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Dr. Rick Hanson’s Triangle of What Is True

Posted on December 12, 2024December 12, 2024 by

Dr. Rick Hanson is a Buddhist practitioner and lecturer who does a weekly meditation that has been speaking to my condition a lot lately. This latest one is particularly interesting: “The Good News That’s Still True.”

Rick shares out this graphic describing what he calls the “Triangle of What Is True.”

Each level he describes as logarithmically related, that is each level is ten times the value of the one above.

At the top if “Actual Harms.” These are actually terrible things that are happening to you and the world. Actual suffering you are going through, injustices that you are experiencing, evils happening locally or nationally or internationally.

One step below that is what he calls the “toxic spectacle.” This is general crappiness that might not be actually harming you, but that is generally making the world a bit worse. Being being unkind and uncivil to each other around you. Someone cutting you off on your commute home, a surly customer at your job, a snarky comment on your social media feed about a celebrity.

At the same time, in the midst of the terribleness, are the people who are actively trying to make a better world. A teacher, a fire fighter, a therapist, a social worker, an activist. People who are espousing causes and values that you think are making society and the planet better. Maybe you are one of those people.

And then below that is general goodness in everyday life — the sun on your face, snuggling with your pet, a delicious homemade cookie, flowers blooming in spring.

And below that is the vastness of our planet, and the larger universe that our planet travels through. This inconceivably large reality that we live in, that existed millions of years before we did, and will exist well beyond our species lifetime.

And beyond that is… something. The mystery that you might call God or something else.

These different realities exist not in isolation but all happening “everywhere, all the time, all at once.”

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