Note to Reader: I believe this entire essay is worthy of your time, but because it is long, I have bolded key features.

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Deciding whom to continue falling in love with, whether or not to take a medicine or supplement, whether to believe the assertions of religion or spirituality, or which pundit or influencer to believe—we are confronted daily with myriad decisions which, at their heart, all have one thing in common: how to determine what’s true, or most likely true.

You may already be asking, “What do you mean by true?” This begs exactly the right question.

Perhaps the most confounding aspect of ascertaining truth hinges on a common thinking error we make from the get-go: all truths are equal and can be discovered by the same means. Thankfully, philosophers, scientists, and even everyday good thinkers and mystics have been studying truth for a long time and we have a lot of guidance for how to go about learning what’s most likely true.

 

The Art and Science of Epistemology

 

The pursuit of truth pertains to a field of philosophy called epistemology, which is the study of knowledge, or how we come to more reliably know what we know. Along with ethics, logic, and metaphysics, epistemology completes the four main branches of traditional philosophy.

Understanding epistemology helps us not only discover what is more likely true, but it helps us not take challenges to our cherished beliefs so personally. And if we do take it personally, we can enter into another kind of truth-discerning process—subjective self-reflection—to discover why we get so worked up over having our beliefs challenged about ourselves, each other, and the world around us.

Thriving, and even just surviving, hinges on discerning what’s true. Discerning truth from falsehood creates less suffering. For this, the devil is absolutely in the details. New Age beliefs (and their attendant spiritual bypassing), religious indoctrination, magical beliefs, as well as conspiracy theories have thrived and contributed to so much suffering because they all share something in common: they adhere to what is most likely untrue. They represent an impoverished, collective epistemology.

Lack of education and failing to practice good thinking, coupled with American junk culture, creates epistemological dead zones: individuals vulnerable to cognitive errors, manipulation, and conspiracy theories. Crucial critical thinking gaps and lack of emotional intelligence have propagated a pandemic of lies. These lies in turn have generated an out-of-control medical crisis. At their root is an epistemological crisis, which is why learning how to decipher what’s true, and to act in accord with it, is so important.

 

Categories Are Crucial: Subjective and Objective Truth

 

Truth exists at different levels and in different categories, which means everything when discerning what is more likely true. Looking into the nuances of truth is key and turns an otherwise banal word into a fascinating exploration.

The two overarching categories of truth are subjective and objective truth. Differentiating between them is crucial.

The expression “You are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts” highlights the difference between objective and subjective truths, between justified belief and mere conjecture or opinion. Opinions and personal preference are a form of subjective truth, while facts pertain to objective truth that is true for everyone. Objective truths are either self-evident (for example, you and I are alive; or rivers and trees exist) and/or require scientific evidence (for example: light travels faster than sound or climate change is man-made).

A common mistake, and by far the largest clusterfuck, is to use subjective knowledge (opinion) to make objective conclusions (statements of fact). Doing so fails to acknowledge the categories of epistemology. The result is to use feelings and intuition to come to factual conclusions about the world, which are more often than not incorrect. For example, one can declare, “I feel that the Earth is flat.” Presumably this means the person senses or intuits this to be true. But it’s a fallacy to conclude that the Earth is flat without checking to scientifically verify this assertion as an objective (not subjective) truth, because assertions about the natural world are the purview of science, which is the best tool we have (even with its imperfections) to determine what’s true about the natural world.

To assert a flat earth truth because of subjective experience (feeling or intuition) is to make a logical conclusion based primarily on subjective experience instead of accurate thinking and evidence. Feelings are a primary means of evidence when discussing how we feel, not for what is objectively true. Using feelings to ascertain factual truth paves the way for emotional reasoning to rule the show.

Intuitions and feelings can lead us to discover objective truths. Many scientific discoveries and inventions began in the creative imagination, such as via dreams and epiphanic insight. Mendeleev dreamed the period table, Neils Bohr dreamed the structure of the atom, and the epiphany of the Ouroboros image inspired German chemist Kekule to discover the structure of the benzene molecule. Elias Howe dreamed up the invention of the sewing machine.

Sometimes an intuition turns out to be true, yet it’s true not because it was intuited, but because it is eventually evidenced. Subjective experience is only the first step in ascertaining objective truth. The next step is to verify the subjective experience to see if it can be placed into the realm of factual existence. One way to do this is through experimentation: to verify the conclusion the experience intimated, such as by employing the scientific method. Many dreams and visions, after all, have little to do with objective reality. We explore these dynamics further along in the section “Art and Science Coexist, Beautifully!”

