In a realm where life constantly shifts, truth emerges as a living resonance shaped by each person’s unique path. The interplay of experiences, unknown possibilities, and changing moments weaves a tapestry of personal truth that cannot be contained by absolute declarations. Rather than fixating on a single unshakable principle, we learn to embrace ambiguity and the freedom to discover truth within.
Participant: Can they talk about the concept of absolute truth? I have my truth and you have your truth. Is there such a thing as absolute truth?
Cheryl Marlene: Yeah, meaning truth that would always be truth for everyone, no matter the circumstances.
Participant: Exactly.
Cheryl Marlene: Exactly. So the way we want to start with this today is, first, let’s define what truth is. Generally speaking, truth is an awareness of the experience of resonance, balance, and harmony within.
And so if it’s personal truth, then what you’re doing is feeling the resonance, balance, and harmony within yourself, for yourself, about—let’s say—a particular topic, event, belief, thought, or feeling, right? Any way that you process knowing and the energy within and around yourself, you can become aware of how energy flows within and around you. You can feel resonance, balance, harmony, alignment, which then gets to how different people’s truths are different.
Who you are as the human being you are is unique in time and space. Because we don’t all have exactly the same experiences—nor are we born into the same family with the same balance between nurture and nature—truth from one person to another can be similar but not exactly the same, right? It’s like how some people like cheese better than chocolate and others like chocolate better than cheese. You’re getting to that awareness of how people differentiate or discern differences based on what feels truthful to them.
So within that perspective, they would say the concept of absolute truth is a perception of what they call the static view. In other words, it’s the idea that all experience is filtered through the three dimensions of linear space and time. In some respects, it’s a convenient way to look at truth. It’s something we’ve done both within different religious traditions and different spiritual traditions: make statements that are perceived as absolute truth, perceived to be the same for everyone all the time.
The problem with that is it doesn’t deal well with three different motions. One, everybody has different experiences. Two, in your life there is always the unknown and the unexpected. Because everyone has different experiences, and because of the presence of the unknown in our lives—which basically means we can pretend to predict things, but the reality is we often look into the future and have no idea—we’re not absolutely sure what will happen. We can have the feeling of that, but the reality is most of life is unpredictable because it dances off into the unknown and the unexpected.
The presence of the unexpected and the unknown, coupled with everybody having different experiences, means the truth for people in the same moment of experience isn’t necessarily going to be exactly the same. Then, if you take all of that and couple it with the idea that in every moment life shifts, life expands, you learn something new, and something you didn’t know shows up, there’s motion. This basically means that truth—even from a static point of view—shifts from moment to moment. The concept of absolute truth is there both to impose a sense of order in an environment that’s uncontrollable and to give the idea that you are in control.
Participant: So…
Cheryl Marlene: And so the other part of all of this is the presence of ambiguity. Different people have different experiences and different ways of interpreting just the simple thing of what’s good and what’s bad, which means ambiguity is always inherent within any situation. In a lot of ways, the basis of ambiguity is the presence of multiple truths.
That bumps up against the idea that if you’re living outside in—meaning you’re going outside yourself to define truth, generally checking in with some sort of external authority that knows better than you—then you’re going to deal with ambiguity the way you’re guided to or told to, as opposed to looking within yourself at what’s truthful for you and finding ambiguity, being willing to acknowledge that it exists.
This is a bit of what we’ve been talking about with the idea of soul paradox. There’s a way in which you could also just say it’s soul ambiguity, because part of the idea of absolute truth is a way to counter that which feels ambiguous.
It’s not that there’s one single truth that makes it all work. Usually, the balance comes in acknowledging and working with the various truths that show up and appear to be ambiguous. For example, most of us can probably agree on “thou shall not kill,” but if someone breaks into your home and wants to try to kill you, there’s the truth—the belief—that self-defense is reasonable in that circumstance. In other words, we’re not holding onto “thou shall not kill” to the degree that if someone wants to try to kill you, you should just go ahead and let them, right? So the ambiguity in that is very clear, and it shows that holding to what seems like absolute truth isn’t necessarily truthful.
But in order to deal with your truth as your truth—and not feel compelled to always take on whatever’s presented as absolute truth—you also have to let go of the thought that you might be able to control other people and their truths, right? Part of how you get to your truth is recognizing everybody has their own truth, including truth that seems false to you, seems like it can’t be true.
A lot of what absolute truth is about is getting everyone to walk in lockstep in one direction so we’re not questioning. We’re not saying, “Oh no, that’s not truth for me,” right? All of us saying, “Oh no, I want to get to my truth,” doesn’t help if the desire is to get everybody to pave the same or everyone marching in exactly the same direction.
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