The Trouble With Truth

This is a REPLAY of a podcast from July 2024, and it seems to me to be pretty darn relevant today in the midst of the current conflict with Iran. 

What if everything you believed to be true was merely an illusion? Inspired by the iconic line, "You can't handle the truth," from "A Few Good Men," we embark on a journey to unravel the complexities of truth. We explore the human craving for certainty and how it leads to conflict and war. Through the lens of Buddhism and mindfulness, we discuss the concept of truth as an understanding of delusion and balance, rather than something tangible or ultimate. By sharing personal stories and teachings, we highlight how minor grievances can spiral into significant conflicts and reveal how recognizing these delusions can foster harmony and justice.

In the second part of our exploration, we shift our focus to the enigmatic realms of death and the afterlife. We delve into various perspectives—scientific, spiritual, and religious—to ponder the continuity of consciousness and the ripple effects of our lives. We navigate the murky waters of absolute versus relative truth, considering how different frameworks and theories can coexist. We also touch on the dangers of dogmatic beliefs and the potential for other dimensions with different physical laws. Join us as we advocate for a more open-minded approach to understanding our world and the mysteries that lie beyond.

Transcript

Exploring the Concept of Truth

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Don't objective! Did you order the code right? You don't have to answer that question. I'll answer the question. You want answers? I think I'm entitled. You want answers! I want the truth! You can't handle the truth.

