WHAT IS TRUTH?

The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and  http://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/quo-vadis

Our destiny is not pre-destined, it seems.  Our human will can change our behavior, which is the essence of what we call free choice. Some choices are good for us, and some are bad for us. As a loving Father, God sent His Son to tell us what is good for us and what will lead us to live Forever.

In my Lectio Divina (Phil 2:5), I thought of the whole concept of pole reversal (don’t ask why, I never know why), and how in our physical world, the North and the South poles have actually reversed in the long history of our planet. I was thinking that everything is bound together as, physical, mental, and spiritual universes. What happens in one universe happens in all of them, although substantially different and in accordance with the Laws of each Universe.

LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE

THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE –– Laws, as I understand them, are those principles from which reality flows and help us explain why things are and how they might be. We muse mathematics, physics, and chemistry, the languages that help us discover reality and how matter and energy behave.  I still have a problem with Time, but at least it is effected and affected by matter and energy.  Scientific thought processes measure what is and make conclusions and deductions based on facts (at least those we hold to be true until further evidence proves them wrong). The scientific human is a tidy thinker, like an accountant. Everything must be in its proper place. Science cannot measure the future but can extrapolate it, using the best evidence to date. If I tell you that humans are the only sentient beings in the whole known universe, you begin the computations (e.g., The Drake Equation) to prove that there could be extraterrestrial life out there, but we have no scientific proof of it, what we do have is logic and probability, which suggests that there may be (I stress the may) life out there.  You can’t rule it out. What has just happened is our projection of what we know to what we don’t know. Science says there may be something out there called Dark Matter and Dark Energy, although we have not seen it. So here, the physical universe benefits from the mental universe (the domain of human reason, collectively and individually).

MENTAL UNIVERSE — The mental universe is one reserved for reasoning beings only. Dogs and cats, elephants, and kangaroos are not part of this universe. Have you ever asked your dog a question, such as, what time is it? Did you get an answer? Animals have an animal nature. They share our DNA, they are oxygen-breathing like us, and they reproduce like us, but they are not us. Why is that? Is there some grand design that we can’t quite pull together, something that makes all reality fit together?  So far, we have talked about two-thirds of reality, most of it visible and measurable. When we factor in the mental universe, some laws are not scientific but more subjective and open to interpretation.  Science doesn’t play well in this playground. Too nebulous. They are correct; it is too obtuse sometimes. This is the world where find meaning and purpose to life, where we find out our purpose in life, where we use all of our knowledge to discover what reality looks like, where we use our mental processes and our history to make sense of reality and to begin to ask questions about how all of this fits together, to discover how to love fiercely, and finally, we know we will die, now what?  Only humans can look at the universe and ask what is it and how is it? Unique people, like the late Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, have advanced enough to peer into how it all fits together.

In just looking around on television, the most unlikely of venues to discover what is meaningful on the planet, I came up with four different ways of thinking about what is of value. I base this on the story of the blind men of Hindustan as they are each asked to describe an elephant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJVBQefNXIw I use all the following languages of being because they have led me to a deeper appreciation of my humanity and where I fit in it. As such they are the bases of the assumptions about why I relate to an unseen God and, actually more important, how I do it each day to grow in my humanity.

THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH-– This is an approach that stresses a rigorous analysis of physical matter using the languages of mathematics, physics, the geologic sciences, statistics, and scientific analyses through position papers. I use this approach as part of my combination of languages to look at reality and try to figure out what being fully human using our next level of evolution might be. The Achilles heel of science is that it only uses the languages of science (only recently acquired through advances in the last hundred years) to look at matter and its properties while denying invisible reality. For me, it is good for what it does, but, it does not have the energy to lift me up to the next level of my consciousness.

THE HISTORICAL APPROACH--I use this approach to search for people who have actually existed and are not fictitious. Do you know Orville Kahl? Orville is deceased and was a television technician in my hometown of Vincennes, Indiana on 6th Street. Orville fixed Muntz televisions way back in the early ’60s.

