Wisdom in a Post-Truth World

I’ve been a philosophy professor for 29 years. One of the central projects in philosophy is the task of establishing meaningful and accurate criteria for truth. What makes one claim true and another one false?

            My students are very interested in this question. We should be too. Especially these days.

            A fundamental trust has been broken. A growing number of us no longer trust scientific consensus, well-established research methods, or even the very notion of expertise. Political leaders, corporate spokesmen, and agenda-driven zealots lie with such numbing regularity that many of us have simply given up. Maybe there’s no such thing as truth. Maybe it’s all just opinion.      

This is bad. Philosophy can help.

            In philosophy, truth is defined as justified true belief. Anyone can have a belief. No evidence is needed. You can believe whatever you want, say, that the earth is flat, or that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or that vaccines cause Autism – three propositions for which there is no credible evidence. (It is a curious phenomenon that the absence of evidence excites conspiracy theorists. They cite the absence of evidence as evidence of a cover-up – the scarcer the evidence, the more effective the cover-up, or so they believe.)

            But a justified true belief is different. A belief rises to the level of truth when two criteria are met. First, is the belief supported by evidence that informed, rational people would accept? Second, and this may seem obvious, but is it true? Does the claim match real events, circumstances, and conditions? If both standards are met, we’ve got ourselves a truth.

            When the Internet was born a few decades ago applications like Google and YouTube revolutionized our search for knowledge and truth forever, in good and bad ways. The good news was that now all of us had unfettered access to information previously curated and meted out by gatekeepers. The bad news is that those gatekeepers were peer-reviewed journals, credentialed journalists, and accredited educational institutions committed to the global good. Now we’re drowning in a sea of contradictory truth claims cooked up by literally anyone with a laptop and a modem.

You watch a little YouTube, read a few blogs, haunt a chat room, and suddenly you’re deluded into arguing as a peer with your pediatrician about your children’s vaccinations. You have come to believe that your pediatrician – a well-respected professional with decades of peer-reviewed training, education, and expertise – has been duped by Big Pharma into injecting toxins into your baby. But you see through the lies.

            What parent doesn’t want to protect their child? And questioning authority is always a good idea – consensus alone does not confer truthfulness. But replacing time-tested standards for the establishment of truth with egocentric, fear-based beliefs is dangerous.

            All of this is just a starting point. Missing from our inquiry are the transcendent, mystical truths most often discussed in spiritual circles. Here, another sort of epistemology is required, for the rules of logic, evidence, and rational discourse no longer apply. The great philosophers and mystics of the world – Plato, Plotinus, Shankara, Nagarjuna – all agree that there are levels of knowing beyond reason that elude the grasp of the conceptual mind. These transcendent truths are best understood as ineffable experiences, not thoughts, yet they still retain all the authority and transformational power of the best, well-reasoned ordinary truths. Wisdom means living in both realms – ordinary and transcendent knowledge – and integrating them into a meaningful, truth-based life.

[This piece originally appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the January/February 2020 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Calling Off the Search

When on their 1987 masterpiece Joshua Tree U2 sang “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” everyone knew exactly what they meant. We seem hard-wired to search, a behavior we no doubt learned hunting and gathering all around the world these last hundred thousand years. An unquenchable longing pushes us toward ever new horizons. We can’t stop.

We’re driven by the illusion that some new acquisition, some new lifestyle, some new understanding, some new something will transform our lives into shimmering palaces of wisdom and bliss. We’ll be finally, completely happy, and we won’t have to search anymore. But there’s just one problem: when we finally get what we want the restlessness lingers. We carry our confusion and neurosis with us into every new situation. Wherever you go, there you are. Different day, different job, different house, different marriage, same old suffering.

Some people even think that if they pack up and move to another town everything will change. In the recovery world that’s called “doing a geographical,” the desperate hope that we can shake loose our demons if we run fast and far enough. But they all hitch a ride – every single one of them. Our demons don’t live in the outer world – they’re within us. They are us.

When Dorothy awoke in her own bed after her mystical journey to Oz, she realized the truth – “There’s no place like home.” And we are always home. Not only can we not outrun our problems, turns out we also can’t outrun our solutions. We carry them all within.

This is why the paradigm of spiritual searching fails. How can we search for truth when not one of our steps leads away from it? As we chase from one explanation to the next, trading one ideology for another, we’re forever cast adrift on the surface: all our doctrines, theologies, and philosophies exist only at the level of thought. They are purely conceptual constructs. The unbreakable whole of life eludes concepts, words, and explanations. Leaving here and going there won’t make a difference. But slowing down, stopping, and opening up will.

