It was about this time that I began capitalizing the word: Truth. The Truth is a deep personal feeling. Repeatedly I was impressed with the similarity between what people felt about the Truth and what they felt about God. Many people with whom I discussed this used these concepts almost interchangeably, almost always with an element of awe. What is special about the following subject titles of Truth is their impact on the human condition. These subjects, including religion, are closely tied with the reality of the human existence and thus have a role to play in the assessment of Truth. Again, facts are the threads of life while Truth is the fabric.

You know the court-room question: "Do you promise to tell the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth, so help you God?". This is really non-specific and could be rephrased: "Do you promise to tell the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts as you know them?". The first question may be asking for something that is far from what is being sought in the court-room. A thoughtful person who took the first question seriously might give answers quite different from the facts. Asking a thoughtful person for the Truth may stir emotional feelings that would cloud reality: "Did he steal the food?" may get a hedging answer: "Well, he was starving!" Under the circumstances the witness might even deny the use of the word steal. As we shall see, facts and Truth are different.

"What is Truth?" There were many answers to the question but four predominated. I will list them in their order of frequency.

I. THE TRUTH IS LOVE

Needless to say, to a person like me, who prided himself in being a Scientist, this answer was an enigma. I could not relate Truth and Love. After some research and questioning, I found that: "in a condition of thirst the Truth would be a drink of water. In a condition of hunger the Truth would be a full stomach. In a cold condition warmth is the Truth". Another important breakthrough occurred when a grandmother told about holding her first grandchild when she felt the "Moment of Truth". She suggested that: "The Truth has to do with important life cycles".

Most people in my experience have idealistically referred to Love in all its altruistic meanings: caring, compassion, understanding, faith, sharing, connubial bliss, and brotherhood. For many, love is no more than a feeling of delightful expectancy. It is a condition in which a person exists with a feeling that something wonderful has happened, is happening, and is about to happen. It is seemingly a state of confused mental and physical rapture directed toward other people, animals, and things.

The concept of Love needs more definition. For example, it is unfortunate for many marriages that when this feeling subsides or is undermined by a traumatic breach of some sort, people think they are "out of Love" and their relationship dissolves. This is especially unfortunate for their children. When the relationship of their parents dissolves, children apparently always take some of the blame themselves which makes them a little less "lovable". This is one step toward eroding an individual's love of one's self, one's parents, one's family, one's community, one's country, and the world at large. Being Loved is very essential to our ability to "love ourselves", return love and identify with others as part of our obligatory social nature.

So we are in a condition in which love is essential to the survival of our children, and families among other important things. In a condition where Love is an essential part of Life, Love IS Truth. But, when people talk of so many kinds of Love: brotherly, motherly, carnal, unconditional, etc., what concepts should be considered that will bring all this together? Love can be considered as a table with four legs: Expectation, Communication, Commitment, and Sacrifice. The essence of love is Platonic love where each person has to care and tend to the best conditions for the other to flourish.

Expectation
Expectation refers to the feelings of love developed from the various physical human bonds. The mother/child relationship is the beginning of affection. Before birth the mother and child could not be more bonded. The physical attachment is complete and the fulfillment of needs is total. After birth this relationship continues with someone who is willing. The child's life depends on this. Later, the child will be expected to return affection as they grow. Greater capability to do this will result in a healthier, happier life.

Affection is physical touching to some degree and fulfillment of needs: food, shelter, waste removal, etc. Physical touching could be anything from a one-armed hug across the back of the shoulders to kissing. Affectionate acts might include bringing someone who is sick hot chicken soup, offering someone a place to stay, or even taking out the garbage. The touching type of affection can be a prelude to sex, so one has to be clear about one's intentions. However, If you want to relax a tense situation, a gentile touch can speak more than words can say.

According to those who study mating and bonding in the animal kingdom, nature has provided human beings with the most powerful bond-maker between mates: human sexuality. The feelings attached to the expectation and anticipation of sexual experiences are incredibly influential. With each sexual encounter emotional ties characterized by preoccupation, anticipation, heart palpitation, and feelings of hope are unconsciously developed in the minds of the participants. The intensity of the condition varies between individuals and even under the best of situations the emotional ties stimulated by sexual encounters or their anticipation are a temporary condition lasting from a short time to only a few years.

