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The truth is not out there. It’s not. I’m Sorry. I mean, I really do hate to break this to you, especially if you are a fan of the melodramatic nineties television sci-fi sensation “The X-Files” (and I’m not)…But if you haven’t managed to figure this out for yourself by now, honestly, truth be told; nothing you believe to be true is actually, inherently “true”, when you actually try to prove it’s “truthiness”.

In my attempt to write this article, I first set out to define the concept that is truth (not the definition of the word), because this seems like a necessary first step if one wishes to dissect the many universal truths available to those of us who consider ourselves “spiritual seekers” (and there are many!). But this task was maddening! Even Wikipedia, the supposed great god of Internet truth has the following to say in regards to the concept of Truth: “The term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree.”

Great. That makes me feel just great. I already find it difficult enough to psyche myself into believing in any one purpose for my life, given the multitude of prospective believable truths that I have read about, and now I discover that the world’s greatest minds can’t even agree on how to define the concept of truth? This is like the time I finally had to accept that Guns and Roses had really broken up for good, and that the highly anticipated follow up album to their double platinum 1991 issue, “Use Your Illusion I and II,” entitled “Chinese Democracy,” was never, ever actually going to be released, even though we all know that it’s already been recorded and mixed!

My thesis is as follows: In my twenty-six years of searching for the best so-called truth to follow, in order to achieve one with the sublime, I have finally discovered that the truth of the matter, both apparently and ironically, is that there is no way to prove that any one truth is true, and, well, this really just reinforces the basic thought that led me to researching and writing this column: Every posit in this world that I was raised to believe as a so-called truism, when scrutinized, cannot be truly proved to be true! These truths might feel true to you, they may even ring true with you in your heart of hearts, but truth cannot, in terms of absoluteness, actually be proven to be true, given that every truth relies on you to have faith in the fact that that truth will be proven at some future point.

Ladies and Gentlemen; I am not only beginning to realize that the truth is not out there, nor in here, nor anywhere, but what is exciting, is that I’m beginning to embrace this concept, and I find it to be spiritually freeing, and quite exhilarating!

Let’s start with the golden rule: “Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you.” Supposedly, if every human being accepted this as a truism, and then acted accordingly, there would be no more wars, because all conflicts arise from one party feeling as though they were mistreated, and therein excusing aggressive action against the party that supposedly acted unfairly upon them.

But even though I am told that “I’m still young,” I can attest to the fact that I’ve met countless people in my lifetime who like to be treated in ways that I would hate to be treated, and so I have actually found myself wishing at times that these very people would ignore The Golden Rule, and instead, treat me the way I want to be treated, as opposed to the way they want to be treated.

And I’m not alone in this feeling. I cite the United States Constitution as exhibits A-Z to back up my claim. If all you had to do was enforce the golden rule, then there would be no need to concoct an elaborate system of laws and legal safeguards in order to preserve every citizen’s right to the pursuit of happiness; things would just work themselves out.

Really, all I want is to be happy. And I’m sure that you feel the same. I hope and pray that most humans agree with this premise, for I’d hate to live in a world full of people who wish to be unhappy! And I think that most people who are capable of analyzing existence would agree that, fundamentally, what drives most of us to avoid death is our goal of experiencing a life that makes us feel happy.

Yet in our fumbling, bumbling search for happiness, we often error egregiously, offend others, make the people we love the most feel immense pain, and we end up trying to tap dance on an all too thin line that separates moral and immoral behavior (also known as the line between altruism and hedonism.).

I think that most humans base their system of morals on versions of truth that they have chosen to accept in order to keep themselves properly (or improperly) motivated. But what excites me about this seemingly pessimistic philosophy that I am now adopting is that if one accepts the fact that the only truth out there is that there is no truth out there, then we can begin to deal most pragmatically with the many paradoxes concerning consciousness and existence that plague so many of us as we encounter our various crisis.

I feel like a record that skips and repeats itself, (not like a broken record, mind you, because it is my experience that some broken records won’t play at all, so that makes the popular analogy that likens a broken record to something that repeats itself, well, NOT TRUE.)

…Uh, anyway, I feel like I’m repeating myself to ad nauseam, but: It is my current understanding that most humans, regardless of their opinions on the meaning of life, operate their own lives with no regard to a singular truth, be it religious or scientific, but rather, by picking and choosing which convenient truths to believe in, and which ones to reject, in order to justify whatever behavior is most pragmatic to serving the chosen course of their life. What is even more confusing is that most humans change their minds about which so-called universal truths to follow at least a few times in the course of their life.

Even our “wise President” once believed that the truth could be found in a line of coke, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and in running the Texas Rangers franchise straight into the history books as the worst Major League Baseball team of all time, but now this same man claims to find happiness in the bible, trading democracy for oil, and in running the United States of America straight into the history books as one of the worst fiscally and politically run nation in the course of modern history. (Well, I guess some old habits die hard.)

If it helps serve to justify your self-chosen “purpose in life,” then you will no doubt find yourself believing in the so-called “truth” that is Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any other religious sect that invigorates your self-esteem. But, if it suits your lifestyle better to have no strict code of ethics, then you will no doubt choose to believe in atheism or nihilism (nothing), science (certain things, but not other things) or agnosticism (“show me god”, and I’ll believe.). It all just depends on your own ego’s definition of the self, and how to best feed that hungry, hungry ego’s desire for fulfillment.

