I have used the phrase 'Honest Truth-Seeking' several times these last months.
And since this business with Truth - or the word Truth itself - leads to enormous confusion, offense - if not direct rage - I had better elaborate and explain it.
I was barely 30 years old when it dawned on me that I had lost myself. I had spent a decade moving further and further away from what I knew was true. I had an identity outwardly - where everything seemed fine - but inwardly there was dissolution. Confusion. Lack of direction, order, presence and general orientation about what life was about.
Other than following my desire.
And what felt good and pleasant.
The culture I had grown up in had taught me I should just follow this - cost what it may. Because if I did this, I would get everything I dreamed of.
I probably should have seen through such an obvious lie - but a child believes what "the adults" tell it. And it went very well - until I had to become an adult myself.
It turned out to be almost impossible to become - that is, adult - since it involved responsibility, difficult priorities and decisions that absolutely did not feel either desire-driven or pleasant.
And to admit that it was I who was underdeveloped, lacked insight or a value-clarified foundation beneath my feet - that was not within the scope of my own capacity.
If something was wrong - it was because the world didn't understand!!!?
So neither worse nor better, I fell - as one does when one is not fully baked - and the platform for the leap was based solely on 'desire'.
Everything around me shattered. The structure I had woven my existence around collapsed under the weight of my lack of consciousness and insight - it simply could not bear it.
In the process I came to hurt people I loved deeply. Including myself. My patterns of "personal truth" were not functional and broke down in the encounter with reality.
It was a dark period, where for a long time I wandered soulless around in a state of complete meaninglessness and inner chaos - trying to hold it all together.
By a stroke of luck I came across the voice of an American older life-wise gentleman, who became a kind of mentor for several years. It opened up a landscape of self-help, therapy, coaching, psychology, hypnosis, philosophy, meditation, personality typology - a lot, which I took a tour de force into - in the hope of rediscovering and rebuilding myself. And over several years it led me back to the light, to meaning, to self-acceptance, to understanding what I had overlooked, never learned and therefore lacked - and how quite ordinary what I was experiencing actually was.
Even though it certainly didn't feel that way when I was going through it.
It lit a fire in me - and I swore one late evening that for the rest of my life I would be a Lifelong Student of Life and Human Patterns.
So I started a search - to explore what was true about myself. What was true about the Human. About the world. I began peeling off the layers of illusions, one by one. It was both brutal and demanding, but along the way something happened in the middle of it all.
I caught sight of two strong underlying forces at the bottom of human patterns, which seemed built into the very structure of the universe.
One pulled downward.
The other pulled upward.
One led to dissolution.
The other to integration.
I couldn't grasp it until 15 years later in my life, when I rediscovered my relationship to the deepest place in the Human and reconnected - to my Faith.
But back to "Honest Truth-Seeking".
In 1944 the physicist Erwin Schrödinger put words to something close to the same in the book 'What is Life?'.
He called it 'entropy and negentropy' - 'dissolution and the counterforce that gathers and keeps life alive'.
In physics, entropy means dissolution, disorder, chaos. The entire universe is subject to this law - everything moves from structure to dissolution, from life to death, from order to chaos.
But life breaks this pattern.
A living system - a cell, an organism, a culture - works against entropy. It maintains form, structure and meaning in the midst of an endless sea of dissolution. This Schrödinger called negentropy - the force that keeps life alive.
Every breath is negentropy. Every new thought that creates coherence in chaos is negentropy. Every culture that builds and carries forward is negentropy.
Life's essence is to say no to decay into chaos - and yes to meaning in order.
But what about the human as thinking, feeling, sensing and conscious being?
Here I myself entered another concept - honest truth-seeking.
To seek truth honestly is not merely to collect opinions or "win" arguments. Nor those one has with oneself in one's interior.
It is the inner will to see things as they are. To leave illusions, self-deception, power games and instead hold oneself upright in reality, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.
See reality as it is - instead of as one would wish it ought to be.
