The Road to Hell is Paved with Absolute Truth

Certainty is Antithetical to Happiness and Freedom

The only absolute truth, I am quite certain, is that there are no absolute truths.

Nearly every person on earth is an authority on absolute truth. Just ask them. Most people have rabid, dogmatic attachments to their own perceived truths, whether in religion, politics, science, medicine, and the list goes on. As Gandhi said, “There are as many religions (and views on truth) as there are people.”

Seeking for absolute truth as the foundation stone of one’s life or worldview will eventually turn into shifting sand. I think we’ve all seen the fruits of the need for certainty: mental and spiritual instability, double-mindedness, blindness to half of reality, divisive dogma, cognitive dissonance, turf wars (including real wars), and pharisaism.

Eventually, when you can no longer defend glaring inconsistencies or continue performing confirmation bias (speaking from experience), the road dead ends in fatalism or apathy. In short, trying to keep one’s faith in absolute truths begins to feel like a road to hell.

Good news! Most of us here already know that the “fires of hell” are merely a sifting and purifying process that we all must go through, not a damning or endless punishment sentence. Therefore, I think that living in this realm, it is somewhat imperative that we each enjoy the experience of pursuing absolute truth(s) so that they can work their futile magic on us, reminding us that as of now, our mortal avatars peer through a dark veil. And to learn by experience, that truth—like everything else—is a journey, not a destination.

Yes, I’m saying that for all of us here in 3D, truth is relative. It’s relative to the truths that we clung to yesterday, that we have outgrown today, and that we are not yet ready for tomorrow.

Science is ever demonstrating the relativity and fluidity of truth. As our cosmic and collective understanding expands, truths of yesterday are outmoded and disproven by greater truths.

When I say this about truth being relative, I mean relative from our current mortal 3D experience on planet Earth. It’s possible that there are knowable absolute truths from another level of consciousness above and beyond 3D. But we are addressing the average earth dweller desperately and fruitlessly searching for a sense of mental and spiritual safety through certainty.

Unfortunately, we live in a society and culture that has groomed us toward the need for certainty throughout our lives, which makes us uncomfortable with unanswerable questions and ambiguity. We have lost the ability to live in our questions and wonder.

I often get asked on social media discussions, when I dare to assert our inability to know anything for certain about “God” or our greater Cosmic Story, then what is my ultimate authority? Are there zero absolute truths informing my worldview? After all, absolute truth is next to godliness in matters of life and faith, isn’t it? The implication seems to be that if I don’t have some kind of immovable, measurable authority dictating my life decisions that the inquirer can outwardly judge and quantify, I am to be considered a heathen, a menace to society.

Hundreds of years have been spent cementing doctrines and church membership agreements surrounding those iron-clad “God-breathed” interpretations, resulting in requisite “statements of faith.” Who am I to question the carefully laid, infallible Christian traditions brought forth over centuries by seminary-educated men, based on the almighty word of God itself? Albeit traditions based on translations in modern English by white protestant males after at least three other language changes and a few thousand years of being rewritten and reworked by scribes of other times and cultures, give or take?

Even hardcore Evangelical Christians progress through life noting that their views and beliefs change substantially through the years and decades. When you go through a massive religious deconstruction period such as myself, watching four decades of mind programming burn to the ground, you realize that the concept of relying on absolute truth did not serve your growth, development…or sanity.

“The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life…”

The fear-driven search for absolutes and certainty has become its own false religion. People in a rational, concrete, crystalized society want rational, concrete, crystalized guide stones that they can read from some supposedly authoritative book or source, then conceptualize, integrate, and enforce on others. Like in the days of old, people are not satisfied or comfortable with the idea of living a free-forming journey where they must rely on gut feelings, thoughtful contemplation, creative intelligence, intuition, and genuine spiritual guidance for their “daily bread.” They want a detailed road map of all the places they’ll ever visit—and how to get there—already determined for them. They don’t want to work for autonomy, harmony, community, and freedom; they want a physical king to rule over them.

I once was visiting my First Baptist pastor in his office (circa 2003) when he beamed proudly at me, “Check this out! I have all my sermon topics planned out through 2005!” I politely smiled at him while inwardly wanting to run out the door and never come back. Which is exactly what I did! Even then when I was still in the program, I knew there was something terribly wrong with his plan.

Can’t Trust That
The great cosmic joke is that truth, at least in this realm, is a moving target adorned with smoke and mirrors. Think about it.

You can’t trust your perceptions. Our brains are basically high tech computers that can rather easily be tricked. More optical illusions here. Have you ever noticed how you are sure you remember things a certain way but find evidence later that what you remember is not how it happened? This is certainly a collective phenomenon too when you consider the Mandela Effect.

You can’t trust your teachers. All teachers are humans—like you—who are fallible. They get some things right; they get some things wrong. Even Gandhi. Even Jesus. It’s never a good idea to put one teacher on a pedestal, or to listen to/follow only one teacher or philosophy, because every teacher and every philosophy holds only one piece or portion of the puzzle. We need all of us together to find greater understanding.

You can’t trust traditions. Christianity. Need I say more?

