Truth beyond words
Is Truth transcendent? Plus my top books from 2024, and some of the best quotes I've collected this year.
If you’re new around here, welcome to Wisdom Wednesdays - where I share wisdom from history’s greatest minds.
(scroll down to view my top 7 book of 2024)
What is Truth?
If you’ve skipped ahead to the book recommendations, you might wonder what the Gospel of John has to do with the Upanishads, or what The Fragments has to do with the Tao Te Ching.
The answer is everything.
Though they come from different traditions and periods, these works are bound together in their attempt to express the inexpressible, transcendent Truth.
These texts speak of Truth beyond concepts, language, genus, or categories. They reveal what man has sought since he crawled out of the ocean - peace that surpasses understanding. Truth unbound by being and time.
But a smart aleck will point out that what I’ve just said is nonsensical because I’m speaking about that which I’ve said words cannot capture. So, by speaking about it, I’ve contained that uncontainable, expressed the inexpressible, and conceptualized the unconceptualizable.
Guilty as charged!
I’m aware what I’m saying is paradoxical. It's almost incomprehensible, but not entirely.
Consider this. How would we describe colours to someone blind from birth without referencing the experience of sight?
Think about it for a minute.
The best we can do is try to approximate the colours with sensation. i.e., Red feels like a burst of intense heat or smooth silk on your skin, and green feels like the early morning sun. But even then we end up alluding to things that have produced certain sensations to our eyes.
Ultimately, the only way to understand red or green is by directly experiencing the colours for ourselves. No amount of description can substitute seeing the colours firsthand.
Something similar applies to Truth Itself.
We can exhaust all the words and sentences from every language to describe Truth, and still come up short. Because directly experiencing Truth will surpass all conceptual frameworks. Yet, as humans, we must use concepts to communicate Truth even though we are fully aware of their inadequacies.
Pseudo-Dionysius, the Christian Neoplatonic philosopher, summarizes it this way:
There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it. Darkness and light, error and truth—it is none of these. It is beyond assertion and denial… for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and, by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond ever limitation; it is also beyond every denial.
Similarly, Adi Shankara, the Advaita Vedanta philosopher, writes:
Brahman is beyond cause and effect. It is the reality beyond all thought. It is eternally the same, peerless, outside the range of any mental conceptions.
Both Pseudo-Dionysius and Adi Shankara are pointing to the Transcendent Truth.
They speak of that which cannot be comprehended by a single person or, for that matter, the entirety of humanity. This Truth transcends the categories of being and non-being. And the closer we approach it the more we move into the cloud of Unknowing.
Truth is that treasure hidden in an open field. When you find it, you hide it again, and then in your joy sell all that you have to buy that field.
These seven texts below are some of the many books that contain Truth in its infinite expressions (see my previous essay here). They form a constellation of insights, inviting us to walk the path of fana.
7 must-read books
As is now my custom, I’m excited to share my top reads of 2024. I read over 70+ books. Many of these books turned into episodes for Becoming Antifragile podcast. So do listen to the podcast.
Upanishads - Unknown
Gospel of John - St. John the Apostle
The Cloud of Unknowing - Anonymous
The Fragments - Heraclitus (listen here)
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu (listen here & here)
Crest-Jewel of Discrimination - Adi Shankara (listen here)
Divine Names & Mystical Theology - Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
10 powerful quotes from my readings
If you compete with no one, no one can compete with you.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animals. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters
When ignorance is destroyed by knowledge of the Self, then, like the sun, knowledge illumines Ultimate Reality.
Krishna, Bhagavad Gita
There are two things which a monk ought to hate above all, for by hating them he can become free in this world. And a brother asked: What are these things? The older replied: An easy life and vain glory.
Abbot Pastor, Wisdom of the Desert
He who knows Brahman who is truth, consciousness, and infinite joy, hidden in the inmost of our soul and in the highest heaven, enjoys all things he desires in communion with the all-knowing Brahman.
Unknown, Upanishads
You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
Jesus, Gospel of John
Mysticism without annihilation is like a bird without wings; it will stay on the ground.
Nevit. O. Ergin, The Sufi Path of Annihilation
From fifteen, my heart and mind was set upon learning; from thirty I took my stance; from forty I was no longer doubtful; from fifty I realized the propensities of tian; from sixty my ear was attuned; from seventy I could give my heart and mind free rein without overstepping the boundaries.
Confucius, The Analects of Confucius
The righteous choose their friends carefully, but the way of the wicked leads them astray.
Solomon, Proverbs
Are jars, pots and vessels distinct from the clay of which they are made? Man drinks the wine of Maya, becomes deluded and begins to see things as separate from each other, so that he talks of “you” and “I”.
Adi Shankara, Crest-Jewel of Discrimination
I’d love to hear your top recommended books for 2025 - don’t be shy.