 

Devils in the Details

 

Let’s unpack an everyday example to reveal the distinctions between subjective and objective truth. Consider that you like apples. You don’t have to provide any more evidence for this assertion because it expresses your opinion, your fancy. You are expressing a personal truth which happens to be uniquely true for you (unless you are outright lying about a fancy for apples, which would be silly). You are not making a factual statement about anything but your own preference. Your liking of apples is therefore a subjective truth.

However, if you assert that just because you like apples this means that everyone likes apples, or should like apples, this is moving from a subjective assertion to an objective truth about others that, in this case, you don’t know to be true. Or consider a medicinal food example: You believe that just because you drank peppermint tea and it helped your indigestion, or so you believe, means it will work for everybody, or that it was actually the peppermint that helped. Your opinion is that the peppermint tea helped you. Whether it truly helped you, or whether it would help anyone else, is the purview of objective truth, which would need evidenced verification.

Let’s examine another subjective-objective example: you “see” (imagine, really) a great serpent that whispered to you the meaning of life while on an ayahuasca journey. If the imaginary serpent conveyed something subjectively meaningful to you—as dreams, coincidences, and symbols sometimes do—it’s epistemologically appropriate to take on this meaning for your own life (subjective opinion), as long as you don’t assert it to be universally true (an objective truth) simply because you experienced a talking snake in your mind’s eye.

To believe that talking serpents exist in real life is to falsely transpose a subjective, personal experience (opinion) onto objective reality (fact). So is believing that the personal message you received from the serpent is true for everyone and everything. This is a violation religion has made—imposing personal, unevidenced truth onto others as gospel (alleged fact)—which has resulted in widespread abuse and genocide.

When I scroll my Facebook feed, I’m regularly amazed to see how many go gaga over an account of friend’s prophetic dream, versus, say, reading about the results of a major scientific study. Such is our infatuation with the imagination over reality. Just because someone dreams or envisions a world full of evolved humans, sci-fi futuristic animals,  and life-saving technology—or that they will fall in love with their dream partner—does not in the slightest mean that it will come to pass. But it can inspire us to build a better future and to ready and make ourselves available for a true love.

Speaking of love, intimate relationship is another fertile terrain for which discerning subjective-objective truth can be helpful. Say you’re falling in lust with a fine guy (or gal). But then you discover, after solid vetting, that he has a history of being abusive and lying.  Subjectively, you’re in love and your feelings propel you to be with him. But objectively, his destructive tendencies are red flags. A tug of war familiar to most of us ensues: do you follow your heart (subjective) or follow your head (objective), or some of both? Both are true, but occupy different categories of truth. Whatever you decide is a subjective decision. But what you base your actions on—feelings of attraction and knowledge of his character—are both subjective and objective truths, respectively. Distinguishing subjective feelings from objective verities can help you understand your inner conflict and desires. They may not give you an objectively “right” decision but they can help guide you in the conundrums of love by helping you make better subjective decisions.

Some other everyday examples: I may intuit that a bear is around the corner (subjective truth), but I won’t know for sure until I and/or others look to accurately discover it’s so (objective truth). Similarly, I may suspect my girlfriend is cheating on me but I won’t know until I find out if she indeed is.

I hope these examples illustrate the difference between subject and objective truths, when and how they can overlap, and why it’s crucial to ascertain categorical truths to develop a sound epistemology. We’ll get into more examples later. When we engage rigorous skepticism so as not to conflate subjective and objective truths, we can truly begin to “wake up.”

 

Evidence and the Burden of Proof

 

The “burden of proof” is a philosophical tenet which essentially conveys that if you make an assertion about the natural world, you need to back it up with solid evidence. The burden of proof is at the heart of our belief systems, public and professional debate, and science. I found this definition from effectiviology to be clear and helpful:

“The burden of proof (called in Latin onus probandi) is the obligation to provide sufficient supporting evidence for any arguments that you make. For example, if a politician claims that a policy they want to implement is guaranteed to lead to a number of positive outcomes, then that politician has a burden of proof with regard to this statement, meaning that they need to back it up with supporting evidence.”

If someone challenges an established and properly-evidenced truth, say a theory or a law (not a hearsay or imagined belief), the burden of proof is on the challenging party. A burden of proof fallacy is when one party tries to put the burden of proof onto the party holding the established truth, such as by asking another to prove that an established truth isn’t true.

From the same citation as above:“

A concept that is intrinsically related to the burden of proof is the burden of proof fallacy. The burden of proof fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone claims that they don’t have a burden of proof with regard to their own arguments, or when someone attempts to shift their own burden of proof to someone else.”