The danger of sex is that it can blind us to the true nature of one's sexual partner. Many absurd couples have been initiated by sexual encounters. On the other hand, continued exposure to meaningless sexual encounters can lead to the desensitization of emotional attachments and couple making. However, were it not for the strength of sex, perhaps no one would pair-up. Incidentally, contrary to some ideas, masturbation has no known detrimental side effects, keeps the plumbing clear for men, and should be considered as healthy in moderation.

Communication
Sharing encouragement and information are important for survival and are the essence of communication. Encouragement, in a couple or within a group, is necessary to develop a common wisdom and movement in a positive direction. Information supplies the tools for this movement. This is a competitive edge in our obligatory social nature. Successful communication is built on mutual values and interests important in the cohesiveness of couples, families, groups, countries, or the world. There must be some degree of sharing to qualify as Love. I can love you, but if you don't love me back it's useless. The means of communication include words of affirmation and encouragement, expressions of love, and acts of affection.

Commitment
Due to the influence that parents have on their children's self-concept, education, and general welfare throughout their life, love requires more than affection and sex to sustain it through the time required to raise children; and, the maintenance of grace through the aging years. The concept of brotherly love and the love of mankind in general can also be of great assistance in providing confidence in contracts between people of similar beliefs in this regard.

Many people equate "commitment" with marriage; however, commitment is any "promise" or "contract". Sometimes promises are made which can't be kept. Those promises are broken. Commitment is more important than acts of affection, sex, and advantageous contingencies. All too often, individuals learn lessons through the process of divorce that would have saved their marriage. They find that they can't keep their marriage contract, but they are committed to their divorce contract. In regard to the marriage, it is too often too late and they are forced to move on to new relationships with new challenges. Individuals who work through difficult problems in a marriage find a deeper meaning to their love and history together; even though, it might mean some years of sacrifice during this process. This is not to say that divorce should be banned. Domestic violence, dangerous addictions, and dangerous behavior can develop over time creating a hopeless situation.

Sacrifice
Sacrifice goes hand in hand with commitment. The question is, can we keep the commitments we make? Are we willing to make sacrifices to keep these commitments? Can we expect less or more of ourselves? When people depend on our commitments they "trust" that that commitment will be fulfilled? When a commitment is broken, the trust is breached. Some people might consider commitment, trust, and sacrifice to be outside a definition of Love. However, these aspects of love add an intellectual value relating directly to the survivability of humankind. Acts of service to one's loved one and gifts are representative of sacrifice and one's motivation to keep their commitments. Some go so far as to say that "Love conquerors all". I believe that this is simplistic. I am quite confident that there is a large segment of the population that has little understanding of Love and would defy conquest by Love in any significant respect. Sometimes Love is not enough.

This is possibly the place where "hope" should be mentioned. Sometimes people will come to a place in their life when all the expectation, communication, commitment, and sacrifice seems to weigh heavy on their minds as being in vain, as though nothing will come of it. One Sunday morning I happened to come across a television evangelist, Jimmy Swaggart, who was talking about those parts of the Bible where there were written the genealogical lists of who begat who, who begat another, who eventually begat someone important in human history. He said, "when you feel down, just think of yourself somewhere in that list of "begaters" and realize that you too have a place in history." Swaggart was later disgraced in scandal, but he had a talent for messages of hope.

There is a contrasting type of understanding of Love that is significant. Several times in my experience intelligent people have discussed their ideas on a life of free love. This free love, or carnal love, that they were talking about is a subdivision of the concept that the Truth is love. Their moment of Truth is in an orgasm. It is, for some, a life-long quest. They seem to feel as though it were their duty to find a virgin, or something close, that they can control, and set them free of their constraints and fears. They seem to feel that they are performing a favor in introducing them to a forbidden joy and breaking down their inhibitions. Obsessive sex was all they thought about. This aspect is a fact, and is worth a mention, but it does not contribute much to the subject at hand.

II. THE TRUTH IS BEAUTY

It is commonly said: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!" This definition is logical, but says nothing: "Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder!" makes sense too. It is dialectic. If we look to Nature for the definition, there is no mistaking its meaning: a functional characteristic of life is reactivity: a positive reaction to a wholesome environment and a negative reaction to an unwholesome environment. The special attractiveness of a wholesome condition to a human results in beauty.