Exploring Truth and Life Beyond

SPEAKER_00 0:42

This is a random podcast thought today, and I thought I would explore what I consider to be an interesting subject area, that is the truth. Now, I've gone into this subject area in other podcasts, either directly or tangentially, but I thought I would approach it again today. I had a sudden inspiration this morning driving to get a cup of coffee, and uh a Starbucks Cafe Mocha will oftentimes inspire you to want to seek the truth, because as you linger your taste buds over the delicious cafe mocha, um thoughts about the truth may arise. Now I'm being a little bit flippant, of course, and kidding around. Um maybe some of you remember the 1992 movie A Few Good Men and the famous Jack Nicholson speech about the truth, and uh within the courtroom setting he was very uh adamant about saying you can't handle the truth, and that was his take on the truth. You can't handle it. Now, I've spent quite a few years in my life contemplating the truth in a very serious way, actually. And you might say there are various aspects of the truth, that's what I've sort of concluded. You might say there's emotional truth, there's spiritual truth, there's intellectual truth, uh, there's various types of truth. And uh I've studied Buddhism and mindfulness, of course, that's what this podcast is about, at least it's supposed to be about that. I I know I veer off of the mindfulness track a little bit sometimes, but the truth uh relative to Buddhism has to do with what's called the middle way or emptiness, and I've talked about that quite a bit. In my uh survey of the truth, I I think that Buddhism comes the closest, as far as I can tell, because ultimately what the Buddhist philosophy is telling us, or at least it's telling me, uh, that's my interpretation, is there is no real ultimate truth. You can't grasp onto the truth and say, and you know, this is it. You can't hold it up and wave it around and say, This is it. People love to have tangible things, they love to have certainty. This is what people seek in life. They seek consistency, certainty. They want to know. I have the truth, I I own the truth. Uh, people go to war over these kinds of things, the ownership of the truth. One person knows what the truth is, the other doesn't, and you go to war because you want to prove that the other person, you know, doesn't know what they're talking about. Or maybe the wrongdoer um has, you know, done something wrong to you, and you then go after them because they've wronged you. And so th this is the way of the world. I mean, the way of the world is conflict oftentimes because people believe that they have been wronged and that the truth is been somehow breached. Now an old boss of mine back in the day many years ago, used to say to me, he said, he was saying, Don't sweat the small stuff. Don't sweat the small stuff. So in my view, um in my adult life, my advanced adult life, my aging adult life, is I I believe that people sweat the small stuff a lot, you know. And that the if if they sweat the small stuff, the small stuff could can become the big stuff because if they sweat the small stuff and hang on to it a lot, ultimately it can evolve and escalate into the big stuff. And the big stuff involves things like, you know, killing people, right? So war, you know. The the small stuff can evolve into the big stuff. And this is uh the downside, the the negative aspect of sweating the small stuff is it can evolve into something more dangerous. And then it becomes a matter of life and death. And of course life and death is ultimately a battle that we all fear. None of us want to fight it, but sometimes we feel we do need to fight it. And as a country, as a people, as individuals, sometimes we feel we need to to to battle something, to to go to war with something, to prove something, that we're right, that we know the truth, and that the other person does not know the truth, and this is the nature of the battle for justice, right? The battle for justice, the battle for truth. What is the truth? And this is the court system that's set up to get to the bottom of well, what is the truth? And and oftentimes when I was younger, I would I would watch a show called Divorce Court, and you would listen to both sides of the divorce case, and you would conclude that one of them had to be lying. You know, somebody's got to be lying. Either that or they're both deluded. They're both deluded. In other words, both delusionally feel that they have a grasp on the truth and that the other is somehow wronging them. And that that's the nature of the situation. They're both delusional in in a divorce situation or in some kind of a conflict situation. I would say that's closer to the Buddha's uh attitude towards these kinds of things is that both sides are delusional. And the middle way is is is striking uh a chord, a balance between the right and the wrong of both sides, saying neither side is right, neither side is wrong. Both sides are in a sense caught up in delusion, and this is the nature of truth, it's not so much that you grasp the truth, but that you grasp the nature of delusion. You grasp the nature of the fact or the reality of the fact that once you enter into the world of language and thought and concepts and ideas and philosophies and ideologies and all the G's, all those things, you you you you step into the world of delusion. And that's really what what the Buddha was trying to tell us in in my mind. And and I've gone over this, you know, in other podcasts in in terms of talking about the uh nature of delusion and uh the two extremes according to the Mahayana school, the extremes of eternalism and nihilism, uh, for example. Uh those are really the way it's laid out. And uh people tend to fall in into these traps. Uh the eternalists oftentimes will will, you know, um go to war for their various eternalist philosophies, you know, one side against the other. In essence, that's what they're warring over. They're warring over, well, my eternalism is better than your eternalism. And then the nihilist, you know, usually doesn't care and they're just trying to exploit the situation and make a buck. And the arms dealers that are selling the arms to both sides of the conflict, of the eternalists, you know, the arms dealers are selling to the either side of the conflict and making a buck, and that's the nihilist. The middle way says, you know, let's let's get together and have a group hug. Let's forgive each other, let's have compassion for the fact that we've got caught up in this sort of an illusion or delusion of truth being some fixed thing, being some absolute thing. We have to have it that way, or else it's not the truth. But if the nature of truth is not really fixed, if the nature of truth is, you might say, contextual or conceptual, or um always has to do with the framework. Uh uh, you might say truth is relative to the situation. That's you know, to philosophy or philosophers, that's often associated with what's called postmodern thinking, relative truth. And relative truth and postmodern thinking is not, you know, the favorite thing of the eternalists. The Christians, the Muslims, the