The Truth is Out There?

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

Have you ever noticed how things change? Of course you have, it happens that we notice this so often, we've developed phrases for it: things change, whatever, so it goes, and so on. Yet, what we don't so often notice is just how much energy we put into keeping absolutes permanent. We want some things not to change, truth, for example. We want something we perceive to be true to stay that way. Otherwise our world would be a relativistic nightmare, we fear. Yes, we need our anchors.

The trouble is we look for anchors in all the wrong places. We look for them, first of all, as if they exist somewhere out there. We reify them, make them concrete and hard, like a statue or a note from God on a tablet made of stone. At this point we decide these are, indeed, the truth and the truth must be defended. And so it goes.
Yet, when we bother to examine truth closely what do we see? We see that truth always depends on the perceiver. Truth is, by definition, a mental construction. It does not exist independent of us. Therefore it is something we have invented to perceive, an overlay of sorts, like a gel used in theater to color a subject.
So where to look for truth and what is its true nature?

Here's a twister: the absolute truth is always relative to a context. We can say killing is wrong and that is an absolute truth and that would be true, but at the same time we must understand that the context of this absolute is the context of the value we place on life. So if life is being threatened and there is no other way to prevent it from being killed, we must kill the threat.

Second. Context is always subjective and relative. Context depends on a perceiver and perceivers exist in context with one another: they are, therefore relative. Some may argue that absolutes exist, by nature apart from a perceiver. To those I would ask, show me an absolute that could be understood without a context.

We begin with being still and we end in that stillness. Knowing that the stillness is not something out there, but something we are, as being itself. Stillness is not "running" when we are running. Stillness is not "working" when we are working. Nor is stillness "sitting" when we are sitting. Truth, like stillness, is both universal and relative. Hold onto it and it becomes false.

Be well.