Truth — a Pathless Land
Truth has no counterpart,
It is motionless like the Void,
It does not wander through the samsara of life and death,
The Three Worlds do not contain it,
Within it there is neither past, nor present, nor future.— Nanquan Puyuan
Truth is a word that has long been up for debate. Ever since we were kids we were taught not to lie, to speak the truth. But what is this truth that we ought to speak? And is it really something to be spoken?
Truth, as an abstract idea, has many layers. Its first layer has to do with our direct experience of being. Here we perceive “the truth” in a blossoming of a flower, a dead bird, a spring evening, or the sound of laughter. In this sense, the word “truth” is attributed to our immediate sensory perceptions. For convenience, we can call it “direct truth”. A worldview that promotes truth and knowledge as an artifact of our sensory experiences is called “empiricism”. As said by F. Nietzsche:
“All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.”
The second layer of truth is connected to speech. How do we use language to formulate true statements? This question is often related to philosophical “rationalism”. In this school of thought, scholars regard reason and logic to be the chief sources of knowledge. Being in opposition to empiricism, rationalists believe that truth is not determined by the senses, but rather it is our intellect’s ability to perform deductive (logical) analysis. Therefore, rationalists claim:
“There are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience.”
For convenience, we can call it “verbal truth”.
Historically, there has been a lot of tension between these two ways of seeing truth, but in this post, we won’t concern ourselves with their battles of supremacy. What we want is to discover whether it is possible to blend these viewpoints into a cohesive vision that could guide us through the thick forest of images, narratives, and sensory information. For that reason, I suggest standing on the side of the skeptics, claiming that nothing can be known with a hundred percent certainty. Even our senses might be misleading. There is strong evidence that suggests that other animals see and navigate the world in a very different way than we do and that we don’t sense most of the electromagnetic information surrounding us. In this way, we are more or less deaf and blind to the vast spectrum of being that we know nothing about. For that reason, we will concern ourselves only with the truth that can be sensed or known through our intellect and senses, not claiming that we are able to know “it” in its entirety.
Getting all that out of the way, our question of the day is: Using words, can we transmit the way the world presents itself to us without losing any essential content?
“Why is it important to express our experience truthfully and precisely?” you might ask. Why bother? Clinical psychologist, Jordan Peterson explains:
“Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor who wrote the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, drew a similar social-psychological conclusion: deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism. Sigmund Freud, for his part, analogously believed that “repression” contributed in a non-trivial manner to the development of mental illness (and the difference between repression of truth and a lie is a matter of degree, not kind). Alfred Adler knew it was lies that bred sickness. C.G. Jung knew that moral problems plagued his patients, and that such problems were caused by untruth. All these thinkers, all centrally concerned with pathology both individual and cultural, came to the same conclusion: lies warp the structure of Being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other.”
In this excerpt, Peterson claims that if we do not align our speech with our experience, we twist the ground of being, taking the footing out of its base. As a consequence, we become warped, lose integrity and step one foot closer to evil, which always lies dormant in the vicinity of our soul, individually and collectively.
Although many psychiatrists say that speaking the truth is a prerequisite for individual and social well-being, I wonder if there is something more to it. Of course, to have integrity in what you do and say is crucial, but can all truth be reduced to utterances (verbal statements)? To gain a fuller picture, we can contrast this view with an expression of Laozi. In his work Dao De Jing, he claims that:
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.”
Here we can sense that what he is alluding to is the side of truth, which cannot be thought-out or described. In this sense, truth is something direct, spontaneous, changing from moment to moment. Just like the stream of water flowing through central London is not the same as the sound “Thames”, so our experience differs from its verbal representations. Articulation is static. Experience is dynamic. The word which we use to describe the river is the same, the river is not. To notice this you don’t need any external authorities, leaders, or gurus. It’s what you are experiencing moment to moment, whether you know it or not. Formulas, dogmas, and various descriptions only get in the way of perceiving the simplicity of it.
“I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others” says J. Krishnamurti.
