Its Truth or Perception?

If I am asked which is the most sought after secret the world over, I’d say answer to what ‘Truth’ is. Human civilization has tried to demystify ‘Truth’ through various paths since time immemorial. The concepts of religion, philosophy, physics, mathematics, chemistry etc are all derived as byproduct of the quest to answer this very question.

One day I gave it a thought too। After all, we all have the freedom to think! The enormity of this question dwarfed me just as the stretch of the blue sky above does. Let me share my line of thinking, let’s see if I get some interesting ideas from any of you too :).

Let us take a Red Rose. In absolute common sense, the truth is – it is a red rose. Why does it look red? Scientifically, it absorbs all the remaining colors of the spectrum except red, and hence reflects it. The human eye receives the red light reflected from the rose through its receptors and recognizes it as the color red. Hence, we summarize that this rose is red and there are no two thoughts about it, it’s the absolute truth. It can be verified again and again on consultations with our fellow beings around. Now, let’s see the same rose through the eyes of say a cow, a dog, a cat (think of all strange animals you have seen too!)? Do you think all of them would see this rose as red? No, they won’t. Because their eyes are different than ours! They are not designed to receive the same bandwidth of colors as are visible to the human eye. So what happens to our belief of this rose being red?

It turns out; it was our ‘Perception’ that the rose is red. In fact, the ‘fact’ that a particular frequency belongs to the color ‘Red’ is also a perception! Cats might be seeing the same frequency of light as ‘Green’, who knows? I just took a small example to analyze how we form beliefs. In the above example, it is our sense of sight that we have standardized as per our convenience over the years and that set standard is perceived to be absolute truth. I think we still are nowhere near solving this mystery of ‘Truth’. The best we can do is ‘Perceive’ :) .