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What Are The Differences and Similarities Between Philosophy and Truth?

Updated: Mar 8

 


 

What are the differences and similarities between philosophy and Truth?


What are the differences and similarities between philosophy and Truth?

 

What is Truth?

 

Winston Churchill said that "Men occasionally stumble over the Truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." Yet the Truth it is so simple. Galileo Gallilei wrote "All Truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." Yet Truth cannot be hidden, as Buddha said "Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the Truth." Elvis Presley said "Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away."


As Henry David Thoreau said "It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." Truth doesn't change. Truth is timeless. Truth just is. The problem is that most of us don't know how to access it. Truth is not affected by emotion, even though Truth must be felt. Emotion may initially cause some people to react like a petulant child, rather than respond as their higher adult assertive true Self. Carl Jung, a spiritual Master who was also a psychiatrist and the father of analytical psychology, wrote that "We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the Truth."

 

As Lao Tzu wrote in the 'Tao Te Ching' “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.” As the Bard and spiritual Master William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” As Aristotle wrote "Knowing your Self is the beginning of all wisdom.”


Meister Eckhart, the German scholar and philosopher, wrote "A human being has so many skins inside (ego), covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know our Selves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know your Self there."

 

Albert Einstein said “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” Once we move beyond words and thoughts, creativity is the highest form of intelligence as it is like communing with the divine. Einstein wrote “Creativity is intelligence having fun.” Creativity is communing with one's Higher Self and with the Universal Intelligence that underlies the Truth.


Pain is the greatest teacher. Lord Byron wrote “Adversity is the first path to Truth.”

 

Truth is a great remembering of who you really are. As Mahatma Ghandi wrote "Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear."


How do we know when we are getting close to Truth? As Rumi wrote "That which is false troubles the heart, but Truth brings joyous tranquillity." Would we recognise Truth, even if it slapped us in the face? As Arthur Schopenhauer, the great, if pessimistic, philosopher wrote "All Truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Martin Luther King Jr. wrote "Peace if possible, Truth at all costs."

 



I believe that wisdom is the divine intuition that your soul receives when you are fully present. The wise choice in any situation is to ask your Self "What would love/my Higher Self/God do now?" Wisdom is the intuition that you receive when you commune with the Universal Intelligence. This is normally during meditation.


The differences and similarities between philosophy and Truth

Traditionally, Western philosophy involves a more scientific approach than Eastern philosophy. Eastern philosophy is capable of exploring Truth, whereas Western philosophy traditionally did not.


What is the difference between philosophy and Truth? The great spiritual Masters and Enlightened BEings (Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Paramahansa Yogananda, and Martin Luther King Jr.,) didn’t play with philosophy. Philosophy, especially Western philosophy, is largely to do with the mind (ego). The mind likes to play with philosophy. Philosophy is something your mind does. It puts together things and tries to explain why they are the way they are. So, philosophy is of the mind, whereas Truth is a direct experience – it’s a feeling. So how can you experience philosophy in order to get to the common ground between philosophy and Truth?


There are a few exceptional people through the ages that have explored this, both in the Western world and in Eastern traditions. However, the Eastern traditions are much more involved with Truth over philosophy and are capable of holding both: Whereas the Western world has been mainly concerned with philosophy. As we have said, philosophy comes from the ego mind whereas Truth is a feeling.


Yogic philosophy has been entirely engaged with finding the Truth. Those great Masters realised that Truth didn't come from mind. It didn't come from scholars sitting down and talking about things, studying them, and trying to come up with theories about them. Truth came from very great BEings. They each realised that they were the one that was looking at things. They were not what they were looking at. That's an experience. That’s a reality. You are not philosophising that you are in there. You know that you are in there. When you look at something, it's you looking at it. It's you looking at your thoughts and emotions.


