some thoughts...

ok, before anything else, i had some thoughts right now. the first and fundamental step in life, to me, is to know thyself. everything else unfolds afterwards, but it is important to know the lens in which you see the world before you go any further into analyzing it. ok, step one taken, now strap yourself in.

but, about truth. there is no great big TRUTH, at least not one that we wrap our minds around. it is not monolithic, unless you consider that it is in itself everything. we lie on the scaffolds of the ediface that is existence. but this doesn't matter to us. being small components of the universe, of life, of energy, we can only observe the face/area that is nearest to us. humans, i believe, can be very noble creatures, although we are also capable of deep and hysterical evil. (possibly similar to shiva in the hinduism, creating and destroying). we will indeed try to scope out this "ediface". but i don't believe that we'll ever be able to understand, and therein is the beauty and the challenge of the task. however, back to our truths, it becomes essentially irrelevant what is indeed the TRUTH, and rather more important what our individual "truths" are. ask yourself this, is perception greater than an event or situation itself? when writing an empirical paper, scientists first set out with a hypothesis, a proposal of what happened. this will always come from their individual viewpoints. despite alterations of these viewpoints, we cannot change our lenses, we can try to make them larger, shift the angle that we're observing something, but we cannot pull "the god trick", as social science terms it, meaning removing your perspective.

ok, you're probably wondering, with all this ongoing nonsense about there being no truth that we can observe, the futility of it all, what is the point? the point is to allow yourself to be flexible, and revert back to what i had described as the first and fundamental step of life, knowing yourself. through knowing yourself, you can get a glimpse of other lenses, and understand your biases, we all indeed have them.

what would we gain by this? maybe the "west" would be more understanding and allow for different forms of governance in the middle east, instead of "inspiring" a top-down, inorganic democracy in iraq. maybe "conservatives" and "liberals" would find common ground in the u.s. rather than seeing each other as adversaries. maybe criminals would be looked upon not as inherently evil and static, but as a measuring stick to see how well government is serving its people, and we can build schools and opportunities rather than prisons.