What is "truth"

Mountainpainter said:
How do we find it? How do we DISCERN what is real and what is not?
Thoughts please
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It would help to zero in on specifics. Some areas are inherently more fuzzy than others. Sometimes only probabilities can be reached with any confidence. Some things are only true conditionally. So what exactly do you want to know?

When you ask what is real, what do you mean? Are you asking if the device you are using to post on this forum is real? Are you asking if logical and moral criteria are real?
 
The severest and most frequent violation of spiritual law that is so often overlooked by human beings is not living in truth. It is self-understood that a person should be honest and should not lie. But lying to oneself is often infinitely more dangerous and harmful than lying to others. Why is it more dangerous? Because when you lie to others, at least you are aware of it; you know it. Thus you are a step nearer to truth than when you lie to yourself. When you lie to yourself, you do not realize it, not because you cannot, but because you do not want to! So you have completely turned away from truth. That is a very grave violation as it surrounds you with a dark wall behind which you must be unhappy, quite apart from the outer conflicts which the violation creates for you sooner or later. Behind the wall (defensiveness) you are lonely and lost. The only way you can find your way into the light is by tearing down the wall and looking at what is behind it, even if what you find is unpleasant.

You know that your actions and even your thoughts are not sufficient to permit the pure emanation of divine substance to penetrate; your lightforce cannot be liberated as long as your feelings do not correspond to spiritual laws. If you constantly decide to use your ego, you become more and more bound and chained. For the more you live in divine law, the freer you must become, and the more you break divine law, the more enslaved you must become. People who do not recognize their hidden motives/desire cannot conduct their lives freely.

Let us suppose a person sincerely desires to love a fellow-creature and desires to do so because he knows that it is right. This desire is in the person’s outer will. After becoming quiet and consulting the inner will, the person will find out that the inner will does not conform with the outer one. To find out such a discrepancy is extremely important, for how can you control yourself if you do not know what is within you? By controlling yourself, I certainly do not mean suppressing anything, but rather holding life’s reins firmly in one’s hands. How can you cure a wrong current if you do not discover it first? But can you do really good to other people as long as your impure currents force you into thinking things that are not according to truth? No. You may be able to perform a good act and consider this a good deed. Yet it is not really a good deed if it is not supported by purified feelings.

What is the work? To master your lower self/ego is the work. You have to learn and to distinguish between right and wrong, between truth and untruth by truth’s own merit and not because you hear it from an authority (C) and therefore easy to believe. How many people accept something said by a respected authority and yet reject the very same words if spoken by someone whom they look down on! That does not mean they are developed. Development means independence, the ability to select truth from untruth. You must accept what you hear for its own value, and therefore it is good that you believe these ideas/inspirations come to you from someone on your own level in real life.
 
Easy.

Truth is what is Objectively Real.

Our job is to clean the lens of perception, to network, to contrast and compare and thus build up an internal map of the Objective Reality around us.

One of the things I like about the C's message is the confirmation that Objective Reality is, well, Objectively Real.

This IS an article of faith, and that's fine by me. We all need a Religion, and mine is the belief in Objective Reality.

Believing this allows me to side step the swampy shadow world of two-bit philosophers who use word games and mental buggeryboo to hide from the work of dealing with life.

It's a huge load off! It's an eternal spring of energy and solace!

Having some jackalope who tries to drag me down into their swamp of perpetual befuddlement is easy to flick away because, guess what? The premise that, "Oooooh, reality isn't really there. You can't proooooove it! Everything is subjective! Everybody's personal reality is right!" is just plain navel-gazing foolishness.

As I build out my map of Objective Reality, I become stronger and more powerful. More than once I have, from a deep place of contentment and certainty, brushed aside frail philosopher trolls, leaving them wondering. Until that point, they were able to batter the sanity of others, crush the self-confidence of the uneducated! This is their special power; to dissolve other's sense of reality, to cast them into doubt and fear. To defeat others!

But.., why, oh, why does it not work on him (me)?

I had one such feverish fool become obsessed with me after we had a long discussion and he discovered that none of his tricks worked. I had reasonable answers to all his bullshit. I was accomplished in science knowledge. In reason. In all sorts of areas. I wasn't hiding behind dogma or simplicity or stubborn ignorance. I thought about his questions, found them interesting, and pointed out their weaknesses. He was baffled! "That guy is really confident. He is happy! He is more powerful than me! How does he do that? I must follow him like a lost lamb!"

Psh. Sorry, bub! Brushing off such wraiths is also just as easy as blowing away their swamp gas. The discussion (or series of them) was the lesson. Now go work with what I've explained and leave me alone.

Of course.., the path to truth does involve knowing that your internal map isn't going to be perfect, that you need to constantly update it and accept that your assumptions may be wrong. But when you know that you're building on God's firmament, you've got solid ground to push off from with each step.

I found my faith, baby! I believe that Objective Reality exists, and gosh, it sure seems to work out nicely whenever I apply that base assumption.

Life is Religion.
 
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Re objective truth. My assumption is that there is indeed an objective truth that lies (pun intended) outside of our human subjective experience. It may even be accessible and discernible from time to time due to varying circumstances but it is beyond our absolute control. Like gravity acting in a certain way when it decides to.

We all try to figure it out. But, in the final analysis, ya pays yer money, ya takes yer chance and ya rolls the dice.
 
And like it was said: you may not find out until later in tomorrow’s box score because if we could absolutely figure it out in advance, there would be no need for faith in the equation.
 
If the objective truth is that we are actually in an experiment, then the implied variability of that scenario means we are in the process of creating whatever the objective truth turns out to be.
 
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