If we follow the axiom that truth is not something to be imposed or pressed on others, why are there so many beliefs and religions that order themselves into strict hierarchies, abiding by various scriptures and dogmas? Many religions, including Islam and Judeo-Christianity, are built upon the idea of a “logos”, a Greek term translated as “word,” “speech,” “principle,” or “thought.” In Greek philosophy, logos also refers to a divine reason, the mind of God. Both Islamic and Judeo-Christian religions use holy texts (“words of God”) to order and manage their adherents.
“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” — John (31:32)
“When the Qur’an is recited, then listen to it and pay attention that you may receive mercy.” — Al-A’raf (verse 204)
For most Buddhists, Daoists, or even some Hindus these types of statements would come across as quite presumptuous. Why should you put faith in someone else’s written word or authority? Don’t words come only as a secondary substance, even if they are brought down from the realm of supernatural beings? What is the basis on which you can assess their truth and origin? And even if they are the true words of the Creator, what if (s)he made a typo, and we interpreted the whole thing incorrectly? Probably because of these reasons Bodhidharma, the Indian founder of the Chinese line of Buddhism said that Dhyana (Indian for “Zen”) is:
“A direct transmission outside of scriptures, apart from tradition
Without dependence upon words or letters.
A direct pointing to mind.
Seeing into one’s nature and awakening.”
As an interpretation of this four-liner, Alan Watts wrote:
“If you really understand Zen… you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because… the sound of the rain needs no translation.”
From the standpoint of Zen, the very debate over the validity of “divine scriptures” is irrelevant. Why bother with interpretations, when you can observe life (call it God, Soul, Energy, any way you want it) directly?
Christians say that human beings are made in the image of God. What if it is the other way around? What if God is anthropomorphized by the imagery of humans? This image of a patriarchal father sitting on a throne throwing tantrums at humanity is rather different from the aforementioned Tao. Although also being a projection of the human mind, Tao is not described as a monarch or a ruler. It expresses a different set of morals, virtues, and values, as did its originators.
The great Tao flows everywhere.
All things are born from it,
yet it doesn’t create them.
It pours itself into its work,
yet it makes no claim.
It nourishes infinite worlds,
yet it doesn’t hold on to them.
Since it is merged with all things
and hidden in their hearts,
it can be called humble.
Since all things vanish into it
and it alone endures,
it can be called great.
It isn’t aware of its greatness;
Being fairly complicated, religious symbolism and ideas are both hard to verify and to reject. They are part of our cultural upbringing, collective imagination, experiences, and projections. As in the words of a neuroscientist Sam Harris:
“When considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn’t. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.”
So how should we separate fact from fiction? Should we be guided by our intellect or led by our ability to sense? Should we employ skills of deductive reasoning or observe the immediate experience? A person versed in both Eastern and Western philosophy would probably suggest taking The Middle Way (a Buddhist idea of a balanced approach to life), or Wu-Wi (a Taoist principle of letting one’s action follow the simple and spontaneous course of nature). To illustrate these suggestions, we can express them through an imaginary conversation between Zhuangzi and Alan Watts, where:
Zhuangzi asks: “Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?”
Watts replies “You hear the sound of water… And that’s quite as important as anything I’ve got to say.”
To come full circle: knowing what is true and the ability to make informed decisions on its behalf is not an easy task. Every day we are bombarded with various images, slogans, ideas, and propaganda. Knowing what is true in the immediacy of experience (a pre-reflexive state) is not that difficult, but how to know what is true outside your local spectrum of awareness? What about the information provided in the news? Isn’t it a fact that most of the truths provided in the media are shaped and packaged to serve the needs of their providers’? Unfortunately, much may be left out, distorted, or even falsified, so it requires a lot of critical thinking, attention, and reflection on the observer’s side, not to be tricked or fooled. The same applies to the so-called religious truths — truths that we cannot test, confirm or deny. What stance should one take towards them? Offensive? Defensive? Claiming? Neglecting? Probably it would be best to take a questioning stance, predicated on a healthy amount of skepticism and doubt. An inquiring person should always do research and expand his scope of knowledge, knowing that he will never reach its end. In that way, we can form our best-informed guesses (hypotheses) without claiming them to be undeniable truths or set conclusions. As said by Henry T. Laurency:
“It is part of mankind’s intellectual education that there must always be room for doubt. That is the only way in which dogmatism and blind parrotry can be counteracted and individual judgment and self-determination can be developed.”
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