The Ring of Truth
Can you hear it? Do you wear it? Will you reach for it?
It’s a great responsibility. To seek it. To honour it. To listen to it. What is true? What is right? What is good? Can you ask these questions? Can you answer them? Have you considered them? Or have you just filled in the blanks on the paper with the first thing that came to mind, put down your pencil, and got on with your little, personal melodrama?
No one has a monopoly on the truth. I’m not trying to claim one. But there are ways to get closer to it, and ways to avoid it, and ways to obscure it. There are lies, and untruths, and deceptions, and denials. There is misdirection and misunderstanding; there are mistakes and mysteries. There is confusion and contradiction. There are distractions, and interruptions, irritations and aggravations. But there are also honesty, openness, humility, attentiveness, concentration, discipline, courage, logic and science. There are questions, but, eventually, for the persistent, there are answers. More answers than any one person can ever learn, though few bother to learn but a fraction. Few dare to ask, fewer dare to learn, and only the very rare individuals contemplate the implications of what they learn.
The basis of truth is fact. Truth begins with facts. We observe, carefully, repeatedly, conscientiously, the world: nature, people, ideas, and thought itself. We seek confirmation from others. We admit our biases. No person can change the facts, which exist in and of themselves. People can only lie. But all lies reveal themselves, in time. The bolder the lie, the more easily dispensed with by the resolute seeker of truth. Because the facts will out.
From facts, we seek understanding. In this world, in our perceptions of it, in our comprehension of it, there is a principle of cause and effect. One event (or many) influences another. This is observed in the entire range of human experience. Understanding is layered. The facts of any single cause/effect relationship break down into actions and reactions which underlie them, and thence into smaller causes and effects, and so on, to the limits of our senses and those of our best instruments, be they machines we build or methods we apply only within our imaginations.
All understanding comes from imagination. It is in our imaginations that we first contrive the possibilities which serve as our predictions for the processes we observe in nature, in society, in human behaviour, in mathematics and everywhere else. But we cannot know which possibilities are the most true until we submit them to the tests of reality. Untested truths are nothing but theories. People who believe in the truth of an untested theory are fools.
We are all fools. We all have our cherished fantasies about the world which we fear to see revealed as such. We are all cowards, to some degree. But it is not something of which to be proud, this childishness, this self-delusion. It is something of which to be ashamed. Discard your fantasies! Renounce your childish dreams and admit the necessity of letting in the truth, though it be incomplete, unsatisfactory, disturbing or unpleasant. Throw down the enshrined theories of your ancestors. They only hold you back. Transcend your foolishness. Cast aside the crutches of your mind. You don’t need them. The untested belief that you need them is the keystone that holds up the structure of errant dreams that you think protects you, but only traps you inside the myths of the past.
We live in an age of marvels, of science and technology, of wealth immeasurable, and yet the pain and suffering of millions goes on and on. Why? Who causes it? Is it truly evil? Is it truly greed and hatred? Or laziness and stupidity? Who has put these theories to the test? Who is presumptuous enough to claim they know the reasons for the troubles of the world? Someone must do it. Is it not the refusal to honour truth? Is it not the refusal to face facts? Is it not the cowardice by which we cling to the promises of our parents, and there’s before them, those who wanted us to act as their mirrors, in their pride and false arrogance, which disguised their own cowardice in the face of their fear of being wrong and being shown as the fools they were? We are all fools, but each new generation has the opportunity to grow beyond the foolishness of their forbears, if they choose.
Have we done so? Are we any less foolish than the men and women who lived a hundred or a thousand years ago? We would like to think so, but are we perhaps only more clever, more industrious, more sophisticated, more subtle in our self-deception? We are still proud, arrogant, cruel, and deceitful, all in the name of protecting ourselves, all for the sake of nursing our insecurities and inadequacies. The fact seems to be that each generation must re-learn everything learned by every past generation, and that there is every a renewal of those passions of the flesh and animal instincts which drive us, and few have the patience, the clarity of thought or the faith to follow the fine and fragile thread of truth that leads out of the maze of confusion in which we are first born.
But the thread is there, silver and softly glowing in the encroaching darkness, still and constant amidst the turbulence of doubt which carries us through our lives. It is the sound of a silver bell in the distance, which you can just barely hear if let that part of you tuned to it to speak to you, if you can find the courage and the presence of mind to resist the sorcery of the necromancers who wish to enslave you, to ignore the colours and lights of the glamourous, the soothing voices and pretty fantasies of the false prophets who want your adoration. The true thread cannot be cut. The true sound cannot be silenced. Truth is there. And as the man said, it will set you free.