Most philosophical and scientific studies are concerned with what you're looking at. In India, thousands of years ago, someone sat down and asked that instead of what I'm looking at (thoughts and emotions) they asked “Who is looking? Who is aware that there are thoughts and emotions?” The irony is the if you ask someone this question, they will say “I am”, which is actually a deep spiritual Truth. This is the foundation of Eastern yogic philosophy. So, the overlap in the Venn diagram between what is philosophy and what is Truth lies here. Let’s say the question had been not “What are my thoughts?” but rather "Who is experiencing those thoughts?" Eastern philosophy is entirely dedicated to these questions and is why I use philosophy, Truth, positive psychology, and spirituality as the basis of my coaching. It's not about the cloud it's about who's experiencing the cloud. And that became the beginning of the inner journey. Instead of looking outward at what you're looking at, the question became “Who's looking?” And that led to meditation. This is why I meditate twice per day and I recommend that you do too. When I first heard from Deepak Chopra that this was the recommendation for a life full of joy, peace, love, and abundance, I thought that it was crazy to do this, but now that has become my daily practice. I cannot overestimate the value of it.


Thoughts are distracting. We are all always distracted. The word distracted means that you are doing something and then something else distracts you. You are distracted by your thoughts. But you are not back far enough to look at it that way. You need to focus on the fact that you are aware, and that thoughts are distracting you. It's one thing to understand that you are distracted from something: It's something else to realise that you're distracted all the time. Great BEings, who can meditate enough to explore the question “Who is it that I see? Who is it that I hear I see in here? Who is aware of the thoughts?” There is only one way to find out. You cannot understand who is experiencing your thoughts without thinking. Scientists could not find out who's back there being aware of thoughts by studying the thoughts. Because they left the seat of their soul from which you are experiencing and it went down to why you're experiencing. The reflection in the mirror is of you - it can never be you and it can never know you. You can know it but it can't know you. So, your thoughts cannot know consciousness. They can think about consciousness, as some Western philosophers have dedicated their lives to, but those are just thoughts, and the consciousness is thinking about consciousness.  


If you go and ask a neuroscientist who is studying this sort of stuff, many of them will say “Consciousness is the natural evolutionary result of very complex neural pathways.” They believe that the connection of neurons together is so complicated that it explains consciousness. Don't believe them because it's not true. How did they get to that conclusion? Through the mind. All their experiments involve looking outwards. You are only going to understand consciousness by asking the question “Who's looking?” This is what the deep teaching of yoga is. It's the study of the nature of Self. I use a capital ‘S’ for Self in order to distinguish it from the ego self which has a small ‘s’.


If you think about it you are not studying Truth. You're thinking about it and that's a very different ball game. And that's where meditation comes from. It's an actual thing. If you want to find out who's in there, you had better not be thinking about it. You had better not be looking at the world. You had better not be looking at what your thoughts are. There is nothing wrong with these studies, but it does not look at Truth and consciousness. So, the question is “Who studied consciousness itself?” Is there such a thing? I hope you're not going out there trying to find the consciousness outside of you because you are it. Why would you go out there to have someone else tell you who you are? No one can know consciousness more than you can. Why? Because you are conscious. Neuroscientists are looking at the mind. You can't use your mind to figure out what your consciousness is. So, why not study what is inside of you so that you are aware that you are aware. And that is the entire process of deep spiritual evolution and meditation, yoga, and Buddhism. They are all exactly the same. The answer is how to stop thinking. And that is where it gets really interesting. But how do you stop thinking? There are times that you stop thinking: For me this is often when I commune with Nature and go for a walk in the woods. It takes me to a place where there are no thoughts and it's just an experience and a feeling of Truth. You turn a corner, and the sunset blows you away. Or the scattered pattern of light coming through the trees and forming patterns on the dropped leaves. It captures your attention completely and brings you into the present. There's just an experience of the awesomeness of what you're looking at. And when you're having that experience you tell somebody “It touched me to the depth of my BEing. Like I was in the presence of God.” People say things like that. You sometimes meet people who mean a lot to you, and you have to hug them for at least 10 seconds in order to feel the joy of human connection. There are no thoughts there is just this amazing experience of BEing. And you wouldn't trade it for anything. If you could stay there you would stay there. There is no higher experience in your life. Most people seek external validation but that is a transient thing and you can never stay there.


But guess what, with Truth, not only you can stay there, but it is who you are! When you say that something touches the depth of your BEing it's because you have ceased to be distracted by your thoughts. It's not an emotion. It's the Self experiencing it's own nature. So, when the Yogis started to study the inner state, they just asked the question “Who is in there?” You must go inside to find out.


