donateur
Truth Analysis
Sat, October 20, 2007 - 12:49 PM
What is truth , what are lies, what is disinfo, what is really going on in the world?
In this overwhelming sea of information, especially in this day and age, where lies and truth are mixed like water and milk, it seems hard at times to really see/know what is going on, as it is.
We are conditioned with beliefs from society, education, government, religion, media, parents and teachers. It's a world where the blind teach/follow the blind and the programming/conditioning is deep and far reaching.
Most folks don't even realize how strong the conditioning is and defend/repeat beliefs/world views which have been memorized/learned over decades/centuries but were never questioned.
Then there is the new age field and the "love and light" crowd who have developed a similar mindset as the fundamental religious crowd based on blind belief, very gullible to anything that "sounds" good and is "positive" and many folks justify the truth of something just because it "resonates" with them. Well, for the Fundamental Christians or Arabic religious people, what is written in the bible/koran, very much "resonates" with them as well, even in the literal sense and we know the danger of such blind beliefs.
That is not to say that we shouldn't trust our inner gut and feelings, however, one needs to be careful and very (self)-aware, where this "resonance" is coming from. Is it reflecting our conditioned mind set and patterns of wishful thinking and beliefs we have, or does it go deeper than that and strikes through our conditioning, even if it is something we don't "like" to see, is against our belief system, but it may be the truth, objectively, as it is?
Interesting to note that some new agers do not truly understand the meaning of "love and light", some even think of light as a literal bright light, when in the true sense is means gaining knowledge on the path to Illumnination, not just imagining balls of light .
As the C's say (from the Cassiopaea sessions)
"The problem is not the term "love," the problem is the interpretation of the term. Those on third density have a tendency to confuse the issue horribly. After all, they confuse many things as love. When the actual definition of love as you know it is not correct either. It is not necessarily a feeling that one has that can also be interpreted as an emotion, but rather, as we have told you before, the essence of light which is knowledge is love, and this has been corrupted when it is said that love leads to illumination. Love is Light is Knowledge. Love makes no sense when common definitions are used as they are in your environment. To love you must know. And to know is to have light. And to have light is to love. And to have knowledge is to love."
Denial and Ignorance seem to be the true "enemies" of our time and you can see it anywhere, not only in the "average" joe/jane but many folks who claim to be "aware" and "spiritual" have these patterns of subjective "tunnel vision".
We must not forget our logical mind and need for critical thinking. Science is mostly based on the logical mind and the five sensory world, leaving no room for "higher" knowledge. New Age material is at times just based on wishful thinking, assumption and blind belief without using logic or critical thinking for discernment.
What is needed is both, intuition and logic, the left and right brain working in harmony and balance, truly understanding the self and gaining self-knowledge, understanding one's conditioning, thought patterns, belief systems, where they came from and what they are, looking deep within oneself, doing "the work" to become a free thinking individuals with true free will, not a machine who just acts out of conditioning and is a victim of external influences, being in a self-inflicted prison her or she are not even aware of. Gurdjieff talks about that in his conversations with Ouspensky in the classic "In the Search of the Miraculous":
"You don't realize your own situation. You are in prison. All you can wish for , if you are a sensible man, is to escape. But how escape? Man must first realize that he is in prison. So long as he fails to realize this, so long as he thinks he is free, he has no chance whatsoever. No one can liberate him by force, against his will, in opposition to his wishes. If liberation is possible, it is possible only as a result of great labor and great efforts, and, above all, of conscious effort, towards a definite aim.
A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before.
To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to speak the truth. The wish alone is not enough. To speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know."
Without self-knowledge objective research is impossible, as one will get caught up in one's own subjectivity, not being able to see things as they are, not as one would like them to be according to preference/denial based on a personal belief system.
As the late comedian Bill Hicks used to say: : A belief is just that: a belief. It doesn't necessarily mean it is true."
Over the years, when discussing certain matters of the world, be it as mundane as 9/11 and politics or topics outside most people's "world view" like the UFO/Alien phenomena and the topic of Channeling, it has shown that it is not easy to have a constructive and productive exchange in order to find out truth. Truth in the most objective sense of the word, to see things as they ARE, not as we would like them to be or not to be based on preference/wish ful thinking. And also not making it a philosphical/theological issue as in "everyone's truth is true" or "Everyone is living their truth" and so on and so forth. That is not the point/objective here. I'm just simply talking about the truth of what is going on in the world and universe without hiding behind memorized "spiritual" slogans which are mostly just a clever ways of justifying avoidance, denial and ignorance, even if only on an unconscious level.
