by SEG

Created on: May 22, 2008   Last Updated: October 25, 2011

The idea of ‘Absolute Truth’ has two directions:  an archaic thought about the existence of a stable truth in an unstable universe and secondly a hunt for the ineffable- some infinite truth that our finite minds can never hope to grasp and conceptually understand- but will never stop searching for none the less.  

Notions of ‘Absolute truth’ emerged in the Western world as human reflections centuries ago.   It was a period of history when mankind’s concepts of reality included a flat world that was the center of a static universe fueled with an ‘absolute time’ across the field of an ‘absolute-space’; something we know today to be un-true.  

The universe of our understanding today is not infinite- without beginning or end- nor is there anything ‘absolute’ about it or within it because even the ‘laws of physics’ which bind the universe together are not absolute; the laws of nature which hold our reality together are subject to evolutionary change and this should aptly inform us about the veracity of any ‘absolute’ ideas. (Lee Smolin, 2006) (1).

Yet while our concepts of truth are limited, they are evolving concepts; all of our concepts about the universe and our life- all of our truths- are transcendent, changing and evolving as we reach forward through time.

 And this is true of our world’s religions to a degree as well, because all the major religions of the world, East and West, were founded with the practical reasons that evolve along with our cultures.   

They all developed systems of practical psychological teachings intended to expand the nature of our ‘temporal’ life…

“… systems which study man not from the point of view of what he is, or what he seems to be, but from the point of view of what he may become; that is, from the point of view of his ‘possible evolution.’” 

~ Peter ‘P.D.’ Ouspensky (1940)

…  and as we and our cultures evolve so too will our religions- to a degree because religions have another purpose.

Beyond those empirical considerations, the mere profuse vastness and intricacy of reality strikes us intuitively as something beyond our temporal concepts of truth- there is a mysterious, ineffable quality to the world that is surely truth yet is a truth our plodding, finite minds cannot grasp; something beyond our calibrations

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