Meditation on truth and reality

We all have a cognitive bias regarding what we think is the truth or how we think the world works. However, few of us actually know what is really going on behind the scenes to make the world work the way it does. And even if presented with the truth, we may struggle to accept it, especially if it runs contrary to our cognitive bias.

So how do you know that what you believe is accurate or truthful or even real? You don’t. You may judge reality and make your opinions based on what you hear from so-called “authorities” like teachers, parents or government, from state sponsored information outlets like news platforms or from your peers. And you will more readily turn to those who already support your cognitive bias, or those who are popularised by others. We conform radically in order to fit in with our society. Few are willing to be seen as a lone wolf or solitary voice from the wilderness, calling to the world to beware any impending imminent future scenario. And state and church often herd us into certain belief systems, where it is either considered illegal or a sin to think other that what they determine to be the truth.

Sometimes, however, we learn in hindsight how both state and church and even academia were mistaken, wrong or outright lying to keep us in ignorance or them in power. It seems to work like this all the time. Few stand for dharma or religion or humanity any more. And few seem to stand for the underdog, like the species going extinct, the natural ecosystem talking strain or the sick and injured human civilization we are all a part of. Those who do try to speak up are sometimes silenced. Whistleblowers are outlawed, crimes of church and state are hidden and perpetuated.

Most of us accept the “ascending” appreciation of truth. In other words we make our own judgements based on personal experiment and experience from the bottom up. Some accept the “descending” order, where we hear from an authority and accept what we hear based on the status of the authority or the conviction with which they themselves believe what they say or appear to believe what they say. We buy into their confidence and are convinced by it. This is where we get the term “conman”. It is someone who is a “confidence trickster” someone who wins over your confidence and tricks you into believing a falsehood in order to cheat you or benefit themselves at your expense. Politicians and priests do this all the time. They convince you to accept their version of the truth because they speak with confidence. But they are just as often speaking lies as they are speaking the truth. Lawyers are a perfect example of this too.

Some of us are becoming aware of this, with age or with investigation, now made easier by the invention of the internet. And we become skeptics by nature, no longer believing anything at face value. And that is a sad but relatively truthful situation in which we live today. So-called “fake news” has always been there, but it has only recently been identified and labelled as such in the popular mindset. Even with loads of study, research and investigation from experts in the field, we may still be duped into thinking we have the truth. Some go through what is labelled now by psychologists as a “conversion experience” and with that change of heart or realization or interpretation of truth and reality, they align with what they believe to be reality and the truth. Until we realize otherwise which implies that we were under some kind of illusion all the time. It is just the type or style of the illusion that varies.

Many of us live under a degree of “cognitive dissonance”, where we may believe two contradictory points at once, where we accept something false as evidence for our truth. And we might even know it but we refrain from deconstructing our belief because it will alienate us from our peers or our group or even ourselves. We suffer from a degree of “suspended disbelief” where we may know something to be wrong or false but we ignore that if it disagrees with our recently accepted impression of the truth. This occurs a lot in religious experiences or in the minds of “magical thinkers” who buy into a myth with no proof and even though it may run contrary to what we know is logic or science.

That being said, even science sometimes teaches illusions or false premises as truth. This has been proved over the centuries, where every few decades a new discovery has to overthrow what was just the day before accepted as scientific truth. Some undeniable “absolute” truths may of course exist, like all humans are mortal or like the laws of mathematics. These hold true for all time and all people, so are fundamental truths. We call them the laws of nature. Certainly in our personal experience we have never met someone who is immortal. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It is just our historical experience which has yet to find such a case.

Yet even these “eternal” truths may be temporary and based on our limited experience of history in time and space. There may be much more going on in the rest of the universe or in the history of the universe which may force us to rethink even these truths, if we were to discover any such new evidence. Curiously, there are ancient texts called the Vedas of India that are purported to be thousands of years old, that tell us of astounding realities that existed then which might blow our understanding of reality our of the water. There are explanations and descriptions of humans living beyond the limitations of our human lifespan today, just as there are archaeological discoveries of giants 15 feet tall in America that mainstream academia hides form us. In other words, human life was quite biologically different thousands of years ago compared to what it is today. Also architectural monuments exist all over the planet that reveal prior civilizations that appear to be even more advanced than we are today, judging by their building skills and engineering feats. For example we still cannot say for sure how the pyramids of Egypt were built or the monuments of Machu Pichu – with individually carved gigantic multi-ton stones all individually carved to fit together like puzzle pieces without cement of any sort, that still stand millennia later.

These mysteries that defy science are left as unexplained mysteries and we go on with our lives believing the theories of reality presented to us by “experts” that may exclude reference to these anomalies. This is a type of cognitive dissonance. Well I haven’t even started to attempt an explanation of what I believe is “truth”, or what actually is reality. I have simply opened up this topic as a discussion to show how we cannot accept anything as truth any more, and nor should we, because what we hear will only be – at best – a relative truth or an attempt at truth. Gravity may be an axiomatic truth, but there will always be the exception to the law, even the law of gravity. What is an airplane if not an object that defies the law of gravity? There may be more to science and the cosmic laws that we are currently aware of, and so we may not be in a position to make judgements on what is an absolute truth.

Ultimately most of what we have are subjective opinions. However, there are absolutes, like the fact that fire burns or sugar is sweet. These are the intrinsic laws of nature and they work for us at the moment. But other laws may be there that we have yet to understand. And what may be sweet to me may not be to you, based on your biology. Earth, water, fire and air along with the elements are our building blocks as we currently know them. What we don’t fully know yet though, is mind. And all the elements are perceived by us through the mind. And mind may have many more secrets still untapped that we can discover, which may oblige us to rewrite our fundamental truths because mind is potentially able to deconstruct and even reconstruct what we currently see as the limitations of time and space.

Yogis of the Vedic culture centuries ago in India were able to defy the laws of time and space by cultivating the mystic “siddhis” or supernatural powers of the mind, where they were able to know past, present and future, they were able to manifest physical objects out of thin air by telekinesis, and they were – at advanced stages of meditation practice after many years – able to even reverse ageing. They could live forever and apparently defy time. Such are the mysteries of the mind and universe that go beyond our current understanding of truth and reality.

So next time you think you know what is going on or you find the truth, think about it in perspective and understand that you are perceiving your subjective interpretation of the truth according to your limited time, place and circumstance in history, and that there is so much more going on than we can ever realize in this limited lifespan. All of this – if nothing else – leaves us constantly open to the mystery and wonder of the vast universe and reality of which we are merely a fragmentary speck.