Pathways #2: “The Truth Path”

General Articles

(A ground)

Nature ← → Nurture

Innocence and experience← →Experience and innocence

Philosophy of mind and self

Eastern philosophy← →Western theology

Enlightenment: Ancient and Modern← → Modern and Ancient

Materialism and spiritualism/Spiritualism and materialism

Science and religion← →Religion and science

The public sphere and the personal space← →The personal space and the public sphere

The psychic and the social← →The social and the psychic

Prolegomena for a philosophy of Self and Other as this concerns Truth

Institutional democracy versus populism/Populism versus institutional democracy

Egoism and egotism

Liberty and freedom/Freedom and liberty

Politics is always personal (Community and politics/Politics and community)

Governance and government → Government and governance

Necessary life experience

Poverty, personal affliction, social alienation, chaotic and crowded spaces ← → Good health, nice things, clean and private spaces

Rejection, humiliation, and/or failure ← → Significant goals and enduring/persistent “dreams” and hopes for one’s own or another’s future

((Transcendental meditations))

God and the Either/Or

Christianity versus reincarnation

Necessary cultural experience

Collectivism Individualism

Values ← → Rights

Inherited knowledges Creative evolution

Antagonists, antipathists, and pathogens along the Truth Path: dishonesty, hypocrisy, hegemony, complicity, duplicity, bias, false consciousness, bad faith.

This month’s article was made possible by last month’s contribution, which was provided by one of our staff writers at F.L. Ternskie. It wasn’t the usual thing we do here, which might be described as cross-disciplinary work in the Arts that focuses mainly on contemporary problems for people in their everyday lives and concerns in our late-modern world. Last month’s contribution was not a study, but original work whose author had developed a path over many years that combined philosophy, spiritualities, spiritual paths, and texts of human history and experience for a unique pathway that promised to sensitize people to develop, enhance, and enrich personal and aesthetic awareness. Would you believe that someone grasped hold of the concept of creating a pathway from the wisdom they possessed, someone from the public this time, and that this person was generous and courageous enough to contact us and share this pathway? Of course, I then said in response and on behalf of us all at F.L. Ternskie: We don’t get to put our own name on our work. We only get to share it here. At least, this is the way we do it for now—who knows if there will come a time when all our writer’s identities will be revealed? So your contribution would be something of the order of a selfless gift to humanity, perhaps even a sacrifice if you should be forgoing the kindness of a stranger that, at some point, would save you if you were only to tell them you were the one to have shared what helped them and they believed you. They can’t possibly believe you if we don’t put down your name here, in the space where it was first and exclusively shared. Are you sure you still want to share it with us?
They were aware of the condition already when they contacted us and they had already thought about it. They are generous, but I’ll venture that they might also see these as especially difficult times for people and humanity. So there it is above, what this month’s contributor calls “The Truth Path.” And we would not be sharing it if we ourselves didn’t believe in its potential value for other people. Like last month’s pathway, we conducted an interview through e-mail which will provide a helpful overview of this new pathway, after which they will present a brief introduction that will lend greater focus to what they believe will help people grasp some of the more challenging or finer points, such special wisdom as only someone much further along a way can offer to illuminate and demystify what may be obscure or even treacherous for someone just starting out and possessing little knowledge or experience of this particular way.

FL: Thank you so very much for having the courage to share and for being so very generous in the great effort you are now making with the wisdom that you now do share. I wonder first of all how you feel about providing something that can so deeply impact people if they lend it their own heart and mind. Can you talk a bit about what made you feel you needed to write and create this pathway of yours? I want the reader to understand that that’s no small task. The last pathway we posted was the culmination of thirty years’ work and life experience. And yours? How long have you been thinking about this path?

