WIP Title: Recognizing Truth

chapter, 001: recognizing truth

RECOGNIZING TRUTH
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How do I know what is true?

I’m 24 years old as of today and my mind, I think, has finally abstracted a basic explanation to describe how I confirm what is real from what isn’t, and just why this particular process is quite airtight (and thus objective, as opposed to being subjective, and thus universally prescriptive).

I described three co-equal elements to myself that together form what it means for me to “know” truth: child-like innocence, adult-like maturity, and god-like holiness; “truth” in this case meaning “that which exists in and of itself”, and “knowing” in this case meaning “perceiving, without imputing Self upon”.

What I’m describing here can then be phrased as “perceiving, without imputing Self upon, that which exists in and of itself”. That seems to me the best way to describe what it means to know truth.

Child-like innocence means something like “freely given trust that any given idea is true”. In the grander sense, approaching every idea this way allows me to put my Self to the side and submit to reality without reluctance, but in the less grand sense of living within that reality day-to-day as a being with limited knowledge, it allows me to fully believe in every idea I encounter before I make any judgments about them. And by “fully believe” I mean to believe in an idea without inserting my Self into that idea. For example, when I was an atheist, I was perfectly okay with accepting that things like morality were human fabrications that did not actually exist.

Adult-like maturity is something like “the ability to accept and properly adjust to, and measure and properly judge, the truth of an idea”. When an idea is fully believed and doesn’t work, that is where this element comes into play. Someone who is attacked by a dog, for example, and then fears dogs as a whole would lack in this element. This is what allows me to put aside ideas that aren’t true, because it separates, rightly, that which functions from those things that fail. Because what becomes apparent to me is that the truth only ever destroys falsehood, and falsehood only ever degrades that which exists in and of itself — falsehood, in other words, is entropic, and doesn’t have an “original” existence. It’s simply flawed perception given perceived validity by flawed minds, and that then causes corruption. (To take our above example, fearing all dogs as a response to a dog attack is a degradation of caution, creating a false perception that if taken seriously generates a counterfeit/false reality in which all dogs are a threat.)

God-like holiness is the hardest one to describe, because the word “holiness” has some sort of relation to the word “wholeness” that I haven’t yet been able to grasp even halfway. But the difference between a holy being and an unholy being can be demonstrated by using false compassion as an example: where a holy being has no trouble with the existence of hell, the unholy being is indifferent towards justice and so tries the justify hell as evil. They lack something critical that turns their judgment inward, so that they submit to Self instead of reality — Self for the unholy being is what reality is.

God-like holiness, then, is probably best described as “that which provides the strength necessary to live reality as Self”. This third element is necessary because even though truth only ever destroys falsehood, Self is fully capable of destroying itself, regardless, by resisting the truth. This is due to the fact that truth is harmful to the parts of Self that are grounded in falsehood. It crucifies falsehood in order to raise truth back to life, harming Self so that a Better Self can take its place, and the problem of Self is that it can resist truth and remain stuck in entropy anyway.

So these three elements together essentially describe how I know that I know what is true (and to what extent I know what is true, as well), which is something that has eluded me for many years.