Very few people teach that distraction is a very spiritual word. It's an extremely important spiritual word. If you don't understand distraction, you don't understand anything about spirituality. Why? Because you are constantly being distracted from the seat of Self. You are being distracted from consciousness through the object of consciousness. The reality is that you are back here looking out. I like to use a metaphor where I am in a room with all of my favourite people, including my family, and Jesus, Ram Dass, and Gabor Maté and I am sitting in that room, and my entire life path involves not getting up from that seat when I look through the window and see the conflict and chaos of the world. I no longer run outside and join the conflict.


But instead, you're looking at thoughts in the world. In the garden of Eden Adam and Eve were in ecstasy and were totally free. They could have chosen to live in a total state of ecstatic well-being. But instead, they fell from the garden. Because you fell from the garden, now you must work from the “Sweat of your brow “ as it says in the Bible in order to be OK. You feel like it's the Truth. You feel that. Don’t you? You work really hard at it to feel all the time that you are OK. Everything that you're doing is trying to make you feel OK. That's because you're not OK. You are trying to control the world so that you can feel OK. You are trying to get what you want and not get what you don’t want. It’s what everyone is doing.


In other words what you are admitting is that you're not OK. And guess what, society tells you that you’re not OK. That's how marketing strategies, which are lies, try to sell to you things, that because you don't feel OK in yourself that buying something outside of yourself will make you feel OK. This is the realm of external validation, and it has only one outcome - misery. Can anything outside of you make you feel OK? The answer is no.


You are not only OK, but you’re also the most beautiful thing that ever walked the face of the Earth.


The problem is that you're distracted from your Self. That's what's happening. The self, the consciousness, your soul, the core of your BEing, The essence of your BEing. In consciousness you are not the one who is looking at, you are the one who is looking. That is the highest thing there is: You. If you take away all your material things are you still there? Take away anything and everything. If you take away consciousness, then nothing has meaning and nothing exists. Consciousness is the core of your BEing. It is the essence of all meaning. Nothing has meaning without consciousness. Consciousness is the core of meaning. It is the essence of your BEing.


You had a fall from the garden, the fall from the seat of consciousness, which is who you are. Jesus taught the essence of all the deep teachings and has much overlap with the teachings from yogic philosophy. It’s as if he had travelled to the East. Jesus said “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). So, guess where it is? Within you. It's not within your thoughts or emotions; it is within you. Consciousness is the essence of your BEing. So, to study consciousness with the mind (as philosophers and scientists do) keeps you busy, but it will never find the answer. The great Masters sought solitude, renounced everything, in order not to be distracted. Renunciation says that I'm distracted by things and therefore I must avoid them. The highest spiritual state says that “I'm not distracted by things, therefore I don't need to avoid anything because I'm not distracted by it.”


So, you are working on quietening the mind. You can use yoga, meditation or mindfulness. At this point the mind is not distracting you and the senses are not distracting you. You don't need to use will, hassle, grind, and grit. Because you are no longer distracted by the outside world and your thoughts and emotions: You have quietened it down enough so that consciousness is not pulled down into it. You cease to be distracted by being pulled down by the mind. Baba said that you can enter the higher levels of consciousness. You get to the point where you are high enough that you are no longer distracted by thoughts and emotions. You have managed to withdraw so that the outside world does not distract you. You have worked on your Self enough. And now the mind is quiet enough so it's not distracting you. What then happens is the most natural thing in the whole world. You are no longer distracted. Therefore, you are in consciousness. But what does that mean? It means that you are you. It's called Self-realisation. You realise your Self as consciousness. Nothing is pulling you out and therefore you are in. And that's where the great Masters went - This is called witness consciousness. The problem is that what we do is to keep our emotions and thoughts, they distract us, and we forget that we can choose to live from our Higher Self. Now your mind keeps going back to those because that's what you stored in there. It distracts your consciousness, so you are not at peace, you don't feel joyful. You don't feel love and meaning. So, what if you manage to let go of all that stuff? So, your thoughts and emotions no longer distract you. What does that mean? Who got distracted? People can have a deep meditation. Even just one minute. And your entire life can change. It's so real, and so deep. You experience that. It's so beautiful, you will want to live there, regardless of your external situation.