My point here is, you probably don’t know Orville or his life story, but he did exist and was not a figment of my imagination. I could probably look up on the Internet to find Orville but with great difficulty. The longer Orville lived (one hundred to two hundred years ago) we tend to blur all those fine details about him, if anyone even remembers his name. The Catholic Church of 2023 is much different from the Church of the Apostles. This was a time of transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament, of moving beyond the Temple in Jerusalem to the New Jerusalem which encompasses the whole world. It is the same Church and we can trace back people who lived in some instances.

THE CONCEPTUAL APPROACH– Much of what I think about Jesus and the Holy Spirit is conceptual. I have not seen their historical faces, yet I know that they have a profound presence in my life. I have not seen the face of Hugh of Lincoln, but I know he exists through the historical approach.  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Hugh-of-Lincoln You may not have ever heard of Hugh of Lincoln. Does that mean he never existed? I hope not. I use the scientific and conceptual approaches most of the time. I postulate about the “spine of reality” that Teilhard de Chardin has as a way to see the continuity and maturation of consciousness from creation to Omega. Is this true? Wrong question for me. I ask, “How can this lead me to use The Christ Principle” to discover deeper meaning about what it means for me to be a human being. You wouldn’t believe where I have been in the depths of my mind. I liken it to, but only a fraction of, what the late Steven Hawking was able to do in his mind with theoretical mathematics and physics. What a mind! Like the scientific approach, this theoretical approach of concepts is based on going to places the mind has dared not travel before and asking the interrogatories.

THE LITERARY APPROACH –– This most popular approach to describing what is meaningful takes the form of classic myth forms (see Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade), stories, similies, fables, archetypal books like Genesis and The Gospel of St. John), plus any other cognitive approach to punch deeper into reality to unleash the buried treasures of archetypes, types, heroes and heroines, Saints, and models of what it means to be fully human as nature intended. It is the human way of communicating what is but cannot be seen, what might be but is just beyond making sense out of it. Myth, far from being a fairy tale is the more intense and archetypal literary device humans have to postulate a reason why we show up on this planet in this time with just the right combination of gases and protections for life to move (intelligent progression).

The Old Testament writings and New Testament fulfillment are designed as a HOW TO book on what to do and NOT do to relate to God. Each age looks at the invisible reality they term God with different lenses. At one point, God is El Shaddai (on the mountain top as with Moses). As they gained experiences of what was true, Israel wrestles with weaving down the path of the covenant, in and out of belief, ups and downs of awareness that God even exists. It sounds like our age is still engaged in that game of yo-yo.  In the New Testament, what was true became not keeping the Law but reading about it (although that was a stage in our awareness of God). Christ came as one to tell us and show us that the Law is not wrong so much as people have not moved from the notion of covenant for a select people, to that select people taking the Word made Flesh to the World and sharing it with those who are not Jewish. All of us are Jewish in our roots (the root of Jesse) but are not Zionists.

Against this development in complex emphases, the early Church termed itself catholic and is open to all humans of all races at all times to the possibility of the manifest ability of The Christ Principle in their individual lives. This is true as long as the individual accepts Absolute Truth as the template against which everything is measured. Not everyone will see this truth, nor agree on what truth is (Pilate’s famous question to Christ, “What is Truth?” Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. If I have Christ in me, and the only way I do that is to put it there EACH AND EVERY DAY.

The Covenant of the Old Testament is my covenant, although it has progressed through New Testament, The Church Universe to this very day.

The Covenant with Christ exists, not twenty centuries ago, but right now for me. I have the Scriptures, Writings of the Early Church (Apostles), Ecumenical and Regional Councils through the ages, and Magisterium all to safeguard the truth for me today, the same one Christ is teaching me right now in my heart of hearts (Matthew 6:5).

My Covenant with Christ began with Baptism with water, when The Father and Holy Spirit shadowed me with their living spirit of truth. I have had to unravel what that Baptismal moment means using all of these languages. Am I correct? I Hope so (upper case is significant).

THE CORRUPTION OF TRUTH

All of these approaches to truth are based on a reality that is corrupt (physically, mentally, and even spiritually). As such, truth exists in a human condition that has a beginning and an ending. Science is corrupt because the theories of today might not hold up to the advances of human evolution and AI in the future. This is not to say they are incorrect now, as much as they are not absolute truth, admitting of no change and remaining the same in all three universes (physical, mental, and spiritual).

