Embracing WRONGNESS: How Being ‘Wrong’ Can Set You Right

Being ‘wrong’ may be exactly what you’re looking for…this article will help you understand why.

Oh, hi there.

In this article, we’re going to explore how being ‘wrong’ is actually a good thing that can free you from the ideas you hold about yourself that are holding you back from life so that you can evolve into your REALNESS and the person that you were born to be

When you truly embrace being ‘wrong’ in this way, you can step into your potential, have better relationships with other people, and feel the sense of tranquillity and peace that comes from letting go of the need to control everything through being ‘right’ all the time.

When you embrace being ‘wrong’ in this way, you’ll find that you’re not constantly forcing life through control freakery and manipulation in an attempt to bend everything to your will, (which is probably wrong anyway) and you can just relax into you true humanity – in other words, you can just allow yourself to be a REAL human being who is limited in understanding and is humble enough to not attempt to be omniscient omnipotent (that’s EGO).

So the short-version of all this is that if you can just get over yourself – sorry to say – and start being ‘wrong’, I can pretty much guarantee that life is going to be way better because you’re going to be aligned with REALITY instead of forcing yourself against it and bringing unnecessary friction, frustration, and misery into your life.

Let’s go.

Socrates: “I know that I know nothing”.

So somebody like me popping up and saying that we should be wrong isn’t actually a new thing. That’s because “there is nothing new under the sun” and the human condition has always been the human condition as long as human beings have been around – and not one of us mortals – in the whole of human history – has ever been right about everything. Ever.

The most famous quote that sums this up is Socrates, the Greek philosopher. He said (quoted by Plato): “True wisdom is knowing that I know nothing.”

That’s a good way to say it. It might be a little bit extreme because we all know a little bit of something. Like, for example, I know that I need a haircut. I know that the weather outside is pretty ‘bad’ right now. So I do know something.

Either way, the point stands that if we think we know everything, then maybe we do know nothing, or we don’t know enough. Because only if you know that you don’t know everything can you truly know something and align yourself with the truth of our life. And so ultimately, I think Socrates was right: Wisdom is knowing that we don’t know everything. Let’s say it like that.

No matter who you are or what you’ve experienced, there’s always more to learn and the things you think you may know could eventually turn out to be wrong so the most REAL approach is to remain open-minded.

What we think we ‘know’ and happen to be ‘right’ about is usually just conceptual ideas and interpretations that we’ve created about life on the best judgments that we have according to the greatest understanding that we have – but because conceptual knowledge is just made of concepts and concepts are not reality itself there’s always going to be limits and we’re never going to be 100% ‘right about things. That’s just the human condition, I guess.

The thing about ‘concepts’ is that can either point you towards reality or away from it – they can never be reality itself (which we can only know through EXPERIENCE, not concepts).

For example, the concept ‘dog’ points to a thing that exists in the world; the concept ‘unicorn’ points to something that just isn’t real, although we can imagine them anyway. The point here is if we’re just trying to interpret life through our interpretations and conceptual knowledge, then we’re always going to be limited.

But for some reason, even though we all often like to believe that wisdom is one of the keys to happiness, we sometimes act in a way where we’re not being wise, according to Socrates’ definition, because we’re acting like we know everything, which is always going to cause problems.

So here’s why:

The bottom line is that human beings can’t know everything. It’s literally impossible because the truth itself is whole but we are fragmented. We’re in fragmented bodies on a fragmented planet, swimming through a fragmented relationship with time, space, and causality – if you want to get into all that.

That means that, by definition, we’re always going to be ‘wrong’ about something – we could even go so far as to say that it’s just our nature to be wrong (and that’s fine…it’s what makes life interesting and keeps us learning and evolving).

And, even if we do just grasp something that seems true through our conceptual understanding, then life just keeps moving anyway, and the STATIC concepts in our head are inherently conflicted with the way that reality is in FLUX all around us. In practical terms, this just means that there’s a very high chance that the concepts we’re using to make ‘sense’ of life are pretty much guaranteed to eventually be out of date, and then we’re just going to be back where we started: being ‘wrong’.

And so, actually, if you’re out there plodding through life like you’ve got everything figured out and that you’re ‘right’ about everything, like I often do, then something has gone horribly wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. And the reason it’s gone horribly wrong is because it is our nature to be wrong about things – and so if we think we’re right about everything, we are literally going against our own realness.

