What is truth anyway?

[DefinitelyNotARobot]

Sorry for the rambling, but I am very confused right now. I can't properly sort my thoughts and I just had to let it out raw. I don't know if any of this makes sense. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. I don't know. I just want some perspectives.

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"Truth" is a weird word. It kind of means nothing to me.

Like what does it mean when something is "true"? What is a truth? What is THE truth?!

When I think about what's true, for me, a lot of things pop into my mind. I do exist. I am a human. I'm a male. We're on earth. (Unless you're an alien reading this from somewhere else haha) 

These things seem true to me. But does that actually make them true? I can't really trust my own mind with this kind of thing. When people encounter a radically different perspective (like let's say: "The material, objective world doesn't exist) almost all people do the same thing. They look at it from their own perspective. If it isn't compatible with their own personal world view they'll just come up with reasons for why it isn't true (if they even entertain the idea to begin with). They think that these reasons are grounded in rationality, but they aren't. At the hands of an ego, reason just turns into another survival tool. We bend it the way it fits us and our beliefs. Is it even possible to use reason without any emotional attachments?

But here is the thing. I'm doing just that right now. I'm using my reasoning. But it doesn't work! How can I ever know that I'm not bullshitting myself. Like with ANYTHING? How can I know that a thing is true? Every thought I have can be false. Any experience could just be another fabrication of the mind. How do I know that I am not trapped in a loop within my own mind? I can acknowledge that there is some sort of experience, but I can't even think about it because, again, any thought could be false. Any thought about what that experience may be could be false. Anything within that experience could be wrong really. In this experience I am a human, but what if this is just a simulation? What if I am some alien from the year 5024 playing a hyper realistic VR game where I don't even know that it's a game? It would certainly change the content and context of this experience. The only thing that remains is that there is something. Some form of experience. I couldn't even tell you what I mean. These words don't really mean anything. Truth. Experience. Consciousness. All nothing but words.

Can I even trust my direct experience. Like I might experience some heightened conscious state, but how do I know that this experience is true? Can any experience actually be true? Like it could always be my mind playing a trick on itself. I might experience myself as a separate self or I might experience myself as one interconnectedness. I might experience myself as everything or nothing, or something in-between. So many different experiences, but all of them are just that. Experiences.

I want to know what's true (Also might be false, what if I actually don't care about truth and I just tell myself that I do), but just contemplating truth feels mind shattering. I am trying to understand what this damn word is referring to, but it just doesn't make any sense. This word feels void of any meaning.

[Mason Riggle]

“If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed”

― Alan Watts

 

3 hours ago, DefinitelyNotARobot said:

The only thing that remains is that there is something.

What is there?  We might ask, "Is there something?, or does there just seem to be something?"

Recognize that it doesn't matter which one it is. 

Are you reading this comment, or do you just seem to be reading it?  It doesn't matter.   

[Batman]

Truth is what is. That's it, you don't have to go any farther than that, because that wouldn't be the Truth.

And yes, of course you can't think the Truth. A thought is a concept, an abstraction of the thing it refers to, and so it will never be the thing itself.

But I sense you are confusing the Truth with some relative truth (such as, the fact that I just farted). I suspect that you know very well when something is relatively true, and when it is relatively false. For example, I could tell you that my penis is 25cm long. This is false, on a relative level (which is the level by which human beings measure stuff). From an absolute 'perspective', there is no penis to begin with.

Experience is not the Truth, because experience is the end result of processing the Truth for the purpose of self-survival. Your senses and your mind are designed to serve the persistence of your self, not what is Truth. So yes, in the reality of self-survival, which is the relative reality you know, your experience is true in the sense that it reflects what you know. Of course experience can change, if your self transform. But the experience will always reflect the self that you are at that 'moment in time', and nothing else. You can take a psychedelic and transform the self for some time, and have a different experience. But it will still be an experience of some self.

It's ok, you can stop with the mental gymnastics, it won't get you the Truth. But relative truths are pretty easy to come by, you only need to know the parameters by which it is known to be distinct from the false.

[Osaid]

truth = existence

[Leo Gura]

If you knew what Truth was, you'd be awake, and you wouldn't be here asking questions.

So here we are.

[BipolarGrowth]

21 hours ago, Osaid said:

truth = existence

This. Everything you’re experiencing exactly right now is Truth.