What is truth? Do you know for certain that something is true on an absolute scale? I don’t, not always. I don’t have a perfect answer for it, but I think that I have an appropriate one. It’s about perception. It’s about your experiences and your beliefs. Your opinions are formed by them and so is your perception. Now, these two, in themselves, are co-dependent to some extent, but that is one for another discussion.
Let’s take the origin of the universe for example. Some scientists say it is the Big Bang whereas various religious scriptures describe different processes of creation. Those are the respective truths for the followers and they believe in each of these ideas. None of us have an undeniable proof of it; not yet, at least.
Your experiences and beliefs are like lenses that you look through, and these lenses are being modified all the time, with each passing moment. There is always a chance that the vision that you perceive is not exactly the same as the reality, rather it is distorted. Coming to reality, is anything real? There are times when what we think we have sensed or experienced is nothing but a figment of our imagination. And for that matter, is it all a dream? Am I dreaming and you are in mine? Or are you dreaming and I am in yours? Or we are all dreaming and our dreams are in sync?
Talking about reality, think about expectations and reality. What do you expect it is or it is going to be, and what it actually is or turns out to be? What do you expect from others and from yourself? What do people expect from you and from the society? All these expectations create a standard to confirm to. When people are confirming to it, then who are they in reality? The person whose actions are matching the standard, the person who is trying to confirm, the person who wants to be a certain way based on society’s expectations, the person who could not match up, yet kept trying, the one who could not match up and is a failure, and the list goes on.
Let’s come to honesty now. When you are honest, you are conveying the truth to the best of your abilities. Suppose you have said something to someone in all honesty. But is it completely true? You believe it to be true. Maybe it is so because you got it from a trusted source, or it is the result of several observations, or it is something you say to yourself to cope up with something or to make sense of something. If you got it from a source, questioning its reliability, which we should, would continue this loop. If it is the result of several observations, then we should know that such findings are probabilistic in nature. If it is something you have said to yourself, then self-honesty is one of the most difficult habits to master and practice. Again, honesty itself can be a topic of discussion.
Now coming back to “Truth”, we see the cycle as we reach at where we started from, with some wisdom gained along the way. It is all about perspective, built on top of foundations such as experiences and beliefs.
By Megha Kutrahe, MBA
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