What do facts and truth have to do with personal growth?
Many books have been written and dance around this topic. I’ll cover a lot of ground quickly and give you the key points to help you escape what I call the Truth Trap. Give me some time, and put aside your doubts while your reading. Understanding the nature of what is in your head is worth the investment of your time and mind. In the end, keep what you like, discard what you don’t.
Our brains are wired to examine our surroundings, draw conclusions, repeat the decisions that work, and replace those that don’t. Early learning, memorization, experience wit h the world, along with our brain’s tendencies, combine to create the fact-based brain. Our schools impart essential shared “knowledge” that is necessary to function well as a society. In an effort to live socially and standardize, we face correct/incorrect, right/wrong, and true/false perspectives constantly. All of this reinforces a fact-based ecosystem of thought. From this environment and the wiring tendency in our brain, we form the basis of the absolute real world in our head. We learn to treat almost everything in our minds as either facts in principal or quasi-facts that serve the same role in practice. We conversationally attest to uncertainty and openness, but we think and act as though our minds are stuffed with immutable facts.
I’ve had to completely rewire my own brain, as I once believed in facts. In very abbreviated form, I held the philosophical view that knowledge is fully possible, since if even one piece of the universe cannot be known, it leads to a problem that nothing can be truly known. I recognized that in practice, much was unknowable, but placed high value on that which I thought I knew. I believed in principal everything could be logically snapped together, even if the logic would be fuzzy in some areas. This perspective seemed more than reasonable at the time.