Its contemplation is pleasing and satisfying as by line, color, form, texture, proportion, rhythm, motion, tone, etc.. Thinking of beauty from the stand-point of survival gives us several important ideas. When one identifies something that is especially desirable, complimentary, and fulfilling to one's needs, that is often beautiful. Beauty has to do with goals, and the fulfillment of our motives. Its appreciation is mostly instinctive though somewhat acquired. Every man appreciates a beautiful girl, but when he meets one dressed up in buffalo grease and flies, appreciation is an acquired taste. Beauty in all arts and architectural forms is a by-product of leisure time, and its rate of creation is a measure of safety between existing life conditions and extinction. In a time of hardship, people are too preoccupied with keeping body and soul together to have time for either the creation or appreciation of beautiful things. Beauty is sacrificed to necessity.

The type of beauty in vogue is a very sensitive index of things to come. The vogue is a reflection of a deep-seated mood before it surfaces. Some phase of art always leads. By the time a predicted situation arrives, art reflects the next possible trend in society. If one would want to feel the mood of an era in time, one has only to take a comprehensive look at the pictures, songs, music, and statuary of the times. In interpreting the mood of a population through its art, one has to be conscious of the circumstances of the times. Present day avant-garde classical art and music is contradictory and discordant. This is exactly the present state in advanced dialectic materialism and idealism. Intellectual paralysis in the minds of the leaders has lead to frustration in the mood of the people. In this sense the art is true, but it is not in tune with survival. Art in tune with survival is beautiful, and, in this sense, is a Truth of life. Anything that favorably represents wholesomeness of the functions characterizing life tends to be beautiful. There are nine classifications of life activities that seem to be essential to life. All of them can be beautiful:

1. Motion and exercise manifest grace in efficient effortless action. Static grace leads the motion of the eyes effortlessly and smoothly from a beginning on a tour around the piece and back to the beginning again. A beautiful object is not confining, but is open and free. A verdant lane in a picture beckons one to walk with Nature.
2. Reactivity and adoption necessitates an initiating stimulus: color, sound, aroma, texture, and savor, affecting one of the sense organs, fulfilling the characteristics of this category. Any form of beauty must stir us for we perceive it through our senses. It is this essence of wholesomeness that draws us to a positive environment. In contrast that which is ugly repels us from an unwholesome situation.
3. Metabolism starts with nourishment. Food is beautiful and has been exploited in art from the beginning. Who has not spent time in front of a baker's window admiring his art? My butcher is a veritable artist with steaks.
4. Work is manifest in every species. Work is whatever effort is necessary to bring to each that which is necessary to promote life and reproduction. The smiles, cooing, and burbling of a baby have the beauty to draw the tender attention of the family. Any work that is well done tends to be beautiful.
4. Play is the expenditure of energy beyond the minimal inefficiency inherent in each species and individual. Play is the exercise of contractile proteins that is essential to prepare the individual for the inevitable instance when survival will depend on greater than usual expenditure of energy. Play is wholesome, and will appear beautiful when observed by a comprehending observer.
5. Birth, growth, maturation, and old age give multitudinous objects for art. Babies have almost universal appeal. An old person sitting quietly in the sun makes a picture that stills the troubled spirit.
6. Sex and reproduction are a natural for many attractive subjects. Beauty in the opposite sex is a feature of attraction, and may be an essential to the promotion of the species. The grown but youthful person ready for love needs no embellishment, but is the very epitome of beauty itself. As we contemplate this, the positive impulse for species survival reaches a peak.
6. Rest and revitalization are essential to life. Rest enhances beauty. A human or beast that is worn to a frazzle and about to die is seldom beautiful. An individual who is working very hard to keep ahead of starvation generally looks pretty shabby. Beauty is the hallmark of a secure area. Beauty is exhilarating as was well illustrated by an experience I had with a pack of boy scouts. I was leading six tired, hot, and thirsty scouts through a sun-baked weed-field, with deer flies, brambles, and soggy pollen laden atmosphere. From their groans and complaints, I was sure they would lie down at the first cool opportunity. The path turned into a vale and there was a shady glen with a tumbling brook falling over mossy rocks. Black moist escarpments bordered the stream with flowers as delicate as a baby's breath growing in the crevices. Warblers sang and flitted through the bushes and trees. The boys hesitated but a moment as they took in the picture. A small cheer ran through the rank. Then they ran on, dropped their packs, climbed, shouted, and explored for over an hour without a hint of the tiredness they had had.
7. Death for the old at the end of a long life that gives composure to the final hopeless struggle resisting death; the contorted and tortured face that finally lets go of care; the relief of frustration and surcease of pain; the final sigh; the vacant stare that begs a tender hand to cover; the peace, at last, that closes a life of hope and faith that raises the strains of requiem. Even there may be beauty.