For example, it’s established as objectively true that humans have generated climate change via carbon emissions. If a climate denier believes otherwise—say, that the bulk of climate change is due to natural cycles—they have to provide the evidence; the burden of proof is on them to demonstrate that anthropogenic (human-made) effects are not the cause of climate change, not on the one who abides what has already been properly evidenced and shown to be true.

A fallacious argument, a burden of proof fallacy, is to ask climate realists to prove that climate change is not due primarily to natural cycles. In fact, the burden is on the climate denier to prove that it is. In politics, Donald Trump has just committed a burden of proof  fallacy (for the umpteenth time) claiming that to enter the White House, Biden must now prove that he won 80,000,000 votes. No, that’s not how it works. Because the votes have been verified by accurate means, the burden of proof doctrine requires that Donald prove that Biden did not win those votes, which Donald has not been able to do.

The great scientist Carl Sagan set the bar for the quality of truthful assertions when he said:

“Extraordinary beliefs require extraordinary evidence.”

With this, Sagan helped popularize (though not enough, evidently) the precept of burden of proof. Again, assertions of fact about the natural world fall under the purview of scientific investigation. You need to provide a preponderance of good evidence, and/or scientific consensus, derived from reliable third-party testing to assert such facts. Of course, scientific “facts” are still relative truths, to varying degrees, which we discuss just below.

It’s not the job (burden) of believers of established truths to evidence that baseless conjectures about reality are false. Otherwise, good minds would spend valuable time trying to disprove onslaughts of untenable ideas. Instead, burden of proof establishes a benchmark of integrity for the advancement of quality ideas (I.e., arguments) that are reasonably extrapolated from previous discovery and corroboration, or are well-evidenced if they are substantially novel. In science, the burden of proof applies to hypotheses for which evidence needs to be generated via the scientific method.

Sagan’s pronouncement and the burden of proof help to close the gap between subjective and objective beliefs, because they lock subjective conclusions outside the domain of objective truth. In other words, you can’t just make shit up without providing evidence. Even hypotheses which haven’t yet been tested are more credible when they contain extrapolations of previous discovery, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity (also informed by a dream he had) building upon Newtonian physics. Hypotheses are therefore somewhat guilty until proven innocent. They don’t establish solid credibility until they can be tested, and evidence determines their veracity.

Scientific “truths” or “facts” are therefore what is more likely true, and most often, what is most likely true. The more a hypothesis or theory is tested, and the longer it holds up to debunking attack, the more true it becomes. As it were, many scientific theories and laws don’t change, not because they are dogmatically adhered to, but because good enough evidence hasn’t come along to upend them.

Theories like gravity (also a law) and anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change are well-established theories that are relatively factual, and would require an essentially miraculous quality of “extraordinary evidence” to be overturned. I say “relatively” because no scientific assertion, theory or law, is 100% “proven” or immutable. This is why science doesn’t really prove stuff. Science evidences what is more and most likely true.

Believing assertions about the world, because they seem true, without evidence is foolhardy. Many supernatural beliefs, such as life after death or a belief in god/s, seem geared to providing comfort in the face of the unknown and an unpredictable, painful, and seemingly unfair world. Nothing is wrong with comfort, but magical thinking becomes a pattern when we give unevidenced beliefs sway, and many are downright dangerous and needlessly violent.

When you don’t believe in reliable scientific evidence and reporting, as well as the rich, time and reality-tested philosophical tradition of ethics, logic, and epistemology, you have no rudder in the world. You are left to your imagination, to sloppy thinking, and to your senses. These are the precise means to determine subjective truth but inaccurate means for discerning (unobvious) objective truth. You have no foundation for determining what’s more likely true and thereby become vulnerable to believing conspiracy theories, spiritual bypassing, fantastic and violent religious fantasies, and magical thinking of all kinds. Deeper emotional motivations to believe what is convenient, to feel a sense of certainty in uncertain times (temporarily reducing anxiety, but which promotes eventual decay and death because it ignores the truth) also likely play a role in believing what is untrue.

Poor epistemology is in good part due to a lack of education and is precisely what Trump has relied upon to dupe almost half of America. He has added his own dose of intellectual violence by disparaging of the sources of truth, such as the scientific community, good journalism, and relatively reliable media. Without any reliable ground for evaluating what’s true, something so simple as agreeing that “the sky is blue”—or that Covid and climate change are real, or that our election was safe and accurate—becomes impossible. These are the senseless arguments we have on social media, with the absurd dismissal of fact and solid logic among those whose sense of self is wrapped around nonsense.