Your truths of yesterday are no longer true. We’ve covered this.

What about God?
It is interesting watching Christians try to develop absolute perspectives on God. “God is infinite, beyond comprehension,” they say. Yet give them a few minutes and you will hear them offer a finely detailed, boxed description of God, typically crafted in their own image. “God is loving, and his mercies are endless,” they say. “But! He’s also Just,” they assert in defending the necessity for a god who would send 98% of humanity into endless torment.

“God,” they say, “is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” Is that true? Are you the same yesterday, today, and forever? Existing vs. the way you exist are two different things, and surely the God fractal out of which you and I emerged is changing as much as we are all changing.

In the Jewish Kabbalah, God is referred to as “Ein Sof,” or “the Endless One.” The Kabbalah emphasizes that God is unknowable. Most of the truths we try to apprehend with our logical minds turn paradoxical, confounding even the adept. We can only know those aspects of God that are revealed to us, and those aspects are relative to our ability to comprehend. According to the Kabbalah, everything is relative to our human experience. It’s all subjective. I must add, in my experience, that this God Source seems to put confounding paradoxes and contradictions on my path on the regular, just to see how I will maneuver. Such a sense of humor, that One.

Are there any transcendent truths that do not change? I don’t know. Truth is apprehended in layers. As soon as you think you have the “highest truth,” another layer peels back to show a deeper truth that supersedes or underlies it.

Think of it this way. “You” (your consciousness) are the “supreme being” of your physical body and experience. However, your body is made up of literally trillions of independently conscious and functioning beings or micro universes (cells, bacteria, parasites, viruses, atoms, subatomic particles), all operating as “You.” The universe spirals both smaller and larger equally relative to us (also here). If you can travel millions of miles to the next galaxy “out there,” you can travel “millions of miles” to the next smaller galaxy “in here.”

The point is, you are a fractal of God. So that should help guide your realizations of the Transcendent (above and beyond, already perfect) nature of God, as well as the Immanent (here and now as you, as humanity, becoming perfect) nature of God.

Truth!
Is there one supreme God over all phenomena? I have no idea! The multiverse appears to be replete with fractals and maybe there’s no top of the food chain. However, I do imagine that there is a Creator God of this realm, or this Universe. But this God would be so far above our mortal understanding we can’t even postulate much. We can only interact with what little is offered to us by this God, as we are ready.

If I had to guess at the possibility of ultimate, absolute truths, here’s my list:

• I am (link).

• All I have is now.

Pretty simple, and leaves a lot open for growth and interpretation. Otherwise, here are some observations I have gathered, which are always up for editing as I learn more:

Absolute Truth is not found in a book (but many books contain bits of truth).

Absolute Truth is not found in a religion.

Absolute Truth is not found in a person. I have to add here, as microcosms of the macrocosm, we all express cosmic or transcendent truth (Beingness) in small immanent packages. In other words, we are all like shards of a mirror that has been shattered into billions of pieces. Hold up any one piece the reflects one consciousness and you have a facet of truth. Put all the pieces together, glue them, and hold them up, you might have a view of the Transcendent God, albeit still distorted by all the cracks.

Truth is fluid and often contradictory or paradoxical.

Truth is whatever you believe it is right now.

Truth changes from year to year, decade to decade, as you change. As the law of attraction demonstrates, “objective truth,” at least in this realm, is not as important or desirable as subjective truth. What you believe or perceive is the most important tool for creating your reality. It’s as if our focus got pulled to some nebulous, futile concept (absolute truth) when in fact, what we really should be most concerned with is subjective truth. We can cultivate those subjective truths by where we put our focus, putting our efforts into rewriting our subconscious tapes or programming.

Why is absolute truth so important to many people? We brought ourselves here precisely to enter the realm of forgetfulness, to get comfortable with living in questions, ambiguity, and to learn to play in the realm of light and shadows.

My “authority” is my own inner compass that directs me step by step, day by day, into evolving higher truths as I am ready for them—truths that are necessary for growth into my butterfly self. I have been given only One Law to keep me from abusing that inner authority: Love others as I love myself (loving yourself is a vital component). Treat everyone as I would like to be treated. This is the only real “law” in our realm and, if conducted in the spirit that it was written, will guide all decisions into a highest possible outcome for all. Because even if my sincere attempt to love another fails them, love covers a multitude of sins.

Anyone who tries to sell you an ultimate truth in a realm that is, by design, shrouded in mystery and obscurity, that person is trying to control you. The spirit behind this type of control is either a projection of their own fear and insecurities, or they are consciously trying to elicit fear in you for nefarious purposes. Either they are living outside of their own power, or they are trying to steal yours.

I leave you with a couple quotes from famous truth-tellers…

"Nobody in this world possesses absolute truth. This is God's attribute alone. Relative truth is all we know. Therefore, we can only follow the truth as we see it. Such pursuit of truth cannot lead anyone astray." ~ Mahatma Gandhi
(I could write a whole blog about this beautiful truth).

"The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority. But the same question stands open from the days of Socrates and Pilate down to our own age of wholesale negation: is there such a thing as absolute truth in the hands of any one party or man?" ~ Helen Blavatsky