Honest Truth vs. Ultimate Truth...Relativity, Einstein, and more

[RonSouther]

Just listened to this reading...really good!

Osho,
You spoke the other night about “honest truth.” Mystics have often spoken of the “ultimate truth.” Can the truth be anything other than ultimate?


Truth cannot be anything other than the ultimate. But the mystics had to speak about “ultimate truth” for a certain reason. The reason was that philosophers have been speaking of “relative truth,” and they have been emphasizing the fact that every truth is relative. In the twentieth century, Albert Einstein brought the conception of relativity to scientific truths; otherwise, they used to be ultimate – they became relative. He was right. Mahavira, Gautam Buddha…they all have talked about relativity.

One thing that is missing is that nobody makes a distinction between truth and fact. Facts are relative, and truth is ultimate, but if you get mixed up and you start thinking of facts as truth, then they will be relative.

Two things first: Facts are relative, and you have to understand exactly what is meant by relative. It means that something can be true in a certain situation, and the same thing can be untrue in some other situation.

It was said that while Albert Einstein was alive there were only twelve people in the whole world who understood what he meant by relativity. It is a very delicate and subtle explanation about the universe. Einstein was continually asked – wherever he would go, in a club, in a restaurant – wherever he would go people would ask, “Just say something about what this relativity is and say it so that a layman can understand it.”

Finally he found a way: he said that if you are sitting on a hot stove, time will appear to you to be going very slowly; a single minute will look like hours because you are sitting on a hot stove. Your state is changing your conception of time. But if you are sitting with your girlfriend, hours go by and it seems only seconds have passed.

He would say, “This is what I mean by relativity: time is relative to a particular situation. There is nothing like “ultimate time’ so that whatever you do it is the same. It has always been known that when you are happy time passes fast, and when you are miserable, time passes very slowly.”

He has established relativity so deeply that it has become almost interwoven with all scientific findings. But only one thing I want you to remember: he is talking about facts and calling them truth. Because of that, the mystics had to use the word ultimate. They want to tell you that there is an experience which is beyond relativity. That’s all their meaning is: truth is ultimate.

For example, what I have experienced in these thirty-five years in different situations – it has remained the same, and I know even in my death it will not be different. This is truth: that which remains the same, whatever happens around it, the center of the cyclone.

The whole world is full of facts. Facts are relative. Now, it has to be made very clear to the scientists that what Einstein was talking about was not truth, but fact. But for science there is no truth other than what they discover. The mystic’s truth they don’t accept because the mystic cannot put it in front of the scientists so that they can dissect it and find out what constitutes it – its measurement, weight, and things like that. It is an experience, and totally subjective. It cannot be made objective.

So let us say it in this way, if they insist on calling it truth: objective truths are all relative, and subjective truth is always ultimate. Just not to get it mixed up, the mystics have been calling it the ultimate truth.

All truth is ultimate. But there are scientific truths which are really only facts. For example, if you are sitting on a hot stove the experience of time going very slowly is just a fact of your psychology; it has nothing to do with time. But nobody has pointed that out to Albert Einstein. When you are sitting with your girlfriend and time passes fast, it has nothing to do with time; it has something to do with your mind.

Time goes with its own speed. It does not change; otherwise there would be such a difficulty. Somebody is sitting on the hot stove, and somebody is sitting with his girlfriend – what will poor time do? Go slow or go fast? Time remains the same; it is your mind, your concept of time which is relative.

All objective truths are relative. You cannot say that somebody is tall; that statement will not be correct, because the tallness of the person has to be relative. Tall in comparison to whom? You have to make it complete. Somebody is fat, but just that much is not right and not complete. You have to make it clear that he is fatter than Avirbhava, or thinner than Anando. Unless you make the comparison, you cannot use relative terms.

But we are using them. Because people are using relative words, the mystics have been compelled to say the “ultimate” truth; otherwise, just saying “the truth” would be sufficient because ultimateness is its intrinsic nature. But it has to be repeated; otherwise there are people who will get misguided, confused, because they have heard about relative truths and they will make your truth also into a relative truth. So a distinction has to be made. To draw that distinction, the word ultimate is used – unwillingly. (continued in the next reply)

more in the next

[RonSouther]

continued...

