"Man has a profound need to believe that the truth he perceives is rooted in the unchanging depths of the universe," writes Huston Smith in The Forgotten Truth, "for were it not so, could truth be really important? Yet how can he so believe when others see truth so differently?"
We live in a world with billions of others, and as we move together through a shared history, we all experience the sky as blue, babies as precious, and broken bones as painful. We agree on many of the details, yet we rarely see the same big picture. Some believe reality to be created by a personal God (dualism), some believe it to be the manifestation of impersonal Spirit (idealism), and others believe it to be an arbitrary accident (materialism).
When we search for answers about the nature of reality, we can pick from any number of ready-made answers, or make up one of our own. Yet we don’t want to add another mere opinion to the mix. We want to have real and accurate truth in our possession, and not just because it is satisfying to be right. As William James observed, “The possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action.”
In other words, truth is power. If you don’t have all the facts about a situation -– whether it's the speed limit on the road you're driving or the purpose of the life you're living -– then you can’t make sound judgments or decisions. You cannot even act in your own best interests. Only when you understand the reality of a situation can you effectively deal with it. The more truth you are able to grasp, the more power you possess.
Truth is powerful, but for us humans, it is also slippery, changeable, relative. It changes according to point of view. As much as we would like to be able to get hold of the truth and nothing but the truth, the fact is, in choosing which window we look through -- or refuse to look through -- we greatly influence what we will see.
Thus, no matter which philosophy we follow, before we can answer questions about reality, we must first answer questions of epistemology, or how we attain knowledge.
Approaching Truth
According to my high school chemistry teacher, the right way of knowing is called the scientific method. One must state the problem, then form a hypothesis that answers the problem, then test the hypothesis through experiment. Not all my teachers were quite as strict, but most insisted that one should observe the world through the window of reason and logic. Those who follow this approach usually end up as materialists.
Meanwhile, my Sunday school teacher was equally adamant that the right source of knowledge is the Bible. She told me my very soul depended on my acceptance of the knowledge “revealed” to the authors of the Bible and interpreted by my church. Any information that clashed with biblical dictates was not to be trusted. This approach almost always leads to a dualistic worldview.
It is interesting that both scientific and religious approaches, so often in conflict, are in perfect accord in their distrust of the self. Religion goes so far as to say that relying on the self to attain knowledge is sinful. Meanwhile, science suggests that a self is not required at all. In science, all one needs is the correct method of inquiry, and the discipline to stick to its rules of objectivity.
On one hand, the scientific rules of knowledge have been a boon to us, giving us a great grasp of “truth” about outer, physical processes -- and granting us great power in manipulating the physical world for our benefit.
But on the other hand, over-reliance on scientific rules can sabotage our grasp of truth. The scientific rules do not allow that the best way to calculate the distance to the sun might not be the best way to calculate the existence of one’s soul. Indeed, science does not recognize the validity of any inner experience that does not have a biochemical – and measurable – basis. When the rules about truth supersede the truth we experience, then truth is lost.
Religion may recognize the existence of the soul, but religion’s list of rules regarding truth is even more restrictive, and stubbornly blind to the aspects of life that exist outside its ancient documents. Religion puts forth a completely predetermined picture of reality that does not allow for new information.
Once again, we are left with a list of rules about truth that supersedes truth, and our efforts to fully understand ourselves and our place in the world are compromised.
Because the traditional “rules” about how we attain knowledge so often throw up roadblocks to truth, the New Age asks, is there a better approach to truth? What rules for the discovery of truth may we adopt that will not become more important than truth? How may we learn the nature of reality without being forced to turn a blind eye to what we may already know?
In other words, how may we discover truth that is whole and complete, balanced between what is without and what is within?
RULE 1. Trust Yourself
After our lifelong inculcation in ways of knowing in which a self is a liability, the New Age comes along with the outrageous declaration that the only real authority is you.
As Emerson most elegantly phrased it, "Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water from the urns of other men. We must go alone."
Idealists have long recognized that we are each responsible for our own little corner of truth. You are the only one qualified to determine the truth of your experience, using your observations, your reasoning, and your intuitions.
