Kay:
Hey there Questers! Welcome, it is May 5th, and this is Episode 555. April fools!
Shi:
You legit fooled me for a second. I’m like, where is she reading this?! Ay, you! You trickster.
Kay:
Happy April Fool’s Day everyone. It is April 1st. This is Episode 324 and we are so excited to have a Soren Kierkegaard quote for you today- from the one and only Danish philosopher.
Shi:
Who tells us, “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Kay:
This is such a good quote.
Shi:
It is a good quote and it’s so fitting for our day of foolery and talking about fooling…
Kay:
Well, I just fooled you.
Shi:
You did, you did.
Kay:
You believed something that wasn’t true.
Shi:
That’s what they call gullible.
Kay:
Well, I love you for it. That means you are open to the reality in front of you, which I think leads well into our first point here. When he says that, “One way to be fooled is to believe what isn’t true and the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” So, what he’s really saying here is don’t fight with reality.
Shi:
We just got through leading our Squeeze In leadership headquarters team through Loving What Is by Byron Katie. The book includes the work. If you’re familiar with it, it has the four questions that you use for an internal investigation into kind of becoming unattached to the stories that are making you suffer and making you miserable and that voice that constantly talks in our head and makes up those stories and keeps you safe and all of those things. But one of our big takeaways from the book and for our group, as we led it through, was this whole notion of: don’t argue with reality. You’re only wrong 100% of the time so you’re welcome to continue to argue with what is, but you will be wrong and then you will be the fool.
Kay:
So, Shila and I have been in some fairly stressful situations over the last month while we have been through this work, and one of the things that Shila and I have adopted instead of getting frustrated and airing our frustrations verbally, what we’ve been saying to each other is…
Kay & Shi:
It is what it is.
Kay:
And that’s a good reminder to help us come back to reality and maybe not fight with it because the fighting against reality ends up causing a lot of internal suffering.
Shi:
Remember that the success rate there is 0%. So, when we use that as the track record, it seems kind of insane that so many of us argue with reality and act that fool by believing what isn’t true or what “should be” and thrashing about mentally and suffering for it internally rather than accepting what is. It doesn’t mean being submissive. It doesn’t mean not taking action, but whatever is currently unfolding in front of you is what it is (as Kay and I said), which means that it is true as of this moment and therefore arguing with it or not believing it isn’t true, being in denial about it, kind of trying to argue the right points and be right about something only makes more suffering for yourself and that’s quite foolish.
Kay:
Alright, we’re going to drop a bit of a bomb on you guys. Most of what you believe isn’t actually true. Now, not talking about the holographic universe and blah, blah. Well yes, that is also part of it but really a lot of what we believe is just based on concepts, based on the experiences that we’ve gone through, the things that we believe, and our understanding of how the world works. But the interesting thing here is that truth is really defined by the person who is defining it. A snail sees the entire world in black and white, but the humans see it in color. If you have a snail and a human sitting next to each other, and they’re both looking at the sky, the two would argue over the truth of the color, because this snail would say it as clearly gray, and the human would say that it’s clearly blue. This might seem silly, but let’s think about a poor person and a rich person. Let’s put them next to each other and ask the question, “Would $100,000 impact your life.” Now, of course, you might say, well, they have different perspectives so of course their truth looks different…but isn’t that interesting?! Where does your truth play into your life in a way that might not necessarily be constructive?
Shi:
I mean, you know what I would say to that snail is holy crap, a talking snail!
Kay:
Now, that’s some foolery.
Shi:
That is some foolery. That brings us into that second part of the quote here, “…to refuse to believe what is true.” If someone says just run as hard as you can and you will eventually see the sunset and you’re running East, you aren’t ever going to see a sunset. It just won’t be true. It defies the laws of physics of gravitational pull, biology, and the world at large. But you can believe it all you want, but if it isn’t true that results in wasted effort and wasted running. So, to remind you of what Soren Kierkegaard.
Kay:
Kierkegaard.
Shi:
Kierkegaard tells us. “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Kay:
Alrighty, gang. That means today we’ve got an April Fool’s Quest.
Shi:
Fool.
Kay:
What are you fooling yourself about based on maybe your fear in figuring out the truth? So, today, take a stand against your own foolishness in any subject that you choose by finding a few reliable sources online about the subject. Get in, go do some research, figure out what the people who study the truth are saying, not just maybe your truth of your own opinion, and allow that truth to empower how you move forward from this point on. Are you ready?
Kay & Shi:
Let’s quest!
Shi:
No fooling’ – fool sucker!
