Why Truth is Like Panning for Gold

Axiom #1: That which is True DOES NOT CONTRADICT.

CONTRADICTIONS can be physical (evidence) or psychological (broken logic), but they are CONTRADICTIONS none the less.

What remains after working through CONTRADICTIONS is thus NON-CONTRADICTORY, and thus MUST IN FACT BE TRUE/TRUTH relative to the context of any situation, circumstance, or given set(s) of information.

Why? Again, remember: whatever IS TRUE, by definition, NEVER CONTRADICTS.

This process is analogous to panning for GOLD: you sift away the excess "NOT GOLD" (I.E the sand, dirt, glass, and other assorted bullshit), and what remains can only be GOLD (True/Truth).

What Tools Are You Using?

Most people's minds are like sifts that have way too big of holes.

Thus all the gold - that which is actually TRUE for any given set of information, situations, circumstances, and/or contexts - slips through with the rest of the sand ("Throwing the baby out with the bathwater").

The difference between True and not-True is impossible to perceive, because the gaps in your sift (or net, etc.) are too big to capture anything new or useful.

It makes discerning anything True indistinguishable from not-True.

Some people fall for the opposite trap and have too tight/small of holes in their sift.

They trap the gold, sure...but they also still retain most, if not all, of the sand.

Any gold retained is obscured by CONTRADICTION (bullshit), and is thus effectively useless for personal progress.

This is the same thing as letting the gold escape.

You still can't tell the actual difference between what's sand and what's gold without "digging deeper" to uncover your "nuggets of wisdom".

The reason for the "These hole are too big/too small" phenomena is entirely due to the presence of CONTRADICTION - I.E. not-Truth - SOMEWHERE IN THE PERSON'S CURRENT CHAIN OF REASONING.

To ignore, marginalize, or outright double-down against this fact is to compound one's own ignorance with massive error.

Your Ability to REASON is Your Ultimate Tool for Knowledge & Personal Growth

Reason = conceptual consistency.

Your access to Truth - whatever the hell that may be for any given context, circumstance, or given set(s) of information - is an ABSOLUTE function of the QUALITY OF YOUR ABILITY TO REASON.

The only thing actually preventing you from receiving the raw data of reality, as truthfully as you can possibly understand, relate to, and use it, is your ability to use REASON.

TL;DR: the stronger your ability to reason, the less susceptible you are to bullshit, lies, and manipulation.

Until you have a proper "filter" - I.E. A SOLID EPISTEMOLOGY (How do we know what we know, and how do we know what we know is valid and useful?) in place, you'll never have the correct size holes in your sift to access Truth, and thus understand its genuine efficacy (actual usefulness and application) in your life.

People in positions of authority, whom are bullshitting you, won't set off your bullshit detector because you foolishly equate authority = integrity = truth.

You've been fooled into letting anyone and everyone whom ISN'T YOU act as your "filter" or "sift", instead of genuinely understanding how to think for yourself, and thus PROGRESS YOURSELF.

This is analogous to trying to have a phone conversation with a third party in between you and your guest, relaying what each of you is saying to the other.

It's not a clear-cut path to what's actually going on; there's a "filter" in the way of the raw data attempting to come through.

That "third party" is your pre-programmed epistemology: your unconscious assumption that any knowledge uncovered by other people, especially in positions of perceived authority (I.E. "Scientists have measured this and proved it, it's a non-discussion", "The government wouldn't plan to sabotage its own citizens) is infallible and trustworthy.

It is the extremely dangerous assumption that other people's knowledge is not only accurate, but also more accurate than your present capability of understanding what may or may not actually be going on with and in this crazy world.

Compound this with the fallacy of group consensus (experts all agree claim X is true, despite being riddled with contradiction), and you have a veritable clusterfuck of psychological and spiritual smoke and mirrors.

