Science can establish the objective truth of facts in the world. However it can't reveal the objective truth of values. The human condition prevents it. — Nikolas

Right, but...

Since it cannot, society values pleasure over the pursuit of truth. — Nikolas

...I don't see how this follows.

That is the problem: can facts and values become reconciled as a quality of truth normal for balanced Man? It can IMO — Nikolas

I think so too. Human reason naturally bridges the "is" and the "ought"

but it requires a quality of consciousness rejected by the world as a whole which glorifies its imbalance described by Plato as cave life. — Nikolas

I don't know what that means, but the reason I think truth is not valued, is not about pleasure seeking as such. It's about power - particularly religious power that lacks the modesty to set aside dogma in favour of reason. Think of the trail of Galileo - where he proved the earth orbits the sun and was put on trial for heresy. It undermined the truth value of science; such that science was used, but not observed. We developed and applied technology for power and profit - and live, as pleasure seekers in that false technocracy.

I don't know what that means, but the reason I think truth is not valued, is not about pleasure seeking as such. It's about power - particularly religious power that lacks the modesty to set aside dogma in favour of reason. Think of the trail of Galileo - where he proved the earth orbits the sun and was put on trial for heresy. It undermined the truth value of science; such that science was used, but not observed. We developed and applied technology for power and profit - and live, as pleasure seekers in that false technocracy. — counterpunch

I agree with you as far as the attraction to power and the prestige and its effect on human higher values. But IYO what is the source of higher values like justice? Does Man create them by trial and error or are they remembered as Plato suggests? Remembrance is called anamnesis and the purpose of philosophy is to help Man remember through the ability to experience objective conscience. So does man create objective values or are they remembered as universal perennial knowledge?

I do feel that what you have said about denial of pleasure as the path to truth is so wrong. Not on the basis of Plato, but when I was going to a fundamentalist church, I began to try to live in the way that you describe and it brought me to a state of deep depression and despair.

My own experience of wishing to sacrifice pleasure in favour of truth at one stage in my life brought me to the point in life where I felt that there was no point in getting out of bed at all. I found that the experiences of trying to deny myself all pleasure simply brought me misery and hell as 'truth'. I would say that it was not a form of 'healing' truth at all. In fact, it felt like the opposite of truth.

You will probably say that that is because I am looking at it from the wrong perspective and should not have felt negative, but I am simply describing the way it worked out when I tried the ascetic path for a few weeks when I was studying, In contrast, when I have some pleasures, I feel able to think and function positively, and explore creativity. Have you abandoned all physical pleasures? What would living without pleasure be? Would it be just spent reading and meditating all day, although I expect one would still be expected to work?Presumably, any form of sexual pleasure would be completely out of the question, and any other forms of enjoyment. I am really not sure that would be the way to finding any kind of truth. You may feel that I am exaggerating but I am trying to think through what the life of sacrificing pleasure would be in the full sense, and it is probably how some monks have lived.

I agree with you as far as the attraction to power and the prestige and its effect on human higher values. But IYO what is the source of higher values like justice? Does Man create them by trial and error or are they remembered as Plato suggests? Remembrance is called anamnesis and the purpose of philosophy is to help Man remember through the ability to experience objective conscience. So does man create objective values or are they remembered as universal perennial knowledge? — Nikolas

Plato is closer. Concepts like justice are expressions of an innate moral sense that developed within hunter gatherer tribes that we homo sapiens lived in for the vast majority of our evolutionary history. It can be shown that Chimpanzees have a proto-morality, so it's difficult to imagine humans were much different.

Chimps share food, and groom each other - and remember who reciprocates, and withhold such favours accordingly in future. This is where the moral sense begins - but of course, we became intellectually intelligent - and increasingly able to express ideas in words.

The idea of objective values came about only when hunter gatherer tribes joined together, and needed explicit social rules with an objective source of authority i.e. God, to prevent any small dispute splitting the multitribal social group into its original tribal components. This is the origin of religion, and political power.

When science was discovered, religious political power supressed it - and so it is power that is opposed to truth, not pleasure. Pleasure is effectively a bribe - to not oppose power with truth; like Descartes - who withdrew his thesis 'The World' from publication while Galileo was on trial, wrote to flatter the Church, and landed a cushy job in the Royal Court of Queen Christina of Sweden. It didn't go well - and he died soon after, but that's beside the point.

↪Nikolas
I do feel that what you have said about denial of pleasure as the path to truth is so wrong. Not on the basis of Plato, but when I was going to a fundamentalist church, I began to try to live in the way that you describe and it brought me to a state of deep depression and despair.

