Relative truth

• 15 September, 2023
• culture
• dream weaving
• Qultura

The truth we most often encounter within our lives, whether it's something from our social environment, from other people, or even within ourselves, is relative truth. It's truth which is in relationship to thought, to the Felt Sense of Immediate Experience, to statements made by other people, and also through law.

Law is based on relative truth, as is science. The concept of law, a human concept, is incompatible with absolute truth. You could even go as far to say that law and truth are incompatible. But see they don't need to be compatible, because you can use law as a standard through which you can determine a relative truth, for example in civil law, or the criminal justice system, or any other type of law. Please keep in mind here that such laws as Natural Law and Creative Law are human concepts on the same level as any law or even a constitution, such as the US Constitution, is still a human concept. Much of the way the universe and much of existence behaves in ways which lie well beyond the limitations of human comprehension.

But see you also experience relative truth in dreams. You experience an environment. The people you see in your dreams have some reality. So too do the sounds and words that you hear. The experiences you go through in your dreams are not any different from your Felt Sense of Immediate Experience - where all the different levels of reality and planes of consciousness you exist on come together through all five dimensions of life. But the difference is that you're fast asleep. Your focus of conscious attention is completely unconscious. Your level of conscious awareness remains on a different plane. But you're asleep.

This is important because it is possible to develop a connection between these two different states of consciousness - sleep and wakefulness. It's often beneficial to do so because it's how you can develop a skill which is known as visioning, and also develop on intuition and the ability to sense and 'feel' during your normal states of wakefulness. This is a major factor when it comes to developing mindfulness and the deeper, existential, spiritual dimensions of living existence through Unmind. Unmind of course is the fourth component of Qultura methodology.

The example of being a member of a jury in court

Let's look at an example of how law is used to determine a relative truth. Using an extreme example, let's imagine you're a member of a jury in Texas participating in a capital murder trial, i.e. murder with an additional felony (arrestable offence for UK folks). As capital trials always occur in two stages first you will be required to participate in determining whether the defendant is guilty or innocent. Then in a second stage of the whole trial you will be required to participate in the determining of the appropriate sentence - life imprisonment or the death penalty. This second phase of the trial is known as the 'punishment phase'. As mandatory death sentences in the US are unconstitutional, all states which have capital punishment are required to have two stages to their capital trials. Uncle Sam doesn't want to make the decision to kill one of its citizens, so the State gets other people to make that decision.

Jury members in Texas are asked to consider three special conditions or factors which are part of the law or legislation:

I've used this example to highlight the ineffectiveness of determining a consistent relative truth using a law. Capital punishment is not a deterrent for this reason. Despite the fact that capital punishment exists in a little over half of US states most people who commit murder end up serving life sentences in prison, pretty much as they do in Britain and everywhere else in the West. Only a minority end up on Death Row. Nobody can explain the difference or what really makes a murder a capital murder. Yet each year some murderers end up getting sentenced to death while others don't, and this is all called justice.

This lack of consistency comes out of a widespread belief in Ego, external authority and the false illusion of separateness between self and other.

Overcoming separateness in a spiritual journey

The whole point of going on a spiritual journey towards mindfulness is to seek unity between self and environment and also self and other. As a simple fundamental basic necessity you need to overcome separateness wherever it is humanly possible for you to do so. All around you your environment is constantly evolving and changing. Within you constant change is also going on across different levels of reality and planes of consciousness. Since starting to read this blog post you've burned through hundreds of thousands and even millions of brain cells. Yet your brain is more or less the same pattern.

While there are many reasons for developing a spiritual journey the main reason is to be able to deal with the process of dying and death. Death from the perspective of Ego is a terrifying experience where you imagine the total destruction and annihilation of self and your whole being. The only way you can get round that is to understand that your Ego is just a physical manifestation of your uniqueness, and that your real self is part of the infinite self of the universe and that you're just here in spirit for the journey. You are the Hungry Ghost messing about with a human physical body on a predominantly physical planet in the cosmos.

You see the process of dying, in the cultural sense, is essentially going back into spirit and leaving behind your physical body and being for the planet. Essentially you're becoming at one with the universe and the planet, completely, but only in terms of spirit (Akasha). Everything that's relative to your physical being, including much of your conscious perception and awareness, gets left behind. Your corpse becomes part of the environment and your conscious awareness and perception developed through memory passes on to other people who knew you. As you were physically manifest in this incarnation to experience life you return again after death into a new incarnation and your whole life cycle starts all over again. This is pretty much the whole point of original sin in Christianity which roughly equates to attachments in eastern philosophies and religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Please understand, and be very clear about what I mean here by 'sin'. I'm not referring to sin in terms of morality, or something 'bad'. The actual fundamental mystical sense of the word 'sin' is insufficient. You cannot be the totality itself or the universe or if you prefer God, simply because you're not omniscient or omnipresent. This is the whole reason why you were born in the first place, and you were born with a certain karma - physical attachments - which you need to figure out throughout the process of your life. What this means is that while your 'self' is equivalent to the universe as 'self', but you are but a fragment of the universe. Think of a biological cell relative to your whole body. Or to make it a bit easier, your finger relative to your whole body. You see your finger needs a hand, an arm, it needs blood, movement, and the whole environment of your physical body in order to function. You are no different, you need a planet, a community, and every thing else in order to live, and you need life in order to evolve and grow.

