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Science Forum Index » Philosophy - Meta Forum » Truth: the ultimate Savior
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| Johnmuthukat |
 Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2007 7:40 pm |
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"One basic truth can be used as a foundation for a mountain of lies,
and if we dig down deep enough in the mountain of lies, and bring out
that truth, to set it on top of the mountain of lies; the entire
mountain of lies will crumble under the weight of that one truth. And
there is nothing more devastating to a structure of lies than the
revelation of the truth upon which the structure of lies was built,
because the shock waves of the revelation of the truth reverberate,
and continue to reverberate throughout the Earth for generations to
follow, awakening even those people who had no desire to be awakened
to the truth." (by Delamar Duvaris as written in the preface of
"Behold the Pale Horse" by William Cooper).
The home truth about truth is that even the untruth and the evils seek
truth for their survival, for it is a question of survival for all
including those whom we consider as the enemies of truth. The only
difference is that truth is powerful openly; evil, secretly.
For millions of years, human life was under the control and protection
of nature, the truth in its material form. Nature is truth and truth
is wisdom. "Never, no never does Nature say one thing and wisdom
another." wrote Johann Christolph Frederick von Schuller
Then suddenly, in modern age, modern man entered the workshop of
nature and started interfering in its working by controlling not only
his life and the life of the whole mankind but also the life of other
species in nature as well. He calls it control of nature, which, in
other words, amounted to control of truth. However, as cracks began to
develop here and there, as the crisis of control got underway as time
passed, and as the crisis reached the SOS level, many well-meaning
minds began to think in terms of going back to nature. The question,
however, is not only whether there is any natural nature left to go
back, but also whether nature is prepared to retake the control in the
midway from man, in a rag tag, crisis ridden condition or whether it
wants to start life on a clean state as is evident from the nature's
practice of promoting extinction of many species that have outgrown or
false lived their utility to nature and to other species in a cyclic
fashion.
Truth, however, is the ultimate savor. There is nothing in the world
which is mightier than truth. And it is only wisdom that can
ultimately follow and track down truth. In the present world, truth
is never going to be traced, for today it is untruth that is tracing
truth, and untruth is incapable of understanding and recognizing
truth, let alone tracking it down. Wisdom is a gift which nature/God
bestowed to each and every one of the creations in nature and which
man critically tampered with when he moved from nature's control to
his own tool's (system's or machine's) control--as the 'tool of his
tools'.
Why is knowing truth such critical and inevitable for mankind today?
Ignorance was not a problem for man so far as he knew he was ignorant
and that he had much to learn from nature, (quote Socretes). It became
a real problem when man claim to 'know' everything and started to
control nature, the truth, no matter Issac Newton admitted: "I do not
know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been
only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and
then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before
me" (Memoirs of Newton).
Today the greatest problem is the growing inaccessibility,
incomprehensibility or the unrecognizability of the truth however
sincerely or expertly man tries to understand truth or nature, for man
has maligned and duplicated nature beyond recognition by his hi-tech
science. We all know that it is not truth that is dependent on us but
we who are dependent on truth. That today, truth has become more and
more inconvenient, embarrassing and even suicidal, and that nobody
today wants to touch it even with a barbed wire, are all the problems
of modern man and not the problems of truth. Perhaps, that is why we
say today that we need truth only in parts, we need only its
superficial parts, its tantalizing parts and never the full truth or
ground realities of truth--the wholesome truth. The greatest problem
before man today is to escape from this crucial dilemma.
For living, either as one person or as one nation or as the whole
world, we need truth to escape from the powder kegs of ignorance that
is spreading all over in modern society, particularly of its complex
mechanical machinations going awry with the machinations of nature.
One may reasonably wonder as to why the world is growing paranoiac
towards realities, as to why it fight shy of truths; why, under the
face of even the last survival instinct it does not want to touch
truth even with a barbed wire; why it can do only some lip service to
truth; why all its modern problem solving processes are limited to be
superficial and proving to be only symptom fighting and never touching
the real fundamental issues. Even more serious, toxic social
conditioning is occurring due to fear that causes selective blindness.
