about trying to count the number of lies he told but the man is a Top Fuel dragster of disinformation; he covered 1,000 feet of falsehoods every 3.6 seconds. I couldn’t keep up.
The thing that really makes me meshugana is that Trump’s conception of reality is based entirely on feelings rather than facts.
Feelings aren’t facts, but they feel like facts. And the idea that facts don’t matter because you can create reality out of feelings is highly contagious . . . and very dangerous
According to one of my teachers, “Facts have a way of winning in the end simply by virtue of being facts.”
I hope he’s right.
Philosophically speaking, reality is a function of facts, not an emergent property of our opinions, emotions, or preferred narratives. Reality simply is what it is.
Or is it? In her book The Trouble With Reality, Brooke Gladstone (Co-host of WNYC’s On The Media) writes:
“By far the greatest source of anxiety for those watching the edifice of reality collapse is the ceaseless cascade of lies. But it is not the lies that pose the existential danger to democracy. It’s the lying, the kind of thoroughgoing lying that gives rise to a whole new reality or, better still, no reality at all.”
If reality is more a matter of relative perception than absolute substance, then yes: lies can be used to leverage people’s feelings in ways that bend reality into the shape the liar desires — or make reality disappear altogether.
This is clearly Trump’s M.O. And one of the reasons he’s so successful at it is because he’s unencumbered by any sense of factuality. As conservative columnist George Will put it,
“My problem with Trump isn’t that he doesn’t know this or that. It’s that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know this and that. He doesn’t know what it is to know something.”
So how do we know that we know something?
Most modern discussions about truth focus on what people believe. Yoga philosophy focuses on how people know.
In Yoga Sūtra I.7, Patañjali identifies three valid means of attaining right knowledge (pramāṇa):
pratyakṣa — direct perception; personal observation
anumāna — inference, reason, logic
āgama — reliable testimony; deference to authoritative sources of knowledge
From the standpoint of yoga, feelings are a valid source of information about our internal state of being, not a source of conclusive evidence about whether or not something is true.
For example, if I say, “everything is getting worse,” I’m actually expressing a feeling but presenting my feeling as a statement of fact. When my mind conveys feelings to my intelligence as statements of fact, my intelligence is likely to accept it and I am likely to believe it.
But is it true? How do I know? Is there any evidence to support my conclusion?
If we apply yoga’s system for ascertaining what’s worthy of reasonable belief, we may come to a different conclusion:
pratyakṣa — When I look closely, I can see that some things are getting better while others are getting worse.
anumāna — complex systems rarely move uniformly in one direction.
āgama — causes for happiness and causes for distress come and go like summer and winter seasons; the world moves in cycles.
The introduction of evidence beyond just my feelings supports a reasonable belief in a different conclusion: “decline is always followed by renewal; the bad things that are happening now are planting the seeds for better things to come.”
This is more than just a cause for optimism; it’s a source of empowerment. Now I won’t feel overwhelmed by “everything” and I will feel like there’s something I can do.
Thinking through our feelings doesn’t deny their validity; it helps us remember that our feelings are not always accurate indicators of reality.
The Bhagavad Gita begins with this exact scenario: Arjuna feels grief, compassion, despair, and confusion. His feelings are genuine. But Krishna spends eighteen chapters explaining why Arjuna’s conclusions are mistaken.
Krishna never says: “You shouldn’t feel this way.” He says: “Your feelings are leading you to a misunderstanding of reality.”
Yoga wisdom never asks us to deny our feelings. It asks us to investigate them intelligently and interpret them wisely.
Feelings tell us something important about our inner state of being, but they don’t automatically tell us the truth about the world. Or about ourselves. For that, we need evidence, dialogue, discernment, and wisdom.
Perhaps most importantly, we need the humility to recognize that feeling certain and being correct are not always the same thing.
And here’s one of yoga wisdom’s great secrets: there is no defense against humility because humility aligns us with reality.
It may seem counter-intuitive in the face of incessant bluster and affected bravado, but humility has a way of winning in the end simply by virtue of being humility.
By contrast, those who cling to insatiable desires, vanity, illusion, and arrogance, no matter how high and mighty they may be for the moment, will eventually, but inevitably, come crashing down to earth.
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” – Proverbs 16.18
Try yoga’s system for attaining right knowledge out on this proverb and let me know what you come up with.
Wishing you all good fortune,
– Hari-k