C.D.: First of all, I’d like to say that I felt relieved in my decision by not having to share my identity! That was not something that would have deterred me, but it allowed me to offer all that I can with utmost sincerity and without the fear that others would think there was “something in it for me,” for as many of us know, I’m sure, that when some people think that way, they feel that whatever is shared has already been shaped by that. I can honestly say that, like the individual who shared the last pathway, I don’t expect to be paid anything, I haven’t been paid anything, and I am offering this only because I think I want people to be thankful to “someone out there” and to believe that “people out there can help,” if that person is or will be helped by this in some way. It’s important for people to think well of “humanity” in the sense of “a lot of people we don’t yet know, many of whom might be good people” and we seldom are able or willing to exercise this act of judgment due to how we might tend to feel at this time in our history. So it made a lot of sense and felt like something concrete I could do. Certainly your staff writer’s work showed me the way—will I follow his path now, having set out my own? Perhaps I will…You say he took nearly thirty years. I’ve known my pathway for many years also, but I’ll tell you, it occurred to me “all at once.” In answer to your question, I’ve been thinking that humanity needs to grasp that there is something such as truth that is just as real, just as significant, and yes, that is just as “true” as anything they themselves need to regard as true, meaningful, and real for themselves. I’ve been thinking about this for my whole life! People often said where I was growing up that the truth is what is most convenient for ourselves and differs among us so much and so often that all we can expect in life is to need to fight for our own truth. So I came to the view that humans tend to believe that “belief” is “truer” than “anything else that can be true” because I believe they become “too caught up” in what they believe they need to be true for themselves rather than grasping what truth actually is in terms of what may actually be real, significant, or meaningful. Also, what can be real is what truth can be for us from what others need to be regarded as true for them—this is a line of truth that opens onto morality and ethics–which includes what we all might recognize as true of who we are or can become, what we all need to at some point be, or as what needs to be true so that we can all share in what we all tend to value so that we can all feel appreciated and from there, get along better or simply get along. We could all go on fighting of course, but…we all know that we mustn’t think we should unless we want to “do all of humanity in.” Truth and what’s true are significant conditions in this way that we all understand what is needed and we all become part of what we know is true so that we can know one another and respect one another and then help one another, or at least not interfere with each other. This comes down to shared experience, but we need to know more about what obscures truth as a factor in our social, psychic, and communal development, and what will aid us in this development toward grasping what can be true and is best for us and others like ourselves in a socially and psychically interconnected human world. So that’s what I’ve been thinking about my whole life, along with what are some broad problems with there being a concept of truth that some can benefit from merely from eroding the belief, or the foundation, if you will, of there being even a possibility of truth and from there using their power or influence over others in those others’ state of doubt and uncertainty, because in taking away the belief in truth as a concept (yes, in truth as a concept!) that must inevitably become something held in common as knowledge and that everyone must benefit from for it to be considered valuable, they block a person’s access to their own resources as a rationally sensing and intelligently feeling member of any community. If you are disconnected from the concept of truth as I see it (from truth being something significantly involving, affecting, or including another), or even simply from your own truth as you have yet to discover it, then you can be manipulated into giving all of yourself over to another’s truth which is rational and convincing enough to compel you do so (perhaps connected to the attainment of wealth, status, or influence as the only possible meaningful “truths,” or perhaps to “mastery of true religion”), but then, you’ll be not just stripped of all the knowledge you can inherit of yourself and all the feeling you can possess from your own experience about your truth, but made alien to it and to higher awareness and real truth as you can know it itself. I will probably talk more on all that later! (lol)

FL: Thank you. You also answered the question I perhaps should have asked, which was, what is your own “experience of truth” that qualifies you to so confidently set out something like a Path of Truth? I’m sure you are aware that people today and in our modern history might be suspicious, sceptical, or even appalled that such an endeavour be attempted, much less shared with others. But you have shared your “experience of truth” as they might know it, and dare I say, you likely would feel sympathetic to them in perhaps their having been “stripped” of a sense of truth that might not only be native to them, but come to be something meaningful, significant, or even sacred for them to attain knowledge through it of themselves. I now note that you chose to go out of your way perhaps to invoke so-called “true religion.” It seems that you regard the normal culture and view of truth as something of a ground of conflict and as naturally “contentious,” but as for belief, it seems you’d regard a popular view or consensus as something like: “oh, we won’t regard that as anything to do with what society and our culture require us to see as a concept of truth.”

C.D.: Yes, I see people maintaining “their own truth” in terms of what they “believe” or perhaps “need” or “want” for themselves. It is very “materialistic” in the sense that the truth is something they themselves possess as something almost concrete, potentially tangible, and that they feel they should keep safe for themselves from others. I’m not suggesting that they start to “share” it—at least not this truth. But, certainly, their view of truth is as something that is wholly personal, to be kept out of others’ grasp or reach, and yet it is the very opposite, or it is contrary, to a more pervasive Truth that is socially constructed and that is actually real and always “happening” in society, that is something that really does affect their own life and the lives and existences of other people. In a sense, they both have their own truth while a more subliminal and pervasive Truth is something that still exists as what is happening beyond and to themselves, perhaps even shaping their own personal truths, a Truth that is shaping our everyday world and yet that we can probably only read about in the news and in books.

FL: Wow, that is very interesting and feels intuitively spiritual, and yet it seems also that this Truth permeating our common or shared reality may be something sinister or indifferent to ourselves and our own possible truths.

