Start with physics — it is more honest than words. Cold does not exist: there is only the absence of heat. Darkness does not exist: there is only the absence of light. You cannot carry darkness into a room — you can only carry the lamp out. You cannot add cold to water — you can only take heat away from it. We gave the absences names and got used to handling them as if they were things. With truth the same thing happened, only in mirror image: it is the one thing that actually exists, and we handle it as one version among many — something that can be disputed.
Truth is what is happening. No more and no less. Not what you think about what is happening, not what you were told about it, not what you remembered, weighed and came to believe — but the event itself, in the moment it occurs. It is raining — that is truth. Everything that starts after that — «there goes the weekend», «at last the garden will drink», «when I was a child the rain was warm» — is no longer happening. It is being thought. And what is not happening but only being thought stands to truth the way darkness stands to light: not a second entity beside the first, but its absence.
Truth is what is happening. Everything else is not a second truth — it is truth’s absence.
Why truth has no plural
Stand three people at one window. Outside, rain. The first sees a ruined trip, the second a watered vegetable garden, the third sees no rain at all, because he is looking at his phone. Ask them in the evening what the day was like — you will get three different days. Yet only one rain fell. It did not fall in three different ways for three different watchers, did not adjust itself to their plans, was not simultaneously a misfortune and a gift. It simply fell. An event does not multiply with the number of witnesses — descriptions multiply.
That is why truth is always one. Not because someone decreed it from above, but because what happens has no variants: it either happens or it does not. It is not the event that grows variants — it is our way of experiencing it. And that way has a name of its own.
A personal truth is what the brain does with the truth
Your truth is the way your brain handles what happens. Note: not «spoiled truth», not «reduced truth», but a different process with a different product. Truth happens — a truth is produced. The brain takes the event and passes it through everything it has accumulated: memory, fear, upbringing, yesterday’s hurt, tomorrow’s plan. What comes out is your truth — yours alone, and honest in its own way: you genuinely do see it like that. Disputing someone else’s truth is pointless, because it is assembled out of someone else’s past, and your pasts are different — by definition.
At the barber’s they show you the back of your head with a second mirror — and you see yourself from behind, as you have never seen yourself. At home, in your usual mirror, you see yourself from the front. Both reflections are truthful. There is still only one head. An argument between two truths is an argument between two mirrors about which side of the head is the real one: loud, sincere, and without a subject.
Truth happens. A truth is produced.
The saying «everyone has their own truth» is usually pronounced to end an argument — with a sigh, as an admission that the truth can never be found anyway. Turn it over. It does not mean there is no truth. It means that nobody in the argument ever presented the truth: each presented their mirror. Truth is one; truths number as many as there are heads. The moment you stop confusing the two words, half of all conflicts end before they begin.
Conviction is always a false process
A personal truth has an extreme, hardened form — the conviction. A truth still checks itself against what is happening, now and then: it looks out of the window before saying «rain». A conviction does not look. A conviction is an answer prepared before the question. It is built entirely on the past: once, something happened; the brain recorded it as a law and has been substituting the recording for the glance ever since.
In other words: you once got food poisoning at a restaurant — and walked out of it with the conviction «they cook badly there». Five years pass. The restaurant has another chef, other suppliers, another kitchen. But you walk past, and the decision is being made not by today’s you but by the you of five years ago, the one who felt ill. A conviction is false not because its content is necessarily wrong — the chef may indeed be bad. It is false as a process: it looks at now through the eyes of then. And the past does not repeat itself in the present — never, not once, under no conditions. The present happens for the first time, every time. Which means any answer brought wholesale from the past is an answer to the wrong question.
It matters not to confuse conviction with experience. Experience is an instrument: it suggests where to look. A conviction is a prosthesis: it looks instead of you. Experience says «check»; conviction says «don’t check, I already know». And the firmer that «know», the less of what is happening it contains — that is, the less truth.
What to do about it? Not fight. You cannot make war on a conviction with its own weapons: on the ruins of a broken conviction the brain will immediately assemble a new one, out of the same debris of the past. Darkness is not carried out of a room in buckets — light is carried in. The light here is attention to what is happening: a simple, almost physical skill of looking at what is, before looking at what you know about it. Attention is not a passive lens: you create what you look at — which means the one who looks at his records lives in an archive, and the one who looks at what is happening lives in the world. Ask yourself not «who is right» but «what is actually happening right now». The first question sets the mirrors against each other. The second opens the window.
Truth needs no defending — it demands nothing at all; it simply happens, here and now, at the single point where anything happens at all and where creation is possible. A personal truth needs defending constantly, because it lives only inside a head and dies without its owner. That is the easiest way to tell them apart: what you feel like fighting for is a truth of your own; what remains when the wish to fight has gone — is the truth.
Truth is one, and it happens. A truth belongs to each of us, and it is thought. Choose which one to live from.
The work on the cover — “Truth” →
— Evgeny Fleysher
Artist and engineer. Author of WHY? and The Spiritual Alphabet, creator of the Art as Healing project. Paints works built on sacred geometry.
About the author and the method →