Effectiveness Is The Measure of Truth

Don't you just love arguing with people who already made up their mind?

No?

Me neither. Who does? It's like trying to walk through a brick wall by taking a running start.

Even worse- how are we supposed to know our own ideas are true? Any idea can feel true, ideas are designed to feel true if you act like it long enough.

The most straight forward solution to this problem is violence. If you seem threatening enough, people tend not to disagree with you very much, at least not to your face. But this approach has, among others, the disadvantage that you don't learn very much any more and are stuck with what you learned when you were more accommodating.

Then a group of people a long time ago came up with the idea that you could just stubbornly argue it out until everybody agrees. They put their ideas in writing and their students are still arguing about them to this day.

Another group of people decided they would carefully set up special situations to test their ideas and then, depending on the outcome, everyone would have to agree. They tried it with falling rocks and turning gears and it worked really well for a while, but then people noticed it's really hard to set this sort of thing up when humans are involved. You just can't draw many conclusions from one person to the next because everybody is different and is always changing.

Even if we can test human behavior there's this little catch that the more important something is, the less obvious it is to other people because it gets very personal and very specific and very emotional. In other words, it gets subjective: defined by experience and relationships and strong bonds and big ideas. Can you imagine a harder place to go looking for universal truth with an inquisitive mind than another person's psyche? Let alone many people! It's so hard that the idea-testing crowd usually just throws in the towel and reverts to arguing that individual experience just isn't all that important.

Huna has a really, really elegant solution to all of these problems. Huna says: If it works, it's true.

This works really, really well, because it encompasses everything. You want to go play the thinker's game or the tester's game? Go right ahead. Learn that way of thinking, and use it for those things you think it's good for. Then, when you come home to your family, you can use a completely different set of ideas to get along well with them, and the two areas don't have to have anything to do with each other at all.

Now let's say you meet people from a completely different culture- say, you're a Westerner, and you meet some people I'd broadly call indigenous people- ones who- broadly speaking- believe that the land is alive and earth is their mother and we are all the same spirit. And now you see that one of them is making it rain by performing a dance. Now whether that person is successful or not, you are going to have a much better time among your new friends if you take the Huna point of view that effectiveness is the measure of truth.

If you come across a skilled rain dancer who is working in good conditions and it actually does rain, you don't have to make up excuses why it had to be a coincidence out of fear of shattering your convictions. Or, say you witnessed a trainee rain dancer, or the conditions weren't very good and all he managed was a light drizzle, you don't have to scoff at the person for working with different ideas about the world. Now if they offered to teach you- you could even learn those ideas and do your own rain dance. Because, hey- if you do eventually get a little rain going it worked, and therefore it is absolutely true that you successfully merged with the rain spirit and started pouring out water. And you could still go back to the office on Monday, if that is your line of work, and do just fine within whatever strange and peculiar environment that particular culture has to offer. If what works is true, what's true doesn't only depend on the person, it depends on the situation, and there is simply no need to reconcile any of those truths with each other because what's true shifts automatically with the task at hand.

Writing this I'm getting all giddy because of how elegant this is!

Now let's look what would happen if you came across some people of a very different belief system and you would insist on holding onto- as an example- the standard Western, let's call it the religiously informed mechanistic worldview. God is not very important but somehow all the values written in His book are still pretty good, but the world is still a machine to be operated better, and everything out there is fixed, dense and real. Now if you came upon the rain dancer, in the best of cases you would simply be rather quiet and simply watch and be very polite, but you still wouldn't be very connected with your new friends because that would cause quite a bit of uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. So it's quite possible you would excuse yourself to the bathroom and disappear or somehow get sick if you stayed. If you expressed your true opinions, you would be dependent on the kindness of the people here not to be too offended, because you would be forced to consider the whole rain dance idea either childish or preposterous, and if you go by the intellectual tradition, you would have to mock the ideas you don't like or scoff at them. So if you'd express what you think you can be pretty sure you wouldn't be invited back.

But in Huna, if you did want to hang around your friends with different ideas, you would do no such thing. It couldn't be true that these people are so wrong- where would the effectiveness be in thinking so poorly of them when you could just as well recognize their wisdom and skill?

This might seem overly free if you aren't used to it. Some people think the world is flat. Does that mean I have to think it's flat too sometimes? And how could it be that a 2000 year old book contains the universally applicable good way of life, and another book that contains something different does too? Oh that's simple, says the Huna point of view, because if someone holds a belief that a certain religion's book contains ideas that make for really good living, following those they feel they are truly leading a good life. Then those ideas, as understood by that person, are true. Why? Because believing you're on the one right path can work wonders for your self-esteem, and that particular person was able to accept the idea that way that good things are going to happen. So it's true.

The seventh's principle teaching is very, very flexible- but it is not without guidance. If that same person also wanted to get along well with their family, yet would somehow start having emotional outbursts when family members display a little bit of skepticism towards all those dearly held religious ideas, then, obviously, there is some kind of falsehood involved. Why? Because outbursts don't work, the harmony isn't there.

That might seem, on the surface, like a bit of a conundrum. The person would not be willing to become secular to better appease their family, and the family might like certain parts of all that piety but might just not be particularly interested in others.

Luckily, in most cases, no one needs to change very much to achieve harmony. Most likely the problematic idea has nothing to do with either one's point of view but is just an idea that was picked up somewhere on the path of life. Something like: If my family doesn't immediately agree with me, I did something wrong.