There are no real, lasting solutions at the level of conceptual, theoretical, ideological thought. The menu is not the food. The map is not the place. To search through thought-systems for real transformation is like wandering through a market with no money to spend. You’re just looking around – you don’t get to have any of it.

There can never be real freedom or joy at the level of thought because thoughts are always about the past or the future. Only in the eternal presence of the Now is real freedom possible. And it is the work of all authentic spiritual practice to draw us into the present moment and out of our thought-abstractions. That’s what ritual is for. That’s what contemplative, centering prayer does. That’s what luminous, sacred music does. That’s what solitude in nature does. That’s what selfless, sacred service does. That’s what meditation does.

One of the most powerful reasons present-minded consciousness is so liberating is because fear withers in the bright light of the eternal present. Fear is by definition future-thinking. It’s imaging harmful future outcomes that have not and will not happen. Fear deals exclusively in the what if. What if I get cancer? What if I forget my lines? What if this plane crashes? And yet, here and now, we’re cancer-free, we remembered our lines, and the plane is still in the air. Coming into the present moment eliminates fear – it simply can’t survive here. Truth won’t let it.

Freedom from fear is found only in the now.

           When you come fully into this present moment you awaken into the realization that there is nothing you need, nothing you want, nothing you resent, and nothing you fear – you are safe, you are loved, and you are whole. The whole world could fall away and not even a ripple would cross the pool of the bottomless stillness in which you rest like a lily pad.

            And it is only from this stillness that you can return to the field of action and do the significant work that needs to be done, not from an egotistical stance (I’m here to save you), but with the humble heart of a servant (How can I help?)

            Of all the practices designed to bring us into the liberating present, none does so much so fast as meditation. Meditation is the art and science of slipping beneath the surface of the thought stream and sinking down into the silent depths beneath the waves. Nothing else so thoroughly and effectively liberates us from the grasp of our habitual over-thinking. In meditation we simply practice shifting into what Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita calls the Inner Witness, that still, silent presence within us. As we learn how to witness our thoughts instead of identifying with them a subtle shift occurs – we no longer are our thoughts. Instead, we watch our thoughts drift across the sky like clouds. We thought we were the clouds, but turns out we’re the sky – the boundless, spacious awareness in which thoughts arise and fade. And when we make this shift a subtle joyful peace washes over us. We go beyond the mere concepts of peace, wellness, and wisdom – we become peace, wellness, and wisdom.

            In the world’s wisdom traditions this is called embodiment, realization, awareness, or direct experience. It is not properly “knowledge,” because knowledge is conceptual. Embodied wisdom has nothing to do with knowledge, religion, theology, doctrine, ideology, beliefs, faith, scripture, dogma, ritual, liturgy, or anything rooted in the realm of conceptual thought. 

This is why searching for the truth always fails. The entire model of searching is based on a false premise. Truth is not something over there. How can you go out looking for something you already are? In his classic book I Am That Advaita Vedanta teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj put it this way: “You are universal. You need not and you cannot become what you are already. Having never left the house you are asking for the way home. Don’t rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether. Enquire Who is ignorant, and ignorance will dissolve like a dream. The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know the source is to be the source.”

            Krishnamurti often warned his students about the perils of attachment to ideology and doctrine, or even teachers. Be wary, he said, of those who talk about the path. “Truth,” he said, “is a pathless land.” There is nothing to seek, and nowhere to go. Instead of seeking, slow down, go within and realize what you are and always have been.

The Three Truths

Life is dizzyingly complex. It’s easy to feel lost, confused, and overwhelmed. So many conflicted voices clamoring for our attention – it seems impossible to cut through the clutter and find the essence. But in the end there are only three truths: impermanence, presence, and love.

Impermanence

On the surface, everything’s impermanent. Nothing lasts. All forms arise and fade. Not only does every wisdom tradition attest this truth, but more importantly, we see it confirmed in our own experience over and over again. There is a graceful fluidity to the process of becoming and be-going that makes life achingly beautiful. But it’s also true that impermanence sparks continual suffering. Everything we touch slips away. For the 2nd century Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius this unimpeachable fact was liberating – our impermanence frees us to more fully live in the moment and truly enjoy our lives. Even as Emperor he knew his fame and importance was illusory and fleeting. His writings are filled with the names of previous luminaries – Augustus, Caesar, Plato, and the question: Where are they now? Reduced to dust. One day we will be lowered into our grave, and all the mourners standing around will one day be lowered into their graves as well, and their loved ones after that, until many, many years from now no one will know any of our names. It will be as if we were never here. The whole world will come to an end. Far from lamenting this, Marcus Aurelius suggests we look with clear eyes at this truth so that we might live with authenticity, courage, and enjoyment. An awareness of impermanence drives us into the depths of the significance of this now moment. This is, after all, all there is.