FFor example, is the offical 9/11 story true or are there lies and deception leading us away from the Truth as we are loosing our civil rights on a daily basis? Are there aliens/UFO's exisiting and do they and had they an inluence on our world or is it just all Sci-fi? These question can be answered objectively and accuratly if proper research is done, becasue no matter what you create in your reality, there are certain truths out there which people don't believe, like to deny or can't handle but exist no matter what we believe or think or create......and which DO have an inlfuence into our lifes, precisely becasue nothing is isolated. Most people just don't see it, becasue they don't question our typical way of life, society, etc....living in a tunnel vision of limited perception, missing a HUGE portion of what is actually happening on this planet and the matrix we're in and how it influences them in the most deceiving ways, shaping their beliefs and world views, promoting complacency and conformity, be it through media, edcuation, religion, science or the new age.
Then there are folks who say that objective truth is impossible because that is what Quantum physics tells us. Well, that would be a good example of Quantum physics being filtered through a typical "new age belief system". Yes there is truth to it and as Heisenberg stated in his "Uncertainty Principle", "the moment you look at something it changes", but looking away (especialy from the things we like to ignore/deny because they look so "bad") certainly don't make them go away. In short, no matter how you use the various CYOR (create your own reality) scenarios as promoted by the new age industry, there still exists an objective truth of what is going on in the world, and it does have an effect on our lifes on some level, even if we don't "think" it does.
Too often people base what they think they know, on opinions, beliefs and assumptions, not really going to the bottom of things, digging down the rabbit hole and research the material that is out there in regards to the various topics, using intuition, logic and critical thinking alike. And so some discussions become a waste of time/energy, they usually turn personal and sooner or later the whole objective of the topic gets lost. But you can't blame anyone either. Yes, there is laziness and the intelligence factor might play a role here as well. But probably in the end eveyone is just too pre-occupied making a living than being bothered to search for truh of what is actually REALLY going on on this planet. Well, that's the usual excuse anyway.
"Make no opinions about anything
unless you have spent considerable
time studying the problem and its
many conceived solutions. Ask your-
self if you are really certain about
something or are only guessing."
- M.V. Summers
So how to look for objective truth?
Here is an excellent article from montalk.net about the search for truth. Pretty much sums up my method of researching over the years. I came by this website some time ago and found it consistent with what I was finding out, independently, so to speak.
Truth Analysis
by montalk
This article describes the reasoning process I use to write most of the articles on this site.
The process is based on two axioms:
1. truth is not subjective
2. truth never contradicts itself
Because truth is not subjective, some ideas are more objective than others. This means that no matter what your world-view is, it can always be improved to be more objective. It shows that there is indeed something to strive for.
The idea that truth never contradicts itself is a very powerful axiom. Lies can be internally consistent as well, but a mixture of truth and lies will show contradictions. You can use this principle to discover what’s true and what’s false. Here’s what I mean:
It is difficult to tell if any single idea is true or false, just like it is difficult to tell which of two similar puzzles a single puzzle piece belongs to. But a large collection of non-contradicting ideas will reveal whether the entire collection is true or false. The larger the collection, the easier it is to see. You start with one ambiguous puzzle piece, find others that fit onto it, and soon you can tell which of the two puzzles you’ve put together.
Another analogy is panning for gold. You start with a large amount of material that includes both silt and gold flakes, then you shake the pan and let the silt fall away. This indicates the importance of continually thinking, reading, and discussing large amounts of new material, which is then to be sorted or filtered via intuition and critical thinking to reveal what is true.
It is better to look for what’s wrong with a theory than what’s right. Debates can rage forever concerning the thousand facts supporting a single lie, but no one can argue with a single fact that disproves a thousand lies.
Remember, as long as your world-view is internally consistent, it is most likely entirely true or entirely false. Combine this principle with the five-step process below, and you will have an effective truth analysis method. The process of discovering truth is one of cycling between gathering material, formulating theories, working out inconsistencies, and gathering more material.
Most importantly, truth is always verified by both logic and intuition—logic without intuition, or intuition without logic should never be used to determine truth. They must be used in tandem. If there is conflict between logic and intuition, check your logical assumptions. Use intuition to guide and logic to analyze.
