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Tag: Truth

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    additive leads to subtractive truth

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    1–2 minutes

    By gaining more information, we will see patterns more completely, which will allow us to understand how complicated reality functions. More data is the path to truth.

    However, most spiritual traditions teach us we find “truth” when we drop our labels and our opinions, our illusions.

    The reliance on intelligence to perceive truth has a paradoxical quality: The more knowledge you add grants you a better understanding, which also adds a layer of bias (an extra opinion or delusion) that blocks you from the truth.

    And yet, this additional knowledge allows you to, over time, recognize and subtract misleading positions, guiding you back to truth.

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    Protection paradox

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    1–2 minutes

    How do you protect transparency, while at the same time protecting privacy?

    Open access, transparency, and truth require openness, while defense or security requires obscuration, walls, and locks.

    And yet, complete transparency is a protective measure by disallowing hiding. Promoting hiding generates secrets from which darkness can thrive. Yet, we may need to hide from the evil that claims to be the light.

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    On being “right”

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    1–2 minutes

    Thinking you are right is the fastest way to enter a power struggle.

    Once in a power struggle, there’s always a winner or loser. Or one party decides passive-aggressively to be magnanimous while holding on to a grudge.

    Your assuredness cannot help but become an interpersonal conflict, which means it was never about converting or enlightening people but about alienating them.

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    Time to truth

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    1–2 minutes

    Trust is in short supply. People claim to be transparent, but most CEOs rate their confidence at reading the company at 75%, while employees rated at 20%.

    Transparency is oddly murky.

    The layers of bureaucracy and hierarchy establish a system, where there is a “speed of truth,” moving through the company. If you could calculate the time until the truth can penetrate to a CEO, perhaps a blunt and honest comment made by an underling where it heard and accepted, you would find that most companies have a terrible problem with transparency and truth.

    This is further confounded by everyone, claiming to be transparent, which they must to maintain their job.

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    Being right is pointless

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    1–2 minutes

    People attempt to be correct. By winning the game, you gain assurance that your viewpoint is correct, and you establish ego legitimacy or intellectual superiority: you become righteous.

    The scariest thing is somebody clever and self-assured, convinced they are right. This method of engagement abandons empathy or curiosity, instead equating “rightness” with domination.

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    Truth is at hand

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    1–2 minutes

    Camus says churches, political or religious, care not for the truth. They establish doctrines, which declare eternal aims, which never last.

    The truth is at hand: touchable.

    Even if you claim it does not last, at least it makes no false declarations of eternity.

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    Truth as creation rather than discovery

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    1–2 minutes

    Is "truth" merely the repetition of acts you create for yourself?
    Suppose there is no universal truth but merely the monotonous repetition that sharpens intuition into hard law, a vital principle. In that case, it may feel like discovery or exposure of truth, while it is instead a personal creation.

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    Art reveals the lie and saves us from the real.

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    1–2 minutes

    Picasso says, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.”

    Nietzsche says, “we have art in order not to die of the truth.” Or, the creative act saves us from the truth (reality).

    In one view, the world is hidden and must be revealed through the “lie of art.”
    On the other, the world’s reality of brutality requires transcendent imagining.

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    Entelechey: realization of potential

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    1–2 minutes

    Aristotle says there is a core principle within that shapes outcomes into reality.

    The “entelechey” is a motivating force that organizes potential into actuality; that is, it directs potential into the real instead of mere theory or form.

    A fundamental seed, like a crystalline DNA, expresses its shape (ideas and form) and its will to expand into an organized realization (matter).

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    You reason toward the truth

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    1–2 minutes

    Both religious and scientific sects believe: they have faith in their truth.

    This requires a series of steps, but without possession of all knowledge, a leap is required into the surety of belief, and from belief, we make claims on truth. 

    In this way, Truth is both fact and not fact, real and fabricated, composed of, confused with, but not synonymous with truth. 

    To explain: a fact does not require explanation or reasoned steps. And yet, truth is founded on a path or sequence of steps, with each step being a small leap. Truth becomes the consensus of several small beliefs, with a smattering of facts.