People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
Some people are already enduring it, whatever it is. The most recent figure I can find for suicides in the UK from the Office for National Statistics is from 2023:
There were 6,069 suicides registered in England and Wales (11.4 deaths per 100,000 people) in 2023; this is an increase compared with 2022 (10.7 deaths per 100,000, or 5,642 deaths) and the highest rate seen since 1999.
Maybe some of these por souls found their lives so unbearable because of their false beliefs. But it is flippant to assume that people can, in fact, endure the truth. Some truths are unbearable to some people.
Maybe there will be a truth I come across which will be unbearable to me. For example, the book due to be released in September, with the cheerful title "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" by Yudkowsky and Soares might do it. Can I really bear to think of my children and grandchildren, all my friends and family, those who brighten our hearts by playing Mozart or Handel (or whatever music you prefer), all the people who care about the environment, the scientists who dedicate their lives to solviing our health issues, all those people who are just people and are unique and precious with their loves and their dreams, just gone - all because the Chinese will get there first if we don't?
I always hoped I would live long enough to see the "Technological Singularity". Now we are in the accretion disk, I am finding it pretty scary. I never imagined AI could hallucinate, or tell lies, or try to blackmail anyone. And this is only LLMs! I tremble to think what could happen if this is combined with an intelligence like AlphZero.
Yet it is impossible to escape an accretion disk.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
So we have to live it until we can't.
I read the litany more as a personal aspiration for rationalists to self ascribe to, not a prescription to be pointed at those who are suffering, to whom I would instead recommend reading the list of mental health resources.
However, if you do think we are in as terrible a situation as I do, I hope you will not turn away from the situation but instead help convince others that we need to act with more wisdom if we are to survive and protect the things we care about in this world.
I think I have problems with this:
Do you actually think that's true?
I honestly don't think I do. I think there are horrible truths that can wreck your life if you're not prepared to deal with them. I think it may *usually* be best if you self-modify to be able to handle them, so that you don't run into trouble later. But to say there's NO difference ignores the fact that your emotional reaction to things is ALSO part of reality.
I like the idea behind it but I don't think I can really endorse it. I'm struggling because I'd like to incorporate it into my project, but it feels too wrong. And while I'm okay with chopping up lengthy sequence posts to so they can be read out loud, rewriting this to match my beliefs... well, it's not exactly a crime against humanity but it's technically not the Litany of Gendlin anymore which ruins some ritual-oomph. (And the part that I'd most want to change is the last two lines, which are the most powerful part)
Ideally it would communicate: "Lying to yourself will eventually screw you up worse than getting hurt by a truth," instead of "learning new truths has no negative consequences."
This distinction is particularly important when the truth at hand is "the world is a fundamentally unfair place that will kill you without a second thought if you mess up, and possibly even if you don't."
EDIT TO CLARIFY: The person who goes about their life ignoring the universe's Absolute Neutrality is very fundamentally NOT already enduring this truth. They're enduring part of it (arguably most of it), but not all. Thinking about that truth is depressing for many people. That is not a meaningless cost. Telling people they should get over that depression and make good changes to fix the world is important. But saying that they are already enduring everything there was to endure, seems to me a patently false statement, and makes your argument weaker, not stronger.
Potential change I can think of that doesn't wreck it too much and keeps it similar enough that I don't feel too bad: "Not owning up to it will only make things worse." Artistically I think it might be better to change the wording to something like "Refusing to admit it will only make things worse," but then the change becomes big enough that I feel kinda wrong again.
Maybe refer to it as Litany of Gendlin', to distinguish it while staying classy.
SECOND EDIT: It's become pretty clear, looking a collection of comments, that Typical Mind Fallacy is at work here. Some people value truth and emotional response differently. My problem is that a) *I* value emotional response as the end, and my preference for truth, while extremely useful, is only there to facilitate emotional response in myself and others. b) I know there will be other people at the event in question who share my position.
In any case, I'd like advice from the people who believe the Litany is inaccurate (or at least are able to model people who believe that) on how to handle the situation.