By Daniel J. Benor, MD

The pursuit of the truth shall set you free – even if you never catch up with it.
– Clarence Darrow

We all aspire to know and express truth in one way or another. We want to base our life decisions and actions, minor and major, on the best information possible.

The difficulty is that in many cases it is challenging to know what is the truth. A spectrum of options are possible:

Problems with ‘the truth’

Each of the above approaches has its benefits and pitfalls.

Faith in authorities may be a fraught and often fragile platform on which to structure one’s truth. Every person and institution of authority comes from specific family, cultural, educational, conceptual, philosophical, religious, life experiences and countless other influencing backgrounds that flavor their truths. How can we trust the truths of others, when our own specific family, cultural, educational, conceptual, philosophical, religious, life experiences and countless other influencing backgrounds, as well as the circumstances we live in, may differ from those of the authorities? We must also temper the truths of earlier times with considerations of the altered circumstances of today. What is or was right and true for authorities who provide truths to live by may be misleading and even dangerous for us to accept as true today for ourselves.

Religious faith has featured most prominently as a source of truths throughout history. I have been skeptical of these truths because even within a given faith there are many authorities whose truths differ from those of other authorities of that faith. Based on the teachings of illuminated teachers many hundreds of years ago, it is difficult to know the original teachings, much less to assess their independent truth through any process of reasoning. There has to be a strong suspicion that the original teachings have been altered through the years. This could occur simply through the drift that we can see in the children’s game that is called ‘telephone’ or ‘whisper down the lane’ – where a sentence is whispered by one person, who then whispers it to another and so on down a line of children. By the time the message gets to the end of the line it is often distorted to the point that it has little connection with the original statement. How much moreso can we expect to find distortions when these whispers occurred over hundreds and thousands of years.

There is also the factor of deliberate distortions of original truths within religious frameworks for the purposes of influencing the faithful in the flocks of followers. The most basic such distortion is the framing of the teachings of the wisdom from a Higher Source as exclusive to the faithful of a given religion; simultaneously declaring all other religious teachings as false.

An impressive example came to me just last week. I was startled to view the on-line free film, ‘Zeitgeist,’ in which a history of prominent religious figures dating back over 5,000 years is summarized: The Egyptian god Horus is described as having performed miracles, was called “the son of God” and “the light;” born to the virgin Isis on December 25; a prominent star in the East and three kings heralded his birth; was an acknowledged teacher at age 12; baptized at age 30 to start his ministry; was killed; buried for three days; and resurrected. Many of these elements were also attributed to Attis of Phrygia in Greek mythology (1200 BC); Mithra of Persia (1200 BC); Krishna in India (900 BC); Dionysus of Greece (500 BC).  [If you choose to view this film, you might consider starting at 9 minutes, 40 seconds – to avoid being assaulted by very graphic, violent imagery at the opening of this film.]

Assuming these details are even partially true, this puts in question my belief in the truth of the story of the life of Jesus Christ as reported in the New Testament. This does not necessarily invalidate the teachings of Christ, although their original truths still may have become distorted through the years.

Media and political sources have to be taken with enormous cautions of skepticism, and can no longer be relied on for learning truths. Five decades ago, when I was growing up and learning to explore the world through school lessons, newspapers, radio and TV, there was a feeling that these sources of truth were to a great extent reliable. As I broadened my perspectives – particularly living in Israel for 6 years and England for 10 years – I found there were prevalent views and beliefs outside of the US that differed significantly from those I had taken on faith as I grew up and attended schools in New York and California. In recent years, these differences have become much more clearly defined.

For anyone living in the US who is not exposed to media from abroad, the following will feel somewhere between heretical to radical. While the US portrays itself to itself as a benevolent benefactor to the world, much of the rest of the world has for decades perceived the US as a selfish, aggressive exploiter of other nations’ resources and labor pools. In recent years, the US has also acquired the reputation of being a warmonger and a financially irresponsible profligate, unwilling to carry its share of the world’s burden for dealing with global heating – despite being the number one producer of carbon emissions.

There is a general consensus that the media have become purveyors of politically/commercially (the two now being inseparable) motivated infomercials rather than of reliable news. So our local and national media cannot be relied upon to build a factually true picture of what is going on that is important in our lives. What does emerge, however, is the meta-truth (the truth about truths) that truth is NOT to be built on media or politicians’ information.