And live in accordance with that.
It is perhaps the most fundamental discipline for a human - and the most demanding. Because it requires humility to admit mistakes. To turn one's gaze toward the uncomfortable. To acknowledge what one does not wish to see. It requires Courage to stand firm on what reveals itself as true. Especially when it contradicts one's understanding and little 'personal truth'. And it requires will to continue seeking when the answer is not yet clear.
It is in this crossfield physics meets wisdom. Science meets spiritual science.
Entropy in the mind shows itself as confusion, relativism and lies.
Negentropy in the mind shows itself as clarity, meaning and order.
And honest truth-seeking is the very work through which we create negentropy in consciousness.
All the great traditions have seen the same.
In the Bible it is called Logos - the Word that creates order from chaos.
In Plato it is the world of ideas, where truth and beauty stand fast, while the shadow play in the cave represents entropy.
In Buddha it is to see through illusion's veil (maya) and find the clear path.
In the hermetic tradition it is called the inner alchemy - to bring the chaotic and dissolving to rest, so the spirit can shine through in pure form.
All true wisdom points to the same.
The human stands in the midst of a struggle between forces that dissolve and forces that gather.
Between Light and Darkness.
And precisely here we must understand the time we live in.
We have accepted the idea of "personal truth" - which in reality most often is just another word for lie. Illusion. Non-functional pattern. We have dissolved Truth into fragments of subjectivity, and even allowed ourselves to call it "freedom."
And the price for this is high. Because when Truth is betrayed, entropy enters.
Human identity crumbles, relationships dissolve, and the structures we build fall apart. Society erodes regardless of how many corrective artifices and quick fixes we make with legislation - which in this time is blown in to fanfares of further control, regulation, surveillance and punishment.
It is precisely the same law that applies in nature - without negentropy, entropy takes over. Without honest truth-seeking - without the will to gather and maintain clarity - everything in the human and in culture will inevitably go into dissolution.
If we pull crooked in relation to the patterns that draw the Human and its society toward negentropy - that is, clarity, truth and light - then the structure collapses sooner or later.
What we offer the next generation is no longer a foundation, but a morass.
Therefore Schrödinger's "negentropy" and the concept "honest truth-seeking" hang inseparably together.
Life exists only because it says no to dissolution.
Truth exists only when we seek it honestly and hold together what would otherwise fall apart.
Honest truth-seeking is therefore not just philosophy.
It is the very work of Life-Force in the human. What straightens it out, so it lives in covenant - in clarity - with its highest purpose and nature.
To seek Truth is to choose Life over Dissolution.
Every time you choose clarity over confusion, every time you choose truth over lies, every time you choose meaning over meaninglessness - then you act in accordance with Life's Innermost Principle - negentropy.
And it is here our destiny is decided.
Because without Truth nothing can stand.
With Truth we can build - ourselves, our relationships, our society and our civilisation - in strength, beauty, order and meaning.
Therefore the next step also becomes this - to begin noticing the lie. Not only in yourself - the places where you gloss over reality, where you dare not stand by what is true.
But even more important - in the voices that shape our society and set the direction.
When politicians, media and institutions tell white or black lies - about climate, about gender, about multiculture, about health, about beauty, about redistribution, about war, about energy, about family, about freedom - then the price is ALWAYS the same - entropy. Dissolution.
For every lie the confusion grows. For every concealment we lose orientation. For every deception structures crumble that should bear. And in the end we stand in a landscape of dissolution, because we built on sand instead of on rock.
Only Truth can create negentropy - that which gathers, holds and bears. Everything else leads to dissolution.
So the question is simple, but radical -
Will we build our life, our relationships and our civilisation on Lie - or on Truth?
❤️🔥🪽
...
With the wish for a good week, where you aim upward.
Even if it is perhaps uncomfortable - and you must make decisions that don't feel pleasant.
Keep your eyes fixed on the gain in the long run! ☀️
