the ONLY truth
if you can afford only one truth what should it be?
the only truth is YOU
everything else is epistemology
your existence simply perceives every other truth1.
but your perception is often deceiving you as shown by gestalt’s psychology and numerous psychological experiments about brain’s illusory perception of the visual field.
you’re not able to always delineate between your mental strata of beliefs, emotions, desires, and knowledge, giving you the illusion of truth. this is the theory of mind.
without the ultimate truth,
without you,
nothing exists. what you perceive is construed.
truisms, reality, conviction, victimhood, all of it is your brain’s output2
samkhya philosophy - the juxtapostion of purusha (your consciousness) and prakriti (everything else) - gave birth to yoga and meditation, as well as strongly influenced vedas, upanishads, and hinduism. it essentially explains the truth through YOU.
one can peruse physics, metaphysics, and philosophy without this realization
and they would be happy and sad in all the normal ways.
the existential joy however lies
in witnessing yourself without the unrelenting smog of thought.
in consciousness meeting with nothingness.
stripped of every thought,
every belonging,
every distraction,
every instinct, indulgence, and despair
at least for a few moments of solitude
to finally come home to yourself.
in the early 20th century albert einstein met with the indian poet and nobel winner tagore. among several topics they discussed the philosophy of science. einstein discussed how he sees reality as independent of human perception - it always is there. tagore had a different view. he thought that reality is whatever we perceive. this view can sound like solipsism but it’s one way of acknowledging the limits of human intelligence derived from the evolution of amino acids on a suspended rock in space. heisenberg famously said this about the limits of intelligence: not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think. in any case, here’s col. jessup for ya.
going back to the famous thought experiment: if a tree fell and no one was around to hear it, did the tree actually make a sound?
air waves did vibrate as it fell. although no one with an ear was around, in absolute reality the tree did fall and it did make a sound. but hang on. that’s not sound if no ear perceived it. it’s just air waves. the notion of sound is merely a perception of auditory brain cells. you could possibly imagine other forms of life in the universe that doesn’t have this skill. so, was there a sound?