C.D. It is and is not independent of our own human reality. It is something to do with politics and economics, and it can be something to do with our psychologies, and it is something to do with our social histories, our social world, and our own beliefs and opinions wherever these come from. It is all “things” that shape us, our cultures, our relations to and our experiences of our cultures, and our views of and our relations with the people in our communities. The more we become aware of this Truth, the more alienated we may become. But the more we learn about it, the more able we are to develop our own truth in relation and in awareness and even in knowledge of the greater world that many others do not see or observe but that we can then work with for the sake of forming our own perspectives and values. So, it can be bewildering to learn of it—it can be quite challenging or difficult–but then it can also help to illuminate our very own way—for it has shaped and will continue to shape our own truth as something more natural and intuitive for us even if no one else is ever aware of it. Of course, I said that our personal truth, the one we are not aware we desire or believe we possess, is something we tend to feel, something we are probably taught, that we should keep hidden. We probably needn’t hide this discovered and uncovered, this higher-order personal, truth as we develop it because we are aware of how we are inferring it from within our world and we are aware of shaping it in our own life. We probably won’t be able to. It will become more intimately part of our social and psychic identity as we live in our community and in society, so we will learn when to share it and when not to share it, as socialization has intended for us to learn our entire lives.

FL: I’d like to move on to the content of the pathway itself, to how you have presented its elements. You’ve used pairings of opposites or complementary pairings entirely. I find that fascinating. And you relate or link the pairings with the use of arrows and forward slashes. Can you explain the use of the pairing—it is all you use. And can you provide a brief guide to your symbols that convey the logic of connection between the terms in the pairings?

C.D.: Absolutely. This is something essential for people to know before starting out. First of all, I started with several pairings and then I decided that I didn’t want to worry about people not understanding a bunch of elements arranged according to different rules. So all of the elements are set out as pairings. Pairings are easy as it is easy to see why two terms are paired together. This means that people won’t get caught up in and confused over what the elements themselves mean—they are simply pairings and all that a set of elements means is the pairing of them and the logic of connection between the paired terms.
As for the logic of dynamic connection itself, the arrows either go forward in direction, expressing a progression or order of succession, or go toward both terms, linking them in equivalence and dynamic interaction and evolving change within and between the two terms. So, first, when a change by way of succession is expressed with a forward arrow, the second and later term always supersedes the first and earlier term. This is important. There is a developmental or pro-generative change and also an appropriation of control or agency happening. One term or pairing of terms is being displaced or absorbed and then taken over by the next term or pairing of terms. This is occurring in time and in the world also—this change tends to happen going forward from one state in the world to the next. When the arrows are linking the two terms together, it is in an equivalence, and the terms or pairings of terms are meant to be seen as existing within the wayfarer together as they are learned and experienced and so to be in dynamic or even evolutionary change within the wayfarer by way of their relationship and through their connection.
Forward slashes are pretty straightforward—this expresses equivalence and equivalence is the most significant logical attribute within the pairing. The terms themselves aren’t interchangeable though—they are still opposites or complements to one another. To know truth with respect to either, you should know both terms and the equivalence as this pertains to the most significant difference between them.
One thing that I’ll add that you didn’t mention is that a lot of the pairings involve reversals of order of predominance, the first term becoming the second term in the second ordering of the pairing. The first term is the primary or predominant term, like the subject in a sentence that does the action, and the second term is subordinated to it or maybe simply the object of it, the recipient of the action of the subject. So when a term is first, it inscribes a place or relation for the second term in terms of itself. The first is, in a sense, primary in any apposite relations between the two terms. This order of the two terms often becomes reversed in the succeeding pairing.

FL: Thank you again. That’s very helpful. You’ve referred in an earlier e-mail between us to the various groupings of pairings with their headings as “stagings.” Now maybe we can do an example with one of the stagings that might cause some confusion for some people. And I don’t need you yet to talk about everything in that staging, or the staging itself as a whole, but just one set of terms because this set of terms stands out. It is unlike all the other sets of terms both formally and in terms of being set out with a highly provocative declarative statement. Can you talk a little bit about how you would approach the set “Politics is always personal (Community and politics Politics and community)”?