My own experience of wishing to sacrifice pleasure in favour of truth at one stage in my life brought me to the point in life where I felt that there was no point in getting out of bed at all. I found that the experiences of trying to deny myself all pleasure simply brought me misery and hell as 'truth'. I would say that it was not a form of 'healing' truth at all. In fact, it felt like the opposite of truth.

You will probably say that that is because I am looking at it from the wrong perspective and should not have felt negative, but I am simply describing the way it worked out when I tried the ascetic path for a few weeks when I was studying, In contrast, when I have some pleasures, I feel able to think and function positively, and explore creativity. Have you abandoned all physical pleasures? What would living without pleasure be? Would it be just spent reading and meditating all day, although I expect one would still be expected to work?Presumably, any form of sexual pleasure would be completely out of the question, and any other forms of enjoyment. I am really not sure that would be the way to finding any kind of truth. You may feel that I am exaggerating but I am trying to think through what the life of sacrificing pleasure would be in the full sense, and it is probably how some monks have lived. — Jack Cummins

You misunderstood the idea and it is not what I meant. It is psychologically dangerous just to give up pleasure without an aim for something better and knowing what the aim is rather than imagining it..

If a person wants to be a concert pianist they will have to sacrifice other lesser pleasures from going out in order to practice. Before sacrificing pleasure one needs a verified aim. In this case the aim is to experience the truth of what we are by becoming a balanced whole. That takes a lot of practice and the willingness to sacrifice our acquired imaginations that keep us within Plato's cave. If I can verify that I am out of balance my aim must be to acquire balance so I can receive from above and give to below.

Consider Plato's Chariot. The dark horse on the left representing the lower parts of our collective essence has become corrupt and the driver must contend with it in order for the chariot to become normal.

It seems that when you were in this depressing period of your life, you had no verified aim replacing pleasure leaving yourself vulnerable to imagination. This is psychologically dangerous.

I didn't think that you meant that one should just abandon pleasure arbitrarily. I think that what happens when I read these sort of ideas they collude with my own Catholic guilt. My own guilt makes me think that I should give up all forms of pleasure as a punishment for my many imperfections. I also know quite a few people who get into that form of thinking at times.

When I spoke about the time when I did try to live some kind of ascetic life, it was at the time I was questioning religion and searching for truth. However, I was also speeding on 'Pro Plus' caffeine tablets, so a bit chaotic. However, I did come out of the dark tunnel. I do have lapses of feelings of guilt and depression, but usually only brief dark nights of the soul, often if I can't sleep.

Probably, the reason why I wrote the reply which I wrote is because I do think that the whole emphasis on striving to overcome pleasure is one that can be so easily misconstrued. I think that I came to the verge of mental illness over it, but probably just managed to think my way out of it on the excess caffeine. However, I have seen quite a few people who have gone down that direction into full episodes of mental illness.

So, what I am saying is that guilt and self hatred, combined with an emphasis on overcoming pleasure can be extremely toxic. Getting back to churches and monks, I do believe that the reason people were meant to sit and kneel on hard surfaces was because it is uncomfortable. And, the idea idea of lent involved an emphasis on fasting and purging oneself.

It has to be acknowledged that Plato was an ancient philosopher, and that the ancients lived in a very different world to our own, as Jack Cummins says above. I agree on the distinction between 'truth and pleasure' but I would express more in terms of the distinction between intelligence or rationality, and sensation. Intelligence is refective and intepretive, where sense-pleasures are essentially physical and habitual. As Aristotle said, we share sensory pleasure with animals but rational intellect is unique to us. So, I subscribe to a form of Platonic dualism, but I think it has to be interpreted carefully — Wayfarer

This may come across as crazy since you seem to subscribe to the notion that non-human animals are about pleasure and humans are about truth, in line, of course, with Aristotle.

However, the situation may actually be the other way round. Non-human animals have or seem to have one objective to wit, to live, and equally important, to live in this world. Naturally then knowing truths is paramount for the simple reason that this will extend their lifespans and make their lives easier. Think of it, how do predators get close enough to their prey to make a kill? By lying of course and by that I refer to the many ingenious ways hunter-killers camouflage themselves and blend into the background. A similar argument can be made for prey that have similar abilities with the ultimate goal of starving their predators. In short, if there's any living organism that puts truth above all else, it has to fall into the category of non-human animals.