Scientific evidence has been promoted as a basis for building true understandings of the world. Science has certainly enhanced our explanations for how the material world can be understood and ways in which it can be manipulated for our immediate benefit. Advances in every field of study, from astrophysics to zoology, have enriched our comprehension of how the world functions and how we can manipulate it to enhance our lives.

However, scientific so-called ‘truths’ have proven to come into vogue and fade in regular succession, much like the seasons of the year but with only modestly longer periodicities. In my first year of medical school I was cautioned: “Medical research is evolving at such a pace that 50% of what is taken to be true today will be proven wrong in ten years. Our difficulty is that we cannot know at this point which 50% that will be.”

Recently, we have also found that scientists may produce truths to order – depending on who is paying for research studies. For instance, studies of drugs that are funded by pharmaceutical companies have very often demonstrate or report greater benefits and fewer side effects than studies which are performed in labs independent of such funding.

So even the promises of ‘objective’ scientific research cannot be relied upon for immediate or for lasting truths.

Personal life experiences help each of us to build a repertoire of truths about our world. These often feel the most reliable because we can know from personal observations what happened and can draw our own conclusions about how things work or don’t work. Many people tend to trust the evidence of our own senses more than other sources.

While this works for a significant and important range of life experiences, it is both too narrow and too random a sampling for building a full and complete picture of the way the world works. Especially in the global village that this planet has become, we can no longer rely only on local wisdom to navigate the challenging times ahead. Global heating, exhaustion of natural resources, pollution and economic situations in other countries have rapid and sometimes drastic impacts upon our lives, and their nature and potential impacts cannot be assessed through local knowledge.

Feeling and intuitive inner guidance provide exquisitely sensitive and potentially far-reaching awarenesses that can help us navigate through life. As one develops one’s intuition, one comes into a place of awareness where truths and untruths have a different ‘feel’ to them. To some extent this may be a reading of non-verbal clues from the purveyor of the information, in addition to the consistency of the information with what we hold to be the truth.

Intuitive awareness of rightness and wrongness may go much deeper than this. Our unconscious mind can connect with the collective consciousness, giving us a much broader and deeper base for assessing the validity of purported truths. Hypnotherapy has known this for over a hundred years. In a trance state, people can be asked questions of personal memory or about information to which they have had no sensory access. They can be cued to respond with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ through automated (‘ideomotor’) responses of their bodies, such as raising the right index finger to indicate ‘yes’ and the left index finger for ‘no.’ Through such techniques, long-forgotten personal experiences may be recalled by most, and psychic information about the world may also be accessed by many.

Our intuition is mediated through the most complex and sensitive computer yet available in the world: the human brain. Skeptics reject this source as unreliable because it is subject to distortions of misremembering, fantasy, wishful thinking and the like. To this list I would also add that it is only partially effective even in the most gifted people. In other words, like any other sensitive instrument it is subject to the intrusions of extraneous information and distortions that are technically termed ‘noise.’

This does not mean that all intuitive information is unusable. It is simply a serious caution to always remember that intuitive information may be clouded with ‘noise.’ The more we use our intuition, the more we learn to appreciate how we can or can’t rely upon it. Even when it is only partially accurate, it can vastly expand and enhance our decision-making about what is true or not for us.

Our intuitive awarenesses also connect us with other living beings and aspects of our world. This is an enormous help in bridging the gaps between ourselves and ‘others’ that have divided humanity among ourselves and have distanced us from awareness of our onness with the environment and with Gaia, our living planet.

So what is the ultimatest most inconvenient truth of all?

From our human perspective, we cannot know THE truth. This is a truth that humanity has run away from for centuries. Just as nature abhors a vacuum in the physical world and will do anything to fill it, so the human mind squirms with discomfort in a space of not knowing reliable facts and truths. We rush to fill the voids in our knowledge and understanding databases with whatever helps us to feel less anxious. Religious leaders and politicians happily tell us their truths, and many grab at these rather than struggle with their discomforts.

If you have not explored and developed your intuitive awareness, I highly encourage you to do so. This can add many dimensions of healing to our lives.

TWR opens and deepens intuitive awarenesses through connecting with our unconscious mind with imagery and muscle testing. TWR provides immediate feedback on many of our uses of muscle testing through the reductions of the intensity of our negative issues when we have identified the issues that are problematic through our intuition.

TWR can also help us deal with our discomforts about not knowing THE truth!

Your feedback on this article is welcomed.

Dan
[email protected]

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