The process goes like this:
1) Gather new ideas from contemplation, observation, discussion, or some reading material. Then pick a mystery, a contradiction, a set of observations or anything that needs to be explained or resolved.
2) To make a good theory that will explain all of that, start with the infinite set of all possibilities. This means anything goes, no idea is too ludicrous. Use your intuition and guess.
3) As ideas come to mind, use critical thinking to eliminate everything that is self contradictory or absolutely impossible. Look for holes in these ideas, try to shoot them down.
4) Of the bulletproof theories that are left, select the theory that:
- explains all the facts
- explains the facts better than any other theory
- explains facts that previous theories could not
- is logically consistent and has no internal contradictions
- makes sense
- feels intuitively correct
5) The theory is worth keeping if:
- it predicts things which are later confirmed by observation
- you find correlation from other independent sources
6) If you come across something that challenges the theory, then:
- check to see that it’s really a challenge, and not just an illusory paradox based on assumptions or incorrect perspective
- check to see if the challenge is even valid, or if it is internally inconsistent and full of holes
- modify the theory to accommodate the challenge
- come up with a whole new theory that explains everything more elegantly than the old one
This is opposite the process used in science and mathematics that starts with axioms and builds upon them. The problem with that - method is that it starts with a very limited finite set and creeps upward like a stalagmite. If the assumptions or axioms are false, then everything built on it is in error. Furthermore, such a process cannot skip steps, as it always needs verification from the status quo to proceed to the next step. It cannot take leaps of faith or logic, and therefore cannot make paradigm shifts. It’s an inflexible process that definitely has its advantages when it comes to high risk applications that need lots of security and assuredness, but as far as breaking new ground is concerned, it’s incredibly slow. Any creativity in that process happens only in the formation of the basic axioms, or in accidents that occur along the way.
The process described in this article starts with an infinite set, and whittles away what doesn’t fit. This means there is no need to leap across a logical abyss because one approaches from the other side. It is much easier to build a bridge if someone is already on the other side. Likewise, once a radical idea has been confirmed using this process, it is much easier to work backwards and logically bridge the abyss. Also, the fitting together of ideas and sorting of truth from lies requires creativity at every step, so it’s the best method of achieving rapid innovation.
Sat, October 20, 2007 - 12:49 PM
What is truth , what are lies, what is disinfo, what is really going on in the world?
In this overwhelming sea of information, especially in this day and age, where lies and truth are mixed like water and milk, it seems hard at times to really see/know what is going on, as it is.
We are conditioned with beliefs from society, education, government, religion, media, parents and teachers. It's a world where the blind teach/follow the blind and the programming/conditioning is deep and far reaching.
Most folks don't even realize how strong the conditioning is and defend/repeat beliefs/world views which have been memorized/learned over decades/centuries but were never questioned.
Then there is the new age field and the "love and light" crowd who have developed a similar mindset as the fundamental religious crowd based on blind belief, very gullible to anything that "sounds" good and is "positive" and many folks justify the truth of something just because it "resonates" with them. Well, for the Fundamental Christians or Arabic religious people, what is written in the bible/koran, very much "resonates" with them as well, even in the literal sense and we know the danger of such blind beliefs.
That is not to say that we shouldn't trust our inner gut and feelings, however, one needs to be careful and very (self)-aware, where this "resonance" is coming from. Is it reflecting our conditioned mind set and patterns of wishful thinking and beliefs we have, or does it go deeper than that and strikes through our conditioning, even if it is something we don't "like" to see, is against our belief system, but it may be the truth, objectively, as it is?
Interesting to note that some new agers do not truly understand the meaning of "love and light", some even think of light as a literal bright light, when in the true sense is means gaining knowledge on the path to Illumnination, not just imagining balls of light .
As the C's say (from the Cassiopaea sessions)
"The problem is not the term "love," the problem is the interpretation of the term. Those on third density have a tendency to confuse the issue horribly. After all, they confuse many things as love. When the actual definition of love as you know it is not correct either. It is not necessarily a feeling that one has that can also be interpreted as an emotion, but rather, as we have told you before, the essence of light which is knowledge is love, and this has been corrupted when it is said that love leads to illumination. Love is Light is Knowledge. Love makes no sense when common definitions are used as they are in your environment. To love you must know. And to know is to have light. And to have light is to love. And to have knowledge is to love."