On the flip side we have humans and the relevant dissimilarity between humans and non-human animals is that we, with our powerful imagination, look to beyond this world - paradise, heaven, nirvana, are all conclusive proof of this fact and notice how all of these are essentially about pleasure. Since we've lost interest in this world, truths no longer matter to us for truths are important only to the extent that they allow us to live to see another day. The world beyond, a place of pure pleasure is what drives, what motivates us.

To sum up then, contrary to how Aristotle thought it was - non-human animals being about pleasure and humans being about truth - it appears that the "truth" of the matter is actually the exact opposite.

The idea of objective values came about only when hunter gatherer tribes joined together, and needed explicit social rules with an objective source of authority i.e. God, to prevent any small dispute splitting the multitribal social group into its original tribal components. This is the origin of religion, and political power.

When science was discovered, religious political power supressed it - and so it is power that is opposed to truth, not pleasure. Pleasure is effectively a bribe - to not oppose power with truth; like Descartes - who withdrew his thesis 'The World' from publication while Galileo was on trial, wrote to flatter the Church, and landed a cushy job in the Royal Court of Queen Christina of Sweden. It didn't go well - and he died soon after, but that's beside the point. — counterpunch

See how Jacob Needleman responds:

Of course it had been stupid of me to express it in quite that way, but nevertheless the point was worth pondering: does there exist in man a natural attraction to truth and to the struggle for truth that is stronger than the natural attraction to pleasure? The history of religion in the west seems by and large to rest on the assumption that the answer is no. Therefore, externally induced emotions of egoistic fear (hellfire), anticipation of pleasure (heaven), vengeance, etc., have been marshaled to keep people in the faith.

The whole notion of sainthood, both in the East and in the West, has contributed to this notion. the saint is often presented as though he were a being with an unnaturally strong impulse towards truth. The picture of the saint's sacrifices and asceticism are so presented as to assure the rest of us that what he attained is impossible for us. This of course, easily supports human passivity and wishful thinking, for at the same time that one is endowing the saint with an unnaturally strong impulse toward truth one might as well endow him, in the bargain, with a miraculous power to help the seeker without the latter making any real efforts of inner questioning and search.

He is suggesting that the attraction to truth is natural but this need for power and all the negativity that has become associated with it has made it appear unnatural. But with a little effort it can be remembered because it is the natural state of the soul to experience truth. This remembering is the source of the human aim to experience the truth of the human condition evenat the risk of avoiding the pleasures that mask this need.

On the flip side we have humans and the relevant dissimilarity between humans and non-human animals is that we, with our powerful imagination, look to beyond this world - paradise, heaven, nirvana, are all conclusive proof of this fact and notice how all of these are essentially about pleasure. Since we've lost interest in this world, truths no longer matter to us for truths are important only to the extent that they allow us to live to see another day. The world beyond, a place of pure pleasure is what drives, what motivates us.

To sum up then, contrary to how Aristotle thought it was - non-human animals being about pleasure and humans being about truth - it appears that the "truth" of the matter is actually the exact opposite. — TheMadFool

But what of these rare ones who have felt in the depth of their being that the needs of the heart are not satisfied by what the world offers:

"...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
-- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©

Are they misguided for needing what the world cannot offer or are we misguided for believing that it can and continue to fight over the power of partial truths?

So, what I am saying is that guilt and self hatred, combined with an emphasis on overcoming pleasure can be extremely toxic. Getting back to churches and monks, I do believe that the reason people were meant to sit and kneel on hard surfaces was because it is uncomfortable. And, the idea idea of lent involved an emphasis on fasting and purging oneself. — Jack Cummins

You unfortunately had a bad experience with man made secularized religion. Trying to heal oneself is not self hatred but the recognition of human potential. Sitting and kneeling on hard surfaces is an exercise for the mind and the will to dominate the drive for pleasure or as Plato called it, our appetites. Read how it is explained to Jacob Needleman in his book Lost Christianity:

Metropolitan Anthony," I began, "five years ago when I visited you I attended services which you yourself conducted and I remarked to you how struck I was by the absence of emotion in your voice. Today, in the same way where it was not you but the choir, I was struck by the same thing, the almost complete lack of emotion in the voices of the singers."

Yes he said, "this is quite true, it has taken years for that, but they are finally beginning to understand...."

"What do you mean?" I asked. I knew what he meant but I wanted to hear him speak about this - this most unexpected aspect of the Christianity I never knew, and perhaps very few modern people ever knew. I put the question further: "The average person hearing this service - and of course the average Westerner having to stand up for several hours it took - might not be able to distinguish it from the mechanical routine that has become so predominant in the performance of the Christian liturgy in the West. He might come wanting to be lifted, inspired,moved to joy or sadness - and this the churches in the West are trying to produce because many leaders of the Church are turning away from the mechanical, the routine.."