C.D.: Yes, politics is always personal. Someone might say, “Well, this isn’t personal, it’s political.” But politics is personal, always, in several respects. First, someone may be acting on a personal crusade for the interests of some group that they themselves want to please, appeal to themselves, or support. I see that as personal—that’s personal politics because one is favouring an agenda out of one’s own feelings of what is desirable for oneself, even if that desire is simply to please those who stand to benefit from one’s lending support to the agenda. Second, we’ve seen political actors disfavour others without realizing that they might be exercising a grudge or a commitment to see someone else fail. They may see this as “good” in so far as the “other side” is “bad.” We’ll get to personal history’s role in this kind of political agency. But the failure to see this as highly personal enables something beneficial to transpire for those who will then have a greater chance at succeeding. Favouring and disfavouring can be a matter of personal preference, and granting privilege to a second party who are then advantaged can be a way of ensuring advantage for oneself with what one has to gain by being in a better position to weaken or defeat a third party. And this is personal in that it can be influenced by personal history, psychology, preference, prejudice or bias, personal belief, or simply (as we’ve seen) revenge. Thirdly, sometimes it just is personal. I’ve seen that, especially in these cases, actors are even more likely to say, “Well, it’s not personal. It’s just politics.” Personal history influences the decisions a political actor will make at any time regardless of what they feel they need to claim for their decision. It is certainly in the interests of themselves and their perceived political legitimacy to claim they are under no bias. Every political actor is “for” some things and “against” other things and every political actor has beliefs about what is right and wrong, better or worse, along the path of human change in history. Personal history influences or affects personal judgment, and politics involves judgment, period. All aspects of judgment, including what’s personal, tend to be at work, at some point, in the actor’s mind and heart. This is the Truth Path after all, and it’s one thing to be afraid of this truth and another thing altogether to deny that it’s the truth. I don’t think it can ever be denied honestly. Personal preference and bias will always bear a highly significant effect in political decision-making, probably all the more, the less aware the decision-maker is of its influence on themselves.
The set of pairings that accompanies this statement, Community and politicsPolitics and Community involves succession through a reversal of terms. The terms, “Community and politics,” is intended to show how one’s sense and experience of community shapes one’s understanding and view of politics through the desire or the need to establish one’s community as a politically legitimate and respected entity or to establish oneself within one’s community as a politically informed and interested actor and agent for the advancement of the aims and interests of one’s fellow community members and one’s community. One’s sense of community may or may not become political in a strict sense, but regardless of how intentionally or explicitly “political” one’s sense and experience of community becomes, one will likely grasp how important politics is both to the place of oneself and to the place and role of others in one’s community; to one’s hopes for one’s community’s place within a greater world; but also to how the apparent differences between one community’s politics and another’s comes to shape one’s own sense of preference for one community over another or one’s desire and efforts to belong to one community over another. The idea of community and belonging in one’s community shapes one’s idea of meaningful politics and likely makes politics something that concretely matters to oneself as a member of one’s preferred community.
So that’s “Community and politics.” What about “Politics and community,” the pairing which succeeds it? The succession of this latter pairing as a reversal of the former pairing indicates that, as one becomes more politically aware and involved in one’s community in a more politically interested and intentioned way, then politics itself comes to appear as a discrete shaper and influencer of the practices, beliefs, views, and actions of all actors and agents who participate within their community. It starts out as partly a matter of perception: “We are now more politically involved.” But the perception then becomes the reality. This is because one does not come to this state of political awareness alone, but rather, everyone does, and the effect is that the perception of being a politically aware and interested observer generates the reality of an entire community of politically interested and intentioned agents. “Politics” becomes a primary vehicle as a “mode of practice” in which “community interests” become influenced and shaped and by which limited resources are directed toward the satisfaction of “the community’s” needs and desires. Hence, “Community and politicsPolitics and community”.

FL: Thank you! I think that is beautifully explained and, as presented, important for people to seriously consider and even to know, if they find that they feel the need to accept it as true about themselves or their own community. But now the last question I have is, can you explain the staging itself, “Prolegomena toward a philosophy of Self and Other as this concerns truth”? I know people will be confused over the pairings of terms under this staging’s primary subject, which is “Self and Other.” But I will note now that you have set out this staging as consisting of prolegomena toward a philosophy as such a philosophy would concern (a concept of) truth. Can you please explain how you consider “Self and Other” as relating to the content of this staging with respect to the staging’s rightful place in the Truth Pathway?

C.D.: I’m glad you bring this up here. I will be discussing “Governance and government  Government and governance” in more depth in the essay component of this article. I will say, however, that this staging is likely the most counter-intuitive. But social reality as we learn it, or as we choose not to learn it, is itself counter-intuitive in many ways. This is one of the truths of socialization, that many people simply choose not to go through it, or they choose not to consent to it in any straightforward, “prescribed” way. Also, the truth is, society, many will learn, is actually authoritarian—many people simply feel that that is what “works best” to keep people honest or to ensure that people follow the rules. So, in response to your question, these prolegomena are the stepping stones if you will toward “straightening,” in terms of our own sense of our naturally occurring experience, what seems so difficult to align in our expectations due to their frequent disappointment—that is, “straightening” our sense of society as “okay” and “worthy of ourselves” (which we need to “go along with” as citizens) in view of how humans know the standards by which they should treat others and yet are so often callously indifferent toward this (and toward “us”) in practice or action and in view of how even basic social interaction tends to “mess up” or complicate or bewilder people rather than ease their natural, normal, or simply highly common anxieties or concerns. So that is what I am aiming at by making “Self and Other” the subject of these prolegomena with respect to a “concept of truth.” The truth is, Self and Other are problematized by the contents of this staging and that problematization is the truer concern at the heart of the reality of our actual or real social and psychological experience. Cerrtainly, there is a lot to do with politics and even government in this staging. Instititutions. But we actually rely highly on institutional orders and rules, on doctrines and conventions, throughout our development and we are socio-culturally conditioned to at least understand ourselves as part of a “society” of “Selves and Others” who are all equally and inalienably entitled to fair treatment, just outcomes, and respect for our liberty. “Egotism” (which may become or merely be “narcissism”) is unacceptable, we are taught, but “Egoism” is fine, at least in a culture where individualism is acceptably necessary for us to grow as unique individuals and to meet our own personal needs. However, few people actually know the difference between these two terms as this difference actually concerns themselves as persons, so it is entirely nature that ultimately decides which of those two they become, usually without their knowing, and perhaps there is a lot less that other people and “society” can do about this seemingly “small problem” than any of us would care to realize.