The problem is that you are distracted. What are you distracted by and why? You do this all the time. We all do. The problem is that we push it away when we store it inside of us. Are you in there? Are there things coming in that you don't like? Do you push them away? Do you try to push away thoughts and feelings that you don't want to have? Suppression and denial involve pushing things away that you don't like. Do you cling to thoughts (as the Buddhists say)? All these approaches lead to misery.


The ego is simply something that you built in your mind to try to live within yourself. It's simply a thought pattern. The Self is doing all this. Consciousness is what has the power to do all this.


When you have experiences and you try and push them away and suppress them, it actually does not push them away. You store them inside. If you let go of things as they happen then there is nothing to forgive. Forgiveness means simply that you did not let it go, but I will not judge you and I will forgive you anyway. You need to forgive your Self and the people that hurt you. Let reality come in and let it pass through you.


Every day there are things that happen that you don't like, so you push them down and suppress them inside of you. You don't let it go and it comes back up years later. Why? Because you stored it in there. Because you couldn't handle it and you pushed it away. So, you stored something inside of you that hurt you. This is not rational. Because you couldn't handle it you took the worst experience that you had in your life and decided to keep it inside of you.


That's why the mind is so distracting. Because what you stored in there are those things that distracted you the most. If anything touches them it distracts you to pieces. You stored the experience.


A computer can store things and bring them back. This is not what we're talking about. The problem is that you suppressed it and pushed it away. Yogis call that thing that is stuck in there a Samskara. These approaches and philosophies date back to thousands of years ago. Why? Because the yogis saw it. This is millenia before Freud, psychology, psychoanalysis or any modern interpretation.  The yogis went inside and saw what was going on in there. Not by studying the outside. Freud’s works were achieved by studying people outside who were institutionalised and he saw these patterns that led to his concept of Self, id, ego, and superego. The ego is also called the self-concept. It's something you think of yourself as. Or it might be something you don't want to think yourself as. And you built a mental concept in there about you who you want to be and a you that you don't want to be. The ego gets triggered all the time as it is so sensitive that it is absurd. So, you are in here watching this. You learn to be comfortable even if the ego is not. It does not distract you. The keyword is distraction. If you go deep enough inside and you learn to work with the mind through breathing and mantras and meditation, just as the spiritual Masters did you can let go of any Samskaras that you stored inside of you. And eventually nothing in there is distracting your consciousness. You didn't do anything to get back to consciousness you simply stopped leaving it. You remain seated in the seat of your soul. It stopped pulling you out. If you take a hot air balloon and it’s tethered to the ground by ropes, It will only go up when you cut the tethers. Then what do I do? Nothing. If you cut the tethers it rises by itself.


So, the Yogis went back there and started experiencing the seat of consciousness. They went beyond witness consciousness. With witness consciousness though, you are still looking at you. You are still looking at your thoughts and emotions. You are still observing something and it's catching your attention. What happens when you are no longer catching your attention - you realise that you are always back there in the seat of the soul, but it's always being pulled down. Then instead of watching your thoughts and emotions, when you go deep enough the Yogis all found the same thing: Which is that my consciousness is like a drop of water, studying me. When it did that it fell back into the ocean. And every single drop of consciousness is of the same nature. It's the same thing. Just like every ray of sun that falls on the Earth falls in different places but it's all the same thing. It's all the sun projecting itself.


Stop paying attention to your thoughts and emotions. They are leading you astray and causing all your lack of well-being. If you stored everything in your life that has disturbed you inside of you, then what will it be like in there, will you be disturbed? Of course! Is it not in disturbed in there unless you work as hard as you can for it not to be. So, when the Yogis went deep inside, they were able to get beyond the senses, and they were able to get beyond thoughts and emotions. So, now they're not distracted. How did they do that? It's called cleansing. Cleansing means that I stored rubbish inside of me and I let it go. We all have stuff stored down there. It's over. You are even bothered by people that are dead. Most of the things that we are bothered about are not even happening anymore. Most likely no one else even remembers them. You must learn to let it go. So, where did the deep teachings come from? If it was stored with pain, it will come back up with pain. Why do you have to store it?