It is my contention that there is no absolute truth except in the divine nature of God. When Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he is not using the words that we use to describe reality. As the Son of God and our friend, God tells me that I must dump all my preconceived notions to embrace something that my reasoning says can’t possibly be true. Scripture calls this “kenosis” (Philippians 2:5) or emptying of self. St. Charles de Foucault called it an abandonment of God’s will. When I look at all of the fallacies of the world, one without absolute truth, everything is relative. Science seeks to remedy this by using a way to look at the reality that rises above individual opinions. I like that. My problem has always been that it doesn’t look at everything in its “theory of everything.” Absolute truth exists outside of the human condition or nature and is actually pure energy, the truth of knowledge, love, and of service, yet one nature that is not human nor animal.

I speculate that God (being pure service or sharing) “cannot not” become more in its nature as an end product, so we have the heavenly choirs of angels, Archangels, and the “spine of reality,” as described by Teilhard de Chardin, and ultimately humans (or any other species out there somewhere). Because the source of all that is is God as creator, God’s fingerprints (DNA) are within each atom, molecule, galaxy, Sun, Plante, Earth, living things, animal nature, and human nature.

SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE– The question that has dogged humans since they first knew that they knew is, is that all there is? We do well in our Western culture with what we can see. We do not handle what is invisible very well. Most of what is meaningful is invisible, so it is difficult for the scientific approach to make sense of it.

I need the physical universe as a base for existing. I need the mental universe as a way to make sense of the physical universe and to self-reflect on why I am even here? All I have for tools are my life experiences and those languages I have learned to translate visible and invisible reality into something that I hope makes sense for my next level of evolution as a human, being an adopted son (daughter) of the Father now, and in the life that is incorruptible. It all sounds like a fairy tale. And so it is? Who would believe it, if the Resurrection Moment did not happen?

TWO DIMENSIONS OF TRUTH THAT CONFOUND REASON 

I have discovered in my own life that there are two bumps that have made me slow down in my thinking about visible reality alone as the only way to discover what exists.

