What Is Truth, Really? Every religious sect, every faith tradition, every spiritual authority claims to possess The Truth. Throughout history, people have killed and gone to war to assert their version of it. And yet, after millennia of belief systems rising and falling, there’s still no universal agreement on what truth actually is.
So what is truth?
The Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti once said: “Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual not through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through understanding the contents of his own mind, through observation… not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection.”
I’ve always found this idea unsettling and liberating at the same time. We are often told, “Of course truth exists. It says so right here in the scriptures. How can you not believe it?”
But let’s pause a moment. If I hold up the Quran, or the Bible, or the Gita, and proclaim, “This is the truth because it says so in this holy book,” am I stating a universal truth? Or am I merely reciting something expected of me? If belief is imposed by fear of punishment, shame, or even the threat of hell is it still real belief? Or is it simply compliance?
Imagine this: I hold up an object in my hand. “Look,” I say.
“What am I holding?”
You look at it and say, “A book.”
“Touch it. Feel the texture, the cover, the pages. Look at the color, the shape.” You do.
“Now, are you certain this is a book?”
“Yes,” you say. “It feels like a book. Looks like one. I know how a book looks. That’s a book.”
And I agree with you. Why? Because we’re both experiencing it directly. No one is forcing the other to believe anything. We arrive at this truth together not through authority, but through shared perception. That, my friend, is our truth.
Truth at least the kind that matters is something to be experienced, not inherited. It isn’t something handed down to you by institutions or enshrined in books that forbid questioning.
Once we try to take a personal truth and enforce it on others once we say, “you must believe this or suffer the consequences” we’ve already stepped into the territory of manufactured truth. It’s no longer about understanding. It becomes about power.
Real truth is intimate. Mysterious. Fluid. Often fleeting. And above all, it cannot be outsourced. You must live it, question it, observe it not because someone says it is so, but because you’ve come to see it for yourself. In the end, maybe truth isn’t something we find once and for all.
Maybe it’s something we return to, over and over again, like a mirror that shows us not what to believe but who we are becoming.