After all, everything in the world of our experience -– whether it is the color of the sky or the idea of god -- is knowable only by way of a self. Our only contact with reality is a self’s perception of reality. The sky cannot possibly be “blue” until a pair of eyes sees, and a mind identifies, its blueness.
We cannot separate an experience from its experiencer, and all truth flows from this indivisibility. Which is not to say that the self creates truth; rather, we connect with truth through the self. We are not the source of knowledge, but we are the conduits of knowledge.
Evidence of our deep connection to knowing is carried within our very bodies. Each of us is full of rivers of intelligence, home to an internal ocean of knowledge that grows our bodies and beats our hearts and digests our food. We do not consciously know how we do these miraculous, complicated things, but this knowledge is part of each self. And it is this self that can be trusted to discern the truth of its experience.
Idealism reminds us that all prophets are self-proclaimed voices of God, all experts self-proclaimed voices of knowing, and any legitimacy they have for me is granted by myself and my agreement with them. Even when we pretend we are bowing to a greater power, a small human self inevitably remains the source of authority.
In the New Age, we realize that the jig is up, so to speak. We stop giving away our power, stop begging "a cup of water from the urns of other men," and start communicating with our own internal ocean.
RULE 2. Question Authority
Both materialism and dualism are bound to the dictates of authority, and sometimes authority is reliable, but then again, sometimes it is not.
History has proven again and again that authority is as great a source of error as it is of knowledge. The sun does not revolve around the earth, slavery is not morally acceptable, and attaching leeches to a sick man will not make him well. Our churches and governments must continually issue apologies to make up for past mistakes, some of which have gone beyond mere ignorance to cause great harm.
Appealing to authority is an exercise in memory, not intelligence. Instead of figuring out what we think, we merely remember what we’ve been told. We become like animals tethered to a post, able to move only as far as the rope allows. Meanwhile, the truth fades away beyond our reach.
This doesn’t mean we should toss aside the hard-earned knowledge of those who came before us. We can, and should, learn from the men and women who have searched diligently and sincerely for truth within both secular and religious institutions. Indeed, the New Age is infamous for mining a wide range of disciplines for insights and freely incorporating them into the New Age worldview.
But we should never depend on the authority of others, no matter how holy the book or how certain its followers. M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, warns that there is no such thing as a good hand-me-down religion or philosophy. To be vital, our philosophy “must be a wholly personal one, forged entirely through the fire of our questioning and doubting in the crucible of our own experience of reality."
RULE 3. Know the limits of sense perception
Information about the world comes to us through a number of sources besides authority. Reason is another mode of perception, intuition still another.
Yet our most basic method of gathering information is through our senses. Authority might fallible, but surely seeing is believing, right? Well, not exactly.
When we look at an object, all we actually see is the colorless light waves that strike the object and are reflected back to us. These light reflections stimulate the cones and retinas in our eyes and it is the brain that interprets them as colors.
Likewise, waves trembling through the air strike our eardrums and our brains turn the vibrations into sound. Different molecular structures in food slide over our tongues, different taste buds respond, and our brains turn the information into sweet, salty, or sour.
The sight, the sound, and the taste of things are literally experiences of the mind, and different minds can, and do, create different sensory experiences of the very same object.
There is also a vast amount of information our senses are not equipped to discern. For example, our ears will hear sound waves of a certain range but are deaf to the higher wavelengths of radio waves. Our eyes easily perceive large objects yet cannot discern the small organisms such as the bacteria and germs that share our lives. What human beings can hear, smell, touch, taste, and see is but a small fraction of reality.
Of course, we have no choice but to rely on our senses to provide us with information about the world. But idealism asks us to consider that sense-information about reality is not the same thing as reality itself. Not only that, but this sense information must then be processed by our emotional, prejudicial minds.
RULE 4. Know the limits of reason
Reason is the most respected mode of attaining knowledge, and is commonly held to be our only trustworthy tool for weighing truth. Certainly, we would not be able to arrive at any truth at all without the use of reason.
Yet it is important to remember that reason does not work in a vacuum. It needs material to work with -- namely, sense material. But, as we’ve already seen, the senses don’t provide complete information about reality.
Reason, already hampered at the outset, is then further limited by what Carl Jung called “ego-consciousness.”