FL: Thank you so very much! It has been a real pleasure! I truly hope you will share your work with us again in the future!

The Truth Pathway: The Calling of Truth

Calling it “The Truth Path” was meant to initially invoke the notion of “the true path” but then to signal that the path presented here, “The Truth Path,” is not intended to be, and does not claim to be, that, “the true path,” but is content rather to be regarded as “a true path.”   It actually happens to be a path for truths. This path is meant to foreground truth as that which it intends to unearth and/or yield to awareness—to yield “truth” as and in itself and for whatever purpose for the wayfarer its appearance, at that time and in that instance, may serve. I have developed a space in which truth may appear, true truth for oneself, and I believe that this space also allows one to engage with these truths by way of one’s own personal engagement with what one encounters by way of the content along this path.
The Truth Path as a whole consists of four stagings, one set of interrelated elements for transcendental meditations, the ground upon which the truth pathway for us ourselves can rest, plus the antagonists, antipathists, and pathogens to truth. The Ground consists of two components—”Nature <–> Nurture” and “Innocence and Experience <–> Experience and Innocence.”   I’ll explain these briefly because this is the place from which one sets out and it is also the path’s intended holding position or place of recovery whenever one feels the need to reconnect with something like first principles or one’s beginnings. One can return to the ground as often as one may wish and it can provide a sustaining and apposite rhythm to one’s position at any time along the path. Nature and nurture are likely familiar concepts when viewed together, likely transcending culture and socio-economic circumstance. I suppose that people would tend to believe that it is a matter of perspective what a person privileges as decisive or most significant in the development of a human being. Some think that nature has to be regarded and appreciated as the dominant shaper of a person, and perhaps this is true in many circumstances and where certain situations arise to make the understanding of nature especially important for a person in “our” society and world. Knowing nature, knowing what is “simply nature’s own” in living beings and the living world, is required for a person to ensure their own survival in circumstances that will be ”naturally” unsympathetic, mercilessly competitive, personally challenging, and even callously indifferent to them as unique living beings. It is Nature’s purpose, it is Nature’s nature, merely to ensure that Nature itself survives, unsubordinated to anything beyond itself unless that place for it is merely in the interests of Nature’s survival, with Nature being whatever Nature needs to be toward this purpose as of and for itself. Others see nurture as something that should be regarded and related to as “far more necessary” precisely because of the circumstances under Nature like those just described. If human society needs more of anything, it is nurture, for it is only nurture that can make an individual “less animal,” less determined by the instinct for its own survival at whatever cost to others, and “more human” (whatever that can be) where others and Society are concerned—that is to say, only nurture is what can allow humans to see nature as the poor and even potentially pathogenic parent that it inevitably becomes when blindly served and left unchecked and unformed. Furthermore, nurture can be transformative of human souls and minds and it is this firstly, that we are changeable and improvable, that our species has always required itself seeing as true of our nature wherever our understanding of others and of “higher norms,” whenever our compassion and our sympathies, were needed above all else. And yet, if a person doesn’t know nature, then they will not know why nurture becomes so vital and so profoundly meaningful, and how their own resources of love, understanding, and knowledge need to be administered effectively for another’s growth and well-being. We can go on and on, back and forth, between nature and nurture.   Hence the arrow indicating the dynamic interrelation, and even, at some point, the interdependence between them, with humanity requiring one and then also, as it will turn out, the other. What comes of the truth is that the truth is bound up in nature and nurture. So much of what is true appears within sight of the interrelationship between these two “forces,” “conditions,” “factors,” “guides,” “texts,” or whatever the prospect of their connection within us may become, in shaping and guiding our own and others’ human reality. You cannot escape the truth being bound in them for we are bound by and to them. The truth becomes bound to and within us in the changes we undergo, and this pairing of terms actually does significant justice to the substantial meaning in those changes in respect of ourselves and others.
Someone once said, “you cannot step in the same river twice.” It seems that they were talking about the River of Time, but this is a good way to think about the opposition consisting of “Innocence and Experience<–>Experience and Innocence.” In the first pairing, Innocence is first, primary and determining in the relation. It precedes and so it is the subject in the pairing with experience as the recipient of its apposite significance—one could even say it takes “experience” as an object of itself.   This doesn’t quite do “Innocence” justice though for what it is in itself as “innocence,” for one who is truly innocent (who is lacking experience) will not yet truly know the adage, “you cannot step in the same river twice,” even if they have heard it said. And if one has “heard” it, then one does not necessarily know it intuitively, and one does not yet know it from the perspective of “experience,” so one also cannot yet know it in terms of one’s understanding of one’s own innocence. Of course, one will be told that one is “innocent,” and like that phrase, one will know what these words signify, but one may not truly apprehend how greatly this state and condition of inexperience is shaping the very ground of one’s being where and how one presently is, how that word, “innocence,” describes being entirely of one’s own-most nature with this “state of nature” as the primary and determinate medium for one’s perception and apprehension of one’s experiences.   