He gently waved aside what I was saying and I stopped in mid sentence. "There was a pause, then he said: "No. Emotion must be destroyed."

He stopped, reflected, and started again, speaking in his husky Russian accent: "We have to get rid of emotions....in order to reach.....feeling."

Again he paused, looking at me, weighing the effect his words were having. I said nothing. but inside I was alive with expectancy. I waited.

Very tentatively, I nodded my head.

He continued: "You ask about the liturgy in the West and in the East. it is precisely the same issue. the sermons, the Holy Days - you don't why one comes after the other. or why this one now and the other one later. Even if you read everything about it you still wouldn't know, believe me.

"And yet . . . there is a profound logic in them, in the sequence of the Holy Days. And this sequence leads people somewhere - without their knowing it intellectually. Actually, it is impossible for anyone to understand the sequence of rituals and Holy Days intellectually. it is not meant for that. It is meant for something else, something higher.

For this you have to be in a state of prayer, otherwise it passes you by-"

"What is prayer?" I asked.

He did not seem to mind my interrupting with this question. Quite the contrary. "In a state of prayer one is vulnerable." He emphasized the last word and then waited until he was sure I had not taken it in an ordinary way.

"In prayer one is vulnerable, not enthusiastic. and then these rituals have such force. they hit you like a locomotive. You must be not enthusiastic, nor rejecting - but only open. This is the whole idea of asceticism: to become open."

I was surprised to experience how much my negative emotions were responsible for producing pleasure. We are not born with negative emotions but they are acquired in life but they rule our lives. Do they have to?

I do see positives in Christianity, and I do go to church with one friend at times, but sometimes I do find this difficult. I once went to a Quaker meeting and found that very positive. I may try that again. Sitting in silence, with people speaking when inspired, is an interesting contrast to the rituals of Catholicism.

The question of negative emotions is interesting. I find guilt to be the most difficult to handle, and probably fear. I do find that rage and jealousy can be turned into pleasure through rock and metal music. I do think that each one of us has a history of emotional scars and probably pleasant ones too. I think that we can work to reframe them, to some extent.

One thing which I do wonder is if emotions we experience are not just ones arising in the individual psyche, but the collective one too. Even with my own demons related to the negative side of religion, I sometimes feel that it goes much deeper than my own experience and I am actually dealing with the dark side, or shadow in Jungian language, of Christianity. I am also thinking about the dark aspects which can arise in mystical experience, and that is why I can relate to the idea of the dark night of the soul.

When I studied art therapy I did find it beneficial to do drawings of my own inner monsters and gargoyles. Also when I went to creative writing classes I experimented with writing from the point of view of being a fallen angel. So, I do think that we can work with the negative symbolic experiences and emotions in a creative way, and that can be a way of healing the wounds.

He is suggesting that the attraction to truth is natural but this need for power and all the negativity that has become associated with it has made it appear unnatural. But with a little effort it can be remembered because it is the natural state of the soul to experience truth. This remembering is the source of the human aim to experience the truth of the human condition evenat the risk of avoiding the pleasures that mask this need. — Nikolas

Jacob Needleman you say? I'll have to look out for him. Because that seems broadly correct to me - although I say that, cautious of where he's going with it.

In my own philosophical search for truth - I've gone down a lot of dead ends; and then had to retrace my steps to find out where I went wrong. That's a painful process - but necessary. I love my country, and while I'm agnostic, I respect religion - for its role as the central coordinating mechanism of civilisation through thousands of years.

I take no joy in the suggestion the Church particularly, and Western civilisation in general made a similar mistake in relation to science - 400 years ago, and we haven't recognised the error, and retraced our steps, even as we approach upon extinction, we continue - as if science were naught but a tool to be used and cast aside on a whim. Science is also an increasingly valid and coherent understanding of reality we need to observe, and act in relation to - particularly with regard to the application of technology, or we are doomed.

In my own philosophical search for truth - I've gone down a lot of dead ends; and then had to retrace my steps to find out where I went wrong. That's a painful process - but necessary. I love my country, and while I'm agnostic, I respect religion - for its role as the central coordinating mechanism of civilisation through thousands of years.