We’re not accepting who we are. We’re not accepting life. We’re not accepting the world. We’ve taken ourselves out of the natural, REAL flow of things – which means that we keep moving, we keep evolving, and, by extension, we have to keep learning. And, that means that we will realise we were wrong and that we can go deeper into understanding the things that we already think we know.

And so if we take ourselves out of that process, we’re actually removing ourselves or distancing ourselves from our humanity and from our realness. And actually, that’s what this is all about:

The best way for human beings to feel ‘good’ is to be aligned with our realness – with our natural flow of constant growth and evolution and movement towards WHOLENESS.

If we stop moving with that NATURAL DRIVE towards wholenes or we stunt our growth and stagnate because we keep putting these conceptual blocks in our own path and try to be ‘right’ about them and defend them, then we’re going to have a really ‘bad’ time.

And so, as per usual, it all comes down to the same old problem:

What is that same old problem?

Well, you guessed it, boys and girls, it’s the EGO.

The ego is the illusion of separation, the illusion of disconnection. And in relation to what we’re talking about, the illusion of stasis, the idea that for some bizarre reason, even though everything that’s real continues to move and ebb and flow and to keep changing, we fight to stay the same.

And the more we cling to that static picture of who we are, what we think the world is, what we think reality is – the more we cling to that – the harder things get for us, because we put in friction between ourselves and life.

But even though it’s hard, so many of us try and cling to this static picture because we don’t want to face all of the ‘stuff’ going on beneath the surface that the natural unfolding and changes in life are going to cause us to face as the unconscious becomes conscious and we have to take a good look at ourselves so we can become whole again.

As a kind of COPING MECHANISM, we create these points of view, these systems of thought – these ideologies – that are ultimately an extension of the ego. And that is actually the main (and perhaps only)  problem.

When people are obsessed with being ‘right’, what they’re actually doing is trying to defend a point of view that they’ve created, which is an extension of the thing that’s causing them to be miserable in the first place (because they think they need for survival).

People always talk about how the ego is a survival thing that we evolved for protection and this is true – it helped us to survive whatever we’ve been through in the past and the emotional pain that we weren’t ready to face at that time. – in addition to this, though, the points of view that we attach to – like our political views and whatever else – are more often than not, if we’re obsessed and fixated with them being ‘right’, an extension of the same old ego.

A point of view ultimately, in this sense, is just the ego’s way of working its way through the world and interacting with the world so that it can maintain its hold over us. And so what I’m saying is that when people are so obsessed with being ‘right’, they’re not actually bothered about the truth; they’re bothered about protecting the ego so they don’t have to change.

This is why it’s important to be wrong and to be open to being wrong, because if you’re not – if you’re going around through life just trying to be ‘right’ about everything – you think that you’re protecting yourself, but actually all you’re doing is protecting the ego, which is the only thing making you miserable in the first place.

And so, paradoxically, perhaps, by being WRONG, you can have some short-term discomfort, sure, but you can also free yourself from this idea, this parasite that has wrapped itself around your psyche and that is holding you back from real life.

So the short version of all that is that the more you need your point of view to be ‘right’, or the more you need other people to believe that your point of view is right – and to come to your way of thinking – the more you’re basically trying to convince yourself that it’s true because, at some level, you don’t actually believe it because it only really exists because of the fundamental state of disconnection within yourself – because of fragmentation, because of the shame, guilt, and/or trauma that have caused you to create a little ego version of yourself and to put that out into the world.

If you understand that, you can realise that, “Okay, if I want to be happy, if I want to feel peace, if I want to be tranquil, blah, blah, blah, I can step back from all that bullshit.

I can be open to the fact that I might be wrong, and I can realise that, actually, all of my opinions and all of my points of view and so on and so forth, they’re not ME or that I am. They’re just something that I have.

And if I can see that, and I can get a better relationship to the truth, then I can solve a lot of problems in my life.”

Because most of the bullshit going on out there in the world, if you look around you, is just people arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong. But it’s all nonsense.

Here’s a little secret about life (if you want to use a dramatic word like secret):

It’s not really a secret, but anyway, this thing that I’m about to share is this: The truth is the truth.

Wow. That’s deep, right?

