I was at a philosophy meetup a few weeks back, and the fellow I was having a conversation with seemed to be on another plane of reality. He couldn’t get past the fact Truth or even the idea of seeking it was some sort of machination of the brain. I couldn’t get anywhere with him because our assumptions were so different. And even if I could make my premises explicit, he just saw that as another code-error of the brain. So basically he explained me and himself away, and in the end it didn’t matter that we were there. I could have just as well stayed home and watched Netflix.
I get it that some consider life to be a closed system. It’s a sad disposition to be in, but most do live in an ordinary consciousness with a worldview that is less than ordinary. And while we can find out or know all kinds of facts about anything or everything, we may never discover what anything or everything is. So while we can be ignorant about a lot of things, the real issue is the fundamental ignorance of the totality.
Bob offered up a great aphorism recently: “Things are only knowable in part because they are unknowable in full.” The mind can know things, but it can’t KNOW the THING. The only reason the mind can know things, is that the THING that it can't know is KNOWING itself. And since KNOWING is infinite, the THING (which is not a thing) is unknowable by a finite mind.
Got that?! And while we can taste the THING, we will never swallow it whole!
Even experientialists are wrong to believe they can nail it down. Yes, some of us have sat on zafus and taken our ayahuasca to get a glimpse of the THING, but there’s still something amiss with this approach. Frank Merrell-Wolff says, “The Pragmatists are right in asserting that formal knowledge is not enough to determine effective or final Truth, but they are wrong in asserting that such Truth, or the knowledge of it, must depend upon experience. On the other hand, the rational Idealists are right in maintaining the effective Truth must be absolute and, therefore cannot be derived from experience, which of necessity must be finite. But they are wrong in so far as they claim to be able to establish this Truth by formal demonstration alone. The effective establishment of this Truth requires ‘Knowledge through Identity,’ i.e. a direct Recognition on the level of Infinity, which is never attainable by any expansion of experience alone.”
And since we are all individuals with differences, “every expression is at best but a facet reflecting the Truth as near as may be.”
As such, we can’t get absolute Truth in a relative world. We are mediators to Truth, but never the possessors of it.