Truth March 21st 2010

Happy Spring Equinox everyone!

Today I woke up thinking about the fact that truth is different for everyone. Some people worship truth. Some people run to escape it before it drives them insane or kills them. Other people just live their lives and could care less about truth either way.

When I grew up the  "Truth" made a lot more sense to me at least. There wasn't any real question in my mind what truth was. It was very white and black, good and bad and all that. And then came adulthood with all the infinite shades of gray and white. And all that sense of initial truth wore away into realizing that compassion for all beings was even more important than truth because unfortunately often "Truth Kills Everyone". So then I began to see that truth was not a "One size fits all" kind of thing after all.

In a sense everyone had to do whatever they could to just stay alive and to keep their loved ones alive. That was a more realistic assessment of life. And that truth was in the end a luxury for the richest humans on earth. And that often even then truth became a plattitude that the rich hide behind in order to keep all their wealth and to increase it and not lose it, so that they don't become poor again.

Rich people and poor people tend to be two sides of the same coin in a way. They are both extremes. Whereas, middle class people are something else again entirely than either rich or poor. And the middle class in every country seems to insure whether or not a government actually works for its people or not.

When I grew up the answers seemed so simple but not now. In the 1960s it was all about not nuking everyone off the whole planet because we all didn't agree. People rail against the Nazis for example in World War II. However, the whole western world had to get just as intense and crazy as the Nazis were in order to win that war. In the end I'm not sure who was scarier. Maybe we were. We won that war.

History is always written by the victors of every conflict, so to take history completely seriously is to be deluded. Only if one can see all the points of view of every battle down through history does one make any sense of history at all. In the end it is just two different groups battling over land and other resources. That is all it really boils down to. There are too many people and not enough resources so let's have a war to reduce population and redistribute resources. In the end that is what wars do. Maybe that is all the truth we need to understand to make sense of history.

However, personal truth is usually based upon one's real experiences every day of their lives. Whether one's personal truth is functional and realistic can be either subjective or objective and hopefully both if the person has a balanced view of what has happened to them.

So, in the end what is truth?

It is different for every person on earth. That is why having a democracy that everyone can participate in helps to prevent wars and to create the common good. I believe that is truth. But not everyone on earth does. That is why there will be more wars. Hopefully, they will be little ones because with Global Climate change a big one would send us all back to the stone age even if some of us survived.