Truth and Fact

The very first sacred cows we need to address are those of Truth and Fact.  These cows have become so big and so universal that they’re worshiped without question by almost everyone, but they’re just cows and it’s high time that we cut them back down to their proper size.

How many things do you hold as truth?  Take a moment to consider the question, perhaps even to jot down a few of your most important truths.

You could fill a whole book with the things you believe are true, couldn’t you?  Or maybe several books?

But are they really true?  Consider this statement, which is a “Truth” held dear by millions of people around the world:  “Jesus died for my sins.”

Is that statement true?  If you are a Christian your answer is probably an emphatic yes.  But if you are a Buddhist, a Jew, or any of the billions of other non-Christians on the planet, your answer will be a just as emphatic no.  Who is right?  Why?

If you’re a Christian you would say “Because the Bible says so.”  But the Jew would say “Jesus was an imposter,” the Hindu would say “You’ve got the wrong Bible,” the Buddhist would say “Life isn’t like that at all,”  the New Ager would say “There’s no such thing as sin,” and the ex-Christian would point out how the Christian Bible is a collection of documents written by people who were often barbaric and half crazy, and that have been edited, revised, and rewritten countless times to serve the whims of those in power.  Who is right?  How would you know?

“Well,” you say, “you just have to find out what the facts are so you can prove who is right.”

Ok, so what are the facts?  And how would you know what are facts and what are not facts?  Any lawyer or politician can tell you just how fluid and elusive facts are, and how they can be changed and manipulated to serve almost any purpose at hand.  Even well meaning people remember the same events with vast differences, so how can you tell who is right?  But let’s take a look at a few commonly held “facts”:

What color is your car?  Red?  Not if you’re color blind, or if you see in some other part of the electromagnetic spectrum than the normal human eye sees.  Really your car has no color at all, but the pigments in the paint absorb all the other colors of light and thereby create an optical illusion that it is red.

Ok, so what about gravity?  It’s definitely a fact that gravity keeps us glued to the Earth, and that if an apple falls on my head it’s going to hurt.  Or is it?  There’s a popular parlor trick where someone gets relaxed and visualizes themselves light as a feather, and three or four friends then lift them off the table using only one finger each and very little force.  Or the opposite, where someone visualizes themselves rooted to the Earth, and then the strongest man cannot pick them up.  How do these things work?

Or take that rock you stubbed your toe on the other day.  It’s certainly a fact that it’s a hard and dense thing, right?  Not really.  Any physicist will tell you that the rock is almost entirely empty space, with just enough particles whizzing around inside it to make it seem hard and dense to other things like it.  And even those particles are not so solid as we might think, for they can appear as insubstantial waves of energy just as easily as they can appear as particles of matter, all depending upon how they are measured.

The bottom line of all this is to say that truth and facts are fluid, changeable, and illusory.  The only real fact there is, the only truth that is beyond question, at least for now, is the fact of our existence.  How and why we exist, and everything else about our existence, is entirely dependent upon the perspective from which you examine it.  It all changes as we grow and change, and the more we can let go of all the things we thought were true, the faster we grow and evolve.

This is not to say that there is no place for truth or facts, for they help us to structure our lives and they give us a foundation from which to grow.  The important thing is to keep them in their right place, and to allow them to grow and evolve along with us.  Truths and facts are snapshots in time of our current level of understanding, and nothing more.

There are many things in life that I hold as facts and as precious truths, but I’m learning to hold those things very lightly.  They help me to understand myself and my life, but they also limit me, and so I must always hold them in question and allow myself to push at the boundaries of what I have thought to be true.

For years the sacred cow of Truth has kept me from writing and teaching, which are some of my great passions in life.  It seemed that the moment I would write something down, or even think about writing it, my understanding would change and it would no longer be true, or I would want to say it in a completely different way, and soon it would all turn into mud and nothing would get written.  So what changed?  I’ve finally realized that I’m not here to write truth.  I’m here to write my journey, and to share what I learn along the way, even as it changes from moment to moment.

Like an explorer charting new territory the map will change and evolve every day, and what I say tomorrow may be completely different from what I say today.  Does that mean what I said yesterday is no longer true?  Not at all, for it is but a moment in a journey and was never meant to be either true or false.  It might or might not be false if I were to try to live it today, and it would absolutely be false if it were taken to be the absolute and unchanging Truth of Life.  But it might also be exactly the truth that you or someone else was searching for in this moment, and so whether it is still true for me is really irrelevant.

The problem with truth is that it implies a lie, and what I’ve learned along my journey is that every lie is based on some truth.  Either the lie used to be a truth and over time got set in stone and distorted, or else it is someone’s attempt to escape the truth of another that has been made absolute and thereby turned into a lie.

You might say, “But wait, what about the lie that salesman told me that caused me to lose my money in a bad investment, or to buy that junker of a car?”  Well, what was it that you held to be so true in that situation that you didn’t think you needed to question it?  Find that, and you’ll find not only the source of the lie that took you in, but the key to seeing through any more lies that come your way.

When we let go of our need for truth we also let go of the lies, and then at last we are free to see and experience life as it really is.  It can be disconcerting at first, but it is an amazing and truly wonderful experience to have!