I’ve suggested in this series that experience follows from the fundamental orientation of our perceptual apparatus. We each occupy a thought system through which meaning and identity emerge, and while we are each unique, there are but two possibilities for the cornerstone of such a system: what I’ve described as unity (reality) and what I’ve described as separation (image). I’ve also suggested this distinction is one that profoundly matters. Framed as a choice, it is the most consequential one any of us can make, as all else that we experience follows from it.
An important question, though, is this: how does one determine, and thus live by, what is true?
I took a few shots at answering this but they both turned into rambling cartwheels of prose. And I think this is pretty simple. Simple doesn’t mean easy to grasp, I suppose, or to accept, but complexity can obfuscate as easily as it can reveal. And this needn’t be complicated. So here goes…
Truth is what you know in the absence of facts.
It cannot be derived from evidence because no evidence can bear its weight.
It’s what you know in the fullness of your heart, from inside the event horizon that no words, languages or concepts can cross.
It cannot be justified and needs no defense, no apologists or expositors, no bureaucratic or institutional structures to uphold it, no dogmas, beliefs or tenets.
It is the aegis of being.
Truth is the basis we share, regardless of our circumstances.
Every point of a line contains its “truth,” but two are required to reveal it. The truth is similar. It is like a line drawn through each one of us. We discover it together.
If you’ve experienced the sharing of what cannot be contained, given what cannot be conserved, or received what cannot be rationed, then I think you have known, and lived by, the truth.
You have witnessed unity, the dimensionless content of who you are.
