2.4 Truth And Knowledge… Getting Beyond Them.
What is truth?  We can say that there are two kinds of truth.  Ultimate truth and relative truth.  Ultimate truth says, “I am it.  What I am is not changeable under any circumstances.”  Relative truth says, “I’m only truth to those who think I’m truth.”  Kinda tough to really verify an ultimate truth, wouldn’t you say?  How would we ever verify such a thing?  So we can only believe we have found some sort of ultimate truth.
What is ultimately true, will be expressed repeatedly and by various means.  It is enduring and is forever manifest, simply because is ultimately true. Ultimate truths have unshakable foundations and apply to all realities.  If we allow for realities to operate under very different and even seemingly contradictory rules, then ultimate truths must be very flexible so as to accommodate them all.  The motivation of self love and expression would be an example of what might be an ultimate truth.  
Relative truth, on the other hand, is more the result of something we have experienced that we have formed ideas about.  In our efforts to understand our world we created science and religion.  Both serve a purpose, but neither can give us complete answers because all systems of thought are based upon truth as seen through the eyes of those involved.  They are based on relative truths, which cannot ever reach the status of ultimate truth.  If they contain any ultimate truth, we cannot be certain.  What they can and do contain are ideas that we can experience for ourselves, but then we would be wise to remember that we are in the realm of relative truth. 
So the idea of truth and knowledge can become a great hindrance if we confuse our sense of knowing with an ultimate truth.  Remember, ultimate truth can not be verified.  All that can be verified is that our ideas are experienceable. So truth is really more a thought or idea about the reality of things as we see them and not really a statement about what is true for others.  What is true, is true, but it’s also not something that lends itself to being packaged and forced upon others.
Truth is a past dominated way of perceiving the world.  It’s derived from past experience, ideas and feelings.  Its objective is to facilitate better functioning in the future by learning from and understanding the past, but it is limited precisely because it is based on past events.  It does not readily anticipate what does not fit with past experience.  Understanding is an ongoing process which changes with additional experience.  Additional experience allows for a greater understanding.  Since experience is always ongoing, so is the process of understanding.  Understanding of the past does not necessarily mean that we will understand the future, but learning how to comprehend our experience will allow us to better grapple with a future that we have yet to experience or understand.
What is knowledge?  Knowledge can be thought of as packaged ideas about truths.  It’s a workable set of ideas that we don’t find the need to question anymore.  They have risen above their former status as an opinion or belief and are now more authoritative in nature.  It’s the idea that we are able to understand things and eventually have sufficient insight to feel that our understanding has a strong enough basis to take us out of the realm of uncertainty and into a realm of certainty.   Feel it for yourself.  Think “I know.” Now think, “I believe.”  Which makes you feel the most personal strength? Usually it’s the “I know” part.  There’s just something appealing about feeling we know something.  Maybe it’s because when we think that know something, we feel a sense that we understand something in such a way that we can use our understanding to achieve something we desire.  Maybe it’s just a sense of achievement.  Maybe we’re competitive and we feel we have an edge of some sort.  Whatever it is, it’s darn appealing.  But it’s also very limiting.
2.4.1 The Unknown
You have been facing the unknown for your whole life.  What you feel you know now, you developed from your life experience.  To know is to feel confident in what you believe so much so that it feels like it’s not a belief at all.  We came into this life as an infant putting our initial well being 100% into the hands of someone else to feed us, protect us and care for all our needs.  .  We developed life skills by adopting initially the ways of those who preceded us into this world. As we found that certain things seemed to work, we applied them in our life and if we got acceptable results, the birth of a new kind of knowledge was born in us. With that sense of knowledge came a sense of security since we no longer had to rely 100% on others in the way we did at birth here.  We developed a sense of self sufficiency and independence.  Knowledge gave us the sense of power to provide for ourselves in our life.  This is the foundation of the expression “knowledge is power.” 
So knowledge feels like power, but it is not true strength.  If knowledge were power, then the smartest people would be the happiest, which is not the case.  Knowledge is a form of hindsight not foresight.  It is like a rear view mirror.  It looks to the past to provide what to expect in the future, which does function well in many cases, but it cannot provide an understanding of that which has not been previously experienced.  It can only make inferences about the future by putting together the pieces of the past.  We can learn from the past, but not all that we learn can be derived from the past.  So knowledge has its limits. 
Knowledge can be viewed as beliefs and ideas reinforced by experience. What we think of as knowledge can be incorrect, as we have all experienced.  So what we think we know may prove to be incorrect down the road.  Knowledge requires belief to be experienced as knowledge.  We don’t feel we know something if we don’t believe that it is true.
2.4.2 Safety
I believe that to some extent we are all seeking a sense of safety in our experience.  We may want excitement and variety, but we all seek some sense of safety.  We use knowledge to provide some sense of predictability which gives us a sense of safety.  And notice that we are talking about the “sense” of safety and not the actuality of being safe.  We want to “feel” safe.  One of the most significant aspects of life is fear which arises when we feel unsafe about the future.  Believing we have sufficient knowledge about the future helps us feel we are prepared for the future, which is a major reason why we so desperately seek knowledge.   But as we’ve covered, knowledge cannot be relied on to give us a clear picture of the future.
Knowledge is the strong belief in what we feel we understand.  What we think of as knowledge is not always correct, even though it may seem to be.  The earth seemed flat.  It seemed like the sun orbited the earth.  It seemed like time was the same for everyone and yet Einstein theorized and physics later validated, the time operates differently when we are operating at different speeds, which is more obvious at speeds close to the speed of light.  So what we feel that we know, while it may give us a sense of safety and security, it is not truth.  It is belief. 
Yet we have learned to seek truth in terms of knowledge and have trained ourselves to believe in knowledge over belief, when in fact, it is all belief; functional and tenacious, but a belief none the less.  To understand this is to create for you a new level of awareness.  It liberating and yet challenging because you will still be subject to your own beliefs that you have willingly adopted and are now seeking to move beyond.
We will always find ourselves facing the unknown.  The unknown is simply the absence of knowledge. Any unexperienced event is unknown. It need not be frightening.   I used to want to be psychic because it seemed really cool.  In my introspection I realized that I also saw it as a form of protection because it offers the ability to see what’s coming and then avoid that which we don’t want to experience.  It stemmed from the desire for a sense of safety.  But is it an enduring sense of safety?  Can I function knowing all there is to know?  If I were functioning at that level, I would say that I was functioning as god.
The irony is that what we feel that we need may not be what we really need.  We don’t fully understand ourselves.  We have ideas about ourselves, but I would say that if you don’t see yourself as totally incredible, then you don’t really know yourself very well.  Now those are words of great encouragement because you will know yourself.  It is inevitable.  But then that is my belief.
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