Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

something that sets us apart as fully conscious animals that can reflect on their actions. But, of course, very often the actions have already taken place! Very often our actions have been of the IMPULSE variety. And even if they have not been especially angry or violent – nevertheless, they’ve been blind and habitual. A lot of IMAGE is thus about telling ourselves that what we have done is okay! We were right to respond in the way we did. We were justified! IMAGE is that voice in our heads that tries to make sense of what we’ve already done. IMAGE leads naturally into SYMBOL. SYMBOL is our spoken and written voices that again, very often, try to justify our behaviour. Given that we’re so driven, is their any hope? The first glimmer of hope is that those two final steps in the progression – IMAGE and SYMBOL – provide a kind of feedback loop. They can

generate sensations in us that are not generated purely by our immediate circumstances and emotional state. This, in turn, opens a little gap – at that critical juncture between PERCEPTION and IMPULSE. There is a hope that we will not simply RE-ACT, by impulse. There is a hope that we can be true agents of our actions – reflective agents. There is a hope that we might actually see the world in terms of TRUTH, MEANING, VALUES and MORALITY – the way we had been fooling ourselves that we were seeing the world all along!

Something, though, is troubling here – before we even get into questions about what to do about the dominance of the progression I've been exploring and what it means for our lives. That something is perhaps more of a modern obsession rather than something that’s been with us for centuries or is part of human nature.

91