Truth is a state of consciousness, I believe, one in which opposites are integrated. This I believe is a typical example:
We have an unconscious to protect us from and endless experience of pain, the repression of traumatic events we simply wouldn't have been able to survive had we not repressed them. We survived therefore by denying our real selves, what we really felt, in order to conform to the whims of our torturers, those who worked so hard to save us from the damage that we would have gotten in the world if we were different. We were taught to hate the abnormal, the other, and to forget where we learned that was how we were seen, what our true selves looked like to authority.
Thus, our real truth is that we believe in lies, what we really feel, what is in the unconscious is the truth of what we feel, but what was never actually true.
This is the catch 22 we are in, terrified to feel what we really feel because it is what we really believe is true about us, but which if we felt it back to its origin we would see was a lie. We lie about what we feel is the truth about us, that we are worthless, but in fact we never were and we would know it if we could allow ourselves to feel it. We are in a capsized boat and we have to dive down to go up.
I am a nobody but I have opened the door wide enough to have felt some of my old pain. I do not know the full story, but I view the frustration you speak of as a kind of fear that my self hate manufactures to torture me. Long before I began to learn the kinds of things I am talking about here, I had made some discoveries down another road. I suffered a deep depression as a result of the loss of my religious faith, one so deep I knew I would never be happy again. I happened to discover information about Zen. The long and the short of that was that I got an insight into a fundamental belief that I held which I hadn't realized I did, that to be happy, life had to have meaning, the very thing I had lost. And it was in the exploration of why I suffered and these Zen folk didn't, although they seem to see the world as I did, that I experienced a transformation in consciousness that changed everything. In just the span of an instant a shift in my consciousness took place that transformed my state of black hopelessness into a state of peace. I saw that the need for meaning is as meaningless as everything else. I would say that what I experienced could be called the grace of surrender but I don't really know what it was. Whatever it was however, it left me with a kind of inner piece. Sweet surrender, I highly recommend it.
Somebody asked a Zen master what he regretted most. What I regret most is nothing, he replied.
Another wrote on the death of his son, This little dew drop world, it may be only a dew drop, and yet, and yet.
Another teacher said, I consider him a man only, who can care for the wolf and the sheep entrusted to his company.
