Good morning Jellyfarm!
(It's morning where I am but I realize it might not be morning where you are!)
China talks about "truth" and I'm uncertain what he means. If he means that the sun is in the sky then yes this is "truth". If he means that rain falls from the sky then yes this is "truth"..... when we can experience the "truth" of a thing we perhaps have that instantaneous insight that he talks about but there are a great many "truths" that aren't as readily available to moments of briliance and readily recognizeable. We "learn" un-truths about so much that goes on in our world...and sometimes these "un-truths" are embraced as "truth".
If we think of truth as concept, we have to recognize that "truth" is not an absolute commonality throughout the universe."Truth" is a local phenomenon and temporal in nature. For example we might say...If I'm standing on my front porch and I drop my coffee cup that cup will fall, accelerating at a rate of 32ft per second per second until it impacts the floor, if on the other hand we were standing on the moon, our notion of "truth" regarding the nature of falling objects would have to be revised!
This is I would agree a rather fantastic example since few of us will ever stand on the moon, but the conceptual "gist" the "hard-and-fast" meaning of the word "truth" simply doesn't exist. We use an idea of truth present in the here and now to describe a situation that our experience informs our consiousness is a reliable predictor of future events or phenomenon. We can say for example that a red rose is "red" but what do we mean by "red"? Is the qualia of "red" exactly the same for every being that experiences that rose?
Of course it isn't! To a person suffering from a form of color-blindness the appearance of that red-rose may appear purple or some other color. "Truth" inheres to a subjective evaluation of reality. It is "true" in the broader sense that our estimates of what "truth" might be in any given situation is the satisfaction of a pre-concieved notion about that thing event or situation. For example, a clever lawyer would question a group of people who were standing beside the road at an intersection and witnessed an automobile collision..."What color was the car coming down Orchid Avenue...?" Some people might say "The car travelling down Orchid Avenue was green." Another person at the same moment observing the same event might say "The car travelling down Orchid Avenue was blue."
What is the truth?
China goes further and suggests that the way human beings intuit the concept of truth is instantaneous and I think that sometimes that might be true but it's also true that until you eduate and open the eyes and minds of some people, they only think they know the "truth".
This becomes very important when we consider things like love and respect, tolerance and morality. Our pre-conceived notions about right and wrong may lead us in the "wrong" direction, and our sense of the "truth" may be inaccurate becasue we've "learned" the "truth" at the knee of our parents or our teachers and they may have either intentionally or unintentionally misguided our perceptions of "truth".
It's easy to throw out a concept and unfurl some rhetoric like a flag waving in the breeze but it's another thing altogether to strip away the potential for misunderstanding and mis-perception and try to deal with the essence of a notion or a concept.
