Please Listen!

When I ask you to listen to me and you start giving me advice, you have not done

what I asked.

When I ask you to listen to me and you begin to tell me why I shouldn’t feel that way,

you are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me and you feel you have to do something to solve my problem,

you have failed me, strange as that may seem.

Listen! All I ask is that you listen. Don’t talk or do –

just hear me.

Advice is cheap; 3.5 rupees will get you both Shri shri Ravi Shankar and Baba Ramdev in the same newspaper, and I can do for myself;

I am not helpless. Maybe discouraged and faltering, but not helpless.

When you do something for me that I can and need to do for myself, you contribute to my fear and inadequacy. But when you accept as a simple fact that I feel what I feel, no matter how irrational, then I can stop trying to convince you and get about this business of understanding what’s behind this irrational feeling.

And when that’s clear, the answers are obvious and I don’t need advice. Irrational feelings make sense when we understand what’s behind them.

Perhaps that’s why prayer works, sometimes, for some people – because God is mute, and he doesn’t give advice or try to fix things.

God just listens and lets you work it out for yourself.

So please listen, and just hear me.

And if you want to talk, wait a minute

for your turn – and I will listen to you.

Analyzing Truth.

What is truth? This question can be seen as one of the most typical of philosophical puzzles. We use the concept frequently and without question- we ask “Is that true?”, we announce, “It’s true”, we swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but truth. Sometime truth is elusive- we find it hard to find out the real truth behind appearances, the truth can be deliberately hidden or obscured, or simply beyond our investigative abilities. Politicians can try to hide the truth, scientists aim to discover the truth, historians puzzle over the remains and manuscript to work out the truth.

In all these instances of searching for the truth, however, what is not questioned is the nature of truth itself. The truth may elude us, but we are in no doubt as to what it is we want to know. But when faced with that question, “What is truth?” the mind goes numb- what does the question mean?We feel like we do know what the answer is, yet we cannot put it into words. so it is with many philosophical puzzle- what is time? what is knowledge? what is mind? Normally we don’t have any trouble applying concepts like time, knowledge, mind- we can look at the clock to see what time it is, we know when the next train is due to depart, we have in mind that we must remember to collect the bag from the left luggage. But when challenged to explain what time itself, or knowledge, or mind, or truth, is, we come to a halt. As Augustine said about time, “I know well enough what it is, provided nobody asks me; but if I’m asked and try to explain, I’m baffled.

There are many puzzles about truth. There’s lie paradox- would you believe me if I told you I always lie? Another, and perhaps the most challenging is the skeptic’s claim that there is no such thing as absolute truth- all truth is relative to the one who judges. The water is cold to me, warm to you- is there any fact of the matter as to whether it is really warm or cold? The table looks solid but the physicist says its mostly empty space-is there any fact of the matter? perhaps there is no absolute truth- only what is true for me, for you and so on.

Global relativism is self-refuting, as Plato observed in his dialogue, the Theaetetus. It falls to an ad hominem objection that, by its own lights, in rejecting it I make it right to reject it. It has to concede that it is false for me; and I- speaking as one who is not relativistic- say it is false. So either way, relativism is false. The truth is not relative, but absolute. Each of us has perceptions, makes judgments on the basis of them, views the world from his own perspective. But the world is distinct  from all those different viewpoints. Truth is objective.The world is a world of facts which make our judgements objectively true or false. It is at the very least, an ideal which our judgements seek to mirror.