Truth

 "Truth is infinitely simple, delusion is infinitely complex" Jed McKenna

What is 'truth'?

"faith, faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty; veracity, quality of being true; pledge, covenant".

It is really interesting that the concept of truth originates from the idea of 'faith', as in our modern world, they seem to be complete opposites. It seems, however, that when we talk about faith we might be talking about something different from 'belief'. The concept of 'Pistis' in the bible sheds some light into this difference: 

"Faith (4102/pistis) is always a gift from God, and never something that can be produced by people. In short, 4102/pistis ("faith") for the believer is "God's divine persuasion" - and therefore distinct from human belief (confidence), yet involving it. The Lord continuously births faith in the yielded believer so they can know what He prefers, i.e. the persuasion of His will (1 Jn 5:4)" 

So, truth is a type of faith in something divine that is out of men's reach but that involves men believing in it. In order to unpack this paradoxical nature of 'truth', we need to look at the alchemist principle of subtle and dense:

"Regardless of the fields we talk about, an Effect, by definition, is what occurs as a manifestation of a Cause. If an effect is the manifestation of a cause, we already have a referential guide that should be sufficiently solid, clear and traceable: The Effect is the manifest part of the Cause. [...] As a manifest part, it will be more readily apparent, because the more "manifest" it is, the more easily it will be perceived by our senses. This attribute is directly related to a particular, well-defined characteristic that things need to be perceived: Density.[...] Then, the Cause is always subtler than the Effect, which will be proportionally denser than the former." (Parise, 2011)

The principle of subtle versus dense is entrenched in the metaphysical idea of cause and effect. 

This principle applied to the type of truth we are talking about becomes the subtlest cause, we are talking about the most primary, the first mover, as Aristotle would call it. It becomes obvious, therefore, that when we are talking about the purest truth, the subltest cause, we are referring to God. Jose Luis Parise writes: "the subtlest Cause is the most Primary (and therefore most Powerful) Cause. And by being the subtlest one, it is also the least "Manifest", meaning the most Occult Cause. And if we are talking about the most Primary, Powerful Cause... that is synonymous with God." 

The subtlest will therefore be the truest and more in touch with the first Cause, which is the ultimate truth... the further away it gets from truth, the denser it gets. And this relationship between truth and transcendence is essential to existence. The further away we move from the subtle, the more stuck we get into the material, the densification entraps us, a lack of meaning and division follows. "If truth turns out to be a sort of rethorical game, or worse, absent altogether, we are left with a potential nihilism that might be seen as an accomplice to fascism itself" (Metz 2004, cited in Worthington, 2011:211).

Why fascism and nihilism? It is said that belief is the enemy of knowing, so in a way, absence of truth in the rethorical discorse, densifies it. The more complex the argument, the more convoluted, the further away it seems to be from 'truth'. Now, is there a type of 'knowing' that brings us closer to truth? 

Jed McKenna writes: "Truth is not a concept to be understood or a feeling to be experienced, it's not in your heart or your mind, it's further. That's what heresy is, truth talk in the dream state, this is the fun stuff. Truth isn't about knowing things, it's about unknowing, it's not about becoming true, it's about unbecoming false, so that all that is left is truth. [...] When we believe in the world outside of ourselves, gain is often perceived as good and loss as bad. When we stop believing in a world external to self that reverses: gain becomes bad and loss becomes good. Nothing we can lose was ever ours in the first place. All we can ever lose is illusion" (Spiritual Warfare) 

That's key. Should we focus on adding knowledge in order to get closer to truth? Or is the complete opposite what has to happen in order to 'become enlightened'? Sartre's idea that it is our absolute freedom what terrifies us and brings us to our own mind enslavement is relevant here. However, are we not born into a complex and dense world? Perhaps transcendence means to be able to move towards the subtle with every 'letting go' we do. Letting go of delusion, belief, deception... density. And face like that our terribly absolute freedom without fear. "The price of truth is everything, but no one knows what everything means until they're paying it." (Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: the Damnest Thing)

But, how can we do this? How can we learn the 'unknowing' process? Does intelligence have something to do with that? Let's look at its etymology: 

Intelligere "to understand, comprehend, come to know" from assimilated form of inter "between" + legere "choose, pick out, read" from PIE root *leg-(1) "to collect, gather" with derivatives meaning "to speak (to pick out words)"

 

Perhaps someone truly intelligent, and thus someone who is able to read between the lines of what is being said, is someone who can get closer to the subtlest truths. Jed McKenna also writes that the most honest and lucid moments are those in which one can see things without protecting lenses, "that is when you pull back the curtain and see things as they are". Those lenses are paradigms, theories, dogmas, doctrines... in one word: Density. Like the Cartesian doubt, one needs to be always aware that the above mentioned are only that, lenses that "protect us" from pulling the curtain of truth, which seems to be an inner process. 

"A man who searches deeply for the truth, and wishes to avoid being deceived by false leads, must turn the light of his inner vision upon himself" (Boethius, 2002:61)

Thus we get to the paradoxical nature of truth, at once the manifested solid effect, and the subtle cause behind it. When one believes that truth is the manifested effect only, one is missing the "why" question, and thus real comprehension of truth becomes impossible. Not only that, the truth in which we believe becomes illusory, and disappears by its own when the time is right as it was only true by convention, we all agreed it was true but in reality it was only a conventional truth. This is a truth that allows us to escape from our deepest loneliness, the absolute freedom and loneliness of life. However, this type of truth exists in the dense realm and is only an effect of the real forces of nature. 

The other kind of truth, however, is one in which I invert the cause and effect. When I stay in the dense realm, I become an object of truth, if instead I let go of those truths that subject me, I become the one who subjects truth. To find the subtle and be able to let go one needs that Pistis or faith of which the Bible talks. Faith in the natural forces of this world, faith that letting go of deception is the right path to freedom and ultimately, to truth.

And from that place, we don't have to plead for truth to come to us in order to be discovered, truth finds us.