That's an idea that will pretty much never work because it's just not how human beings get along with each other. So now we found an idea that is- for all practical purposes- false. So if the person were to do some exercises to discover which ideas they hold and find one that just obviously will just never conceivably work, then we've found a falsehood, an untruth. It's just not so- why not? Because it doesn't work. So the person can now repeatedly explain to him or herself that family disagreeing is just perfectly normal and is no cause for alarm. Voila, harmony- and no resolving of any great dilemma between modern life and faith was required. The actual problem was just a destructive idea, a falsehood, that was allowed to take hold, and now it's gone, so everyone is now closer to truth.

Using the Huna teaching about truth, there is no need to try and square practical solutions you reach with some kind of philosophy you're also adhering to. The practical solution is the philosophical imperative. And yet you get all of the depth and guidance of having a strong underpinning of great thoughts to apply your life. It just so happens that these thoughts are very flexible, and are geared at setting you up for success.

You can use Huna to creatively square your situation with another philosophy if you want to, but you never have to do this to get something to be Huna-like. If it works well, it is already Huna.

I met a very sad philosophy student once. He said to me that the woman he loved was in Canada and he was here in Germany and they were forced to split up- he had logically derived from first principles that, although it pained him, this was the only way to go. It was heartbreaking to hear, and I was quite happy he later decided to just ignore the train of thought that had brought him to his misery and got back together with her again. But wouldn't it have been nice not to have to chose between the philosophy and the heart! With Huna, you don't have to- your philosophy automatically defers to the heart at the right time, and all you have to do is apply it!

Let's look at a more exotic example, someone who beliefs in a flat earth. This is something that could invite a lot of eye-rolling from the idea-testing crowd. And if you've seen enough globes and satellite images, the idea of a flat earth might seem quaint at best and dangerous at worst. And if you want to navigate ships, or figure out how stars move, people a long time ago found out that thinking of a round earth is a heck of a lot easier because explaining all the wobbles takes a lot less thinking.

But if you're not particularly interested in knowing what rocks in space are going to be doing, why would you bother? If you just want to go visit your friends a couple blocks away, you just walk straight ahead across the ground. Not taking the curvature of the earth into account in this situation has the advantage that you're a lot less likely to get distracted by deep contemplation of the spherical geometry and get run over by a bus. So for all practical purposes, in our daily lives, we're all flat-earthers. Why overcomplicate things? Up to about twenty kilometers flat is just as good, and it takes a lot less thinking. Personally, I think the vocal flat-earthers are, perhaps subconsciously, trying to make that point.

When it comes to how you feel about yourself, that is where the seventh principle really, really, really, really shines. Because this is an area where everyone seems to agree that it's just too confusing to conclude anything about. In other words, there are no facts when it comes to feelings. Every idea is valid, and which one might be correct is literally anyone's guess. So guess you do! And when you chance across an idea that implies that you're good, strong, healthy, worthy and lovable, then you behave in ways that cause you to experience life that way. But when you chance upon a different sort of idea, one that implies that everything is a mess and you can only do wrong, then you experience life that way. The tragedy is how haphazard it is. Because we normally don't really have a cultural way of working with our ideas, it's just chaotic turns of events that say whether you hear and accept ideas that work well, and are true, or those that don't. It's just so haphazard.

But the good news is that it doesn't have to stay that way. When it comes to opinions about yourself- such as whether you are good, beautiful, desirable, worthy, and usually get what you want without effort- there is simply no way to determine if that is true or not, because you can argue either way. Anything you do can mean that good things happened and you did well, or bad things happened and you did poorly.

Now if you apply the seventh principle to this situation, the solution becomes pretty clear. Always, always, argue to yourself that what you did is good, and what happened is good. Of course you are beautiful, well-to-do, and usually what you want happens because the entire environment conspires to help you all the time out of sheer kindness. Of course you are intelligent, philosophically sound, cool, fashionable, sought after, successful, high-performing, relaxed, good with people, and helpful to the world. Because... and now you argue why to yourself. It gets a lot of fun after a while, when you realize it was only a game all this time and it's one you cannot lose if you just play it this way. Of course the world is a good place, because while certain things do happen, certain other really amazingly good and beautiful things happen too. Sometimes all it takes is to put a little twist on things- put some good in by changing the interpretation. You know it's true because you get a lot more good-natured when you do this, so it works, and you do want to feel better, right?

The seventh principle is also how you know that all the other principles are true. The sixth principle, all power comes from within, is true, because then you have the most power when it just comes from you, and you are doing Huna because it's good to have more power, right? The fifth principle, to love is to be happy with, is totally true, because you do feel better when you praise something and feel worse when you curse it, and you want to feel better, right? The fourth principle, now is the moment of power, has to be true, because when you focus yourself in the immediate present, you are a lot more effective no matter what you do, aren't you? The third principle, energy flows where attention goes, is completely true, because when you do focus on something for a long time, doesn't it start to feel more and more real and alive? The second principle, there are no limits, is obviously true, because once you realize you can shift your focus in and out of this life any time you want and come back later, how much more free could you get? And the first principle- the world is what you think it is- doesn't it work really well to explain pretty much everything that happens? So it must be true!

Oh yes- if you want a simple, convenient, comprehensive philosophy that works really well as positive guidance in just about any situation you could ever come into, from the mundane to he special, from the subtle to the spectacular, from the mountains to the sea- Huna does that, and it does it better than anything I've ever seen. I believe Serge did an amazing job taking what he got from his family and make it simpler and more accessible, and I believe I did a great job at making it more simple and accessible still.

We now have discussed all the important aspects of Huna in this blog. It will work wonders for your life, for your relationships, for your success, if you use it. Be blessed!