1. CHRIST REQUIRES THAT I DIE TO MYSELF IN BAPTISM (AND EACH DAY THEREAFTER) TO ENTER A COVENANT THAT IS INCORRUPTIBLE. This is always foolishness to the Gentiles and a stumbling block for the Jews. How irrelevant it seems to find truth by giving away your free will that says you are the center of truth. It is that act of abandonment of everything that is to step out into now only the unknown but one which we can’t even relate as human experiences that is illogical. I can only come to this awareness through Faith (God’s own energy) using what the total life experiences of my reason have afforded me. When I look at the energy of the World to allow me to reach the last stage of evolution as a human, it is not there. The World only gives me human experiences up until I die. Is that all there is? If I have realized each day that I am an adopted son (daughter) of the Father, something kicks in at the death, the something that kicked in at my Baptism and Confirmation, that sustained me with the bread of Life in Eucharist, that makes me new over and over and over. God doesn’t leave me an orphan. I have learned, over a considerable lifetime of failing to do what Christ says, that all I need is to sit in the back of the Church, like Mrs. Murphy, with eyes lowered, repeating the mantra of the ancient Church prayer, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy of me, a sinner.”
2. CHRIST REQUIRES THAT, IF I WANT TO HAVE TRUTH IN ME, IT MUST BE TRUTH THAT COMES FROM OUTSIDE ME, EVEN OUTSIDE MY HUMAN NATURE. Where can I get the truth? Depends on whom you are asking? Ask a Democrat what is true and they will say “Follow me, we are the way to go in the future.” Ask a Republican what is true and they will say “Follow me, we are the way to go in the future.” Ask each one of them who has the truth and they say, “We do.” Sounds like a split in the road. The late, great Yogi Berra was known for his witty sayings. I remember one saying that might apply in this case. “When you come up to a Y in the road, take it.” I have reason for a reason. I know that I know. I know what I know from my life experiences both those that are good and those that have damaged me. Hopefully, I have “picked myself up, dusted myself off, and started all over again.” I have the freedom to choose what I want to enable me to be more human. Everyone has the freedom to choose. What people choose, however, can make them free or dead, depending on the choice. God comes into the picture (in Genesis as an archetypal story of what it means to be human) and tells humans what is good and what is bad. The problem is, that humans don’t like to be told anything by anyone at any time. This choice is inside of me but the truth is outside of me, of course, granted that you accept the mindset that God tells us what is good for us and what will kill our spirit. If you don’t accept that, your alternative is that you not only have choices but determine what is good for you based on intuition, human needs, human urges, and animal urges. This is why THE WORLD does not have the power to raise us up to the next level of our human intelligent progression and become more conscious of who we are and where we are going. There are four types of truth that I have uncovered.
   1. ABSOLUTE TRUTH — This is the truth that is contained in the Divine Nature. It is so powerful that it is a person, the Holy Spirit. This truth does not admit corruption or change. It always is. There is no movement nor layers of truth to this Divine Absolute Truth. It is divine energy and admits to no corruption or additions, as does Truth that comes from our human nature.
   2. OBJECTIVE TRUTH — Scientific truth wants to avoid the inconvenience of dealing with invisible reality as part of what makes up reality. As such, they only look at what they can measure and verify as being true. They are correct, of course, in the focus of their measurements but do not account for the invisible reality around us. Objective truth still exists in the mental universe and, as such, is subject to the corruptibility of matter and mind. This truth might be considered the upper society of human reasoning but it is subject to the changes in the information, data, new theoretical constructs, and the ever-growing influence of the James Webb Space Telescope. All of this is good and must continue to evolve and grow in order for humanity to reach its destiny.
   3. SUBJECTIVE TRUTH — Less political but more relevant to me is subjective truth, the thinking that I encounter each day as I move forward in the consciousness of what is both inside and outside of me. Subjective truth is what you think about something or what you think about something. The big logjam of modern thinking is that each person has the right to believe whatever they want and what they want is reality for them. Often, groups of people form thinking, such as Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Atheists, Lay Cistercians, and societal governments. This thinking may or may not be fostered in others by the majority of believers, and it sometimes results in destruction, anarchy, and freakish laws and policies by governments. All of this is subjective truth and no one can challenge your right to choose. The intended consequence of the Genesis Principle is to help humans with the reality that there is a right way to be human and a wrong way. Looking at it this way, all of Scripture is God’s word on how to be authentically human, even going so far as to deny oneself to move to that next step of human complexity, intelligent progression. All human truth is subjective, despite claims from this or that societal movement to hold that it alone has the truth. Nations come and go. Theologies come and go. What endures is the Word of the Lord as enshrined in the stories of Scripture and the power of the Holy Spirit not to let human folly totally destroy that heritage from God.
   4. RELATIVE TRUTH — This form of truth is what people want it to be regardless of its relationship to reality. Relativism is the most prominent type of thinking these days. When someone challenges you that this is just your opinion, it is relativism behind the smokescreen. Relative truth is what the individual thinks is true. Add all of this up and you have the hodge-podge that we know as The World of secular thinking. Relative truth does not admit any absolute authority outside of itself.

THE FOUR QUESTIONS I ASK MYSELF

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO WAKE UP IN A CORRUPT WORLD AND TRY TO SWIM IN THE WATERS OF HUMAN IMPERFECTION? Include in this is: what are good behaviors and what are those behaviors, that, if I do them, will lessen, not strengthen my humanity? How do I use the most powerful animal urge I inherited from my past, the urge to procreate? Why is there evil in the world and where does it come from? Is there a force outside of myself that pulls me towards an unseen fulfillment of my humanity? How can I use my sexuality and procreational tendencies to be authentically human and not animal?

HOW CAN I GET THE POWER TO LIFT MYSELF UP TO THE NEXT LEVEL OF MY HUMAN EVOLUTION? What is my destiny? Is there an invisible part of like or am I condemned to live out existence with just what I can see and observe until I die? What part does Christ play in all this cacophony of seeming contradiction and bustling of self-proclaimed prophets that I should follow what they say to reach fulfillment for my human destiny? Non-believers in the Resurrection and Real Presence of Christ are not bad as much as oblivious that Christ alone lifts them up to that next level of their human evolution through their adoption as sons and daughters of the Father. Humans don’t have that power as part of their humanity. Jesus, being of both human and divine nature, paid the ransom for many (redeemer) and became the only way humans can reach the destiny that their nature intended.