The appreciation of beauty reaches far back into our evolutionary history. We tend to think of the primitive human creature as stooped and hairy. Perhaps he was, but he was also vain, for he made head bands, necklaces, bracelets, belts, and anklets as much to beautify himself as to protect himself from dangerous spirits. He was not so much concerned with proportions and color harmonies as he was with survival and success. He knew that if he wore beads, the girls looked at him more, and he felt better. When he felt better, he had more success at hunting. Little wonder that amulets and stones still has such a deep seated fascination for us. There probably is no better way to calm the nerves of a fearful maiden than to give her a diamond. How many men find satisfaction in wearing a stone in a ring?

Beyond the essential factors of life there are other areas of beauty. In contrast to wholesome subjects we have discussed, there are the awesome attractions of the forbidding gorges, cliffs, and erupting volcanoes. Even the explosion of an atomic bomb test may be beautiful when seen in a colored movie. It is the safe distance that allows the appreciation of the beauty. In contrast, earthquakes and breaking dams seldom seem beautiful at any distance.

Religion has always provided an inspiration in the arts. Much of the great art is sacred in nature. Think of the oratorios, masses, paintings, sculptures, tapestries, jewels, and architecture that have graced the temples and churches down through the ages. There is beauty in unity. Beauty is sometimes destroyed by fracturing. On the other hand broken sculptures and architectures stimulate a nostalgia for the whole. A Venus without arms; a capital without a pillar; pique the imagination and raise dreams of glories passed. There is a humility in the contemplation of broken antiquities that touches on our own mortality and vanities. What the ancients saw as permanent beauty, we see as tumbled ruins. Our own state may some day reach that.

III. THE TRUTH IS WORK

Two inferences are immediately evident. The concept was conceived by someone who liked to work; and there are enough people who like their work that this is the third most frequent answer given. It goes deeper than just liking the work one does. A person may not like the type of work but may love the process with its exhilaration and exercise leading to a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, and that is what we love.

The reason for this was found in a study of wild animal behavior. "Work" in the wild animal kingdom is whatever an animal has to do to make a living and to propagate. It begins with finding a nipple and sucking. Other work begins early too. It has to do with all the cute things babies do to reinforce a mother's love for babies. It is no accident that Nature has provided powerful reciprocal moods in the mother, father, and baby.

Most animals have no extended foresight. They have no understanding of the consequences of anything they do. Their actions are in response to a stimulus that is provided by Nature deep in their subconscious. With the simplest creatures it is almost completely automatic: the nearest living thing to an automaton and robot. To an animal there is a need: a basic desire, a search, and a fulfillment, without foresight. Animal work encompasses: movement, exploration, foraging, aggression, eating, copulation, and breathing. All animals have an irreducible inefficiency to all of their work. Any additional inefficiency to their work is play.

Most all animals and many primitive people work directly at their needs. That is: When they are hungry, they go directly to their food and eat. It is uniquely human in our present state of knowledge to consciously displace our work with foresight. That is: Some humans do not wait until they are hungry before they forage for food. With foresight they may gather more food than they can eat for the present, and store part of it somehow against a time when they don't want to, or can't work for their food. Animals, such as rodents which store food for another time, have no conscious foresight. A young squirrel that has never seen winter can have no conscious foresight of the conditions of winter. It has already been abandoned by its mother, so she does not teach it to store food. This storing instinct is a pre-programmed condition of their subconscious provided by Nature even before birth. It occurs only in the temperate and frigid zones where it is needed to survive the winter.

It is the displacement of work that is so uniquely human and makes the picture intricate. At one time, if we wanted a home, we picked a spot, gathered the materials, and made a shelter. Now, a person who wants a home may hire out as a house-wrecker and give part of his wages to someone else to make the home for him. The man may hate house-wrecking, but love having a home. This is an irony that is a consequence of displacement, and is at the base of the last twelve thousand years of civilization. A person may feel the success of the process without caring for the process and conclude: "The Truth is Work". It is this insight that gives the meaning of Truth. The Truth refers to a primitive pure promotion of life.

