Truth...Such A Strange Thing

Fort Huachuca; June 20, 2024

See original here with footnotes

I stand at Sentinel Field looking at a brilliant sunrise – the morning clouds set ablaze in an orange hue. The sound of soldiers training, the smell of astroturf, the warm morning breeze of the desert that surrounds Fort Huachuca fills my senses. And yet as I do my pull-ups, the laps, the miles, the weights, my mind is elsewhere, taken to the clouds. As beautiful as the morning sunrise with the backdrops of the mountains and sky island bluffs can be, I feel the call for somewhere higher – like a whisper carried with the desert wind. Truth calls. And my soul wishes it could be carried with it. 

In our class we learn of the limitations of the human mind to comprehend facts, our biases that hold us from clear judgment, the concentration amidst pressure required to scratch the surface of events, the difference between perception and perspective, the need that the military requires of us to practice intellectual humility, shed our biases and preconceptions on the altar of facts and reality. Reality, can it be really known? Or is it one of those things where the less you contemplate it the more of it you experience, and the less you try and catch it in a snapshot of the mind, the more of it the universe presents it to you. Truth – such a strange thing, a fleeting, elusive and invasive thing. I wish I could see it all. To perceive pure truth, but I cannot. My senses are insufficient for such a task. But to experience all truth is an impossibility, even for an immortal being. To experience the full range of possible experiences one must fade away from existence altogether, that they might know what it is like to switch between the states of existence and nonexistence – the fear and desperation that might accompany such a transformation into oblivion. 

If the materialists are right, then our souls are fabrications of the patterns of firing neurons of our electrical powered and chemical driven organ. And with the passing of this form we inhabit so too goes our person with it. We cease to be – fading away into that eternal goodnight. Is this true? I hope not; but my hope does not constitute a good argument for what is real and what is not – for the same reason that fear does not determine if an object, person, or idea is in actuality dangerous in its nature. Hope, like fear, clouds judgment. 

Hope accompanies fear, they come together. One thing cannot be hoped for without the fear of its opposite being reality. I hope that I am humble, but I fear that my humility is a false mask I wear to avoid the corners of my mind which harbor my deeper pride. Do I really act in faith towards the principles I believe myself to be a proponent of? Or is the sum of my actions equal to the amount of vice I cannot see – the desire for power, status, recognition, and vain ambition which leads ultimately nowhere fulfilling? This is the truth I cannot detect, nor can those who observe me. Both they and I are kept from the whole truth and no therapist, no priest, no sage and no guru is able to gaze into my being with enough precision and completeness to provide me an answer I can trust. 

This life is a time to prepare to meet God, which will be a time where our true motivations will be presented to us in their nakedness. I feel less afraid to meet my Maker than I am for my Maker to present my nakedness to me. Adam and Eve made aprons not to hide from God, but to hide themselves from what God might see. For these same reasons we hide ourselves from society but also from ourselves. If society accepts us then we must be acceptable. It is perfectly reasonable that we hide in our disguise, a false truth, that we grow to love more than our actual self. But who is the “we” presenting our “self”? The self that chose the persona over the truth? That is the self that exercises the power of choice, where the spark of our divinity resides. The self that has the power to perceive – perceive the voices of our different selves. If only I could perceive the part of me that perceives. If only I could see truth – but I cannot. I can only experience it. And that “self” is called by the voices of the desert wind to a place it remembers, but that it cannot recall. How ironic that I am at Fort Huachuca, home of Army intelligence, and the part of me that is truly intelligent is called to another place. If only I could follow it.