Is truth an opinion?

Is truth just an opinion?

You might know the story of the 5 blind men and the elephant, where each person tells what he observed to the other and it turns out that they all are wrong in reality.

We come across several incidents in day to day life, and while we have our point of view, truth happens to underly reality. To be more clear, just as the saying goes, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, truth too has a framework of its own. Each person observes different things in his life, and it is the occurrence of this duality that makes us question truth.

So lets try to look at a link connecting opinion and truth.

We say seeing is believing. But in reality, truth tends to have its own limitations. This is exactly where religion fails. Each religion preaches some beliefs depending on the person who initially perceived it with his 5 senses. But when attempted to put the different views from different people together, we turn up with something that we turn up in the story of the “5 blind men and the elephant”, the resulting entity is nothing close to an elephant.

Sometimes truth changes over time. For example, the flat model of the earth and the theories like the geocentric theories have prevailed in society we had mathematically consistent models of motion and time. It took a change in mindset to accept that the earth is indeed round and of course the heliocentric theory and now we have bent the math around what we now believe as the truth. 

How truth is different from belief:

Most of us believe whatever we know as the truth. This kind of a mechanism helps us survive as individuals, because, if we really had to find out the truth all by ourselves, there would not be any time for the more important things in our lives. 

For instance we believe our parents that they really are our parents. We believe that our name is so and so and continue with that. We believe that the world was here before we were born and will continue after we are gone

When a teacher says things like electricity and magnetism, we believe our teachers, even though none of these phenomenon have been completely understood. We believe in mathematics and things like elementary particles and string theory even tough in reality we don’t have contemporary analogies. For that reason, we tend to rely on analogies more than reality while understanding the mechanism of most phenomenon (misuse of vocabulary).

As children we are taught to speak the truth and from experience we learn that good morals are indeed a pre-requisite for a good way of life. However some situations lead us to question the fundamental principles and when we don’t find answers to such situations, we tend to come up with our own ideas on what might have happened. At his point we see that truth can be made up just as easily as an opinion.

This is it true that truth is just an opinion?

No. Like most human behaviour, truth too is assimilated with a negative feedback attitude. We perform different experiments in real life which tells us how to react to different situations we come across, as we learn we label different things as true depending on reliability of the argument. Whereas opinion is just what we think at one specific moment in our lives. In a broader sense, opinions are the way we reach the truth or what we tend to conclude as the truth.

Does it really matter?

No. Like I initially argued, it does not matter, because whatever happens in reality we each find explanations and try to move on. We are so good at modeling things with mathematics that when we find mathematics showing results on extrapolation, we tend to come up with realities based on our observations; take string theory, chaos theory, extra dimensions for instance, where mathematics expalins everything perfectly but we are limited by our sense.

It is a common opinion that proverbs are universally applicable. However there are several proverbs which contradict each other! this clearly helps us to distinguish beliefs, opinion, truth and fact.

Essence of a goal

We humans do everything in life with some or the other goal. Sometimes a goal is very clear to us sometimes its foggy and sometimes we see right through it.

1) A child cries with a goal of getting its stomach filled, a goal of conveying its desire to sleep, a goal of conveying its displeasure to something or a goal of wanting to be with its loved ones.

2) In sports a goal is almost always visible.

-In cricket you need to send the ball outside the boundary.

-In foot ball in a goal post.

-In basket ball in a basket

-In golf, pool, snooker, carom in a hole

-In snake and ladder it’s the last square.

-In chess its by method of elimination

-In volley ball, tennis, table tennis badminton, throw ball you need to keep the ball within the boundary.

3) I was once asked why test match gets less audience than a 20-20 cricket matches. Here are some points I could think of;

            1) It takes a real long time to set a goal and a whole lot more to achieve a goal in a test match, where as in a 20-20 the whole process is a whole lot quicker.

            2) In test match there is a huge chance of a draw match. Very rare in 20-20.

           

Time is thus of a great essence when it comes to addressing a goal.

4) I had a beautiful lesson in Sanskrit in my 9^th standard named 'Shraddha'=>belief.

Shraddha means honest dedication but in this chapter it addressed belief.

I still remember that this lesson spoke all about how belief has held our lives together.

While on one hand a goal gives you a sense of direction, it is the belief that finally keeps you going in life.

• We sleep every night with a belief that we are actually going to get up the next day in the morning.
• A monkey hangs on the branch of a tree belief that the branch is going to remain intact.
• A sentence said “Yo yat shraddha sa aiva saha”, which means that a person becomes what he believes in life.
• The lesson also had an abstract from ‘The Bhagavad Geeta’,

“Shraddha vishwam idam jagat,

Shraddha vishwa vyapini”

            According to the lord, it’s the belief that keeps the world going, belief makes the world a better place.

5) Other instances of setting a goal include:

a) People buying lottery ticket with a hope of getting a lot of money(goal).

b) Students write exams with a goal of passing (however some aim higher (~_^).

c) Ideally the end objective of education system must be to make the students good citizens, how ever, most institutions have lost their track.

d) Students go to class everyday, believing that their teacher is going to show up.

