After all these years, I’m experimenting with the conclusion that there is no ONE truth after all.
As modern physics has shown us, it can be a particle or a wave, depending on how it is measured or observed.
In other words, it depends on how it is measured or observed.
I think that this concept is very hard to accept, that two or more truths can be simultaneously correct.(Depending on how the particular thing or philosophy, or whatever is observed)
For example, is there an anthropomorphized deity like Yahweh, Jesus or Krishna,or just the impersonal universal order of things?
Actually both might be true. Let that sink in for a while. :)
Except that as humans, we are in fact made of the universe, so in that sense, 'truth is what truth is'. But what exactly that is in relation to anything else, truthfully, can not be said truthfully.
In the end you realize thoughts are just maps to get us to the corner farm store to buy milk, or in the older days, kill a mastodon, for survival. The absolute can not be found in thought. But you CAN build a better widget making machine with thought. It's just not really real.
I know the old Zen masters understood this. They realized there is no need for it to be really real. What gets you to the store to buy milk doesn't have to be the truth. In fact you don't want it to be the capital T Truth -> because THEN the best you can ever have is some thought from a human mind.
Better to connect to something else. THAT can only be done outside of time, causation, conditioning, right, wrong, truth, false. Because in the end, there is no such thing as actually true or actually false.
THAT is the land of God, or Enlightenment. To go THERE, you have to put down all opinions, all knowledge, anything you 'know' or understand, you have to put down everything. When there is nothing that you know, there is something there, though to call it 'something' is a lie, but there aren't words.
I know the old Zen masters understood it. They codified it (orally and in some ways in writing - although it can't actually be codified or 'understood') -> I believe the early Christians understood it, sought to communicate it, knew there weren't words, but gave it their best shot.
It's surprising to me that a literal interpreter of the Bible can in one sentence say God is greater than we can understand, and still think He can be expressed in words. At BEST many of the lies of the mind can be removed, clearing the path. I think the early Christian written history was the least worst thing they could come up with to approach it. Zen masters knew it couldn't be approached intentionally.
So 'Eternal' means 'no time' -> not endless time. This is why 'Heaven is already in and around you' -> you (royal you) just don't know it. It's not the grasping of something, it's actually the opposite.
So I think the key is that WITHIN the scope of the subject of thinking and logic, things can be true, but that scope itself is not cradled in a thing like itself.
In the end the closest thing you can say is 'A is A' and even then you've lied, but it's less of a lie than anything else you can say. Almost. In the oral history, before a student becomes a master, a Zen student answers a certain koan ... not correctly, because there is no correct, but in a way that demonstrates to the master that 'he gets it'. "Getting It" is not true or false, right or wrong. It's just 'getting it'.
What you 'get' is not some thing, in fact you get no thing. There, all words turn into circles, but they remain amusing :-)
In the meantime, we still have to get to the corner store to buy milk, we just don't have to believe it's true. Believing it is true is the BIGGEST wall between man and God. But for communication purposes we can say 'it is true that if you take the 2nd left instead of the 3rd and continue driving, that is the 'wrong way' to get to the corner store. Or if someone says 'the 2nd left is the wrong way' you can say, for communication sake 'that is the truth.' But always it's understood to not be the capital T Truth.
To SOME extent the left (the arrogant high IQ ones) make the mistake of wandering only partially into this territory - one foot in 'something' and one foot in 'no thing and the is-ness that's still there.' If you do that, you will die very soon, hence they can, with a straight face, actually buy into their own moonbattery and talk about it so convincingly because they believe it as to get the lemmings that follow them to run at the cliff with them.
They should thank us, they know not that we save them from certain destruction!