Finding Truth

[thoughts from   ~burning woman~  Sha’Tara]

Some go to great lengths to find the truth and having found it, are willing to die for it while others, most others, are quite willing to kill those who won’t accept their truth.  This is true of all who ‘believe’ because all belief systems are based on perceived or accepted truth.  In the declaration of independence of the United States, Thomas Jefferson is quoted as having said: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Objective observation shows Jefferson to have been endowed with a great sense of the ironic, unless the term ‘men’ refers strictly to a small cabal of ruling elites.  Signers to the declaration owned slaves (so much for liberty!)and it wouldn’t be until the Civil War some hundred years later that US slaves would be nominally set free and not until the violent riots of the 1960’s before they would be allowed to share common space with whites in public places.  Women had practically no rights under the law until the times of the “suffragettes” (derogatory term borrowed from the struggle for women to gain the vote in Britain) who were subjected to ridicule, persecution and jail before women WON the right to vote—for MEN—in 1919 …  an example from the State of New Jersey (Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia):

Female voters became so objectionable to professional politicians, that in 1807 the law was revised to exclude them. Later, the 1844 constitution banned women voting, the 1947 one then allowed it—but, by 1947, all state constitutional provisions that barred women from voting had been rendered ineffective by the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1919.

Meanwhile throughout the home of the brave and the land of the free, workers were subjected to horrible conditions and grossly underpaid and again it wasn’t until the struggles that established workers’ unions that minimum wage, pensions and basic benefits were reluctantly ensconced in the law.  Of course and once more, the ‘equal’ men called these struggling workers ‘communists’ and had leaders assaulted, beaten, gunned down and jailed, particularly in the depression era but the struggle has not ceased to this day and much of the gains made in the post war years have been lost through the legal shenanigans of corporate lawyers and their lackeys in the American government and the courts.  I suppose if one were a jaded politician, one could say that when you struggle for some kind of equality within the System you are in pursuit of happiness.

So much for the self-evident ‘truths’ boasted of by Jefferson.  Of course that was deliberate political deceit, but like his forefathers in Athens, he knew it would sound good to the rank and file, the believers, the sheeple who were about to be called up to bear arms and to die to establish a new set of elitist rulers over themselves.  They may have to pay more taxes after the Boston tea party but it wouldn’t be to the hated British monarchy but to a hated central government in a would-be republic.  It is said that when you’re in hell any change is good.

What is truth?  “Sometimes what is important is not what is true, but what you believe to be true.” (Fallen Angels- by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn.)  This is the great conundrum for all who believe they have (or share) a universal truth.  Is there such a thing?  It is so easy to answer ‘yes’ to such an obvious question, and yet, what do we know of ‘The Truth’ so many claim to be party to and which differs so much from group to group?  Does Wall Street have ‘the Truth’?  Does Christianity?  Does science?

Imagine ‘infinity’ as a cantilevered plank extending off from wherever you happen to be standing, over a bottomless abyss of what appears to be emptiness.  You see that you have already moved along that plank and looking back you realize that each step ‘forward’ was accomplished by letting go of your preconceived truths to discover something new.  Looking back, you see that each step was made from a truth that became a falsehood when you completed the step because the new truth you discovered made the old one obsolete.  Now you stand there, on this extended pathway, proud of your new truth.  Now, you think, I know the truth, finally.  But as must be in the created order, things continue to change, to move away from you.  Eventually you are forced to move from your comfort zone, for whatever reason: pressure from behind, simple curiosity or cross-winds of change that threaten to bowl you over.  You raise your foot and step forward once more.  To do so you again abandon your cherished ‘truth’ and find a new answer to the old question.  Again you realize you were wrong in your assumptions.  So how do we move ourselves forward in evolution?  By accepting that no matter what we know for certain today, tomorrow will make it obsolete and we will have to accept, or create, a new way of looking at everything.

Having moved forward on the infinity path over the abyss of uncertainty you realize your old beliefs cannot hold you here: you must abandon what was true and accept the new paradigm.  The process, as indicated, is infinite for those who are of the evolving, expanding, ‘ascending’ minds.  As for those who are not, who reject change and wrap themselves in the comforter of old beliefs whether they ever really worked or not, I suppose using the plank analogy, they get run over, or pushed off, never to be heard of again.  So it must be if ‘life’ is to be a viable system, which against all observable odds, it insists it is.

What do I mean by ‘the old question’ above?  I mean the question that haunts ascendant beings: what is life?  Where does life come from and where is it going to?  Does life have a purpose, and if so is it intentional or did it just develop with time?  If it does have a purpose, whether intended or accidental, what is that purpose?  Am I a part of that purpose as a self-empowered individual or simply as a mindless and powerless aggregate of the whole?  Does my presence in it matter and if so, for a few moments or for ever?  

The real question would be, what does it mean to be alive? 

If we are to broach the subject of truth we must first answer the above question.  The only way I can see to understand truth is to know my purpose.  But I cannot know my purpose if the place I find myself in at this moment remains undefined.  If you were to walk into an alien building with much activity but none that you could comprehend with your mind or senses, how would you set about determining what your purpose is in being there?  How would you go about participating in a proper and logical fashion, contributing to the effort of the place so you could claim, say, a wage at the very least, or give legitimacy to your presence there? 

I posit that the universe we sense we are a part of is such an alien concept.  We sense its presence and its activity but do we know how we fit in?  Or do we simply accept the fact that we ‘exist’ in space/time on a planet we have come to claim as home and use as a free resource center?  If individually we cannot understand our place in the cosmos, then who do we trust to make it clear for us?  Quite obvious: That which claims to have, or to be, the truth.  If being alive means moving from truth to truth through infinity, what choice do we have, being unable or unwilling to forge our own truth, but to accept whatever is offered to us?  All that Truth Source has to do is convince us of its legitimacy—on this world that’s not so difficult.  Remember that nation of well educated and ostensibly intelligent people who were completely mesmerized by Hitler… Now there was a leader who definitely had the Truth—all you had to do was listen, then turn in your Jew neighbor to be enslaved and killed.  Who else can we trust to have the Truth today?  Well, televangelists come to mind.  George Bush had the Truth about Iraq—stay the course people.  Vote and believe.  Go to church, or Vegas, and believe: you will go to heaven; you will come home rich.

Despite all of that, is there some kind of consensus ‘truth’ that all could accept?  It seems that life did establish certain parameters to define itself by after all.  There is the sense of right and wrong behavior.  A sense of what is good and what is evil.  All intelligent, sentient, self-aware type beings seem to possess this innate awareness, this guiding principle.  The people of earth struggle greatly with this principle.  They desire that which is good but they are motivated to do that which is ‘evil’—in principle.  I know why that is, having passed through that stage myself and remembering how it feels but cannot explain it here—too complex a ‘story’ for an essay I think.  But we know this.  When we think about ourselves and those we love or care about, we want good things for them.  But if others stand in the way of those good things, we are quick to justify inimical thoughts and acts against them. 

So, for us, there is ‘universal truth’ after all.  We do know right from wrong, and that without leaders, without books, without guidance.  As we watch our world change, apparently for the worse, perhaps in time for the better, it’s time for us to individually determine our purpose within the basic truth we possess that did not come from any outside source but from within.  Those who sowed the wind of their imposed ‘Truth’ have reaped the whirlwind and when the storm abates it may well be that all we have left is that truth within ourselves.  It is what will move us to reach out to others and rebuild our world on a new pattern.  Maybe.  I’m on the jury and I know we’re going to be out on that one for some time!