UN-FORGETTING TRUTHbyBill Cottringer In an interview about making “The Passion” movie, Mel Gibson pointed out something that can greatly affect our approach to life—the definition of truth. According to the most literal Greek translation of the word “truth,” it means “un-forgetting.” In one of those “aha” light bulb moments, I remembered a relevant subtitle of a book I wrote a few years ago entitled, Re-Braining for 2000: Forgetting to Remember. Often, the definitions we give important words, greatly affect the realities they unfold for us; and sometimes our “wrong” definitions needlessly reduce our happiness and contentment. Try to un-forget the more simple, realistic definitions of these seven words:LOVE Twenty-five years ago in A Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck attempted to give readers a better understanding of the whole love phenomenon, because the quality of any intimate relationship depends upon an accurate and mutual definition of the word love. After all, we get what we expect and if we are expecting one thing and get another, we are usually not happy about it. By having this magical, idealistic, and overpowering feeling of romantic Romeo and Juliet style love, according to Peck and several other current writers, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment when reality kicks in, and it always does. By changing love from a noun to a verb, and practicing it as ordinary acts of unselfish kindness in every day living, we can increase our wealth of happiness and contentment and have wonderfully satisfying relationships. What we un-forget is the loving part of being in love.COMMON SENSE Next to love, there is probably no other word in the English language that is so misunderstood than common sense. Lack of common sense, may be the core problem behind most failures. Robert Sternberg hit the nail on the head when he introduced the concept of successful thinking—combining logic, practical sense and creativity to get the best results. We may also want to remember Mark Twain’s definition of commonsense. He said it was “the simple knack of seeing something the way it really is and doing something the way it should be done.” Common sense is the brain’s source of nourishment and if we seem hungry, we just haven’t gotten around to un-forgetting all the common sense we were born with. All we have to do is stop making so many assumptions, and start asking better questions and looking below the surface of something. Another source of common sense is what you realize when you analyze your own failures and mistakes.CREATIVITY The common association of creativity with music, art and literature masterpieces may actually limit its practical application by the masses. We all have access to a bottomless reservoir of unlimited creativity. All that is required is to start looking at ordinary things and experiment using them in newer and more unusual ways to communicate simple truths with clarity and impact. Another simple way to exercise creativity was offered by John Maxwell—just add something of your own to someone else’s idea. To that I would add. “take the apparent Yang & Yin opposites of anything and fit them together to form a bigger picture.”INTUITION Intuition is instinct—becoming less out of tune with our innate ability to recognize moments of danger vs. moments of opportunity. Such discrimination is critical so we avoid unnecessary failures and increase our successes. Present day educational research is investigating the possibility of a relevant physical brain function that has gone dormant. Imagine that! Intuition can be more readily accessed if we view it as a walkie-talkie between our head and heart—which means we have to silence both to un-forget and hear the truth. When we begin to do this, we may start encountering meaningful coincidences with others described by James Redfield in The Celestine Prophesy. Then we can share important success clues with each other and make better progress in un-forgetting truth than we can on our own. RESPONSIBILITY Being responsible is one of those things that is difficult to describe, but we all know when somebody is or isn’t being that way. Few of us can tolerate irresponsibility in another. Stephen Covey offered an intriguing definition of the word by changing the emphasis to response-ability—the ability to make the right response to a situation. What we generally have to un-forget is our ability to control wrong reactions, even when they may seem so natural as when someone is doing us harm. When we start remembering how to exercise more self-control over our tendency to want to hurry up and react to solve problems, we can begin to get a glimpse of how proactive thinking can be used to behave in ways that prevents problems from occurring in the first place. REALITY People’s private definitions of reality can go to the extreme of being instrumental in causing them to become mentally ill. However what we all may need to un-forget is that the “reality” of what we see depends mostly on where we are looking from. If you don’t like what you see, all you have to do is change your viewpoint. Major paradigm shifts are a gateway to creativity, and although this may seem to be a complicated, esoteric process restricted to Mensa candidates , just think about what the real definition of truth is and how that can immediately change the way you approach life and learning. Such a change can be instant and transformational. RIGHT Words such as “right,” “good” and “yes” immediately conjure up their negative opposites, which may needlessly keep us from un-forgetting certain truths Another part of the difficulty in the word “right” is that it refers to both a process of getting to an outcome and the actual outcome itself, as well as referring to several aspects in between. Are the wrong means to a right end justified? Can you do something for the right reason in the wrong way and still be right? The dictionary also has a very difficult time with this word. Webster’s Second College Edition devotes nearly seventy-five lines in an attempt to clarify the word’s meaning. But notice the most frequent phrase that resembles the un-forgetting aspect of truth: “to correct and put in order.” Maybe if we remember right thinking, we will begin to get more right outcomes. A starting point to un-forgetting truth is to shift our focus of competing against others, to competing against ourselves in discovering and applying the real definitions of these seven words. William Cottringer, Ph.D. is a success coach and writer from Bellevue, WA. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too. Bill can be reached at bcottringer.pssp.net or (425) 454-5011.