You're Stuck Because You've Been Conditioned to Operate Unreasonably (Inconsistently)

Until you learn how to properly REASON with information and claims - how to sort what's bullshit from what's valid -  all personal development, mind hacks, business tricks, and relationship help in the world will not save you.

You are stuck because you require a fundamental shift in your root assumptions, of which are presently analogous to writing philosophical checks that reality can't actually cash...because they contain CONTRADICTIONS.

These CONTRADICTIONS cause seemingly-random anxiety that can manifest as stress, procrastination, etc.

You have internal blocks which are CONTRADICTORY, and the part of you that matters the most knows this.

Try driving your car while hitting the gas and the brakes at the same time.

This is why you're actually stuck/experiencing resistance in life.

The purpose of this site is to help you figure out the optimal size holes for your gold-panning (Personal Growth) endeavors.

To have the presence of a single false hood (I.E. CONTRADICTION) in your reasoning is to poison the proceeding logic, and thus poison the entire thing.

Any extension of an absolute is also itself an absolute.

There are no "degrees of Truth".

It either CONTRADICTS itself, or it doesn't.

No combination of Truth with CONTRADICTION (Not-Truth) will ever yield raw Truth.

Too much sugar spoils the entire batch.

Before you can even logic something, you have to have a reason for trying to combine those two things into a logical statement or claim.

The process starts on the level of REASON, and if you have flawed REASONING, all of your logic will likewise be flawed.

Why? Again, because any extension of an absolute is also itself an absolute.

Thus, the ability to understand Truth, as it could ever exist or be applicably useful to make positive changes in your life, is a function of your ability to REASON.

Fashion your sift, and prepare to uncover the treasures within and around you.

"Waking Up" Part 1: Bullshit Makes the World Work

Most of the world functions as it does because bullshit is the fuel required to make people behave in ways they know aren't optimal for the evolution of themselves and others.

Not relying on pre-packaged ideologies stuffed with contradiction isn't an easy task to willfully engage in.

Many will not - and thus gladly remain stuck - trading powerful Truth (REASON) for comforting lies (CONTRADICTION).

One of the first major steps to "waking up" is to understand that:

1. Everyone is operating through a philosophy - and those who argue they aren't, are the most heavily and subconsciously entrenched, blinded, and corrupted by said philosophy (see "theoretical physicist")
    
2. Getting a progressively "Truer" grasp on the nature of reality, your place in it, and how to succeed depends on constantly seeking out the removal of CONTRADICTION from yours, and others, current positions of philosophical reasoning.

There are no "degrees of Truth".

What's dry is dry, because it's NOT WET.

What's True is True because it DOESN'T CONTRADICT.

You'll experience a constant "perception correction" due to your constantly-increasing ability to REASON.

These "AHA!" moments (what we commonly refer to as epiphanies) then become the norm when you use REASON as your primary tool for figuring things out.

To have the presence of a single falsehood in your paradigm is to poison the entire thing.

It either contains contradiction or it doesn't.

To argue otherwise is to abandon reason for concepts, which are just that - concepts - that have no basis in actual reality outside of your ability to conceive of them psychologically.

This is the entire point to understand: your greatest ability is to conceive concepts within your own conscious awareness, and then use those concepts to ultimately make your life easier, more enjoyable, and productive.

It's from this point of SELF-AWARE CONCEPTUALIZATION that all of your other knowledge (epistemology; how you know what you know is valid) is derived.

I assert that for far, far too long, society and humanity in general has been lazily satisfied with allowing contradiction as a means for "explaining" extremely complex or seemingly-unsolvable concepts, phenomena, and experiences.

This is precisely what most people do, then hinge their entire foundation of knowledge on the assumption that authority figures (scientists, government officials, CEOs, etc.) have it all figured out, and there's nothing left to sort out.

Most people's worldview "makes sense" because it's composed entirely out of a plethora of lies and distortions which are bent, twisted, molded, and then glued back together to force a "reasonable enough" paradigm that's actually founded entirely in EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONTRADICTION (Materialist Science/Scientism).