 

Seeing Isn’t Always Believing

 

So much of what we once believed about the world is false. We once thought the Earth was at the center of the universe, that it was flat, and that people fell ill because of evil spirits. After all, the sun seems to rise in the East, set in the West, and thereby circle the Earth. But we now know that it doesn’t. Walking out to the ocean and looking to the horizon, once could swear the Earth is flat: “Look, the horizon ends way out there in a flat line.” Similarly, exorcisms and faith healings to drive out evil spirits have been debunked over the last decades.

Donald Trump asserts fake news without evidence and provides no substantive evidence for his legal challenges to the election. It’s all epistemologically whack due to poor thinking, and likely deeper forces, as I explore more generally in the context of why so many voted for the guy.

Other examples of what seems to be true but isn’t: looking into the sky and claiming that contrails are actually chemtrails. Or believing that Jesus rose from the dead and will return yet again to save humanity and the planet. Or that praying has an effect on the world beyond our own skin just because it feels so powerful and someone seems to benefit. Again, this is to make objective conclusions based on the weight of subjective experience.

We can still be hopeful about the future, to any degree, without believing that Jesus will appear out of thin air to save us. It looks like chemtrails are in the sky, and our imagination can guess as to what’s going on up there (beware: your mind is biased towards sensationalism), but in reality, there is no solid evidence that chemtrails exist. Believing in what is more likely true and realistic, we have a better shot at following realistic probabilities rather than what is less likely to be true. Ironically, by believing what is less likely to be true, we jeopardize our current and future wellness.

Or, consider the accusation that Joe Biden is a pedophile because it looks like he is being too fresh with children. Photographs and video might cause us to wonder what his motives are in light of questionable appearances, which would make it a hypothesis that needs evidence to become more credible, which would amount to knowing Biden’s intentions or finding clear-cut evidence of sexual misconduct. But appreciating the evidence, without coming to emotional conclusions, there is no evidence for this. If solid evidence surfaces, that will change the story and we will all have to abide it. The same applies to believing that Biden is suffering from dementia, when in reality he has a stutter. Spinning stories from assumptions, emotionally-driven confirmation bias, and any need to deny truth is bad business.

The common thread in these examples is that our naked sense faculties and intuition for ascertaining truth are flawed. Feelings and emotion, including our denial of them, often cause us to leap to factual conclusions that aren’t true. This leap happens in the gap between the experience of emotion and the thought that forms in response to the emotion/s. For example, say you were once ripped off and hurt by a guy in a ponytail. If you read a news story about a guy in a ponytail being questioned for a crime, your emotional bias is more likely to believe him to be guilty than innocent. Your bad past experience lives in you and causes you to make biased conclusions. This is a form of emotional reasoning, and it is dangerous, unless your catch yourself, which requires you to question and healthily doubt yourself. But most people don’t catch themselves. This happens all day long all the time, thereby skewing our faculties for accurate epistemology and causing needless suffering.

Another form of emotional reasoning: If hear a loud noise or receive some unsettling news, just because I feel afraid that something terrible will happen doesn’t mean that it will or that I am actually being harmed. Our brains interpret the experience of anxiety as if we are currently suffering injury or dying. Anxiety sufferers especially have to learn to check their conclusions based on the strength of emotion; this helps regulate the anxiety and not exacerbate what is already experienced as bad and scary enough.

Just because I feel afraid to do something that won’t truly injure or kill me—like giving a public talk—doesn’t mean that I should avoid it. By the same token, asking someone special out on a date, or crossing a high bridge to save my life, is ultimately helpful. Confronting our unrealistic fears, by discerning the difference between rational and irrational fears, helps us overcome them, not make up false stories about reality, and to live more robustly.

 

Art and Science Coexist, Beautifully!

 

Now for an even more nuanced devil in the detail: just because we discover a belief to be false doesn’t mean we have do away with the wisdom of that belief. We can acknowledge what is objectively true and preserve what is subjectively valuable about the false belief. This is one function of mythology, wherein we acknowledge that gods and spirits most likely don’t exist, but we retain the moral and psychological value of the stories—a saving the baby from the bathwater situation.

For example, we can discerningly take to heart some of the moral teachings and metaphors of religious texts without believing them literally. Consider the act of sacrifice, which shares etymology with the word sacred. Making sacrifices (a subjective, moral endeavor) can confer benefits. And we can receive the value of sacrifice, without taking to heart some of its literal examples, such as those from religion. To wit, killing a first-born for an imaginary god (which god is most likely a false, objective belief) or stoning women to death because scripture says so, are not humane, and examples of sacrifice we should not adopt.

