The difficulty was never finding it. That is worth saying first, because everybody assumes the search is the hard part and prepares accordingly. The search is not the hard part. Things reveal themselves to anybody who stays with them long enough, and often a good deal sooner than we would like them to.
The hard part is seeing a thing as it is, without immediately converting it into a version we can live with. And that conversion is not a decision anybody makes and could be held responsible for. It happens instantly, below awareness, and by the time anybody is conscious of what they are looking at, it has already been adjusted and the adjustment cannot be located.
It takes an extraordinary kind of courage to leave something unconverted. Almost nobody manages it often. Managing it more than before costs most of what a person was once sure about, which turns out to be a fair price.
The half we are trained to take
We are taught, from the very beginning, to accept one part of a truth and to fight, ignore or deny the other part. Everything is sorted at speed into right and wrong, good and bad, ours and theirs. The sorting is so fast and so complete that we experience the half we kept as though it were the whole thing, and there is nothing in the experience to indicate that anything was left out.
When somebody says this world is real, that is true. When somebody else says it is an illusion, that is also true. On the surface those two contradict each other and cannot both be held. They are both parts of one thing, and the whole is the union of them, and our training simply will not permit us to hold both at once for more than a moment.
So a half gets chosen and defended, and the people who chose the same half are found and settled in with, and a lifetime is spent in a conversation that excluded the other side of every question at the very beginning. And that conversation feels complete from inside, because everybody in it agrees.
What conversion looks like from inside
It does not feel like dishonesty at any point. It feels like understanding, which is what makes it so difficult to catch. Something happens, and within a second there is an account of it, and the account holds together and sounds reasonable and nobody consciously constructed any part of it.
Usually the account has one particular feature, which is that it leaves the person in an acceptable position. Not heroic, because that would be too obvious even to them. Just acceptable, reasonable, understandable in the circumstances. And that consistency across thousands of separate incidents is what finally gives it away, because a genuinely impartial process would not produce a favourable outcome every single time.
Our minds are taught to be biased and partial. Not by anybody malicious, and not on purpose. By ordinary upbringing, by everything absorbed before any of it could be weighed, by the reasonable preferences of people who loved us. And it is this, rather than any lack of intelligence or effort, that stops us seeing the whole of anything.
Why the version is needed
The version is protective and it is doing a real job that should not be dismissed. To see certain things exactly as they are would require action, or grief, or the admission that many years were spent in a way nobody would have chosen if they had been looking properly at the time.
So the mind does the kind thing. It softens, adjusts, provides context, and hands over something that can be carried through the afternoon without collapsing. And an entire life can be lived on those adjusted versions, competently and even happily, and never once handle the original of anything.
The courage required is not the courage to be brave about a hard fact, which is how it is usually imagined. It is smaller and stranger than that. It is the willingness to stay in front of something for slightly longer than is comfortable, without doing anything at all to it, and to let it be whatever it turns out to be, including something that costs a great deal.