I would not like to use it because it is a repetition, a tautology. “The ultimate” and “the truth” mean the same. You can use either, but to use both is an unnecessary repetition.


My father was very insistent that every Monday he had to receive a letter from me while I was in the university. I told him, “If there is something wrong, if there is some problem, if I am sick, I will inform you. But unnecessarily writing the same thing again and again has no justification.”

He said, “Justification or not, it is not a question of your arguments. I wait for seven days and I become worried about you. It is not your sickness that I am worried about; I am worried about what you are doing, what is happening to you. You may get into trouble any moment. So every Saturday you have to post a letter so that on Monday I receive it. If I don’t receive it on Monday, then I will unnecessarily have to come two hundred miles to the university.”

So what I had done…I had written one letter, “Everything is all right here. I am not in any trouble. You need not be worried.” And on other letters I had just made the sign “ditto.” He was very angry. When he saw me he said, “I feel like beating you! You write ‘ditto’ on the letters!”

I said, “That’s exactly the situation, because I have to write the same thing again. And do you think I write every Saturday? I have just asked one typist to type the first letter, and a hundred letters with the ditto. I have given them to one very particular man – because I may forget and unnecessarily you may have to come – and I have told him, ‘You have to post one of these ditto letters every Saturday.’ He is so particular in everything that once you ask him, he will do it.” He was a student, living in the same hostel.

My father was very angry, “Have you ever heard of anybody writing in the letter just ‘ditto’? I wait for eight days and then I get a card on which the only message is ‘ditto’! Not even your signature, because in ‘ditto’ everything is implied from the first letter: Refer to the first letter. You can read the first letter again when you get the ditto letter.”


Life is not mathematics, it is not logic, it is not science. It is something more, and that something more is the most valuable.

The mystics have called that something more the “ultimate truth.” They can be forgiven for calling it ultimate. But you have to understand that the reason they are calling it ultimate is because there are people who are calling every truth relative – not only scientists, not only people who are working with matter.

Mahavira says that truth itself is relative: he has no ultimate truth. Buddha has no ultimate truth. Again the difficulty is that Mahavira and Buddha can be misunderstood when they say that there is no ultimate truth but that every truth is relative: it can be one thing in one situation, it can be another thing in another situation, and because it is related to situations it cannot have any ultimacy. This goes against all the great mystics.

Only Mahavira and Buddha, two persons…. But I know both, and I understand both better than their own followers, because none of their followers have been able to make any sense out of it: either all the mystics are wrong, or Buddha and Mahavira are wrong!

I say nobody is wrong. What Mahavira says is that truth has seven aspects, and Buddha says that truth has four aspects. They are really referring to the expression of truth. Truth can be said in seven ways according to Mahavira. He is really a logician. But what he is saying is not about truth – there is a misunderstanding. What he is saying is about truth expressed, not experienced. When you experience it, it is always ultimate, but the moment you say it, it becomes relative. The moment you bring it into language it becomes relative, because in language nothing can be ultimate. The whole construction of language is relative. Buddha is not a great logician, so he stops at four, but the situation is the same.

They are not speaking of the truth which you experience in silence, beyond mind. Nothing can be said about it. The moment you say something about it, you drag it into the world of relativity, and then all the laws of relativity will be applicable to it.

Perhaps Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the best logicians of this age, was right when he said, “That which cannot be said should not be said.” This is a strange statement. It stands out in the whole history of thought, unique and original: “That which cannot be said, should not be said” – because if you say it, you are contradicting yourself. First you say it cannot be said, and then you say it. You may make all kinds of conditions: “When I say it, it is no longer the same; when I say it, it even becomes untrue.” But then, why say it?

Wittgenstein’s statement will make it clear that Mahavira and Buddha both were talking about the truth said: then it is relative. The mystics who are talking about the “ultimate truth’ are talking about the truth experienced yet not brought into the world of language and objects. So I think it is better, although it is a repetition, to allow them to use the word ultimate, because it keeps it separate.

From "Beyond Psychology"