The mind is not an indifferent receptacle. The ego causes one’s reason to select and interpret information according to its own needs and interests. It is a very efficient screening system which brings our attention to facts and data that support its preconceptions, and discards facts and data that clash with its preconceptions.
Our hallowed reason is often reduced to helpless slave -- slave to our passions and preconceptions -- and will support any view one's emotions wish to impose on it. That is how reason is able to create arguments for either of two contradictory views with equal plausibility.
Reason then, can be a powerful defense against recognition of truth, and often perpetuates illusion with elaborate rationalization. Witch hunts, slavery, Nazism -– all these were defended compellingly by reason in their day, which is why Jung called our confidence in reason “our greatest and most tragic illusion.”
The New Age cautions us to beware the limits of reason and our over-reliance on the rationality of our minds. Reason is surely one of our most valuable tools in the determination of truth, but it cannot do the job alone.
RULE 5. Learn to use your intuition
Anyone who's taken an algebra class knows the frustration of trying to solve a problem beyond one’s mental reach, and the surprise of the moment when the mind leaps beyond the logical steps of formula and “gets” the answer. Yet, when the teacher pushed us to "show our work," we had no answer, for there was no way to explain how one got there in a single step when everyone else took the long way.
There never will be a logical way to explain intuition, an inner skill that not only shortcuts reason, but reaches into places that reason cannot go.
Unlike rational processes which advance in linear fashion and leave a clear path of incremental steps, intuition is a direct leap into the heart of things. This leap is hidden, mysterious, yet uncannily accurate.
With intuition, subject and object merge together and produce a calm sense of certainty, or telltale bodily response, like a pleasant electric charge. Nabakov spoke of the frisson, the telling shiver of truth. Intuition often comes with a shiver-like feeling, a sense of knowing that is palpable, immediate, unshakable.
Intuition is closely related to the mystic insights from which most of our religions were born. In mysticism, the self (subject) and object (reality or God) quite literally merge together, producing an ecstatic, trance-like state. When mystics lose themselves in this state, deeper truths flow from them in the fiery poetry of symbol that the logical mind does not always understand.
Yet just because intuition is non-rational doesn’t mean it is irrational, or contrary to reason. As Aristotle first observed, the highest form of reason (theoria) is a type of disciplined intuition.
The 19th-century Transcendentalists would later speak of this higher form of knowing as "transcendental reason," a lightning-fast process superior to the slow and clunky steps typical of logic. Today, many researchers talk about "whole-brain" knowing which employs the intuitive left hemisphere of the brain as well as the logic-focused right hemisphere.
Intuition is absolutely vital in gaining complete knowledge. Great thinkers often describe their revolutionary ideas as coming from intuitive flashes that are only later corroborated by hard evidence. As Einstein noted of his discovery of the theory of relativity, “I did not arrive at an understanding of these fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.”
Of course, as with the other modes of perception, it is possible to give too much weight to intuition. Like reason, our sense of intuition can be influenced by emotions and the ego’s desires, and so is not infallible. If we accepting whatever "feels right" as the only criterion of truth, then we are vulnerable to getting caught up in the realm of the ridiculous and constructing fantastic theories that clearly have no relationship to reality as experienced by the other modes of perception. This is a trap that has plagued many a New Ager.
“Intuition is not a sufficient foundation for any philosophy,” wrote the famous Harvard professor of philosophy William Hocking. “But we are not likely to achieve any true philosophy without it.”
Rule 6. Use all modes of perception
Truth is not a one-dimensional matter. Life unfolds simultaneously as a physical experience, a mental experience, an emotional experience, and a social experience, and so a complete truth must incorporate all these aspects.
Our best chance of reaching a true and complete philosophy, “rooted in the unchanging depths of the universe,” is to glean our knowledge from all sources available to us, whether it be from the East or West, whether ancient scripture or yesterday's latest scientific discovery. We need to confirm what our intuition tells us with our senses. We need to take what authority proclaims and corroborate it with our reason.
When all modes of perception work together, each verifying the others, we move as close to truth as humanly possible.
RULE 7. Truth is relative
Okay, so if we all follow these new rules of truth -- trusting ourselves, observing our own experience, getting in touch with our intuition -– does that mean we will someday all arrive at one similar truth? Not a chance.
