What is true and how can we know it? How sure can we be that something is the truth or the only truth? Is it possible that it is filled with intentional lies and unintentional overlooked gaps that change it once known? Is the truth what you think or have experienced, what someone else has or what we’ve experienced collectively, or all of it or neither? Is your singular truth truer than collective truth? Is truth the same as a fact? Is ignorance bliss or is knowing the truth better even if it is hard or destructive at first? Is truth what works in reality or is reality so warped that lies carry more gravity and operational power than the truth? Is absolute truth better than absolute lie or do you sometimes need a mixture to get to a higher realm or does the system break down if a lie interferes? Is truth a singular thing or a layered onion of understanding?

Welcome to the arena of questions humans have been asking themselves since our frontal lobe and language was developed enough to ask them. All of the questions above are hard questions that took (and are taking) lifetimes, careers and generations to figure out and the answers vary and change with time and culture. The concept of Ken Wilber that will follow here is by no means an answer to heavily complicated and somewhat metaphysical discussion on truth but it may help see things more clearly. Ken is a, now 71-year old, philosopher interested in psychology and the developer of systematic philosophy who suggests synthesis of all human knowledge and experience. He breaks down structures of human knowledge, creating a grid made up of four quadrants split by the axes of “interior-exterior” and “individual-collective”. It is a sort of metatheory explaining how every form of knowledge and experience fits into the whole, as none of them alone hold the whole truth of being. So truth is always at a crossroads and every quadrant holds a piece of the puzzle, the only way to assemble it is to play together.

The upper left quadrant refers to interior and individual, the intentional (I), upper right is exterior and individual (it), such as behaviour, lower left is the interior collective stance (We) aka the cultural and lower right quadrant denotes the exterior collective (its) such as the organization of the social. These quadrants are further split into lines, levels, states, and types but we won’t go into that now. So why is truth so hard to discern sometimes and why does its search cause tension and radically different claims? Because, depending from what quadrant you’re arguing your point you may be blind to the truths of some other quadrant, and you may both be right or wrong. Mr. Wilber adheres to the Buddhist and mystic view that the truth as a whole is unknowable to us or always incomplete. No matter what is true for me (upper left quadrant – personal) and no matter what is true for you, and what we try to get to in our dialogue, none of us is perceiving or in possession of the whole truth as we can’t know it. Social regulations will strive for the best possible thing for the largest number of people leaning on the truth of the social and circumstance,  developmental phase, resources… but every system in place will inevitably be reductive to some other truths and may stomp on some of your personal ones. Your truth may be true and that of a system may be as well, but they might not align. In his opinion the closest we can get is in “the simple feeling of being”, an enlightenment which is a sort of emptiness, it is not a void and not  non-void, it isn’t both, it is not neither, it just is, without grasping to any particular thing, claim or stance as The Truth.

Nothing we say is the complete, singular and total truth in the end. It’s impossible without dialogue on an interpersonal or societal level, if it is possible even then. We may not be in the position to ever understand the nature of truth, but we can open ourselves up learning, listening and taking other points of view continuously into consideration to correct our path. This is better than being right. Fighting for a bit more truth is better than fighting to win an argument. Bottom line is a solipsistic one – meaning we only have access to our own experience which is the truest to us. Even if we never get to the point of pure truth, we may be consoled with the beautiful  and noble, obstacle ridden path, of the seeker.