What also interests me about Truth, is that most concepts of truth are usually passed down from one generation to another, and as I learned at the ripe age of four, during a popular game by the name of “telephone”, even the simplest of sentences get misconstrued and reworded when passed along among enough people. (Telephone is a playground game where children sit in a circle, and one of them whispers a sentence into the ear of the child next to them, and then each child, in turn, proceeds to whisper the same message into the ear of the child next to them. Almost invariably, some child decides that the game would be more fun if they screw up the message, and so when the last child in line says out loud what has been whispered into his ear, it’s usually something that only vaguely resembles the initial sentence.)

I think that religious truths are passed down, over time, just like sentences are in a game of telephone. And I think that this explains why so many religions seem to have conflicting dogmas within their own religions. After all, it would only take one self-serving fool (King James, I’m glaring at you!!) to re-write the bible and literally transform that entire catalogue of truth in the process. There is, after all, a reason that the phrase “lost in translation” is not only popular, but also quite apt when explaining how impossible it is to convey the ‘true essence of a thought.’

(GIANT DISCLAIMER: I have NO PROBLEM with the Christian religion, in and of itself; for I wholeheartedly embrace and endorse any religion that above all else instructs its followers to always forgive everyone they encounter, and to never take violent action against another living thing.)

With that said, I think it’s basically absurd “to go all in” and believe in The Bible, The Torah, The Koran, or any other religious document as “the word of god,” when these prophecies claim that at some point in time, a very real god actually verbally espoused the meaning of life to some lucky human being, in hopes that he would “spread the good word” to the rest of the humans on Earth. Why would an all powerful and omniscient being only tell one human the truth, and then sit back and expect every other human being on earth to trust that one human’s word? These religions claim that their god can do anything, so why wouldn’t these gods prove the truth to each of us, thereby ensuring that we’d all act appropriately?

This is why I usually tune out these days whenever I hear so-called experts talking about their subjects of expertise on Television; whether they are talking about housing slumps and the lending crisis, the war in Iraq, the sudden drop in the population of bees, global warming, the emerging shortage of water, the Malthusian dilemma of overpopulation, Einstein’s theory of relativity, travel to mars, or any other subject under the sun. For I consider all of these pundits and experts to be just like me; not necessarily full of shit, but at the very least, full of themselves, their own agenda, and heavily invested in pursuing their egomaniacal objective of having people listen to them, and then, ultimately, believe that their perceptions are “true.” This is commonly referred to as playing god!

But here’s where I think I’m clever, and tricky. By writing about a lack of truth, and just how full of it we all are; I can’t really be proven that I’m wrong. I may, in fact, be writing the only truth that there is. Of course, I may also just be “playing god” myself. I suggest you “go with your gut,” and believe what you want to.

Try to tell a colorblind person who sees brown instead of green that grass is green. He may agree with you, because so many other people have told him all of his life that the grass is indeed green, and not brown, but his subjective reality will always dictate otherwise, and if you try to ignore your own subjective reality then you WILL go insane.

Sometimes cancer patients are given a timeline by science for how long they can expect to live with their incurable disease. And sometimes, these same patients not only outlive the scientific estimates but also “miraculously” overcome the cancer, and no one, not even scientists, can explain how this occurs. Sometimes these people claim that a god cured them, and others simply shrug and tell people that they are “just happy to be alive.” The point is, these things happen often enough that we cannot deny their existence, and yet we can never really know for sure just how and why they did indeed occur.

So let me put it to you this way:

How sure are you about the supposed truths that you believe in? Would you literally bet your life on their veracity? Some people do. We call these people martyrs. These are people who are “put to death or endure great suffering on behalf of any belief, principle, or cause.” What I have learned in my analysis of truth is that I am no martyr, nor do I think that I will ever be one. This is because I can’t foresee any one, single cause out there that I believe in so much that I would be willing to die for it.

I would die to defend myself, and I’m sure that I would be willing to die trying to defend anyone that I love from their own death, but to be honest, unless I am ever in that situation, which I have never been, I really don’t know for sure that the preceding statements are true.

What I DO know is that there are a million and one causes out there that people are trying to get me interested in fighting for, and I do not wish to die for any one of them.

I’m not positive that global warming is or is not imminent, nor whether or not it’s going to destroy earth. I’m also unsure as to whether or not mankind was designed by a prescient being that actually cares as to whether or not we continue to rape and ravage the earth until we bring about our own extinction.

But people, time and time again, “go on record” claiming to believe in certain truths, regardless of any convincing evidence beyond something they have read, heard about, or ‘felt in their heart of hearts.’ And I’m not mocking these people; I’m just astounded by their arrogance.

I’m not even so positive anymore as to the truth of very real posits that exist within the constraints of our actual space-time dimension. For example, I really don’t know whether or not the war in Iraq was a “mistake”, nor am I willing to believe or disbelieve in the veracity of the claim that Saddam Hussein had realistic intentions to attain and or wield any weapons of mass destruction. And I never will be, and neither will you. Why, you ask? Because we hung Saddam before we could actually get him to reveal the truth about his own real intentions, and now that he is dead, we’ll never get to know for sure.

That is, unless of course, you believe that Saddam Hussein is the second Son of God, because according to The Christian Truth that 83% of Americans claim to believe in (this is according to an ABC News Poll from 2002) in the entire history of mankind, there is only one person that has ever been able to rise up from their death in order to explain themselves more clearly to the rest of mankind, and that man was Jesus.

But it should not, and in my opinion it DOES NOT really matter what other people think. It only matters what you think, because your thoughts will precede your actions in life. So I guess the only really, super important question to ask yourself is, well, “do you think?”