This is analogous to claiming to have completed a very difficult maze puzzle, simply by drawing a straight line from start to finish, bypassing any of the heavy mental lifting required to actually solve the puzzle step by step, then claiming you've done the work and solved the maze problem.

If someone can manipulate your epistemology (your trust that what you're being shown is valid knowledge, and not manipulated in a way to fool you into a certain type of behavior), they can get you to believe and follow insanely contradictory lines of reasoning that have absolutely no grounding in reality whatsoever.

This, I submit, is one of the major stumbling blocks of human history, and one this blog/site seeks to combat using the diamond-bladed sword of REASON.

REASON is like diamond because it can't be cut or destroyed by anything other than itself.

REASON is like a sword, because when wielded properly it becomes a tool for both defensive and offensive learning and growth.

One is then able to hack and slash their way through the contradictory overgrowth, revealing a rationally and conceptually consistent (True and useful) path of personal progress.

A Rooster Lays an Egg on a Rooftop...

A rooster sits on a rooftop, facing due east.

Said rooftop is shaped like a pyramid, with four sides coming down from its peak.

The sun is rising slowly, with a south easterly wind of approximately 10 mph/km.

The rooster cries, laying an egg precisely at sunrise.

With the information provided to you, what direction does the egg end up rolling off the pyramid-shaped roof: north, south, east, or west?

If you're smart, you should have stopped at the very idea of a rooster laying an egg.

Roosters don't lay eggs.

Hens lay eggs.

Roosters are male birds.

The entire premise of the "question" presented - even though a bunch of seemingly pertinent additional information is provided to help you calculate some scientific, deterministic/probabilistic way of predicting which direction the egg will roll - is irrational. 

The definitions contradict reality.

It's an ontological impossibility (a hen is a hen, a rooster is a rooster) before it even leaves the gate.

Roosters don't lay eggs...

...And NOTHING just becomes SOMETHING, out of NOWHERE for NO REASON (looking at you, Scientific Determinists AND Creationists; both guilty of the same irrational premise: DETERMINISM).

My point being: if you allow for even a single CONTRADICTION in your premise, all of the following logic will be flawed...no matter how tempting the story (Big Bang vs Creationism; both entirely IRRATIONAL, and thus can in no way direct us to any sort of Truth (whatever that may be) due to being based on flawed premises, as explained above) you wrap around said logic.

If the root assertion is contradictory, all your math is merely proof of your intellectual fallacy.

If violating reason is a prerequisite for your theory or claim to make any sense, you have no "leg to stand on" regarding claims to the nature of "just what the hell is going on" regarding consciousness, humanity, and our place and function in the universe we observe.

This is a great example because it's so ridiculous after you see "the trick" in the "question". This is because it perfectly illustrates how modern people's minds are conditioned to immediately concern themselves with weighing and calculating (I.E. "cause and effect", I.E. "the laws of physics", I.E. being drunk on the DETERMINISM Kool-Aid) to "find an answer" that's "objective and empirical and thus True" instead of concerning themselves with the ROOT ASSERTION AND CLAIM of the argument at hand.

This cart-before-the-horse bullshit runs rampant in modern "science", which is anything but science at this point in history.

When REASON is used as a sword to cut through bullshit claims, what's left, no matter how improbable, or impossible, must be TRUTH.

Reality, consciousness, and the human experience are a lot "weirder" than I think both past and present paradigms have allowed.

It's the self-induced psychological handicap of accepting CONTRADICTION in our reasoning that poisons the punch, dulls awareness, and stunts not only massive social change - but most importantly, change on the individual level (of which the former is entirely a function of).

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." -Leo Tolstoy

To Progress The Self is to progress everything and everyone that is not Self simply by association and influence; and it starts by no longer tolerating IRRATIONAL PREMISES as explanations for consciousness, the nature of reality, and our place and function in both.