But what it means is that the truth doesn’t change. Nobody has ever argued about the truth. Nobody can argue about the truth. Throughout all of human history, the billions and billions of dead people – and there are more dead people than living people (just throwing that out there) – but anyway, throughout human history, nobody has ever argued about the truth.

Which may sound weird at first, but when you think about it, the only thing we can argue about is our interpretations of the truth. Our opinions of the truth, our understanding of the truth, none of those things are the truth itself.

None of our attempts to defend the truth have any effect on the truth itself

None of the arguments that we have, nor any of our attempts to defend what we think is the truth – or to shatter other people’s visions of the truth because we disagree with it – none of that stuff has any effect on the truth itself.

And so if you can understand that, the ‘secret’, it actually allows you to kind of step back and to relax because you realise there’s two different levels:

1) There’s the level of fragmentation and all the opinions and the arguments and etc. going on out there in the world. And then there’s: 2) just the truth itself – which is just there truthing along without anything impacting it or anything affecting it. The truth is just the truth – all of these circles we run around in trying to be ‘right’ and to make other people wrong, they have no effect on it whatsoever.

And even if you think you do have the truth, even if you did have the truth, you wouldn’t need to waste time defending it and trying to be ‘right’ about it, because it doesn’t need defending, because nothing can change it, nothing can hurt it, nothing can have any impact on it whatsoever.

You either accept it and you’re happy or you don’t accept it, and then you spend your life arguing about whatever you think is the substitute for it, and then you get miserable. And it’s really that simple.

The truth does not need defending. The truth does not need you going out there running around trying to be ‘right’ about it. All you’re doing is fighting for your interpretations and your ego. But the truth is the truth.

So that was very philosophical. But what does it mean? How do you use this information to be happier in life, to be more real?

Well, it’s really simple:

It just means that you have to stay aware – you have to monitor yourself, so to speak. And anytime you find yourself getting overly emotional and trying to be ‘right’ or trying to persuade other people, well, you’re not actually on about the truth; you’re not trying to bring more truth into the equation – you’re trying to defend your ego.

And if we’re real with ourselves, like we’ve already said, the ego is the main source of all the problems in our life anyway. And so whenever you think that you’re on some kind of a CRUSADE to defend the truth and you’re getting overly emotional about it, well, because the truth doesn’t need defending, and all of your emotional outbursts and so on and so forth have literally zero effect on it, you can step back and you can remind yourself, “Okay, it’s my ego here that I’m actually trying to defend”.

And – maybe, if you’re lucky – that will be enough to make you stfu. So you can actually just breathe again and remember that you’re not going to change anything anyway, because no one cares if you’re ‘right’ apart from you.

This also means that you don’t really need to invest energy in defending your opinions. That’s counterintuitive to some people, because we think the more vociferous we are about our opinions, the more other people are going to come on board and think that we’re ‘right’.

If we we’re driven by underlying shame – which is often what causes us to need the ego to be true in the first place – then we feel like if we can get others to just believe that we’re right, then some of that shame is going to be diminished and we’ll feel better about ourselves.

But, actually, it doesn’t need to be that way – because if you think about it, if you really believe that your opinions are true – if you truly, truly believe it – you don’t care what other people think.

That sounds a bit arrogant, maybe, but you just don’t. It doesn’t matter what other people think though: you’re aware that what you believe is true because you’ve had some experience beyond the conceptual. And so it doesn’t matter if other people say you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter if other people think you’re right. You just know the truth.

And so maybe you’ll put it out there in conversation, and you’ll share it with people, and you’ll have a dialogue and all that kind of stuff – normal human behaviour. But if somebody disagrees, you can either calmly say, “Well, actually, I think this”,  or you can just smile and nod and then go about your life knowing that you’re aligned with the truth anyway, but also knowing that you might not be (and if you’re not, that’s fine, because maybe you’ll learn some other stuff, maybe you won’t).

Either way, there’s no point wasting time arguing about things when you can just be living the truth that you think you found to the greatest extent possible.

A quote that I love throwing out there is by the physicist David Bohm. He has this book called On Dialogue where he says something like, “Your opinions are not something that you are, they’re something that you have.”

They’re not something that you, are. They’re something that you have. And I think that’s a really great quote because it just reminds you to kind of step back.

