Veda and Truth

Veda is about: truth is hard.

Veda says: if you have found the truth, you have achieved nirvana. Veda says the purpose of life is to find the truth, achieve nirvana.

We take truth for granted. We confuse our conceptions and notions as truth. And we are constantly unhappy because reality pokes at false reality we have built around us.

There are so many issues that has the world divided. Freedom of speech. Abortion. Global warming. This book or that book. Capitalism vs Socialism. West is good vs West is evil. Muslims are terrorists or peace loving.

Nothing we know, we should assume is 100% true. Everything must have a level of truthiness attached.

The core theory is this, there is this reality, the reality can be seen as as series of true false questions with answers.

Then there is our view of reality. This is our answers to those questions.

Our answers are maya. The reality if truth, or god, or universe. Everything we know, it is maya, it is our answer to those true false questions. What we know is not true. Some questions we get it right, some questions we get it wrong.

Our job is to find the truth. The correct answers to all those true false answers. The moment we have them, we will not have any more doubts.

Our job is to then not assume any answer we have is final. One new answer often invalidates other answers. Sometimes one answer we have, we have obtained it with much efforts, and some other answer we have is barely a notion. We have probabilities. For each question, our answer has a certain probability of being right. With experience, with learning, with time, some of our answers change. With experience, learning, time, the confidence we have on few questions change.

If we are on right track, we will get all answers correct someday. But this will mean we should be able to give up on our existing answers from time to time. If we insist that answers we know are correct, and fight the new experience, knowledge, if we have fear of accepting that what we may know could be wrong, if we wrongly put the confidence level to any answer we have for those questions too high, we start departing from reality.

We stop answering some questions. We start building a subset of questions, where our answers seem to feel consistent.

The good thing about the universe of true false questions, is that there is only one correct answer that is internally consistent. Every wrong answer, can lead to a subset of questions, where that subset is consistent, but every new observation would be an assault on this subset, every new knowledge will challenge these subset and want to be included.

Sometimes we accept such disconnected set of questions, for morality/religion we will have separate thing, and for science, medicine we will have another, we think we can bracket all questions about reality into possibly conflicting, but internally consistent separate groups.

We can not. We can only do so by hide questions, limit observations etc.

If we seek the right answer, the correct true false answer for the all questions, we have to give up on our ego of “having the answer already”, and be open to changing our answers in light of new knowledge.

This leads to complications, how to take quick decisions? How to function in life if things we know may be not true. Analysis paralysis?

Yet when we are shopping, when we are hiring, when we are marrying, we do not really pretend that we have the truth. People may claim they know the product they are buying, the person they are hiring/marrying may be ok, but few really have to believe in their heart that that choice is the best choice in the world.

Its an acceptable choice. And this lack of 100% confidence does not really hinder us from making decisions. We have a sense of things, and we get by.

In marriage we tend to be "married" to our choice, though in modern times, increasingly less so, but in products/employees, we are not so much married to our choice, and would be willing to change if a better alternative comes along. This happens all the time. We switch our phones. We change our jobs. All the time.

We are more vedic in those things. We do not believe this phone is the best phone in the world, just that it appears better than what i have right now. And when a better phone comes along, we switch.

This is veda way of thinking. We have this truth, but we do not have to believe this is the truest truth, and when a truer truth comes along, we discard the old truth and acquire the new one.

This is how science works too. Veda is about application of this "scientific thinking" at personal level too.