Therefore the spiritual process is very important in life because through it you shift the emphasis away from your physical being, body and Ego to your spirit or - as it's attached to your physical body through which it experiences life - your soul. Any spiritual process is essentially soul work. This is important because truth being relative, the more you develop spiritually, and in terms of conscious awareness - which is the connection between spirit and body - your individual truth changes as you progress and so too does your perception of truth. Please keep in mind that integrity is not really something you can express through achievements and labels. It's something relative to your core being and is something other people can feel or sense about you. Truth is the basis of integrity and integrity is also fundamental to empathy.

There are three approaches to the spiritual process - all relative to our relationship as individuals to our environment.

• Man under Nature

  The general 'Man under Nature' is based on total fear of the power of the universe and the environment. This is the strategy which offers various gifts and sacrifices to the gods of the winds, and of storms and so on. See fear of the wider environmental forces which are much greater than the separate self. You're this tiny separate being while before you were the whole thing. Now you're just this little thing and all these forces are not you because they're separate from you. You've defined yourself as a sepaarte entity and environment of head, body, arms, legs, but then see there's all the rivers, mountains, forests and so on.

  This is a strategy of mitigation. We will offer you our blood sacrifices if you won't destroy us.

• Man over Nature

  There's another strategy which is one which Western cultures take which is Man over Nature. The power of our mind will solve all problems, up to and including climate change. This is what it's about. This is what we're telling ourselves and each other through our cultural beliefs. We will be able to rule all the oceans, all the land, all the mountains, all the other species and so on. We will be able to take what we want and exploit the natural resources to maintain our separateness.

  In other words what is being said here is that the human intellect is God. We can create our own heaven with our own mind. The tension, neurosis, ecological crises, genocide of vertebrate species, immediate threat of starvation, all kind of throws some doubt as to the validity and potential success of this strategy.

• Man integral to Nature

  Then you have the third strategy which is essentially Taoism, in that Mankind is a separate entity to Nature but is relative to the Dao and Nature and is therefore part of an unfolding process. This is the more conscious and enlightened approach. This appears to be what human culture seems to be moving towards.

  This is also the same strategy as Qultura, which is essentially a simplification of Taoism and also a modification through the Principle and the Process, the basis of Qultura methodology. Unlike other methods and strategies Qultura requires a partial rejection of separateness through development of a Qultura method from the complete methodology through community participation and community involvement. You develop a Qultura method through dream weaving and development of relative truth through subversive activities, such as dream weaving, developing creativity, and community volunteering and activism. The power of Qultura lies in the coming together in community to create new culture and cultural attitudes.

Connection to environment and other

What Qultura shares with Taoism is an understanding of the necessity of learning about, listening to and understanding your environment. In Taoism this involves learning about the Dao from the Tao Te Ching and, if you become somewhat advanced in Taoism, from reading the later book the Chang Tzu. However Qultura takes a different approach in that you only need to study and become familiar with Qultura methodology which has four relatively simple components which give anyone a solid basis of mystical principles from which they can develop their own meta-physic based on where they feel they are on their spiritual journey.

One of the main reasons why I have spent so many years develop Qultura methodology is that all too often the vast majority of different methods - be they religions or methods tend to take a 'one size fits all' approach to the spiritual process and in so doing can end up being insufficient as a means of developing a spiritual process. The obvious example is Christianity. Christianity started out as an offshoot of Judaism first developed by Gentiles in Judea for people who either didn't conform to or fell outside the strict geometric religious, social and cultural system of Judaism. In the early years of its development it was an effective method of developing a spiritual process, but centuries of being doctored by the Church for the purposes of religious authority has kind of butchered it. While some people can somehow still figure it out many people can't and all too often - simply because people don't like being talked at - it turns very many people away from religion and away from God.

Another major reason is that generally the 'one size fits all' approach doesn't really work because it does nothing to address the core issue, and that is a fundamental emotional and psychological attachment to the structures of separateness and its reinforcement. Here I'm referring to the Ego itself, external authority and ideology. Here I can give you another example here and that is Buddhism. All too often the way Buddhism is taught and practised is according to a set of lists developed by Siddhartha Gautama and his small band of disciples, such as the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Five Precepts, the Three Marks of Existence, and so on and so forth.

The spiritual process involved in Buddhism - which is based just as much on external authority as religions - i.e. you need a teacher, is externalized to that you are led to believe that nirvana or enlightenment is an objective you need to somehow work towards by following the method and applying the principles to spiritual practice. Spiritual practice in Buddhism is generally understood to be meditation. It works well as a monastic system when you're a Buddhist monk in a community of other monks but see here again you've got separateness between you and the rest of society. But it's much less effective in the modern world and social system where you have to deal with the paradox of living existence.

