See God        (face to face)

     As citizens of the modern ages, we have grown accustomed to the bending, stretching, twisting, and spinning of the word “truth”. We have witnessed the expansion of the high concept of truth from the exact fact of the universe in every new version of this unending moment, nanosecond by nanosecond, to a matter of individual belief and opinion. We fell from the pursuit of “The Truth” as the highest of all visions which would include God, to the contented ideology that everyone has their own truth independently invented or borrowed from dogma, and all are equally valid; disagreeing zealots and fundamentalists here noted and acknowledged.

     Once upon a time, in my circles we used to describe the truth as “what is”. This had a higher and more profound meaning than more flexible terms such as “reality”, “fact”, “nature”, and “actual”. Then, we capitalized it as “Truth”, and finally added the capitalized preposition to make it “The Truth”, always trying to push it higher and higher above the relativism which threatened to make it little more than “valid”. Now, decades later, I have created my own trinity of inseparable qualities that capture the universe’s true nature and its most profound phenomenon. I call it truth, beauty, and love, and the one immutable thing I know is that it cannot be converted into knowledge.

     Everything we know is something we remember, whether we do it as civilization or as an individual. The constancy of physical laws and the predictability that things acquire in their light make us both the devotees and the beneficiaries of science. But here is the great divide between the truth and that which is valid and known. The truth held to the highest standard is all that is, in this exact and unending moment. Knowledge is everything we have discovered in all of our past experience and retained. What can be known is our past and our predictable future–the no longer existing and the not yet existing, both falling on either imaginary side of this moment, never ever touching the truth.