On Truth and Falsity

                             The Constants in Reality

The skeptics recognize that every individual person can be in a different physical, mental, and emotional state as they go through life. And individuals can have different perceptions in each state of being. A person who is awake has different experiences than when he is asleep. A young person has different experiences than when he grows old. A person who is in love has different experiences than when he hates someone. In other words, each individual can become a different system in different circumstances. Both persons and their experiences can be in different systems. The skeptics maintain that because both individuals and their perceptions can change, then a constant reality cannot be determined.

But the skeptics fail to realize that in all these changing systems, both in individuals and in their perceptions, there remains certain constants that never change. Every individual uses these constants when he formulates any sense objects or thought objects into true or false systems. A person who is asleep always forms his dreams with the experiences he had while awake. He may formulate his experiences while asleep into very strange systems, but the experiences always comprise the same kinds of experiences he had while awake. In other words, he constantly uses the same experiences. A young person naturally formulates different systems in his mind than he does when he grows old. But his basic experiences in both cases remain the same. A man in love with a woman certainly feels a different system than if he hated her, but nevertheless, the constant experiences of love or hatred remain the same in either experience that the same person may have. In other words, systems can certainly change, but basic experiences never change.

These constants form the basic system of reality. There can be different systems of love, but love as an emotion never changes. There can be different systems of taste, but taste itself never changes. A sick person who tastes honey as being "bitter" has a true experience, but the system would be false. A young person may form a false system called "I know it all," but still knowledge itself remains constant. When that person grows old, he may learn that he actually knows very little, but knowledge itself as a means of knowing does not change. Humans possess many of these constants that never change, and by means of which humans can communicate with each other in their co-operative search for better systems for each other. Some of these constants are "red," "round," "truth," "justice," "beauty," and "love." There exist many different shades of red, but "red" as a basic experience remains the same. Objects can have different shapes of round, but "round" remains the same as a constant, basic experience. Some systems can be true and others false, and others matters of speculation and opinion, but in every system the basic experience called "truth" remains the same. The true system is useful for human knowledge. The false system should be truly discarded for being useless. In systems of speculation and opinion, the truth can be hard to find, but nevertheless, humans seek it. Humans have the ideal of "justice," even though they constantly seek for better systems of justice. If a man loves an ugly woman, to him she has "beauty," just as those who know she is not beautiful. They have to have a constant idea of "beauty" in order to exclude it from the system that is an ugly woman.

Humans also possess certain ideas that they could not have derived from sense or thought perceptions. Humans have the useful idea of nothing that they never see, but which can be used to exclude unneeded ideas from any system that they may formulate. The idea of nothing can also be used to indicate the falsity in false systems. All false systems mean nothing. Humans possess the useful idea of infinity even though no one has ever directly experienced infinity. Even the largest number that a human can conceive still remains finite, and no finite mind can ever make that huge leap from the finite to the infinite. For this reason, there can be no such thing as an infinite number. Whatever infinity happens to be, it cannot be a number because no thing can be added to it or subtracted from it. These unexperienced ideas do become experienced when they become impressed on human consciousness. But from where do they come? They could have come to human consciousness from an infinite field of ideas. But ideas cannot exist without consciousness, and therefore, an Infinite Consciousness can exist.