Presence

When we fully acknowledge, accept, and even celebrate the transitory nature of all things, we are freed of our debilitating attachment to any of them. Coming out of the mind and its endless dissatisfactions, desires, and fears we show up disarmed and awake in the simple, uncluttered, and concept-free awareness of this present moment. No longer enamored with the thought-world, we fully enter the real world. Even our sense of self is amended – we experience ourselves not as a separate entity, cut off and alienated from the whole, but as an egoless aspect of the whole. This is a freedom the conceptual mind can only imagine.

Through practices such as meditation, contemplation, reverie, aesthetic rapture, and immersion in nature we begin to experience for ourselves a realm of being formerly hidden from us – the background beneath the surface of the fleeting surface of impermanence. This abiding presence was always with us – in fact, it is us. It has many names in the world’s wisdom traditions – Inner Christ, Buddha-Consciousness, Atman, Inner Witness, Holy Spirit – and yet no name can fully describe or contain this depth-reality. It eludes our conceptualization and defies any attempt to clothe it in language. All of our words and concepts merely point to it the way a trail sign points to the path ahead. The sign is not the destination, the menu is not the food, and the map is not the place – yet we rely on these referents to show us where we need to direct our active engagement, knowing that when you walk the trail you leave the signpost far behind.

One thing that all the sages and seers report, and a claim we can confirm in our own experience, is the idea that this nameless presence hidden just beneath the surface of the fleeting world of forms is silent, still, abiding, and changeless. Unlike the world of surface forms, it never wavers. It hovers beyond all qualities, categories, processes, and concepts. It just is. And in its stillness it seems apart from the impermanent realm. Calling it permanent is probably excessive and unnecessary – we should avoid calling it anything. Names and concepts distort more than they reveal. But what we’re left with is this – it feels like something. We may not be able to think it, but we sure experience it. There’s a deep, abiding stillness and peace in the presence. We experience an aliveness here, a sense of refuge, and a loving warmth. It’s easy to see why in many belief systems this sacred background, this abiding presence gets personified as a deity, and how teachings, doctrines, dogmas, rituals, and institutions spring up around this primarily experiential awareness. You can call it God if you want to. But you don’t have to. It is possible to remain in the presence of this abiding, underlying reality without clothing it in language, concepts, or religious ideologies.

If we had to name the feeling we have when we realize this presence, we’d probably just say “love.”

Love

Love is the only word left standing after we’ve eliminated all the others. Of course it too is inadequate. But it’ll do.

The most immediate and acute way to experience this for yourselves is in the wake of the death of a loved one. Your beloved is gone. They took form, graced your life, and have now returned to the formless realm. And yet in their absence, you feel more keenly than ever before their presence and the absolute love that you shared. Love is unaffected by the passage of time and the transience of forms. Love is the name of the infinite field out of which forms arise and to which they return.

Armed with these three truths – impermanence, presence, and love – we return to the battlefield of our lives full of humility, yet brave enough to take a stand and do what needs to be done. Love is our power now, and love overcomes every fear, every foe, every lie, and every limitation. We see clearly the beauty and pathos of these lovely, fleeting forms around us. We accept the changes that we and everything else are going through. We no longer cling to the past or crave private happiness. We simply intend the best outcomes, and work diligently to bring them about, letting go of attachment and practicing deep-tissue acceptance of whatever comes our way.

We cultivate a practice of conscious intentionality. We live our lives on purpose. We leave time and space for reverie, joy, meditation, prayer, contemplation, and connection, knowing that these are the windows through which the sacred presence behind the veil of impermanence floods into our lives like sunlight after a storm. No matter what is happening in the outer world, we remain aware of the sacred background, the stillness and silence of our inner being.

Love and only love enables us to withstand the suffering brought on by impermanence. In our pain we reach inside to touch the presence within and are in an instant restored. Love is who we are, what we are, and what everything is. When we live and have our being in love, we are on the beam and held aloft from darkness, ignorance, and meaninglessness. In love we rise to our full stature as beings of infinite value. And we fall in love with the whole messy, beautiful world.