This results in loss of insight and foresight -- not to mention the
inability to see what's right in front of your nose --is often called
"Not-Seeism", that has been draining our lifeblood for decades, and
has been linked to the current epidemic of passivity.
" The victor will never be asked whether he ever told the truth.",
said Adolf Hitler and thus confirmed the fact that hiding the truth
has always been the monopoly of the victor. Thus, market force
remaining the global leader and victor ever since the last two
centuries, uninterrupted through industrial revolution, colonialism,
capitalism and now the market economy leadership, the question is
whether the truth about the present society will ever be told. Here,
my attempt is to take up that challenge in whatever small way I can.
My hope is that the world will at least take note of its last survival
instinct and may spell the beans.
Today the extremities of global problems, that are threatening the
very existence of mankind, are such galore and popular that it has
almost become trite to narrate them. Today everybody wants to be
worldly wise in a market dictated world even when it proves to be
suicidal -- even in the not-so-long run. But today, when it comes to
be a case of my own survival, I think I have to think twice. And thus
in the 'global village' of today, in the planet run on buttons, you
cannot save yourself unless you can save the whole world, the whole
planet. So even in self-defense it is always the world that comes
first; we cannot save ourselves without saving the planet as a whole.
Therefore, if somebody even promises me the whole world under the
condition that I keep mum and go about the way the world is going, I
will not be able to keep his word for I cannot see things separate
from the world I am living in. And I am not interested in a world
that is not capable of promising me, my children, my friends and all
my near and dear ones a secure place in it.
You become controversial the moment you start doing justice to truth
or to your own conscience. Here the question is as to how prepared one
is to face controversies: Well, as I consider it, there cannot be
another time more fit to face controversies than it is today when
everyman, including the most successful exploiter of man, faces the
gravest challenge in history, to his own extinction, as a species. So
don't worry about controversies or reverses when all of us are already
in them, whether we admit it or not; whether we do something or do
nothing.
Increasing problem of understanding truths and realities--problems of
Generalization
The brutal anomaly of the present human society, that is unique and
more pronounced than any time in the long human history, is the
growing invisibility and incomprehensibility of the real problems
faced by man today, especially by those whom we regard as our leaders
and the so-called experts and specialists.
Today man is a vastly reduced human species, a close-ended synthetic
creature--only a caricature of the real man that inhabited this planet
for millions of years. Because of a highly mechanized breed today,
modern man cannot understand anything that is natural or anything that
is not analytically, compartmentally and mechanically explained
With his common sense under siege and having being long mechanically
addicted, modern man wants everything in easy-to-read and ready-to-use
mode--as compact as 'pills that thrills'. It seems difficult for him to
understand multiple subjects put together or themes that require multi-
disciplinary perceptions.
Considering the fact that the nature of life and its large scale
behavior on the Earth are as yet beyond the reach of modern physical
science to describe and predict, all are ultimately related to the
fact that modern science has not succeeded (at least, not yet) in
rationally understanding the non-material attributes of the
extraordinary phenomenon of life. As the analytical description of
science goes on splitting knowledge into thousands of isolated
fragments (compartmentalisation and specialisation) and as the gap
between life and knowledge grow wider and wider the galloping high
speed social changes of the fully mechanized modern society renders
man an ideal tool for exploitation. While the natural approaches a
problem with a wholesome, holistic point of view--we can vaguely put it
as deductive method (method of synthesis)--the modern analytical
method approaches it in a particular, compartmentalised or narrowed
point of view--we can vaguely put it as inductive method.