WHAT IS ABSOLUTE TRUTH? Who can provide me with a truth beyond my human nature’s freedom to choose? Why it is necessary for me to give away my YES and NO to a higher power to fulfill my humanity and raise me to the next level of my evolution? In the physical and mental universes, I seek to know what truth is through reasoning and my choices of what makes me more human. As a citizen of heaven (the physical, mental, and spiritual universes) I seek the truth but not from my reason alone but from being in the presence of truth as a person (the Holy Spirit). I am not able to be divine in nature, but God, through Baptism, welcomed me as an adopted son, to be the most human I could be. Mary is the type of what this relationship is. Truth is a person in this relationship, not a fact or description of reality. That is why I sit on that park bench in the middle of winter and just wait to hear the faint heartbeat of Christ, meaning power, kingdom, and glory come from God to me, as I am able to absorb it. (capacitas dei) Where can I get the power beyond myself to be myself in all its fullness? What do I need to do to be saved, not once, but each day I wake up?

HOW CAN I USE MY HUMAN REASONING AND ABILITY TO CHOOSE WHAT IS GOOD FOR ME TO ACCESS THE DIVINE EQUATION AND RECEIVE CORRECT ANSWERS? I plop into the lifeline of life for seventy to eighty years (82.9 as the only one who ever lived. I have my whole lifetime to discover the meaning or purpose of life, what my purpose in life is, what is the scope of reality, how it all fits together, how I can love fiercely, and what I must do until I die to maintain meaning.

If there is no God, which is hypothetical in my case, I will have answered, at least partially, what my next step in my evolution is and lived here and now with peace, the prosperity of spirit, love of neighbor (still a struggle), and the happiness of knowing that I am part of resonance of the totality of all that is, rather than the dissonance of not knowing, loving or serving humanity.

TRUTH: THE FOUR INSCRUTABLES

Having explored truth in a deeper way, I invite you to move even deeper into truth. I have already elaborated on inscrutables in terms of The WAY, and also THE LIFE, so I will just offer a brief overview of THE TRUTH.

Inscrutable, as I understood the concept, is an improbable condition that allows me to seek an answer to the question, “What is true?” Four qualities are required to get an answer.

These four inscrutables help me to answer the question, “What is the truth, and how do I know that what I think the truth is, is true?

THE CROSS –– If I want to know what is good for me and what is not (knowledge of good and evil), somehow, it must involve the cross of Christ. Ever wonder why you begin every Catholic prayer with the sign of the Cross? That is the sign in which you were Baptized, the price Christ paid for our redemption to be adopted sons and daughters of the Father. Baptism takes away the barriers between divinity and humanity but the effects still remain. Those effects the Church calls Original Sin, but it is the condition of corruptibility into which we are all born. At the heart of this is knowing how to be an authentic human with an orientation to heaven, or how to be unauthentic in our human nature that leads to becoming just a human who is born, lives, loves, and then that is it. It is good but doesn’t lift our humanity to the level of intelligent progression. Secular humanism, good as it is, doesn’t have the energy to lift my humanity to its intended purpose. I like to look at progression using Teilhard de Chardin’s map (unattributed) to get a big picture of what TRUTH, the WAY, and the LIFE is by viewing the “spine of reality” that God has created for those who run the gauntlet of meaning and misinformation to seek something invisible yet compelling us toward an unseen fulfillment of our nature as intended. St. Augustine would term this: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”.

Characteristics

• The cross means humans must, in humility and obedience to God, be penitential before God in what St. Benedict calls “Fear of the Lord,” in Chapter 7 of his Holy Rule.
• Humans don’t like to be told what to do by anyone. To be an adopted son or daughter of the Father means I embrace the “sign of contradiction” in how I view reality.
• Daily, I must seek God as I find Him. My mindset is to always grow deeper in Christ (capacitas dei) and convert my life from my false self to my true self (conversio morae) not just once, but purposefully through Lay Cistercian practices and charisms. He must increase, and I must decrease. Without the cross, I won’t allow Christ to tell me what to do (although it is always my free act of the will to transform my life).
• To discover what is Absolute Truth, I need the power of the cross to lift me up each day to become what my Baptism intended–adoption. 
• The cross allows me to offer my will to the Father through Christ as the one gift God does not have. It is called gratitude and made not without a conscious act of love. (Philippians 2:5-12)