Denial and Ignorance seem to be the true "enemies" of our time and you can see it anywhere, not only in the "average" joe/jane but many folks who claim to be "aware" and "spiritual" have these patterns of subjective "tunnel vision".
We must not forget our logical mind and need for critical thinking. Science is mostly based on the logical mind and the five sensory world, leaving no room for "higher" knowledge. New Age material is at times just based on wishful thinking, assumption and blind belief without using logic or critical thinking for discernment.
What is needed is both, intuition and logic, the left and right brain working in harmony and balance, truly understanding the self and gaining self-knowledge, understanding one's conditioning, thought patterns, belief systems, where they came from and what they are, looking deep within oneself, doing "the work" to become a free thinking individuals with true free will, not a machine who just acts out of conditioning and is a victim of external influences, being in a self-inflicted prison her or she are not even aware of. Gurdjieff talks about that in his conversations with Ouspensky in the classic "In the Search of the Miraculous":
"You don't realize your own situation. You are in prison. All you can wish for , if you are a sensible man, is to escape. But how escape? Man must first realize that he is in prison. So long as he fails to realize this, so long as he thinks he is free, he has no chance whatsoever. No one can liberate him by force, against his will, in opposition to his wishes. If liberation is possible, it is possible only as a result of great labor and great efforts, and, above all, of conscious effort, towards a definite aim.
A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before.
To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to speak the truth. The wish alone is not enough. To speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know."
Without self-knowledge objective research is impossible, as one will get caught up in one's own subjectivity, not being able to see things as they are, not as one would like them to be according to preference/denial based on a personal belief system.
As the late comedian Bill Hicks used to say: : A belief is just that: a belief. It doesn't necessarily mean it is true."
Over the years, when discussing certain matters of the world, be it as mundane as 9/11 and politics or topics outside most people's "world view" like the UFO/Alien phenomena and the topic of Channeling, it has shown that it is not easy to have a constructive and productive exchange in order to find out truth. Truth in the most objective sense of the word, to see things as they ARE, not as we would like them to be or not to be based on preference/wish ful thinking. And also not making it a philosphical/theological issue as in "everyone's truth is true" or "Everyone is living their truth" and so on and so forth. That is not the point/objective here. I'm just simply talking about the truth of what is going on in the world and universe without hiding behind memorized "spiritual" slogans which are mostly just a clever ways of justifying avoidance, denial and ignorance, even if only on an unconscious level.
FFor example, is the offical 9/11 story true or are there lies and deception leading us away from the Truth as we are loosing our civil rights on a daily basis? Are there aliens/UFO's exisiting and do they and had they an inluence on our world or is it just all Sci-fi? These question can be answered objectively and accuratly if proper research is done, becasue no matter what you create in your reality, there are certain truths out there which people don't believe, like to deny or can't handle but exist no matter what we believe or think or create......and which DO have an inlfuence into our lifes, precisely becasue nothing is isolated. Most people just don't see it, becasue they don't question our typical way of life, society, etc....living in a tunnel vision of limited perception, missing a HUGE portion of what is actually happening on this planet and the matrix we're in and how it influences them in the most deceiving ways, shaping their beliefs and world views, promoting complacency and conformity, be it through media, edcuation, religion, science or the new age.
Then there are folks who say that objective truth is impossible because that is what Quantum physics tells us. Well, that would be a good example of Quantum physics being filtered through a typical "new age belief system". Yes there is truth to it and as Heisenberg stated in his "Uncertainty Principle", "the moment you look at something it changes", but looking away (especialy from the things we like to ignore/deny because they look so "bad") certainly don't make them go away. In short, no matter how you use the various CYOR (create your own reality) scenarios as promoted by the new age industry, there still exists an objective truth of what is going on in the world, and it does have an effect on our lifes on some level, even if we don't "think" it does.
Too often people base what they think they know, on opinions, beliefs and assumptions, not really going to the bottom of things, digging down the rabbit hole and research the material that is out there in regards to the various topics, using intuition, logic and critical thinking alike. And so some discussions become a waste of time/energy, they usually turn personal and sooner or later the whole objective of the topic gets lost. But you can't blame anyone either. Yes, there is laziness and the intelligence factor might play a role here as well. But probably in the end eveyone is just too pre-occupied making a living than being bothered to search for truh of what is actually REALLY going on on this planet. Well, that's the usual excuse anyway.