We can, however, take away the belief that other forms of sacrifice, can confer benefits, and are humane. Donating something valuable to charity, giving up a pleasure trip to the beach to protest climate change, sitting down with your daughter to read Ulysses versus playing video games, or leaving a treasured feather at the base of a favorite tree as a symbolic prayer for better days (which can feel good and requires no supernatural belief), are all sacrifices that confer benefit. So, instead of shunning sacrifice altogether because we don’t agree with certain forms of sacrifice, such as those cited in religious texts, we can preserve the “baby” of sacrifice while throwing out the “bathwater” of believing in what is most likely untrue or killing innocent others.

Another domain for appreciating the importance of metaphor and symbol (as subjective experience), without literally believing the allusions, is visual art and poetry. Each employs symbol and metaphor, in combination with many other subjectively experienced qualities, such as color and texture, story and meaning, revelation and an appeal to the imagination. Art primarily stimulates a rich, soulful (not that there we have a literal soul!), imaginative life. Living with a sense of awe, beauty, and wonder is as important as living with rationality, facts, and material appreciation. The former pertains primarily to subjective truth, and the latter to objective truth. Both are critical, but again, also need to be separated in our belief system (epistemology) to live sustainably, collectively and individually. Subjective truth is valid and true in and of itself. Objective truth is what has been rigorously evidenced by scientific inquiry, such as the reality of gravity, a tree, or climate change; or it is deduced philosophically to be more likely true, such as assertions that don’t commit logical fallacies.

An even more nuanced appreciation of these dynamics is that art can convey subjective truths that are also true for most people, such as the importance of compassion, the awe of the natural world, the horrors of injustice, and the often confounding dynamics of lust and love. So, while artistic, personal truths are largely subjective and personal, some also convey what is subjectively true for most people, thus approaching the domain of objective truth. This argument falls apart, however, in the prevalence of a belief in god and the objective truths of religious scripture, for example. So, each belief must be carefully discerned for what genuinely approximates objective truth.

I am an avid poet and lover of art. But I no longer confuse the metaphors, allusions, and nuanced purpose of poetry with literal, objective truth. For example, referring to “god,” “spirit” or the “soul” in poems can be used to convey an experience or felt-sense of something greater than oneself, not necessarily a literal. But 99 our of 100 times, if you ask the artist if god, spirit, and the soul objectively exist they will tell you “yes, of course.” And because the delineation between subjective and objective truth is so muddied, or unknown to most, I try to no longer use these words in poems. Their mere mention solidifies peoples’ belief in them, because they don’t practice epistemological rigor. I also avoid them because they are hackneyed and banal, diminishing the quality of a poem, in my opinion.

Nota bene: I did use the word “soulful” in the penultimate paragraph above, along with a qualifier, because there is not a satisfactory equivalent word (“essence” is close, but doesn’t work in the needed form of the adjective “essential”), even though I don’t literally believe in a soul as an indwelling “spirit” or something that survives physical death. I also speak of “spirituality’ sometimes, even though I don’t ascribe to “spirits.” When not criticizing spirituality, I usually qualify the term to mean “embodied spirituality,” referring to nothing esoteric and supernatural but what is integrally, beautifully human, and connected to the rest of existence.

Just because I no longer include these supernatural terms in poems, however, doesn’t mean they aren’t abundantly employed, not only in poetry and imaged in art (faeries, gods, and mythological creatures, for example), but also in prose and everyday speech. If you agree with the points of this essay, when you see these words or symbols used in art and speech, you might practice interpreting theme only as metaphors, not literal truths. This way, you preserve the baby while throwing the bathwater, retaining the value and beauty of sharing personal, subjective experience while not asserting the existence of supernatural forces. In other words, an invocation of god, for example, becomes simply one’s imagination, or that combined with a felt sense, and this experience of awe and beauty can enriching, but not literally interpreted.

Nota bene #2: Have you ever questioned why any of us have a concept of “God” in the first place? Where did anyone ever come up with a reliable, critically deduced, assertion of its existence?

Now for an even more nuanced weave: can art and science overlap? Specifically, can a poem, a dream, or the imagination, for example, convey literal truth? And, can scientific inquiry benefit from symbol and the imagination? The answer is a resounding yes! And this makes the journey of living creatively and skeptically even more riveting, exciting, and robust. To wit, I copy a section from the beginning of this essay:

Intuitions and feelings can lead us to discover objective truths. Many scientific discoveries and inventions began in the creative imagination, such as via dreams and epiphanic insight. Mendeleev dreamed the period table, Neils Bohr dreamed the structure of the atom, and the epiphany of the Ouroboros image inspired German chemist Kekule to discover the structure of the benzene molecule. Elias Howe dreamed up the invention of the sewing machine.