One hasn’t yet experienced “stepping in the same river twice,” so one sees things “only one way,” with no basis in oneself for comparing two like things in terms of some significant difference owing to one’s experience of them each and both. So the experience one has of innocence is that the unfamiliar and the tender and delicate membrane of one’s own references and memories has not yet had to deal with what is unlike that which it can figure, grasp, apprehend, and perhaps merely think or assume it knows (although many who are innocent will simply “know” that they “do not truly know”). Innocence knows all that it can only through direct experience of reality and memory as something isomorphic or analogous to the same thing. So, the determining condition and state of innocence over and against experience is a highly weak and delicate kind of power, and innocence inevitably somehow always seems ready to come apart and give way to experience. This allows a truth to “happen” for a person simply through the vehicle of one’s senses, and of one’s developing memory, and the reference to like and unlike as of a past that one eventually learns one must somehow surrender (or make a great effort to resist) and, in this new relation, in this new body, mind, and changing self, one nonetheless must serve what one encounters with greater knowledge and perhaps even better understanding for the present and future.
One does inevitably step in the same river twice and one recognizes that the experience is different each time. First-time experiences become relatable to other experiences and those experiences reflect back on the first time, and what one knew about that experience seems to be rather bare of real substance compared to what one possesses of these more recent experiences. One’s self feels a little “weightier”—could this be what one might recognize in one’s “physical body” as the expression of one’s very “soul”? One perhaps feels something like “more self-possessed,” and one thinks of the adages that one once thought one knew, and one realizes, “Oh, I didn’t know actually what they meant then—because now I know them. I know I know them.”   A reversal has taken place and “Experience” now occupies the position of the subject and “Innocence” is something more or less in the background, as something observed or seen through the lense of what is not it. But certainly it is not simply an “object” of Experience, but something reflective, something that resonates as itself a significant aspect of the soul in its own right, at least as seen from the perspective of one’s own Experience. It is something that can even be luminary, that might characterize or lend a special quality to the lives, states, opinions, and conditions of others.   Do we ever wish we could attain or perhaps merely grasp a state or sense of innocence from within our own experiences while still possessing the wisdom we have gained from that initial, that first and “untinctured,” state of our own nature? That would be what we seek, would it not? Our own natural ground of who we are in our very essence? Why does experience lead us away from this? And then why do we feel called back to “our innocence,” meaning “our very essence”?   The truth of our world is manifest, is “churned up,” if you will, by dint of this interaction between these two states, with the earlier state of opposition playing upon the opposition’s succeeding state, and sometimes, the truth of us can only be grasped when we realize that earlier state somehow in ourselves or in our understanding of another.
To summarize the ground, we are all in possession of it, sometimes naturally, sometimes by less direct means or media. For one, we all have experienced the grip Nature itself possesses upon and over human beings and humanity, and we all possess knowledge of having been, or even of occasionally still being, in this grip in the world. We also know nurture as a prescriptive and even sometimes a cure for helping ourselves or others regard what is true about us as not simply what is “for ourselves in our immediate needs and wants”—for this actually tends to become an oppression—but as what we can realize through ourselves by directing our efforts further forward in time, “toward a better world,” even toward a better universe as this may be required, one that will include us as we long to feel and to be included, as we desire to feel like we belong and to actually belong.   This scarcely seems possible in the human world many of us occasionally encounter, but we still possess it nonetheless—or perhaps we are relieved to be in its possession.   So this is “Nurture” “cutting through” “the “blinding pains” of what is at times “our nature,” or of “Nature in and as its own will for itself.”   Secondly, we are in possession of experience when we might be most innocent and we learn that we may not truly be in possession of real knowledge or genuine understanding as we become more experienced. This is a critical truth in our development as a member of our community, of human society, and as a “citizen of human history.”   History, where it has broken with reason or with any rational sense of what is just or acceptable, is less likely to repeat itself through us in a state of experience that is cognizant of what it meant or means to be innocent, and innocence through us can become our understanding of others in their state of ignorance or inexperience. I needn’t say any more about how “true truths for us” can become manifest in these two mutually sustaining and highly dynamic (living!) oppositions. They live through us and the truth appears possessed of something like substance. It comes to bear its own weight in ourselves, in terms of our experience and in the effect it can convey through our real memories, in terms of how we once felt about it when it revealed itself directly and through our very senses, and in terms of how we may need others to help us better apprehend what can otherwise only be our nature for itself. Truths are what happen in the light or darknesss of these two pairings as the very ground of our being toward truths.   For as long as we live, this ground does not abandon or disappear from us.   It is the physical, personal, and spiritual substrate of our being in our encounter with all that appears along The Truth Path.
