Spiritual Truth

"Just as something is seen in a dream or in an illusion ...
Just like that the whole universe is seen by the wise ones."

— Vedanta

What is true, what is real? And, how do you know? If something is true or real or right or good, doesn't that imply that something else must be not true, real, right, or good? If we are to realize what is right, good, and true, doesn't that require our clearly perceiving and overcoming what is untrue, illusory, wrong, or evil? Of course it does. So, how do we do that?

You stand on the stable unmoving earth, and observe the sun coming up over the eastern horizon, arcing across the sky, and passing over the western horizon. It is almost unimaginable that the sun is not circling around the earth, but the earth is rushing at 66,600 miles per hour around the sun, while spinning on its axis at about a thousand miles per hour. The ground beneath your feet does not appear to be moving at all, does it? And, you can see the sun moving across the sky. What a leap it requires to grasp the truth of the situation, to accept the Greater Reality. You did not make this discovery yourself. You just took it for granted that what you were told (rather than what you see) is factual. But, with regard to spiritual truth, you are responsible for your own understanding and making your own discoveries. And, this can be much more difficult than arriving at other kinds of truths. It can be very hard to learn to see the underlying spiritual truth, beneath the false appearances and common sensory perception of the world around you. Nearly everyone in the West believed the wrong thing for thousands of years, which proves: if you only go along with what the majority believes (or only what you see with your own eyes), you may never realize a Greater Truth.

How many people pass through this life without ever even coming close to the Truth? We tend to think that something is true because we learned it in school, or saw it in the media, or the preacher said it, or the doctor said it, or our leaders said it, or our friends believe it, and so on. Most people live life this way, never realizing the thoughts that inhabit their minds are not necessarily true. Even mathematical concepts are not absolute truths. Albert Einstein observed, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." We were all taught in school that one plus one always equals two, right? Well, not always. In the binary mathematics that computers understand, 1+1=10. We were taught that we cannot add apples and oranges, or different things. But, is it not true that one apple plus one orange equals two pieces of fruit? Since everything in the world is unique, there are no two of the same thing; so if we believed in the "absolute truth" that we cannot add or subtract things that are not identical, we would never use arithmetic. Further, mathematics that may apply in two dimensions does not necessarily apply in three dimensions; that in three dimensions does not work in four dimensions, and so on. Higher dimensional "truths" seldom fit into lower dimensions. read more ...

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