Sometimes an intuition turns out to be true, yet it’s true not because it was intuited, but because it is eventually evidenced. Subjective experience is only a first step in ascertaining whether it is also an objective truth.

A gesture from dance, an image from a poem or dream, or a symbol from a painting, can lead to the discovery of a literal truth. This is how art serves science, how subjective imagination serves rationality. When subjective truth leads to objective truth, then we can abide both as objectively true. Reciprocally, scientific truths can serve art. The spirally staircase design of DNA or the dazzling constellations of stars in the night sky have provided endless inspiration and metaphors for poetry and art. The intricate and delicate interdependence of all parts of a thriving forest ecosystem wows the imagination and has found its way into many of my own poems. The elaborate and exquisite design of sand under a microscope is art, is beauty itself, and startles the imagination!

Of course, true to this epistemological discussion, not all imaginations are objectively true. They may lead to or overlap with objective truth, but not necessarily. In fact, much of what we imagine is not objectively true. We’ve all woken from a dream, or even a bad mushroom trip, only to sigh in relief that it wasn’t true!

In sum, our subjective, artistic selves can flourish alongside our objective rational selves, with no interference and contradiction. They in fact mutually enhance one another. For myself, critically thinking to tease these two domains apart and to flourish in their overlap is itself utterly creative and invigorating. It bolsters my rational mind while not getting in the way of feeling free, imaginative, and full of wonder.

 

A Dream of Trees

 

Let’s examine another instance of : just because I feel connected to, and in awe of, a magnificent forest doesn’t mean that the trees have a “spirit” living inside them, or that the forest itself has a spirit. Of course, if such a spirit is ever evidenced, then we can rightfully change our minds.

One benefit of believing that everything in the natural world, including humans, has an in-dwelling spirit is that it helps us to behold the world as sacred, so we can feel connected to it and thereby foster it. The “in-dwelling spirit” belief may have originated in the same way it is perpetuated today: we feel so connected to nature when we are in its midst that it’s hard not to anthropomorphize it as sentient, as humans are. As a result, we, and likely our ancestors who were not equipped with science and the rich philosophical legacy of skepticism as we are today, confounded subjective with objective truth.

This is an example of a god of the gaps logical fallacy: using supernatural, unevidenced explanations and magical beliefs to fill in the gaps where scientific evidence and/or sound reasoning has not, and presumably could, explain the subjective experience. Emotional reasoning—the desire to believe something to be true—helps fuel the untruths.

Believing that trees and rocks are essentially equal to us because we each have a spirit helps to minimize our superiority and dominion over the natural world. This traditional belief has endured for thousands of years; it has helped humans, until recently, not excessively destroy the world in avarice and (ironic) self-importance. The story is most likely false (there is no substantive evidence that we or trees have spirits), but the wisdom (subjective truth) of oneness is helpful as a guiding morality and survival aid.

We can act and view the world as interconnected, sacred, and deeply vital without believing in spirits. Biology, chemistry, and physics show us that everything is related and dependent on the other; we are even made of the same stuff. Parts of stars are inside us. We depend on the Earth, just as it depends on us; our flesh becomes what we eat. We also derive non-material benefits (as well as harm) in relationship with the natural world: a sense of beauty, inspiration, awe, compassion, empathy, and life lessons. This interconnection is essential to our wellbeing and sacred all on its own regardless of how we may benefit from it. Becoming aware, practicing reverie, and expressing gratitude for the gifts of the Earth and the universe we see in the heavens at night, we consecrate and sacralize the wisdom of interconnection and stewardship that the old stories taught us—without believing in falsehoods, and while believing in what is evidenced and the most updated version of what we determine to be true about the world.

Believing in falsehoods about the world may seem innocuous in one moment, but the next moment it can cost you or others your life.

We don’t have to believe all the old stories to retain their wisdom. One way to reconcile these differences is to create a new story, even one based both in science and in myth. We can appreciate the natural world without believing falsely about it. When we meditate on the fact that our biological, and to a good degree psychological, health depends upon the health of the natural world, we can find ourselves in it, and it in us. We are, in biological fact, made of earth, and some stardust.

Most people I know also feel a sense of oneness with the natural world simply by experiencing it. Being in nature nurtures our connection with it, without having to believe what is likely untrue. We find physical unity with the natural world based in objective truth and appropriately meted subjective reverie, not on falsehoods. We find connection with nature, and steward it, based on objective fact and a subjective experience of rapture. We can even use rituals to consecrate this oneness, without believing in false beliefs so common in ritual work.

