“I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Knowledge is spectrum and if you can accept that, then truth is spectrum. Borrowing loosely from Clare Graves’ “Spiral Dynamics,” all things build upon themselves. For example, when the molecule was discovered it was a truth, but when the atom that made up the molecule was discovered, it did not make the molecule an untruth. Imagine if those that followed the truth of molecules wanted to censor the discovery of the atom? We would hold an astonishment to the profanity of their fervor!
Life thrives on heresy and dulls under orthodoxy. Consider how one religion is born as a heresy to another religion… how one tradition formed can become an affront to another… how a ritual established for one purpose becomes an abomination to another. The great crime of intellect is in those unverified thoughts that one proclaims a knowing even though they can never quarter truth. The capitol failure of understanding truth is our tendency to adhere to a truth that we can never intimately know in its completeness.
“Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
The conflict of life fractures our mind and gives birth to new revelation and each new revelation conceives a deeper truth. Once light appears through the aperture of the fractured mind, we claw at the earth and stone of our imagination to open it further. There is no return to the dim that appeared as light, for this revelatory light storms the prior light.
To lose a truth we’ve held so tightly is to face a type of existential nihilism, for that truth was part of our identity. If we can survive this, we can begin to live more expansive in a newer truth, we can begin to live life with intention, wonder, and curiosity to the forgone conclusion that all life must accept… that we were meant to live the questions, not live for the answers… and who is to say what mysteries lie beyond our knowledge?
Thus the locus of genius is not in knowing truth, but knowing our developing relationship with truth. And if we can hold a critical, constructive kinship with truth, then we are heretics, for how can we once again hold to an orthodoxy?
Is it difficult to accept that our most intimate beliefs are borne upon a purely experiential and individual context? Can we accept with intellectual honesty, that everyone believes just as we do because we do the same things, read the same books, listen to the same teachers, live in the same community? For the God you believe in, and the God I believe in, and the God your neighbor believes in are very likely three different Gods. God is an experience.
What separates the mature from the immature is, perhaps more than anything else, a capacity for being on their own, without distraction, and thinking about who they are and what they have experienced. The mature person can allow themselves to examine and as it were ‘feel’ their own feelings, even when these are very difficult and hugely unwelcome. — The School of Life
And do not forget that most great figures of history were at one time considered heretics and radicals, for they assaulted the status quo to bring us the truths we live by today.
Originally published Steve Thomas as “The Fractured Mind” on FireflyHorizons.com