What Is Truth?

Every day you are faced with a decision: What will you do with your life today?

What you do every day, depends to a large degree on your beliefs about the purpose of your life. Even if you don’t know the purpose of your life, you have a default purpose or goal that you live for. Perhaps your purpose is to be happy. Perhaps your purpose is to make lots of money. Whatever your purpose is, your life will be organized around that purpose.

The problem is that the purpose you are living for now may leave you empty in the end. These lessons are designed to help you find a powerful purpose that will meet all of your needs and your deepest desires.

As you search for your purpose, the first important question you must answer is, were you born with a purpose, or do you need to create your own purpose?

But before you can answer that question, you must ask the most fundamental question in life: What is truth?

What Is Truth?

There are actually three different views about truth and reality. These three views contradict each other, so only one can be correct.

The first view is that the physical world we see is the only reality, and that everything that happens can be explained by the laws of physics, chemistry, and the theory of evolution. This is the physical-only view.

The second view is that everything we see emanates from an infinite conscious spiritual reality. Most who hold this view believe that what happens in the world we see can be explained by the law of karma. I will call this the spiritual-only view because many who have this view believe that the physical world is actually an illusion.

The third view of the world is that a powerful spiritual Creator created the physical world, and that the Creator sometimes performs miracles that don’t follow natural laws. I will call this the spiritual-physical view.

Each view of reality provides a different answer to the meaning of life. In order to be sure you find your real purpose, you need to know which view is correct.

Of course, you are probably confident that you already know which view is correct. But let’s go back to the beginning to understand where your knowledge about everything came from.

How You Know

When you were born, you began learning about the world through experience. You looked, listened, smelled, touched–and most of all–you tasted everything.

Soon you began to use reason to understand things you cannot see, hear, and touch. For example, when your mother went into a room and closed the door, at first you may have thought that she disappeared. But she always reappeared from the same door. So you came to understand that even when you cannot see your mother, she is in another room, and she will come out from that same room later.

As you developed language skills, you began to learn from what people told you. Someone probably told you not to touch a hot stove. You may have touched the stove anyway and discovered that it is easier to learn from what other people tell you than to learn from experience.

Scientists use these same tools to understand the world we live in. Scientists learn about the world through observations. They use reason to develop theories about how the world works. They also rely on the reports of other scientists to increase their knowledge.

The tools you use to understand the world are like a simple version of the scientific method.

As we build up knowledge, there is an essential tool that we all use to discern between reality and illusion, between truth and error. It is the law of non-contradiction.

If a new experience is inconsistent with our past experiences, we notice the contradiction immediately. For example, if you saw a pig flying in the sky, you would stop and take a second look. Your experience tells you that pigs can’t fly. So a flying pig would surprise you. It would contradict your mental model of the world.

As you took a second look at the flying pig, you would see that it was actually a pink balloon. Even if you didn’t have a chance to take a second look, then you would assume that you made a mistake. You would consider what you thought you saw to be an illusion–not reality–because it contradicts what you already know.

This law of non-contradiction is essential for discerning between reality and an illusion, truth and error. Without it, you couldn’t know anything for sure.

The law of non-contradiction allows you to recognize that stories about talking animals and princesses that live on clouds aren’t real. It also allows you to recognize when someone is lying to you. Without the law of non-contradiction, you would either believe everything you saw and heard, or nothing at all.

The law of non-contradiction is essential for building an accurate view of reality. And most of the time it works very well.

But sometimes, we don’t have enough experience to notice a contradiction. In this case, a false belief can enter our mind, and become part of our view of reality. When this happens, the false belief causes us to reject truth, because it is inconsistent with what we think we know. This is called the Semmelweis Reflex.

The Semmelweis Reflex

The Semmelweis Reflex is named after an Austrian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis. When Semmelweis began working at the Vienna General Hospital in 1846, he was troubled by the fact that so many women were dying from fever after childbirth. The hospital had two maternity clinics. The first clinic was run by doctors, and the second was run by midwives. In the first clinic, more than 10% of women were dying after giving birth. In the second clinic, less than 4% of women died. Clearly, something was wrong in the first clinic.

After about ten months of research, Semmelweis proposed that the doctors at the hospital should be required to wash their hands after touching dead bodies. As soon as this policy was implemented, the death rate in the first clinic dropped from 10% to less than 2%. Semmelweis had made an important discovery that could save many lives.

However, the world was not ready for Semmelweis’s ideas. The medical community had different views of disease. Many doctors still believed that sickness was caused by an imbalance between fluids in the body. So Semmelweis’s suggestion that doctors should wash their hands before touching a patient was rejected by most doctors, in spite of the evidence that Semmelweis shared proving that handwashing prevented many illnesses.

When we are exposed to ideas that contradict the ideas we already have, we usually respond in the same way that people responded to Dr. Semmelweis’s ideas. We simply ignore the evidence and continue to believe what we already believe. If we do this, we have no hope of escaping from an inaccurate view of reality.

As I mentioned earlier, there are three basic views about truth and reality. Only one of these views can be correct. But your natural tendency will be to instantly reject any suggestion that your view of reality is incorrect. Just like the doctors who rejected the evidence that Dr. Semmelweis shared with them about the real cause of illnesses, you will naturally reject even clear evidence that shows your view of reality is incorrect.

But unless you have an accurate view of reality, you cannot know the real purpose of your life. Each view of reality provides a different answer about the purpose of life, and only one of these can be correct.

Finding the Truth

How can you know if your view of reality is correct or not? How can you overcome your natural tendency to reject ideas that don’t match what you already believe? How can you find the truth?

First, consider why you have the view you have.

Most of us simply inherited our view of reality from the family, culture, religion, and country we were born into. From a young age, we were immersed in a culture that explained what happens in the world according to one of the three basic viewpoints.

If you had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family, in a different country, in a different culture and religion, _ what would you believe now _?

Think about it. Your initial view of reality was determined by the culture you were born into.

Since you inherited your initial view of reality by the chance of where you were born, how confident should you be that it is correct?

One reason you may be very confident that your view of reality is correct is because it seems to provide an explanation for everything you see. But the same is true of the other two views of reality. All three views are extremely powerful at explaining almost everything that happens. The main reason your view seems more accurate is because it is more familiar. If you had grown up in a different culture, the view that you have now would probably seem foreign and foolish to you.

Perhaps at some point in your life you have actually questioned the accuracy of the view of reality that you inherited, and you confirmed your belief, changed it, or were left undecided. But even then, you probably only considered the alternatives that you were exposed to by your experiences and education.

After you realize that you inherited your view for reality, the second tool you can use to find the truth is the law of non-contradiction. As I explained in this lesson, we all use the law of non-contradiction, and without the law of non-contradiction, it is impossible to know anything at all.

The law of non-contradiction allows us to reject ideas that contradict any certain knowledge we have. It also allows us to reject any ideas that are self-contradictory. For example, you know there isn’t any such thing as a round square, because squares cannot be round, and if you made a square round, it wouldn’t be a square anymore. Any idea that is self-contradictory is impossible.

In the next lessons I will show you that two of the three views of reality are self-contradictory, and that they contradict what you know from experience and reason. The remaining view is the only one that does not contract what you know from reason and experience—although there will be some apparent contradictions that we will need to look at.

If you already have an accurate view of reality, the next lessons will help you understand the rational basis for your beliefs. If you have an inaccurate view of the world, the next lessons may help you escape from a life of pain that comes from following an empty life purpose. Either way, you have everything to gain.

As you listen to the next episodes, I challenge you to take an honest look at these three views of reality, and decide for yourself which one matches the reality you see.

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