A quick look at the variety of beliefs held by New Agers shows that even when looking through the same idealistic window, the world still looks different through different eyes. And although this can bother those who are looking for the comfort of an absolute -- to a New Ager, this is exactly as it should be.
After all, a poor farmer in 16th-century China lived in a life vastly different than that of a wealthy stockbroker in 21st-century Manhattan, and it would be absurd to expect them to arrive at the same version of truth. Not only would it be absurd, it would be contrary to the entire purpose an idealist believes we humans are on this earth to fulfill -- to explore different facets of experience and discover fresh truths unique to our own time and place (See Story of Creation).
Ken Wilber describes how different versions of truth can all still be relatively “true” in his book, The Spectrum of Consciousness. He describes all consciousness as a spectrum of vibratory levels, much like levels of electromagnetic radiation express themselves in various wavelengths. Just as we become aware of a specific radio wave only when we "tune in" to that particular wavelength, so we become aware of those levels of truth that our consciousness tunes into.
Just as a radio wave that seems different from a light wave can still be part of the same spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, so a religion in China that seems different from a religion in America can still be part of the same spectrum of truth. Each point of view is the result of our being tuned in to a different vibratory level.
From this vantage point, writes Wilber, "no approach, be it Eastern or Western, has anything to lose -- rather, they all gain a universal context."
Safeguarding the universal context of relative truth is a primary goal of New Age philosophy. Rather than feeling discouraged that people see truth so differently, the New Age understands that each person’s fragment of truth is an important piece of a larger puzzle. From the materialist with her hard lines of numbers and facts to the idealist with his blurry, relative lines -- each new piece of “truth” adds another dimension, another shade of meaning to the whole.
Or in the words of William James, each person’s truth is as necessary as every other, each “verified in its own way, from hour to hour, and from life to life, each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell out the meaning completely.”
RULE 8. There are degrees of truth
In the New Age, each person’s fragment of truth is respected as an integral part of the whole. But this doesn’t mean that we do not recognize that some fragments are clearly more in line with reality than others.
“The fact that all perspectives are relative does not mean that no perspective has any advantage at all,” Wilber continues. “That all perspectives are relative does not prevent some from being relatively better.”
We are human, we are going to make errors. And if we neglect to use all modes of perception, we are likely to make many errors. Respecting someone’s right to determine her own truths doesn't mean I cannot disagree with her, or point out her error as it appears to me. My only obligation is to remember that my view is no more privileged than hers.
Yet, I must also remember than in order to bring to bring my truth closer to the truth, I must be free to try out new ideas, explore them, test them.
In the end, it is not my job, or yours, to determine the truth for all time, for all people. It’s not my job, or yours, to determine any greater truths at all. We merely have to decide what is true for ourselves, and only ourselves, at this particular moment. When we do this consistently, we may find our own small truth growing, expanding and opening toward the source of all truth.
Living the truth
Obviously, the New Age rules of knowing can have a great impact on truth and one’s view of reality. By incorporating a wider range of knowledge sources –- from East and West, science and religion, psychology and myth -– we end up with a more complete picture of reality. By incorporating intuition, we develop a much more detailed and accurate picture of reality, as well as a picture more balanced between our inner and outer worlds. And by trusting ourselves to evaluate our own experience, we see a picture of reality more relevant to our own lives.
Yet, the most profound impact these rules have is on the personal level -- in our relationship with ourselves and with others. From the beginning, we are empowered to rely on ourselves, believe in ourselves, trust ourselves and the guidance of our inner voice. We are allowed to mature beyond children who parrot what others tell us and become grown-ups able to think critically, and independently, for ourselves.
In learning that we are trustworthy, we come to realize that others are trustworthy also. And because we don’t have to be “right” all the time, we can afford to let others express their own points of view without feeling threatened. We may even begin to listen, truly listen, to what others think, and to honor what they have discovered on their own unique journeys.
This greater respect for oneself and others expands out to a greater respect for the world around us and its entirely mysterious depths. The more we learn, the more we know we have yet to learn. And as we become more comfortable with our uncertainty, or what the Buddhists call “not-knowing,” we may find ourselves walking lightly, almost playfully through new ideas. Our lives may open up to a wonderful new sense of adventure.
When anything is possible, how can we not lead richer and fuller lives?
Go to The Story of Creation.
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