I’ll talk about a couple of the stagings by focusing on one pairing from each of them which I hope will illuminate some facets to my own approach to the stagings.   This is to give someone a general idea of how to first think about and engage with the stagings as they are presented. What I can say right now is that each set of pairings within the stagings should be approached as a survey. Do not spend a great deal of time, like months on any particular set of pairings. It is best to spend a week or two on each to get a sense of what the terms refer to, the significance of the terms within the pairing and then to move on. Your brain will fill in around each set as you go through the sets of elements in the other stagings. You can go back to any of the earlier pairings as you wish or feel inclined to do.
The first staging is the Philosophy of Mind and Self as this will unearth truths about one’s own situation in human knowledge and the real import of one’s experience in terms of the human endeavour simply to know and to earnestly practice from one’s own developing understanding of the human mind and self in time and history.   A question: in what respect are you approaching this subject with your own mind and self? Should you “bracket” your own mind and your own sense of what you are unearthing—should you enter through what you learn by way of your own experience and “observe yourself” as you learn? This is really up to you. It is possible that this is better for you, but it is also possible that it is not the best way for you to learn. But be “mindful” and be “aware” that you yourself are not meant to be or to serve as the primary subject here. Rather, you are a part of what comes to be known as the truth about the human mind and the human mind of knowledge and it is these or “this,” the human mind and human self of human knowledge that is the subject of your investigations and discoveries.
The example I will take up is Enlightenments: Ancient and Modern <–> Modern and Ancient.   There have been several enlightenments that have been regarded as epochal shifts in human history whereby humanity has undergone fundamental and substantial changes in how it understands itself, how it conceives of knowledge of itself qua true or apt knowledge (what it values from these shifts as “knowing” or as “that which is worth knowing”), and how it conceives of its purpose qua its own differences from all other living beings on this planet and also from itself at all earlier points in history. That is what is meant by “Enlightenment.” What I want to stress about this set of elements with respect to all the other pairings in all the stagings is that it is recommended that a wayfarer look at content in terms of what is of personal significance (in terms of one’s own experience, what is valuable for one’s own awareness and mind, and what comes to be practical in one’s own life) and then also in terms of the formal understanding of the elements in themselves and within the pairing from the perspective of educators and so-called “experts,” public and cultural media, and peers and significant others in our own lives. Part of the truth from this will be a “noise” that arises—like a feedbacking in the mind—that itself might be deciphered, grasped, and evaluated.   So bear in mind that the sets of elements and the logic of the pairings themselves should be “hot” in the sense that they are meant to raise “truth spectres,” “truth expressions,” and even “reflections of truths themselves” (“true” truths) that are part of the content of the wayfarer’s developing knowledge and understanding of what will be regarded as the more meaningful or significant truths, the truths actually sought and realized along the truth path. One should not forget the logic of the pairing’s opposition in terms of the connecting symbol and whether there is a reversal of terms. Here there is. In the first pairing, Ancient Englightenment (ancient knowledge of mind and self) predominates over Modern Enlightenment. And then there is a reversal by which Modern Enlightenment comes to predominate.   The predominance of one over the other—its, in a sense, “privileging of itself”—affects them both and the relation between them.   The logic of connection between the two of them is, however, a dynamic, flowing, and ongoing one.   From investigating both Ancient and Modern Enlightenment one will likely find a reason to regard them as in dynamic connection in terms of a developing human knowledge of mind and self.   How this comes to illuminate significant truths about the wayfarer themselves and about human beings and humanity is for the wayfarer to discover.
