♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦
Topic #53
What I Know To Be True
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It’s easy to say that what you know is true is subjective, but truth isn’t subjective. It is truth. Truth is an absolute. We don’t have to like it. It doesn’t have feelings. It’s a universal concept, not an entity or what not.
When I saw the writing prompt at the beginning of last week, I agreed to write on it, hoping that I would be able to come up with something in the meantime. It goes without saying that I’m as busy as a writer can be and the level of output I do is not lessening anytime soon. There simply is a lot of work to do as a writer. But, I don’t want to write about that. I don’t want to write on philosophical things either. Certainly, I don’t want to discuss the political in this particular article.
Philosophically, finding the truth and claiming to know truth are very touchy things. Does experience in life give you a vantage point from which to view and understand whatever you’re examining and arrive at some truth?
In some cases, I think that it does. Neither do you have to be a certain age or creed. The realization of truth comes upon you at any time. For instance, when I was a girl, I was on summer vacation, maybe about 10 or 12 years old. Laying on the couch, between dreamland and waking, I watched Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951). This animation is my favorite to this day (along with Cinderella, 1950). The artistry still moves me, as well as the stories.
While I watched, I was rather suddenly taken with the idea that one day, I would be dead—gone. I remember the initial panic threading through my heart at the thought. It felt like someone pulled a shroud over me from that moment forward. I regarded life with a fairly different lens, a darker lens.
The truth that we all die is about the only thing of which I am absolutely certain, regardless of how science seeks ways to make the inevitable a question mark. Even if science developed a therapy, it would not become available to average persons, and, the other truth I learned over the years, humanity would commit terrible crimes to keep things this way. As absolute as death is, humanity’s cruelty is also a given. No, the actions do not have to be committed by every human or even the majority to make this statement true. There will always be someone who wants to abuse other people, and then there will always be those they stir up to help them.
The awareness of a shrinking time table, or expiration date, on my life affected me in interesting ways. Not all are healthy, for sure. I am very driven to complete tasks in short order. This drive is a double-edged sword: keeping me on task but a great source for stress. Burning the proverbial candle at both ends has been written about quite frequently, so I don’t think I need to talk much about the repercussions there. It is enough to state that I’m probably stealing away time from myself by running at full throttle all the time.
Another affect: I suck down knowledge like alcoholics suck down beer. Hey, if there is a hereafter, your mind is all that is going with you, so I plan to pack it full. The research of the esoteric and occult are favorite hobbies of mine. Am I looking for answers to defy death? Not at all. Instead, I want to learn more about what it means—what comes next. I’m both skeptical of religion and skeptical of the idea it is an ultimate end. The complexity of the universe, the existence of our minds, and some other things tell me there is far more to our reality than we know.
That is fascinating to me! It may read a bit dark to others, but I rather think it’s put me in an interesting frame of mind from which to write. And, it really explains my Trailokya Trilogy.
Let’s hop on over and see what the other authors have to say on the topic of truth…