“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust
Question:
What is truth? What is beauty? What is love? What is sacred?
The
eternal questions, the answers to which people have been trying to find
for as long as we could think. And still we are unsuccessful.
But
the answer may be much simpler than we think.
Answer:
It is whatever we believe it to be.
Ever
had an argument that you couldn't win? About something very simple,
like the temperature? In the same room some people will feel warm, some
cold, some okay. So who is right? People have a tendency to state their
opinions and feelings as facts, but we take for granted the most obvious
aspect of human nature: the fact that everything we know is not fact
after all, but simply our perceptions of things. Everything, without
exception, before we can understand it, is put through a filter of our
senses and beliefs.
“Six blind men came to an elephant. Somebody told them that it was an elephant. The blind men asked, ‘What is the elephant like?’ and they began to touch its body. One of them said: ‘It is like a column.’ This blind man had only touched its leg. Another man said, ‘The elephant is like a rope.’ This person had only touched its tail. Similarly, he who touched its trunk or its belly talked of it differently.” - Hindu tale
Who
is right, who is wrong? Or is the truth really the sum of the
half-truths of all the men?
The
way we think depends on so many factors it seems shocking that people
ever agree on anything. It depends on our physical, sensory
perceptions, to non-tangible factors such as our culture, traditions,
expectations, experiences, our mood or the general context. This
explains why people perceive the same things differently, starting from
the very simplest levels such as color and temperature, to more complex
things such as politics, religion, even love.
Through
these factors we form our viewpoints and opinions, and then we form our
own idea of "common sense.”
“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” Albert Einstein
This
statement throws a clear problem into focus: our perceptions of the
world, once formed and backed up by arguments and experiences, are very
hard to change. But what do we do, then, if our views are, I try to stay
away from the word “wrong,” but how about, “harmful”? For example,
prejudices or stereotypes.
You
may be surprised at how hard it is to break through these barriers,
especially if they have been built up about a certain culture or a
country, for long periods of time.
I
believe that to be able to truly see the world we must be aware of these
differences in viewpoints, be aware of our own filters and prejudices,
keep an open mind. We must be respectful of past knowledge and
experience and add our own to them, without taking any one viewpoint as
the absolute truth, always questioning, thinking for ourselves and
striving for equality and liberation of the mind in all aspects of life.
PUBLISHED, BILNEWS, MARCH 16TH 2010, PAGE 5
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