I’ve already spoken in the interview about the most provocative heading among the stagings, Prolegomena for a philosophy of Self and Other as this concerns Truth, which is provocative because this staging seems to indicate that a philosophy of Self and Other has more to do with formal and informal socio-political institutions and the norms of greater society, with experience of social and community values and socio-political culture, than with whatever a philosophy of the individual person, or even of their own personal and social identity based in their (in “our”) own uniqueness of “soul,” might concern someone interested in philosophical truths about human beings and humanity.   This is the counter-intuitive quality of true wisdom (especially seen where it must mostly be discovered). It can only mean that we must sometimes venture where people have gone without much success for not having had the initial awareness or knowledge we are hoping to mostly divine so that we can grapple with actual or real truths about all that we will understand primarily as what inevitably or inescapably concerns us all, and concerns us ourselves especially in the way that what affects everyone else also profoundly becomes part of our own experience of reality and affects our own truth. This truth is part and parcel of all the truths that need to be discovered in their own right.   And yet it is not savvy or astute political judgment we are after, but wisdom of humans where their politics and their communal connectedness and interdependence leads them down paths of meaningful and significant history that has concerned, that presently concerns, and that will always concern all of us as people (as members of a social group), as persons (as individuals), and as beings of human history (which is essentially what will be the significance or meaning of the truths from which we can then come to possess a stronger and more fertile wisdom in our lives and communities and in our broader political, cultural, and “historic” concerns).
From this staging, I want to look at “Governance and governmentGovernment and governance,” because this is highly significant at any time in history and it is the least likely to be understood by groups of people who have become politically mobilized while being discovered or realized by individuals in their being especially challenged in their concerns by the ramifications and implications of it. Governance is the rules, structures, systems, processes, all the checks and balances, and essentially all the formal institutional aspects and intended design elements of government. This is nuts and bolts and what government is meant to do, to be, to follow, to adhere to, and to see itself as being and doing, and as how government is meant to be administered and maintained.   Do people in a community see government as this? I believe that they sort of do—I believe that while they may not understand all of what makes up governance for their govenrment, their government tends to be regarded as being, more or less, what people require it to be and as doing, more or less, what it is required to do, at least in so far as the codes of practice and conduct require it to and in so far as nobody usually goes out of their way to violate these. Government cannot stand for lawful governance without conducting itself to a reasonable extent according to the rules, design, and organizational practices of prescribed and sound governance. With the first pairing, “Governance” is first and it can be seen as dictating an acceptable and reasonable expectation of government, if not also a standard of government. Some people within a community are more likely to admit or to believe that a government as a whole, as a legitimate body, in its meeting a standard of practice set out by the codes, procedures, and well-established institutions of governance, meets an adequate standard for government for it to be considered good government. However, the arrow between the two pairings goes in one direction and the logic of connection between them is that of the second pairing succeeding the first pairing.   And this second pairing is a reversal of the first. In this second pairing, it is “Government” that determines the character of the relation between itself and governance. We ask, what is government really in a representative democracy, but people in positions of authority and influence representing the private or shared interests of people in communities who have elected them to represent them for the purpose of bringing their concerns and interests to the table where decisions can be made respecting those concerns and interests. In this pairing, government could very well come to seem to have very little to do with formally established institutions, procedures, and codes, or even with how well the requirements and standards of practice of the intended design are being followed—not because the rules and design of governance are not being adhered to, but because this actually comes to matter far less than other factors and conditions of influence or power, whether these factors and conditions exist between communities or between community members competing within a single community or whether they are at the level of actual government, between the representatives within government representing one interest over another and their parties’ own political power and the perceived currency and strength of their interests in terms of greater or greatest interest.   People, the arrow indicates, come to matter more in and for government—people who govern, or who desire to influence those who govern, come to be more determinative for government—than structures and institutions of governance.   This reversal, which likely will come of direct or indirect experience of either informal or formal politics, is a significant discovery with a meaningful impact on truths respecting a person’s view of participating in their community, on an individual’s material considerations of their own place in greater society, and on everything they come to regard as of political interest to them and all significant others in their world.
I think that I have adequately presented how I am intending the different elements of The Truth Pathway to resonate, to interrelate, and to interconnect for the discovery of meaningful or significant truths. I hope I have also explained clearly what is meant by “truths” in terms of a “truth path” and that I have also provided sufficient examples for the purposes of illustrating how to approach the pairings and the logics connecting pairings within their stagings. I hope that this path proves fruitful at unearthing truths that provide some benefit to you. A good garden requires good soil and I have found in my experience that “significant truths” can provide better soil, more favourable conditions, for what can always become a richer, a more truly meaningful, and a more fulfilling life.