This is where we get to the main issue with Buddhism. It can work as a system, provided you can somehow work it all into your daily living and lifestyle, but it's a very nihilistic system which is very up front and in your face. You're told that you suffer because you're attached and the only way forward is to let go. But what are you attached to? Why do you need to let go of it? What happens when you're no longer attached? Furthermore how do you know what enlightenment is if you've never experienced it? How can you tell you've made it to one of the different levels of Buddhism - arahat, boddhisatva, or buddha? I escaped much of this in my own training by being guided and directed towards becoming a 'sramana' (a Buddhist shaman) and being told that I needed to figure it all out by myself through my spiritual journey and by listening to the wisdom of older people. But many people don't have this experience of Buddhism.

As you can see there are all sorts of pitfalls and a fundamental paradox to the spiritual process.

The Principle and the Process

As you can hopefully see I've developed a system which is anything but 'one size fits all' and stripped away all the initial learning curves you have to go through by learning a method. You have free access to Qultura methodology in a free e-book or via a website (such as this one or the Qultura and Qultura Core websites). All you need to develop a Qultura method - your own Qultura method - is relative truth and to join the Qultura community.

So what you have to wrap your mind around, initially when it comes to Qultura, is that the 'real' Self and who you really are is not physical at all, but is consciousness and spirit. Your Ego is merely role play for the purposes of a physical identity in this incarnation only. It's got nothing to do with who you really are as a human being relative to this planet or the universe. This is where relative truth becomes so very important when it comes to Qultura. You don't have to follow a method or embrace an ideology or new belief system, simply because whatever Qultura method you develop needs to be based on your relative truth.

Before I conclude this blog posts by highlighting the importance of participation and involvement in the Qultura community I need to bring to mind three very important mystical principles.

• All existence is change, all existence is relationship

  We start with the most fundamental, basic principle (outside of course the basic Principle & Process of Qultura methodology. Reality, however which way you define it, cannot ever be fully understood, known, explained or defined. You just can't do it. The universe is coming at you in a vast multi-dimensional continuum of sensation and experience. In other words everything is happening everywhere all the time. The focus of your conscious attention, equivalent to the Ego, is extremely narrow and limited.

  This one mystical principle, just by itself, almost completely subverts the entire 'Man over Nature' strategy which lies behind Western social and cultural values. Most of our social and cultural values are based on an underlying assumption that we understand our environmental reality and we have it all figured out when it comes to society and the socio-economic system. This creates a fundamental paradox which manifests itself in many different ways across the different levels of reality that we experience through life.

• Trauma and suffering arises out of separateness and division

  This principle is essentially a subversion of the underlying premise of Buddhism - you suffer because you desire through physical attachments. The suffering doesn't come from developing the attachments. Buddhism approaches the desire for permanence through attachment in an impermanent existence from one angle. Qultura approaches the same issue from another angle. Trauma and suffering arises out of the separateness and inevitable divisions where you are forced to let go of that what you are so emotionally and psychologically attached to. Examples include death, birth, the loss of love, the ending of a relationship, loss of a job, becoming homeless and so on.

• The environment creates, the individual grows

  This is also another fundamental mystical truth which also subverts the whole 'Man over Nature' strategy behind Western social and cultural thinking. Can you create a living tree? If you think you can, then please feel free to get in touch and explain how. Please explain it to me as if I'm a five year old child. You see you can plant a tree by burying a seed in soil, but it's the environment which creates the tree by providing it with a nurturing environment in which the tree can grow.

  Similarly the whole separateness culture, together with your Ego structure, dependence on external authority and various organizations and institutions has been developed layer upon layer over many years through a process of socialization which you, me, and everyone else has been put through from our earliest experiences of life onwards. It was created by an environment, and you merely grew into it and maybe still participate in it.

  This is where we get to the sheer necessity of the Qultura community. Sure you can try to liberate yourself in your own spiritual process and journey all by yourself. But a fundamental part of any spiritual process or journey is relationship. Relationship here implies both connection to environment and other. But trying to develop a meta-physic out there in mainstream society is extremely difficult if not impossible - because you're looking to subvert mainstream social and cultural values. If you start trying to do that people are naturally going to do whatever it takes to defend their Egos, ideologies and belief systems. You could end up being even more alienated and caught up in even more separateness, which kind of defeats the whole point of any spiritual process.

Hopefully now you can see the point of developing a Qultura method within the context of the Qultura community together with other people who are also seeking to develop their own Qultura methods, each in their own individual way. What connects everyone is of course the practice of dream weaving through community participation and community involvement.

I could further into aspects of the Qultura community and opportunities for developing a spiritual process via the Qultura community but I feel that I've taken up enough of your time and attention already by this post about relative truth. So what I will do is break things here and continue in the next post 'Using perspective to resolve the paradoxical nature of life'. You have enough to digest and take on board here. When you feel ready to continue to explore this further with me you can come back for another instalment in the process.