Roses are right violets are wrong. Huh? That doesnt sound right. Roses and violets are natural phenomena. They are impervious to narrow categories made by the minds of man. Roses are never right, violets are never wrong, they just are. We can likely find ourselves in agreement about this, even though the same type of thinking gets us into heaps of trouble every day as we judge the world around us in dualistic terms.

Humanity is a part of nature too. Yet we find rightness and wrongness in almost everybody. Take a walk to a local store to grab a snack and you’ll surely pass a situation that you will label right or wrong. This is the nature of the human mind. Our experience can be likened to a ‘monkey mind’ which thinks “it looks like an X so it must be an X, X files with the X’s and so on.” This is generally followed with “I respond to all X’s this way” and then a quite rehearsed response comes to the lips and projects into the world.

I’m sorry to say, this is not genuine experience. It is repetitious habit-response with no end, a life lived bouncing around in a matrix of a limited number of categories that all things fall into. Reality barely breaks through the cracks. Even western medicine now takes sides with the yogis, the Taoists and a host of eastern traditions that have been hand-holding westerners back to a simple starting point: real life exists beyond the monkey mind which spins around in a blender of surface level experiences and categorizes sensory perception into a dull flat line. You need only drop in on a yoga class or stop by the nearest Buddhist meditation center to begin to unravel this mystery for your self, but do expect to work for it! Fortunately you will find many wonderful tools for bringing this monkey to a quiet resting place so that you can actually catch your first glimpse of what is really going on around you. This may be the starting point it but does not take us to the end. A clear mind is just the beginning.

A quick glance from your computer screen is all it requires to be catapulted back into a world that is in a heap of a mess. Why? Human beings disagree about what is right and what is wrong. The question remains. Can people determine right from wrong? Is there a right and wrong to determine? Questions of such complexity often require a mind of the oddest sort. So I took it to the mystical Sufis who are known for their curious, inconsistent behavior and allergy to dogma. The mystical Sufis view of reality includes the changing context of time. No second in time is the same as any moment before it or after it. This belief prevents Sufis from authoring doctrine because as soon ink from a pen dries on a page the idea being written exists in a different context than when it was created. The world has changed rendering it useless. It is for this reason that Sufi knowledge is found in modes of communication that transcend the linearity of words. Sufi knowledge is archived in poetry, dance and art. Lets grab the Sufi view and come back to the big question, is there such a thing as right and wrong?

Rather than beginning with a list of rights and wrongs and working outward from there, lets begin with what we know best, ourselves and an ever changing universe. If we operate from our own core, that is to say our own purpose, than all that we come into contact with which is relevant to that purpose becomes relevant to us. This gives us a way of knowing when to act. You could say that we have a way to find ‘permission’ to act. When we move through life in this way situations are lifted from the duality of right and wrong. They instead become relevant or not relevant. This makes it more difficult to categorize things, something that our monkey mind wishes always to do. If we believe our purpose to be authentic, if we trust it, than all that we find on its path ‘belongs’ to it. This will be different for each of us. If we jump to the end of the story and look at the results of the actions that were achived using this method of thinking, a new view of truth is formed. A truth that pertains to a given person’s purpose and to a particular, unduplicatible situation. The changing context of events delivers us to where the Sufis arrived long ago, unable to solidify any doctrine because of the endlessly changing context of life. Truth in this way does not become falsely secured as an absolute. There is no chance of it because of its relationship to a unique moment in time. Truth remains true only in a given context, one that is fleeting. This kind of truth leaves us free to move to the next moment of our lives with nothing impeding us from experiencing it authentically. An escape from “looks like an X so it must be an X.”

Viewing truth through the changing context of time, rightness and wrongness emerges. Not as definitive constructs but as formless and ever changing ideas that wrap around reality even as reality changes form moment to moment. Rightness and wrongness give way to complexity. Truth springs out of relevance. In the end an absolute truth, which is tied only to one moment in time, does not threaten to overstay or distort our perception of future moments.

It takes a bit of practice, step through your front door and try to resist judging what you see. A pause may remind you that that moment has already slipped away. You might be propelled you into the realization that everything is in a constant state of flux always, living, dying all at once. There is no hope to capture it but you can surf it like a wave. Along the way seek truth wherever it may be hiding. And don’t be surprised if it wiggles from your grasp day to day, this is an auspicious sign because truth as the Sufis say, is not found in absolutes or externals. It moves! Too ungrounded for you? Then take yourself back to the rose and the violet and sit in the comfort of their eternal trueness. Leave the chaos to wild at heart, just be careful not to judge what you see along the way.