6) There are a lot of examples of people who have reached their goals after setting a goal. Some of such examples include.

   a) Master blaster – Sachin Tendulkar.

   b) Kiran Bedi.

   c) Mahatma Gandhiji (next Anna Hazare)

   d) Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page.

   e) Nicola Tesla, Edison, Einstein, Newton.

   f) Charlie Chaplin, Lata Manjeshkar, A. R. Rehman.

   g) Dhirubai Ambani, Narayan Murthy, Ratanlal Tata.

   h) Swami Vivekananda, Mata Amritanandamayi, Pandit Ravishankar, Baba Ramdev.

  i) Barrack Obama, S. M. Krishna, Yedyurappa, Jailalitha, Lallu Prasad, Narayan Modi, Mamatha Baneerjee, Adolf Hitler.

7) Set a goal today machis and machas!

            “Failure may be the stepping stones of success, however don’t aim at failure for this reason! (~_^).

8) Most engineers join a company in the beginning to be promoted over time to raise up to the top position in a company. A really passionate employee, gives his best at his work and is often recognized in a company. Its the goal that drives employees to work everyday and come up with faster and more efficient solutions to everyday problems.


Note: the following picture says more than enough of things to be aware of when a goal is set. Make sure you have overlooked the consequences of setting that particular goal and stick to it if you think it is worth it.

9) In most situations in life, we realize it much later that we were actually closer to a goal than we had assumed to be. It is very important for a person to visualize a goal so that he at least has an idea of what he is going to see at the end of the tunnel

10) Here are 3 illustrations by that I felt needed some light in this discussion.

a) this is a very funny instance from the popular series ‘friends’, the way I remember it (^_^).

Chandeller Bing is this amazing guy who has a typical way of always thinking out of the box in all situations in the series.

One day at work, Chandeller hears a fellow work discuss amongst them on how Chandeller is being under-paid for his efforts. This somehow triggers a logic in his mind and he comes up with a master plan to get fired, because he considers it less dignified to give out a resignation.

According to his plan, He decides to over-work right from the next day. He shifts his work space closer to the paper copier, in order to avoid spending time moving back and forth during his paper works.

He starts to really focus on work and 3 days from this day he finds out that the guy sitting next to him has been fired. He feels a sense of victory and finds out other ways to do more work out of his time.

He starts to attend a call, write his report and type in his computer all at the same time. He next day the guy in front of Chandeller gets called by the boss and when he returns, the finds that the guy had been called to tell him that he was fired. He now decides that he is next on the line and keeps doing his work as planned.

The next day, the boss calls him and he goes with zeal of satisfaction that his time has finally come. However in reality, the boss of his boss would have fired the boss of Chandeller and made Chandeller the boss, due to his failure in recognizing the talent of this worker.

Thus Chandeller gets his pay to be increase, and a promotion at the same time.

At this point we must note that, the problem he was having was a low pay and even though we can’t agree with his logic, he reached the goal of solving this problem.

Yes, most of the time, goals are not reached as we plan them to, but the universe has the most unexpected way of talking us to the goals when we least expect it to. So; Do set a goal.

b) Story of the cobbler.

            I had read this story a long time back so do forgive the glitches.

Once upon a time there was a cobbler in a small village, he had heard many of his relatives’ talk of the lord’s temple in the Himalayas, and had the desire to go see the lord himself. So when he managed to collect enough money, he set out to reach the lords temple in the Himalayas.

This cobbler managed to reached the Himalayas in the end of rainy season, and winter had just begun. When he reaches the directed place, only to find a board that said that the path had been closed due to high expected blizzard. The cobbler felt disappointed and decided to go back to his village.. But while on his way back a blizzard really sets in, and just at that time he hears a voice from a distance.

He finds a shepherd taking his sheep into a small cave and decides to follow the shepherd to the cave. The shepherd and the cobbler talk till late in the night about their experiences and go to sleep by the fire.

However the next morning when the cobbler wakes up, he notices the shepherd missing and when he reaches the mouth of the cave, he realizes that the blizzard has ended, and the path seems to be flooded with people.

It is only then that he realizes that the night that he had spent with the shepherd in the cave lasted 4 whole months outside, and summer had set in by the time he had woken up.

In this story, the cobbler reached his goal by first setting it. And because of his belief he made it through the hardship.

c) Walk to the end point at Manipal.

            I had set to see the End-point of Manipal hill one day (this is a very beautiful spot and I hope you don’t miss it when you visit the place).

Since I had never been there I just kept on walking till I reached the place. It was as if every roads corner was a short term goal, eventually leading to the final destination.

Only when I got there, did I realize that I no longer felt a need to return because I had reached a goal eventually leading to the final destination.

Clases were just beginning at MIT and I had nothing to study at home, I had just eaten food so did not have the excuse of hunger.

I took a different path hoping there to be a short cut some where how ever there were none and I felt like walking a long way back home. Infact home never appeared to get closer.

I finally reacher back and that evening when we were discussing about End Point I realized that End Point was 6 Km from their home. And I had walked 6 km back and forth without realizing the distance.

To sum it all up