religious people of all stripes. They don't like this kind of postmodern thinking about relative truth. They want a fixed truth, they want an absolute truth. They want an absolute truth usually because they want to go to an absolute place when they die, maybe like a heaven that's eternal, that lasts forever. And they want to be there with the other truth people, you know, that believed like they did, and therefore they go to that place. And, you know, strangely enough, I I don't say that they shouldn't have that. I mean, maybe they can go to that place, and maybe they can continue there in in eternal bliss with all the other people that believe in the same eternal thing that they believe in. I'm not saying that that's not possible because if you really open up your mind, you can open up your mind to the fact that there can be parallel truths, perhaps. There can be multiple truths existing in parallel at the same time. And uh we don't have to have one truth, and that the delusional people can hold their truth uh, you know, in a delusional fashion. They can do that. But I think that realizing that is really the the middle way, you know, in essence. It's emptiness, it's realizing that there is no fixed truth, there's no absolute truth. This is a sort of precarious situation for some people because it really brings up a lot of fear. Because at the end of the day, when you die, what's left? Is there anything left? Are you going anywhere? Are they going to accept you? Well, they love you in some Buddha world, you know, or some some realm, some divine realm. You don't know. You sort of throw your lot in more with the scientists in that way. The scientists than the atheists. And oftentimes the nihilists don't believe there's anything after death. There's nothing. It ends. And in a in a way the Buddhist believes this because the Buddhist is very scientific, and the Buddhist believes that once life is over, that's it. There's nothing else. And uh it might consciousness might continue in a in the sense that there's an there's a uh sort of like a ripple effect of water. You know, when you drop a stone in water, you have ripples. So, in a sense, you could say that your consciousness, your life has a ripple effect. And the materialists will think this ripple effect is through their children. I mean, that's the way that they see it. The children will have their ripple effect. That's why they want to have children. They want to have children because it gives them a sense of eternality, of continuing, of continuance. And uh there's nothing wrong with that, and that's oftentimes that the desire to have children is to continue you in some fashion, in a material sense, and in the sense of having a body that continues. In a spiritual or consciousness sense, it could also be said that life or consciousness continues, and this is what the spiritual theorists might uh tell us. You know, they'll tell they'll tell us that there's future lives that in essence this life will lead to another life. The uh eternalist might say there's a soul. Right. That that's a typical thing within the the church or religious world, is that there's a soul and it has to do with saving your soul, making sure your soul is saved so that you can continue in some more pleasant realm with other people that believe in the same kind of truth that you do. And again, I'm not saying that this can't happen. I don't know. You know, it might happen. Who knows? I I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. The the scientists might say adamantly it can't happen, that there's no way it can happen. I'm not quite there with the scientists. I I leave myself open to the possibility that we don't know. And this takes us back to Socrates, of course, and the Greeks. We don't know. We we know that we don't know. So the truth is really that we don't know the truth. We we can never really grasp the truth. It's very settling in a way, but what we can understand is frameworks and theories and concepts and ideas, and they can all fit together in a very beautiful way. And scientists do this really elegantly. Uh, physicists do this very elegantly in their equations. They make it all fit together in a beautiful way, even though oftentimes they will contradict themselves. But in the hard sciences, uh, they say, you know, look at this. I mean, you put these two things together in a chemical way, it's always going to happen. You're always gonna get this reaction, you're always gonna get this result. And that's why, of course, we can make things, we can create things, because we have fixed laws, fit fixed physical laws that work. And therefore, your idea, Don, that truth is relative is stupid. Because look at this, the sciences prove that they're you're you're you're delusional. You are delusional, Mr. Thompson, because you believe that truth is relative. But I don't know. Still, philosophically, there might be other universes and other places out there that have completely different laws of physics. Who's to say? We don't know. You could say that there are universes and dimensions that completely uh turn inside out what we believe to be true in terms of our physics. We don't know. I think it's uh philosophically possible, and if it's philosophically possible, it may indeed be possible in reality, that there might be different dimensions. The physicists do tell us this that there's different dimensions. I'm not trying to torture you or torture myself and all of this, but I'm trying to hopefully create a sense of uh a couple of things. One is, you know, perhaps we can lighten up a little bit about the truth in our adamant uh feeling sometimes that we have to have it and that we do have it, you know, that we do have it, and that we since we have it, nobody else can have it, or we have to group together with people that share our truth and eliminate everybody else that doesn't share our truth. And that's uh, you know, maybe not the way to go. Because oftentimes that results in war, and we've seen a lot of that lately, haven't we? We've seen a lot of war. You see a lot of times where people feel that they've been wronged and maybe they have been wronged. But the root cause of that wrong may come from another wrong that they their opponent felt that they were uh, you know, victim of. So these cycles of violence, uh oftentimes the root cause is clinging to this idea that I have the truth. The truth to the capitalists is of course, we know the market. The numbers. If you have the numbers, that's the truth. If you don't have the numbers, that's not the truth. Whoever has the most market share has the truth, therefore. If the capitalist, the market is the truth. Whoever has the most most numbers, you know, that that's what it is. So uh I'll leave it at that. This is a little bit of a you know, I'm trying to joke around a little bit here, and I don't know if uh, you know, hopefully you took it in the in the right way. I'm not trying to be uh, you know, uh arrogant or uh disrespectful. But you know, I'll leave it at that and and and let you go on with your day, and I appreciate you listening. Until the next time, I'll uh look forward to talking to you soon. Bye bye.