IV. THE TRUTH IS MYSTERY

This statement seems to express an antithesis: The Truth is not a Truth. With what we already know about the subject we can go directly to the seat of the question: For millions of years man understood almost nothing. He could see things happening, but why they happened was a mystery. None of the laws of Nature, physics, and chemistry, had been formulated. Disorder was the rule: Clouds, trees, weeds, water never appeared twice the same way. Order and consistency was, and still is, a small fraction of what a man sees, and, if he ever perceived it, it must have confused him all the more, because that was an extraordinary feature.

In the beginning of acquired knowledge the few generalities that were comprehended were perceived as magic and were a cause of wonderment in early minds. It was only very recently, as time is now counted, that some few men started pointing out consistencies to some of the others and such people still are very much in the minority as far as the whole world is concerned.

Though our knowledge is encyclopedic, we understand only one to three percent of the energies of the universe. Things as common as gravity mean almost nothing to us. Almost everyone, even the most dedicated scientists, depend on the large part of mystery that still remains. Indeed, if there were no mysteries, all scientists would be out of work! It occasionally seems that some scientists fight to preserve the mysteries that remain. It is a matter of survival. As things are now, facts have very little to do with the world. Magic forces still control mankind. It is the objective of my effort that some of this controlling superstition be dispelled before it is too late. If we are going to change things for the better, we should prepare and do so before things become desperate, for when the situation is desperate, we do desperate things, and if we don't then know what to do, the desperation is to no avail. In fact, the answers are very simple. All Nature's answers are profound and simple, but patience and humility are required. The process could be painless, voluntary, and certain, but there is a large windmill of rhetoric in the way.

One may wonder why in the face of all our problems we still prefer mystery. The answer seems to lie in the fact that Science finds rules, and rules are constraining. It is almost as if Scientists were moralists, and everybody hates moralists. Scientists talk about causes and consequences. Damn the consequences! Stop for a moment to consider how seldom we think about them. Children watch TV as a huge rock drops on Krazy Kat flattening him to a paper thin blotch from which he quickly unfolds and fills out to normal with no consequences. Is that just a childish thought? We have an adult variety. Consider: In an adult story the detective surprises the villain and is knocked unconscious. A few hours later he comes to, and gets right back on the job, remembering everything that happened right up until when he was hit - no consequences! The feature of retrograde amnesia is ignored. (Retrograde amnesia: When a person is knocked unconscious, he forgets immediate foregoing circumstances.) Anyone I ever knew, who was knocked unconscious, limped and grumped around for six weeks afterwards! Another adult fairy story concerns this modern Don Juan who jumps from bed to bed with no thought of pregnancies, venereal diseases, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, and suicides due to broken hearts. We enjoy such stories, because they depict a world that is free.

Everybody must be somewhere between the poles of ALL SUPERNATURAL and ALL NATURAL. A person who lives near the supernatural end of the continuum must populate his perception with multiple spirits to do all there is to do. When one gets half way to the other end, one seems to need fewer spirits, because half of Nature runs automatically, and maybe it is only the human mind that needs God's help.

We have heard of people of great faith express the Truth as Love, Beauty, Work, Mystery. The Truth was also expressed in other terms.

According to others, the Truth is: service, equanimity, serenity, fraternity, family, bravery, and even cowardice, to list a few others. To an athlete the Truth is winning. To two men who had been incarcerated in an insane asylum for schizophrenia, reality is The Truth. Functionally, though, each person emphasized a different aspect of The Truth, they were expressing different views of the same force.

V. THE TRUTH IS FREEDOM

To anyone who has studied Nature there is possibly one Truth that was not mentioned by my patients. That is: The Truth is Freedom. Perhaps, it is because in this part of the world people take Freedom for granted. This Truth is so universal that if any, it probably should be the fifth Truth. To a caged animal which has experienced freedom, freedom is a condition for which they are constantly ready. To humans who live in oppression, freedom can be more important than food, or water, or life itself. "Give me liberty or give me death!" Freedom has a broad meaning to higher forms of life.

In definition, freedom is the sense of being able to move in any direction to the limit of one's capacity, physically and especially mentally. A fence beyond our capacity and knowledge normally gives no sense of confinement. A shoreline is almost never sensed as a confining border. An area upon which one may wander as the sole authority is an area of freedom: the essence of territory. Anything, even knowledge, that makes us conscious of a limitation is confining. An obstacle that requires effort to surmount limits our freedom. In a sense, if we are ignorant of our limitations, we feel free. As a result, scientists, intellectuals, moralists, and preachers are often hated for stating our limitations.