On Truth and Growth

A Reflection and Respectful Reminder

Apr 30, 2025

“It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.” ~The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley

It seems that in the day-to-day of life, we can get away with viewing Truth as some lofty ideal. In the most radical cases, we can even begin to fall into a relativism. Our contemporary culture constantly circumambulates the question of Truth with the non-answer that “I have my truth and, you, your own,” with the hopes of ultimately settling disputes about life’s deepest questions by undermining the foundations of any possible answer. This era is one in which the sheer volume of raw data and information has atrophied our society’s capacity for productive public debates.

What makes life worth living? Why should we be good to ourselves, others, and even non-persons? What/who am I, and what is my role in this whole thing? These questions, among countless others, are often considered to have no answers except those supplied by mere sentiment or something akin to the Freudian ‘unconscious’ which is ‘really calling the shots’ unbeknownst to us. In some cases, the possibility of any real answer (i.e. an answer that satisfies the question on its own ground) is denied. This is particularly seen to be the case with the metaphysical position of physicalism, in which non-physical entities (like consciousness, mind, etc.) are denied ‘real’ existence, and are at best epiphenomenal.

Evolutionary psychology likewise poses the danger of simply explaining the possible physical causes and conditions for our being as we are, denying the intensity of such deep questions as the value of a life. We may live well in the absence of taking these questions seriously. However, at the moment when the world begins to lose its sense, especially in a crisis at the ground of our existence, we begin to recede from the world as it seems to ask the ultimate “why?” It is precisely at this moment that we begin to take seriously the question of Truth, in which all of existence becomes a great question. From this perspective, all else seems irrelevant.

Our typical ways of making sense of the world are confined within our conceptual models of the world. We can take the idea of something that goes beyond the scope of a model as a decent analogy for what philosophers have called the Absolute, transcendent and without limit. Throughout history, this aspect of reality which transcends our understanding has been thought of as both a kind of chaos which threatens the very foundations of our being, and as a limitless source of possibility.

The Absolute cannot be represented in the same manner as our conventional notions of objects, actions, persons, etc. for the same reason that these examples admit the possibility of representation. In picking out the properties of some object, we first call forth the object as distinct from a myriad other objects. That is, the object is spoken of relative to what it is not.

The manner of describing the world in terms of objects and their properties is relational. Relationality in this sense requires a multiplicity of entities1, as no description is possible without comparison with what is ‘other’ or different. This multiplicity is a limit which is negated in the Absolute. It is not that the Absolute is everything somehow combined into an indistinct mass. Rather, the Absolute is more properly thought of as some inarticulable ‘X’ prior to the conditions (i.e. limitations) which make the existence of entities possible.2

“It” is not a being among beings such that it can enter into a relation in the sense necessary to be described as an object, which implies at the very least its opposition to a knowing subject. That is to say that the existence of objects of experience requires the existence of a subject which experiences.3

Even in the case of the Abrahamic religions, which differ mostly in their making the Absolute able to enter into relation with the individual, the transcendence of God is considered to be entirely beyond the scope of the human mind’s ability to comprehend. This does not, however, prevent the many world wisdom traditions from making such attempts in the service of various ends, often with the hope that our intellect may one day grasp the ineffable core of reality.

In the everydayness of life, our most common way to open ourselves up to the possibility of the Absolute is our ability to go beyond ourselves in the act of listening to others. The term ‘ecstasy’ taken in its original ‘ek-stasis’ means to go beyond oneself in a state of transcendence. In viewing our own perspective as ‘equally real’ as others’, we open ourselves up to the possibility of truth beyond our limited sense of self (ego).

The development of a child is a good analogy to this. As young children, a great obstacle is overcome in the child’s development of a theory of mind (the realization that others do not share his perspective). As the child matures into late childhood, he then understands that simply because he sees things one way, this does not mean everyone else does (nor must they). The child continually realizes this in greater and greater depth as he matures into adolescence, in which this realization (in the dual sense of recognizing its significance and its becoming actual) becomes the grounds for many kinds of neuroses.

One of the first glimpses beyond the self-centered perspective that says, “I know what’s really going on! I’ve got it figured out!” is this naturally arising ek-stasis. It is as though reality gives us a thorough shaking to disrupt our states of comfort and complacency. When the child settles into a model of the world (through the lens of a child), reality presents adolescence and its turbulence. A similar pattern takes place in each life-stage change. The phrase ‘reality check’ is a commonplace reflection on the fact that our models the world are mere perspectives apt to being exposed as perspectives when we fall into a forgetfulness of it.

Not unlike the process of maturation, our path of growth to be active forces in creating a better world requires us to develop new habits of thinking – new habits of being. Otherwise, we will only be able to talk in circles about truth and falsity until our mouths run dry and our tongues shrivel up. To truly effect change in the world, we must first purify ourselves of our self-enclosed habits. The habit of fleeing from conflict, of stretching the truth to make ourselves appear more qualified, of assuming others have it out for us, etc. must all be seen as limits to overcome. In much the same way a child must overcome the limits of his childish habits, we must also overcome our egoic habits.