Spiritual growth means that when you were little, and you were not as evolved as you are now, you couldn’t handle it. But you can handle it now if you choose to do so. Not only can you but you will as you will not keep that thing inside of you as it keeps distracting you either subconsciously or consciously. You live like that. Cleansing means that you understand that stuff has to come up so that you can be free. Just let it come up. The result will be worth the pain. I guarantee you that. Olympic champions work on the philosophy of no pain no gain. You are very great BEing. But you are being distracted by that stuff. Why that stuff? Because that's the stuff you couldn't handle.


So, basically you learn to let go. As it comes up, the more you let go, and the less you are distracted. The less you are distracted, the more consciousness sits in the seat of Self. You become established in the seat of Self. Your consciousness is pulled down into you. You learn to cleanse so that you are not distracted. When you're not distracted you find your Self in peace, love, joy, and abundance. You are no longer pulled away from your seat of Self as a result of thoughts and emotions. When you let go, eventually you will feel the energy pulling you up. Just like you cut the tethers: The hot air balloon goes up naturally. It takes a great BEing to let go. Really, it's your life's work. It's your key to everything. Christ said “You die to be reborn.” Consciousness has a source, but you will never find that through philosophy and examining the mind. You are it. This is the result of letting go. All of this is not philosophy, it's a direct experience of Truth, which is a feeling. That is who you are. That is what is going on. And that is what is the core of the deep teachings.


I am honoured to have distilled it for you in this article. Buddhism and Sufism (in Islamic teaching) came from this.


The Yoga-sutras of Patanjali (2nd century BCE) are the earliest extant textbook on yoga. He was the author or one of the authors of the great Hindu classic: the Yoga-sutras, a categorisation of Yogic thought arranged in four volumes with the titles “Psychic Power,” “Practice of Yoga,” “Samadhi” (state of profound contemplation of the Absolute), and “Kaivalya” (separateness). Yoga, one of the six systems (darshans) of Indian philosophy. Its influence has been widespread among many other schools of Indian thought. Its basic text is the Yoga-sutras by Patanjali (c. 2nd century BCE and 5th century CE). The practical aspects of Yoga play a more important part than does its intellectual content, which is largely based on the philosophy of Samkhya, with the exception that yoga assumes the existence of God, who is the model for the aspirant who seeks spiritual release. Yoga holds with Samkhya that the achievement of spiritual liberation (moksha) occurs when the spirit (purusha) is freed from the bondage of matter (prakriti) that has resulted from ignorance and illusion. The Samkhya view of the evolution of the world through identifiable stages leads yoga to attempt to reverse this order, as it were, so that a person can increasingly dephenomenalise the self until it re-enters its original state of purity and consciousness. An aspirant who has learned to control and suppress the obscuring activities of the mind and has succeeded in ending attachment to material objects will be able to enter samadhi—i.e., a state of deep concentration that results in a blissful ecstatic union with the ultimate reality. Patanjali wrote in the Yoga sutras that the first stage is to draw from your senses. Then he wrote about the ability that now you have drawn from your senses on the insides to a one pointed focus on one thing, so that you are not wandering, and you have one point of focus. This is not meditation. It's the ability to focus on one point so that it's not jumping all over the place. Take that one-pointed focus and focus on consciousness itself. Let it come back to the seat of consciousness. That is meditation; that is yoga. This is not philosophy.


Make of your life a prayer. Jesus said “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-17). Jesus also said in Luke 21:34-36 “Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man."


Because you are consciousness, you are the greatest thing that walked the face of the Earth. The problem is that you started identifying with what you're looking at. You identified with everything that defines you externally. Everyone is capable of the deepest and highest states, and it does not involve leaving the life that you have. It's about ceasing to be distracted by that which you are not, which are your thoughts. You may ask “Which thoughts are me?” The answer is none. You are distracted by all your thoughts and emotions and by your body senses. How do you get out of this situation? First, you have to want to get out. Then you must realise that it’s nothing to do with the outside world. You are literally God descended, playing in his Universe. You need to become aware of this every single second. That is your state of BEing. There are great Masters who at all times that is who they are, at all times of their life. The real point is that Self-realisation is not a philosophy. You are it. It's a shift from the mind to the heart.


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly



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