 

Rewiring for Reality 

 

One problem with believing untrue things is that we rely upon the false stories we believe, and in the process, we miss out on taking measures that will help us suffer less and create a better world. It’s arguably less problematic to believe that a personified god inhabits the ethers of outer space and the interstices of our own bodies, or that spirits exist in biological organisms, than it is to believe that a Satan-worshipping cult of elite pedophiles drinks the blood of young children. Or that the severity of the Covid pandemic is a hoax.

 But believing what is likely untrue is a slippery slope, for the pattern of thinking it creates, for the lazy epistemology it represents and perpetuates, and for the damage it does. False beliefs generate more false beliefs and eventually too much harm is done. I call this “cognitive entrainment” and discuss it here.

We don’t knowingly have to believe any falsehoods. In fact, creating a grounded spiritual practice of fasting from false beliefs and abiding what’s true engenders our humanness. It forces us to cope with reality and build real resilience and coping skills (such as being with difficulty, treasuring the here and now, and acting on behalf of the greater good), instead of living in a fantasy world, for which there is always a price—because life is full of problems that demand accurate identification and sustainable emotional responses to be wisely addressed and effectively mitigated.

When we have our heads in the sky, or in the sand, we miss seeing the problem; we therefore can’t make an accurate diagnosis, or thereby formulate a proper treatment. We are also less likely to develop the psychological resiliency we need while remaining honest about the world. For example, if I believe my friends and relatives have gone to heaven after dying, this magical belief can preclude my grief, which grief helps me clear the hurt in my heart and embody greater empathy and compassion, which make me more integrally and robustly human.

Relying on a second coming to save us from climate crisis, or that New Year’s or the Mayan calendar’s predictions will wishfully erase the problems we face, means that we don’t do enough to save us from our folly. Believing in magic to make things better, we abdicate measures that will help, which is the hard work of changing who we are, engaging whole body-mind transformation, taking action, and making common sense sacrifices.

I find it curious how denying physical reality goes hand in hand with not making physical effort. For example, believing that prayer affects someone who is unaware that you are praying for them might mean that you waste precious time and focus on ineffective action. Praying for someone to recover from cancer as a sole means for helping won’t actually help the victim. Giving them money for treatment or providing emotional support to the victim and their family is more likely to.

Demanding evidence for, and skeptically investigating, your own conclusions and beliefs is a practice, a rewiring of the brain, that can be invigorating, exciting, sobering, and make your life more enjoyable and less painful. It may temporarily dampen your excitement as you deconstruct any fantastic beliefs, but the benefits of aligning with reality are ultimately much more fulfilling, not to mention compassionate to yourself and others.

If facing truth this way is scary, you may need support dealing with any uncomfortable feelings the fantasies have kept at bay. This likely means you will encounter fear, grief, anger, helplessness, and despair, among other difficult emotions. This is also why sharing facts with deniers of all sorts meets such resistance; their sense of self and keeping at bay scary feelings is often at stake. It’s also why learning to welcome, work with, and ultimately leverage these difficult emotional states is key to facing what’s true about yourself and the world.

Thinking realistically relies upon our ability to emotionally cope with reality. We tend to disbelieve what we can’t emotionally handle. But if we can befriend and learn to thrive through difficulty, we can tolerate more truth. I refer to this as “raising our fear mark.”

 

Squirming from Reality

 

One way magical believers and spiritual bypassers try to deny the categorical distinctions of subjective and objective domains is to argue the “observer effect.” In a nutshell, the observer effect shows that the mere act of human observation can change whether quantum particles appear as a wave or a particle. This is an oft-misunderstood tenet of quantum dynamics that applies to the all but invisible world of sub-atomic particles. Indeed, the observer effect does not apply to the macro world of coronaviruses, cliffs, and flying bullets—all dangerous objects whose real-life effects we cannot change with our thoughts or our mere presence.

If we could change the objective nature of reality merely by exercising awareness or good thoughts, this would debunk the subjective and objective categories presented earlier. This would liberate conspiracy theorists and magical thinkers to believe whatever they want about the world. For this reason, the observer effect and other inaccurately concluded quantum physics dynamics have been used by any number of charlatans to push magical beliefs about our abilities and the nature of reality (read: Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Bruce Lipton, et al, and new age gurus).