If somebody is disagreeing with you or saying that your opinion is stupid or that it’s wrong or whatever else, well, that’s fine, because they’re saying it about your opinion, which is just a conceptual idea that you’ve picked up to make sense of life. They’re not saying it about YOU.

If you can remember this and you can take your ego out of the equation, once again, you realise that you actually don’t have to take disagreement or anything like that personally, because what’s real about you is always real: you can’t add to it, you can’t remove from it, because it’s a state of WHOLENESS – and so whether your opinions are aligned with the truth or not, well, it doesn’t matter because you’re still real.

If you need to be ‘right’ all the time, then you just have some kind of a block between you and life. And if you’re open to being ‘wrong’, you can ensure that that block diminishes in its power over you, and then things are just going to be better.

So I just want to put that out there: Your opinions are something that you have, not something that you are. And if you understand that, you can free yourself because you can be wrong, and then you’re going to be aligned with life.

3 ways to align yourself with REAL life by finding your own ‘wrongness’

Here are three things that you can do so that you can align yourself with your own realness by being wrong and using that wrongness to develop a closer relationship to the truth (which sounds weird and paradoxical and maybe like bullshit, but I promise that’s how it works):

The first thing you can do is exactly what we just said: Don’t take things personally.

The only reason you take things personally is because you, are lapsing into control freakery – because you need your ego to be the truth – and any disagreement is basically threatening the scaffolding that your whole ego rests upon and you’re terrified that it’s going to come falling down and you’ll just be like an empty husk of a human being.

But actually, if the ego disappears, you become more real. So anyway, don’t take it personally because it’s just an opinion.

The second thing is to remember that if you’re wrong in life, then it’s going to allow you to learn something new. And if you keep learning, well, ideally, unless you’re fooling yourself, the only thing that you can learn is more about the truth – you can go deeper into it, and then you’re going to have a solid foundation to grow real and it’s just better.

The third thing is just to remember that nothing really matters anyway. If you’re right with your opinions, okay, that’s cool. If you’re wrong, well, that’s fine as well.

But ultimately it’s all just ebb and flow, and we’re all going to die one day anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

So that’s ultimately all I need to say in this article – there is nothing wrong with being wrong.

In fact, there’s actually a lot right with being wrong because by being wrong, you can align yourself more closely with the truth and then – because you get out of the ego – you get into the flow of life, and you keep evolving and expanding in a real way that allows you to be more connected to yourself and have better relationships with other people because you’re not going around in circles arguing about things that they don’t really care about.

At the end of the day, most people are not interested in changing their opinions for all of the reasons we talked about – and so, you can ultimately just release yourself from a lot of the unnecessary friction and stress and nonsense that goes on out there in the world about people being obsessed with being ‘right’, because they think that being right somehow makes them a better person.

It doesn’t, which is weird to hear, perhaps because our whole lives we’ve been learning things in school by rote and things like that – thinking that we have to pass our tests and everything, picking up all these facts and stuff like that.

Obviously, it is better to be ‘right’ if you can be, because then you’ve got, the truth on your side to some extent. But what I’m saying is it doesn’t matter that much – or not as much as everyone makes out – because we can always learn more.

All I know is that I know nothing.

If You Argue With an Idiot, It Makes You an Idiot.

The final thing I suppose I want to say here is that there’s an old saying – I don’t know who said it.

They say “If you argue with an idiot, it makes you an idiot”.

This is just a reminder that if you find yourself out there and somebody comes up to you and they’re trying to be ‘right’ about everything, then don’t argue with them. Just let them think that they are right, because there’s no way you’re going to persuade them otherwise anyway and it’s just going to drive you mad.

It’s going to be a waste of time. And arguing with an idiot makes you an idiot, so it’s kind of a dumb thing to do.

And if you are the idiot – no offense – that’s going out there trying to be ‘right’ about everything….well, ask yourself “Why?”.

The answer is almost always going to come down to the same thing: ego ‘stuff’, underlying shame and a need to control life because you’re scared to leap into the great unknown of uncertainty and find out who you really are.

I hope that helps you if you needed it. I know it might be wrong in many ways. That’s cool. But, hope it helps. If anyone wants to talk to me about any of this stuff or anything else, book a call or click the WhatsApp button on this article and you can send me a message.

Let go and grow real!

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