The cheered linear development and the suppressed generalized
development:
We popularize with great fanfare the arts and the sciences, the
culture and the religions and go the whole hog in attaining cutting
edge position in every one of these fields through specialization and
compartmentalization. But when it comes to popularizing life and man,
or on the attempt to harmoniously synthesis all the above fields put
together for a balanced blending towards man's progress, we suddenly
seem to beat a hasty retreat. We have all sorts of experts and
specialists in thousands of fragmented, isolated or individual fields
and branches in social life, but there seems to be none on man in
general. Now if we view this whole gamut of compartmentalized
materialistic development with no central authority to oversee the
interdisciplinary commonality among these hundreds of aberrational
development we see a complete departure from early practices ever
since the beginning of modern era. Here an evolutionary social
corrective force seems to be severely lacking. There were periodic
social and spiritual correction forces in almost all civilizations
other than modern, largely western, civilization.
The natural life process continued for tens of thousands of years--for
ages. Thus we have had in our history (limited to its written part)
great sages, thinkers and great leaders like Socrates, Aristotle,
Confucius, Sri Buddha and Christ. They were our old 'scientists' in
the holistic sense. Theirs' was a humanist Science. They used their
intelligence with conscience. Along with their big brains were their
big minds. Thus their visions were not specialist, compartmentalized
or narrow, nor were they based on barren logic. They all had holistic
visions of the world and all its life process and were capable of
synthesizing every aspect of life into its constructive end by their
enormous love towards humanity.
Right now, our main theories of science and the scientific method all
say that breaking down problems into smaller problems, or chunks of
matter in to smaller chucks of matter, is useful because the sum is
equal to the total of the parts. But the real and main impact of
Chaos Theory is that the sum can be quite different from the expected
behavior of the combination of the parts. In a sense, Chaos is
"wholistic science" -- you must look at the
whole system to understand the whole system. Looking at the parts
helps you understand parts of the system, but it often misses quirks
in how the parts interact, and you can completely miss the big picture
because of the scale of those quirks. Most people think of Chaos as
simply being pretty pictures of quirks.
Ever since European universities started functioning around the
Twelfth century, science was following linear mathematics. Linear
mathematics does not always work in this dynamic universe. Let us
examine something very simple. Hydrogen is a very volatile atom while
oxygen abets volatility. The two atoms combined together, the
resulting molecule must be terribly volatile! Let us take water (H2O)
as a good example and set fire to it. Does it burn? The moral of the
story is that the whole need not be the sum total of the bits always.
If one concentrates just on the final outcomes of this kind of
research we come across better realisation of the futility of this
kind of scientific pursuits.
Compartmentalization-specialization has generated sort of a cult
society revolving around experts and professionals, and to a society
driven not by ideas, but obsessions. It has, in the process, led to
fast the decline of ideas, leading to the current state of dismal
dialog. In a sense that is what is happening in global politics today.
Like seven blind men, each of whom touching different parts of the
elephant describing his part of the elephant as the totality, what
passes for argument has taken an increasingly maniacal bent in recent
years. What we generally refer to as "knowledge," "truth," "facts,"
"certainty," or "final answers" would be much more accurately
described as "That which appears to be so, based on our current
perceptions." We certainly have thus set limit to the human senses,
and thus to our perception itself. The paradigm shift hasn't really
hit the everyday world.
This tends to specializing rather than generalizing. But who cares
for the truth, the generalizing fact? Being highly compartmentalized
and fragmented in specializations, modern experts and professionals of
all hues function much as hands in gloves with the hi-tech market
forces rather than with man. The non-wholistic modern education
system has virtually contaminated almost all bright modern brains on
the specialization traits that it has literally incapacitated them in
thinking on generalized, integrated lines, towards some alternate
methods of solutions. To find the truth, which always lies just on the
other side of all modern stories, has become a far more Herculean task
than ever.
One should speak truth at least when one sees no hope in toying the
present world of untruth, when one realizes the mortal fact that being
silent on truth is more catastrophic and more suicidal than speaking
truth, as is the case today.
John Muthukat
http://www.fireflysun.com/book/john.php |
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