as I have been very busy of late… I write when I can…
the “Truth” can only lie in two places… inside of us or outside of us…
when someone says, the truth lies with god, that is outside of us…
when I was searching for god for 40 years, I was searching outside of me…
now many believe that the truth is found inside of us…
The Buddha for example…
so we have either the truth lying inside or lying outside of us…
but if I am right and everything is one and connected, then the truth can
exist in us and outside of us… a search outside of us should at some point lead
us back to ourselves and a search within ourselves will lead us back to the outside…
perhaps that is why the most appropriate symbol of life is the Ying/yang…
I would post this symbol but my incompetence in technical matters prevents me…
now one might argue I have gone “mystical”, but I haven’t… just because I
insist that life is best understood as experience and not in a metaphysical sense,
that doesn’t preclude stretching experience as far as it will go…
take an action… for example, throwing a rock… I throw the rock…
then, I mentally put that experience into some sort of context…
I could by the way, do it the other way around, mentally put that experience
into context and then throw the rock…I am throwing the rock to show my arm strength,
or to chase off bears or to impress a girl, many reasons exist for me to throw that rock…
the question becomes, how are we to understand that event?..
there are many such events in life… some past, some present and some future…
history is a study of events in the past, we hear about an event, say, the battle
of Waterloo… we then try to make some sense of that event, mentally…
we categorize those events, put them into some context… we mentally try to
to understand that “truth”… that “truth” of Waterloo which is an physical event
and we try to make sense of it mentally… the truth lies both inside of us and outside
of us…
a search for a truth either inside of us or outside of us, will lead us to the other…
we are mental and physical and our truths lie in both the mental and physical…
now is this like the famous mind/body problem? how does the mind influence the body
and how does the body influence the mind? No, this is something different…
this is an understanding that the “truth” whatever that may be, lies both inside
of us and outside of us, as they are the same thing…
but one might say, we are two distinct and separate things, inside and out,
mind and body… over the course of this thread, many times we have come
across two distinct and separate things and we have come to understand that
two distinct and separate things when understood, become two sides of the same
coin and then they become the same thing… good and evil for example…
to slightly change directions, we have a viewpoint and that viewpoint is
society driven, culturally driven… X, Y and Z are right and A, B, and C are
wrong, this is culturally and society driven… Truth, justice and the American way,
I have heard this all my life and it is culturally driven… we hear a truth and
as enough people belief in this truth, we accept it as our own… American is
the greatest country on earth… this “truth” is society and culturally driven…
this “truth” lies outside of us… but even a cursory look at it shows us that
America is not the greatest country on earth… so how do we understand this…
we have a culturally driven truth that America is the greatest country on earth
and we have a understanding that America is clearly not the greatest country on earth?
how do we reconcile this anomaly? we have two truths, clearly one is wrong,
but how do we understand this as one truth is society and culturally driven and
we certainly don’t want to be wrong in regards to our culture and out society…
how do we find the answer to this quandary?
Kropotkin