One way to test someone’s loyalty to the observer effect is to challenge them in the macro-world of ordinary life. Ask them to drive off a cliff, sit in a tiny room with eight Covid patients with no PPE, or instantaneously redirect a bullet flying their way. If they could change these real-world, material effects with the observer effect, they might be more inclined to take you up on the offer. Then again, there are folks ignorant enough to do just that, which doesn’t prove the observer effect but instead their poor epistemological discernment!

Another way deniers, conspiracists, and magical thinkers try to squirm from reality is by claiming corruption in science. Science and its reporting are not perfect, and not as accurate as the scientific method itself. This, however, does not mean that all of science is biased and untrustworthy just because it’s imperfect. Nor does it merit that we ditch science altogether in black or white fashion (a logical fallacy) simply because we want to secretly dismiss what flies in the face of what we want to believe.

Scientific inquiry, discovery, testing, and corroboration via peer review is the best method we have for determining what’s most likely true about the natural world. These endeavors produce facts that are most likely true, not opinions.

 

Cherished Beliefs and Misperceived Threats

 

Facts challenge our cherished beliefs, for which we must be able to tolerate cognitive dissonance (the capacity to hold opposing views simultaneously as a tension of opposites) until we can side with what is more true and in order to make the transition into abiding more truth.

A desire to hold onto cherished, untrue beliefs—either because it makes us feel like we are dying (we aren’t) when we lose them, or because it makes our world more momentarily exciting to believe untruths—causes many to denigrate science, in myriad clever ways! Flimsy arguments are produced to defend against a fear of acknowledging that the stories which have defined a sense of self and security in the world are false. That is scary. But, again, just because it’s scary (a feeling) doesn’t mean we will be harmed if we face our fears and discover what is more likely true (logical conclusion). In fact, we stand to benefit. We can use this bit neuroscientifically-driven epistemological insight to align with more truth.

Unfortunately, our nervous systems aren’t outfitted with the ability to instantly discern real from false threats. We react without thinking in the face of fear. Sometimes this is helpful, sometimes not. Emotional awareness to recognize, analyze, and critically think through our reactions and reservations about reality, and to tease apart stimulus and response/reaction so we can respond more skillfully, is at the heart of grokking reality and avoiding concocting and adhering to false stories.

Emotions and feelings don’t always dictate the veracity of what we perceive to be true. When they alert us to real dangers, such as fleeing from a bear, they can help us navigate the world more successfully. Because our neurological fear response formed long ago as a survival mechanism to instantaneously help us avert danger (think: bear charging out of the wood inciting us to run), it has allowed you and me to be alive today, by preserving our forebears. This survival-based, instant reaction that saved our ancestors was paramount once ago, and to a degree, still is. It’s natural to initially react to fear in fight or flight. But when we continue to believe that a false threat is real, and stay away from it, we shrink from life. We believe falsehoods about the world just because they incite fear in us, even though they don’t truly pose a threat.

 

Fear and Truth

 

People don’t believe untruths just because they are stupid or ignorant. Believing and seeking out the truth require emotional mettle, the same resiliency and patience that allows us to pause between an emotion and a (ir)rational conclusion based solely on the strength of emotion. If we don’t have the capacity to tolerate feeling and being with sadness, anger, and fear in the face of being disillusioned about what we thought was true, then we’re not going to have much interest in believing what’s true about the world or ourselves. Again, this is what I call our “fear mark,” which I discuss at length in my new book Climate Cure. For example, if it freaks you out too much to seriously consider that major cities around the world may be underwater in the near future and that humanity may go extinct (as are predicted and theorized, respectively, to varying degrees if we continue as we are), your fear is likely to prevent you from believing these things.

So, a refusal to believe what is evidenced to be true seems in many cases to be more of an emotional handicap than an intellectual one, especially for intelligent people. After all, we all know many otherwise intelligent folks who believe crazy stuff. Yet, for those who are emotionally intelligent, a lack of education may determine one’s capacity to better align with reality. We need not only smarts but courage to believe what’s most likely true.

I conclude by invoking a line from previous: Without any reliable ground for evaluating what’s true, something so simple as agreeing that “the sky is blue”—or that Covid and climate change are real, or that our election was safe and accurate—becomes impossible. This is too much of America today.

So, let’s revel in our personal truths and only believe what can be evidenced, both interpersonally and generally, about the world. Let’s practice differentiating between subjective and objective truths so we can live more harmoniously, effectively, and joyfully. If enough of us receive the emotional and intellectual support to discern truth, we might save our future from the jaws of ignorance clamping down even harder on us as we struggle to emerge from a spiraling pandemic and to inaugurate ever-more epistemologically savvy leaders.