"Make no opinions about anything
unless you have spent considerable
time studying the problem and its
many conceived solutions. Ask your-
self if you are really certain about
something or are only guessing."
- M.V. Summers
So how to look for objective truth?
Here is an excellent article from montalk.net about the search for truth. Pretty much sums up my method of researching over the years. I came by this website some time ago and found it consistent with what I was finding out, independently, so to speak.
Truth Analysis
by montalk
This article describes the reasoning process I use to write most of the articles on this site.
The process is based on two axioms:
1. truth is not subjective
2. truth never contradicts itself
Because truth is not subjective, some ideas are more objective than others. This means that no matter what your world-view is, it can always be improved to be more objective. It shows that there is indeed something to strive for.
The idea that truth never contradicts itself is a very powerful axiom. Lies can be internally consistent as well, but a mixture of truth and lies will show contradictions. You can use this principle to discover what’s true and what’s false. Here’s what I mean:
It is difficult to tell if any single idea is true or false, just like it is difficult to tell which of two similar puzzles a single puzzle piece belongs to. But a large collection of non-contradicting ideas will reveal whether the entire collection is true or false. The larger the collection, the easier it is to see. You start with one ambiguous puzzle piece, find others that fit onto it, and soon you can tell which of the two puzzles you’ve put together.
Another analogy is panning for gold. You start with a large amount of material that includes both silt and gold flakes, then you shake the pan and let the silt fall away. This indicates the importance of continually thinking, reading, and discussing large amounts of new material, which is then to be sorted or filtered via intuition and critical thinking to reveal what is true.
It is better to look for what’s wrong with a theory than what’s right. Debates can rage forever concerning the thousand facts supporting a single lie, but no one can argue with a single fact that disproves a thousand lies.
Remember, as long as your world-view is internally consistent, it is most likely entirely true or entirely false. Combine this principle with the five-step process below, and you will have an effective truth analysis method. The process of discovering truth is one of cycling between gathering material, formulating theories, working out inconsistencies, and gathering more material.
Most importantly, truth is always verified by both logic and intuition—logic without intuition, or intuition without logic should never be used to determine truth. They must be used in tandem. If there is conflict between logic and intuition, check your logical assumptions. Use intuition to guide and logic to analyze.
The process goes like this:
1) Gather new ideas from contemplation, observation, discussion, or some reading material. Then pick a mystery, a contradiction, a set of observations or anything that needs to be explained or resolved.
2) To make a good theory that will explain all of that, start with the infinite set of all possibilities. This means anything goes, no idea is too ludicrous. Use your intuition and guess.
3) As ideas come to mind, use critical thinking to eliminate everything that is self contradictory or absolutely impossible. Look for holes in these ideas, try to shoot them down.
4) Of the bulletproof theories that are left, select the theory that:
- explains all the facts
- explains the facts better than any other theory
- explains facts that previous theories could not
- is logically consistent and has no internal contradictions
- makes sense
- feels intuitively correct
5) The theory is worth keeping if:
- it predicts things which are later confirmed by observation
- you find correlation from other independent sources
6) If you come across something that challenges the theory, then:
- check to see that it’s really a challenge, and not just an illusory paradox based on assumptions or incorrect perspective
- check to see if the challenge is even valid, or if it is internally inconsistent and full of holes
- modify the theory to accommodate the challenge
- come up with a whole new theory that explains everything more elegantly than the old one
This is opposite the process used in science and mathematics that starts with axioms and builds upon them. The problem with that - method is that it starts with a very limited finite set and creeps upward like a stalagmite. If the assumptions or axioms are false, then everything built on it is in error. Furthermore, such a process cannot skip steps, as it always needs verification from the status quo to proceed to the next step. It cannot take leaps of faith or logic, and therefore cannot make paradigm shifts. It’s an inflexible process that definitely has its advantages when it comes to high risk applications that need lots of security and assuredness, but as far as breaking new ground is concerned, it’s incredibly slow. Any creativity in that process happens only in the formation of the basic axioms, or in accidents that occur along the way.
The process described in this article starts with an infinite set, and whittles away what doesn’t fit. This means there is no need to leap across a logical abyss because one approaches from the other side. It is much easier to build a bridge if someone is already on the other side. Likewise, once a radical idea has been confirmed using this process, it is much easier to work backwards and logically bridge the abyss. Also, the fitting together of ideas and sorting of truth from lies requires creativity at every step, so it’s the best method of achieving rapid innovation.