Philosophy - General

Holophany and Truth


The quest for the "Truth", or more accurately, THE TRUTH, is probably as old as human awareness; but why would knowing the truth have any importance? What advantage does knowing the truth provide? Does such knowledge help in navigating the rough seas of right and wrong? Or do humans hope that such knowledge will light the path for mortals in the form of an unwavering beacon that leads to freedom? To immortality? Omnipotence? The fact that each proclaimed truth turned out to be a Will-o'-the-Wisp rather than a beacon seldom restrained seekers of truth from worshipping the next fashionable conception of truth, which seems to indicate that the belief that there must exist a TRUTH that will liberate us is so deeply ingrained in our way of thinking that not finding it won't deter us from stumbling onward in our search.

What is this evasive and nevertheless much sought after scintillation so often envisioned as enlightenment? Mastering the tools that harness Nature through knowing its true essence as well as its mechanisms? Or is THE TRUTH the will of God as interpreted from the scriptures or revealed in dreams? Or is it surreptitious slogans thought to penetrate the insipid walls of superficiality and mediocrity when repeated ad nauseum (you get what you deserve, Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free..., etc.)? Or is truth our sense of justice and moral intuition? Even if the true nature of truth would have been charted and decreed through universal consensus, even then, could we assume that indeed, it was THE TRUTH? How would we know it from all the previous proclamations that turned out to be false leads?

On the contrary, it would seem that the firm belief that a person or group knows THE TRUTH or God's will leads to human sacrifice, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Stalinism, genocide, the destruction of the Twin Towers and all the other innumerable murders and wars during human history in the name of this or that ideology. More atrocities have been and are being committed in the name of truth and for the glory of God, King and Country, in the name of supreme and just values, than can be recounted in so short a space as a single article. Oh, but these were all perpetrated by madmen, they were all perverse abominations, evil, the work of the Devil, you could say, and the perpetrators did not know or act in the name of truth or God in all reality. However, precisely such certitude in the rightness of one's knowing that the other is infallibly wrong is the motivation for perpetrating destruction. We could imagine a Bin Laden doing what he did with full integrity, firmly believing himself to be Allah's messenger fortified by the prophetic dreams of his associates. What then is the difference between truth and delusion? Consider the compassionate, pious, and righteous who declare that they are saving millions and millions of suffering children and sanctify life above all else with a ban on abortion, those who believe that it is the invariable right of every family to have as many children as they please whether they are capable of caring for them or not. Do these decent souls encourage overpopulation and destruction of the global ecology? Do they encourage the proliferation of the uneducated and the desperate, thereby sentencing them to brief lives filled with suffering? Are they the right candidates to represent truth and justice?

It would seem that we have certain expectations of TRUTH, but those expectations are only partially met by any discovery, any declaration, and then we either embrace this partial truth as the TRUTH or we go on to the next assertion of what the TRUTH is. In short, the closer we come to it, the further it gets away from us. What if our basic assumptions are wrong? If we assume that there is an absolute truth out there independent of our assumptions, then there can be no such creature, since we assumed that there was one. Put differently, our assumptions are subjective and cannot be regarded as proof of the objective existence of anything. Only by negating truth, only by saying, "there is no truth," can we prove the existence of truth. But how could such a negation prove the existence of truth? If it is true that there is no truth, then and only then is there truth, the truth being its own negation (if indeed it is true that there is no truth, then stating that "there is no truth" is the truth). If we assume that the sentence, "there is no truth" is not true, then of course, there is truth (if the statement, "there is no truth" is a lie, then there is truth). In either case, whether the statement "there is no truth" is true or a lie, the result is truth. Or rather, the proof of the existence of truth is a "pradox", which says nothing about the nature of truth, nothing about what that truth might be.

"Holophany" is neither phenomenology nor a model of Nature. Looking for a truth that establishes the nature of things is trying to derive lawfulness from phenomenological observations. Such phenomenological laws are generalizations that predict the behavior of specific occurrences, and as such, they are limited in their creative aspects. These laws and worldviews are "Beliefs" about how things are, should, or could be. We think with events occurring in space and time around us, and indeed with us within space and time as well, and we think through the language of phenomenology. My breakthrough was, instead of focusing on how and what things were, focusing on the dynamic structure of things, which is, how they are perceived. Or in other words, instead of trying to understand phenomena by discovering the underlying lawfulness, my efforts were directed towards understanding the dynamic infrastructure of any lawfulness, belief or perception, which of course is also a kind of lawfulness, but a very different one. Its parameters are not phenomenological entities, but abstract logical creatures. The lawfulness of the act of perception became the loop logic, a big step toward discovering the secrets of Creation. A new non-causal language evolved that linked "Consciousness" with the rest of existence through the endemic paradoxes that gained a paramount status when truth turned out to be a dynamic structure rather than a reified goal.

  
Learning is an enriching experience; however, when it becomes confusion, it is not learning, but a stop, a blockage. Learning is motion in time and being confused is coming to a stand still for not knowing the direction to take. When you look for learning truth, THE TRUTH, you arrive at this confusion. You then see the many truths, or everyone preaching his truth, whereas TRUTH you cannot learn. Thus, if you want to learn, beware of learning THE TRUTH. The ardent need for knowing the truth often leads people to search for it in many places, and on their quest, they try to fit whatever they meet into a supposed truth. The result, of course, is a mess: people try to understand with what they already have and are willing to make the chicken square so that it fits the truth they know. You will notice that I am not teaching truth, but rather, I am teaching processes, HOLOPHANY, which is the activity of manifesting wholeness. This means bringing down ideas and ideals into activity and thus allowing people to participate, play, act. I don't teach what should be, but what can be. Proposing any ultimate truth would be a truncated way of showing where you cannot get... Whenever teachers speak of absolute values, know that they speak of partial existence, if what they are saying has any value at all. I am not teaching utopia, but rather, I am teaching ‘how to' in general: how to create, step-by-step, the conditions that can generate what in a given moment would seem like utopia.

SHET