How Can We Know The Truth?

"Winston was beginning to wonder if the state could declare if 2 + 2 = 5" 

In the time we are living in it is getting harder and harder to know anything anymore.  In some ways it feels like there are two separate worlds people occupy.  In each world there is that which is true, but it is not the complete truth.  Parsing these half truths and figuring out what is real is becoming a full time job.  

I'm exhausted. 

And yet, I press on.  For me getting to the bottom of things and understanding the whole truth is not just important, but it actually lends cohesiveness and continuity to life.   It ends the cognitive dissonance. 

But how do we know what we know?  How can I be sure that what I know in my bones is not merely an artifact of what I want to see? 

I can look at my hand and drawing on my senses and my direct experience of "handedness" I can definitively say "this is a hand"  THIS IS MY HAND!  Now it is possible that I am having a hallucination and through some fluke of biology my "knowing" is only a collection of neurons firing in my visual cortex such that I see "hand" and think I know "hand" but all things being equal this is mostly how we know what we know.  

Our direct experience is something we have come to know and trust. 

There is also a priori knowledge which is based on logic and reason (such as a mathematical equation) in which the knowing is the proof itself. 2 + 2 = 4.  

And finally we come to consensus reality where the group decides what is real.  For a long time many millions believed the world was flat (that ones making a comeback) and there were dragons at the end of the world.  We can find many examples of this in today's politics. (I hear the words fake and hoax frequently these days)

I find no particular comfort in the a priori and consensus "realities."  I might think differently if I were a mathematician or a physicist, but let's face it Schrodinger's cat was both dead and alive and Eisenberg's electrons can be anywhere at anytime.   

So were does that leave us in terms of how we operate in life?  In terms of ethics, truth, and actions? 

I have no answers, but I do have some queries that might point to a direction: 

• The gut has neurons too; lots of them.  Have you ever known fear?  Did you feel it in your gut?  Maybe the gut can give us a "truth-meter" on what is going on?  
• Could trusting our gut instinct be a direction?  (Quakers have always trusted this when receiving messages as we center down and seek clarity sometimes the physical discomfort to rise up is truth coming through.)
• Might truth be a process?  We think of truth as being this bolt of insight.  A bold epiphany.  What if through a clearness committee or just seeking over time truth emerges slow and in bits n pieces?  

These tools (Quaking (feeling spirit stirring in the body), Centering Down, and Clearness) may be a path to the truth, ethics and actions?   The power of expectant waiting is exactly in the not knowing.  In that liminal space where knowing is suspended new questions arise and new understandings too. 

​Joseph Olejak

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