Ideas are connected. For example: spirituality tends to exist to help humans deal with the fear of death. The fear of death spills over into other areas of life as a fear of impermanence, or a fear of change. The fear of impermanence then filters up into nearly every ritual we perform, every interaction that we have, and every attempt at philosophy that we make. The fear of death makes our ego process constantly desperate to be reassured: “But surely I will not die, right?”. This puts the fear in every statement of or about truth that we make.
It is so potent that we have changed the meaning of truth to imply that things that are true are always true (or perhaps better, that if they aren’t always true then they aren’t really true). The Ego wants them to be that way so that it can resolve its fear of death. That is also the reason why people react so violently to when their paradigm is threatened, even if they end up changing it later. You can see this effect in almost everything, but particularly in spirituality and sexual relationships. It is so deep that we demand permanence from others, and get upset when they change.
People assume that truth exists in some tangible, permanent, knowable fashion. All we really have are abstractions based on realizations. These abstractions are either useful in the satisfaction of desire, or they aren’t. The ones that aren’t are refined or ditched by process. This happens in the expression of Desire, and what process is all about. When the Ego reifies (i.e., treats itself as truth and permanent) itself, however, its fear of impermanence overrides the process of refining abstractions that don’t work.
Two people can have access to the same data and create different abstractions that explain relationships in that data. The only comparison that can really be made between the two is how they apply to the satisfaction of desire.
As will be explained in other posts, this is not to say that reality isn’t “real”, or that it is “unknowable” (to say that everything is unknowable is to eliminate the meaning of the word “know”). Truth not implying permanence simply means that to say something is true is not to say that it is necessarily true or always true.
It means that, when you use the verb “is”, you are describing (or can only describe) a process, not a state. This is the very nature of the verb, but our fear of impermanence tries to use it to reify abstractions as processes.
To put this, as the discussion of actions and rationality, in the context of the philosophy I want, this is more than just something that must be begrudgingly accepted. I celebrate impermanence.
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