I take no joy in the suggestion the Church particularly, and Western civilisation in general made a similar mistake in relation to science - 400 years ago, and we haven't recognised the error, and retraced our steps, even as we approach upon extinction, we continue - as if science were naught but a tool to be used and cast aside on a whim. Science is also an increasingly valid and coherent understanding of reality we need to observe, and act in relation to - particularly with regard to the application of technology, or we are doomed. — counterpunch

You will probably appreciate Jacob Needleman's book: Lost Christianity. He was an atheist with a great dislike for Christianity and Judaism. He had to teach a course on religion but discovered some of the ideas most are unaware of are as deep as any philosophy. He bean to realize his preconceptions were wrong.

https://tiferetjournal.com/lost-christianity/

.................What is needed is a either a new understanding of God or a new understanding
of Man: an understanding of God that does not insult the scientific
mind, while offering bread, not a stone, to the deepest hunger of the
heart; or an understanding of Man that squarely faces the criminal
weakness of our moral will while holding out to us the knowledge of how we can strive within ourselves to become the fully human being we are meant to be– both for ourselves and as instruments of a higher purpose.

But, this is not an either/or. The premise –or, rather, the proposal—of this
book is that at the heart of the Christian religion there exists and
has always existed just such a vision of both God and Man. I call it
“lost Christianity” not because it is a matter of doctrines and concepts
that may have been lost or forgotten; nor even a matter of methods of
spiritual practice that may need to be recovered from ancient sources.
It is all that, to be sure, but what is lost in the whole of our modern
life, including our understanding of religion, is something even more fundamental, without
which religious ideas and practices lose their meaning and all too
easily become the instruments of ignorance, fear and hatred. What
is lost is the experience of oneself, just oneself—myself, the personal
being who is here, now, living, breathing, yearning for meaning, for
goodness; just this person here, now, squarely confronting one’s own
existential weaknesses and pretensions while yet aware, however
tentatively, of a higher current of life and identity calling to us from
within ourselves. This presence to oneself is the missing element in
the whole of the life of Man, the intermediate state of consciousness
between what we are meant to be and what we actually are.
It is, perhaps, the one bridge that can lead us from our inhuman past
toward the human future.

Can our species ever reach a quality of understanding of God and Man that does not insult the scientific
mind, while offering bread, not a stone, to the deepest hunger of the
heart? If we cannot, our species may not survive

"...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
-- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- © — Nikolas

Simone Weil and his ilk of similar thinkers are precisely what I'm talking about. Truths about this world don't matter to them because to them truths about this world are, in their own words, "...finite and limited and radically incapable of staisfying the desire which burns perpetually within us for an infinite and perfect good..."

As a matter of clarification, by "truths about this world" I refer to facts such as which berries are edible, which poisonous going all the way up to those about the universe itself. It's to be distinguished from any and all claims about "truths" beyond this world i.e. claims like heaven, nirvana, moksha, salvation, etc. which take place in different realms.

That out of the way, let's pick up where we left off. As far as I can tell, Simone Weil's "...infinite and perfect good..." (above) is just another way of saying pleasure. It's difficult to say whether Simone Weil and others who share his sentiments are aware of this or not but to be fair, the clever disguise pleasure uses to fool people that it's something else viz. "...infinite and perfect good..." is very convincing and hard to see through. Good whether one conceives of it as "...infinite and perfect..." or not is, after all, ultimately associated with pleasure (heaven, nirvana, etc.).

Now, some may say that, congruent with Simone Weil's thoughts, that "...infinite and perfect good..." is truth of the highest order, an ultimate truth and thus that we, humans, are not actually pleasure-seeking as I'm positing by actually truth-seeking. The apparent disdain and rejection of truths about this world being simply a natural response arising from the realization that there are greater truths like the "...infinite and perfect good..."

This, however, is again deception at a grand scale. Pleasure has once again managed to pull the wool over our eyes by masquerading itself as not just truth but now as ultimate truth, "...infinite and perfect good..." This scam if I may refer to it as such is so good that it makes people irrational to the point where to them one bird in the hand (truths about this world) is no longer worth two in the bush (truths pleasure beyond this world)".

That out of the way, let's pick up where we left off. As far as I can tell, Simone Weil's "...infinite and perfect good..." (above) is just another way of saying pleasure. It's difficult to say whether Simone Weil and others who share his sentiments are aware of this or not but to be fair, the clever disguise pleasure uses to fool people that it's something else viz. "...infinite and perfect good..." is very convincing and hard to see through. Good whether one conceives of it as "...infinite and perfect..." or not is, after all, ultimately associated with pleasure (heaven, nirvana, etc.). — TheMadFool

Let me first say that Simone Weil was a highly intelligent woman totally dedicted to the experience of truth. She practiced her philosophy. Susan Sontag wrote in book review on Simone:

Yet the person of Simone Weil is here as surely as in any of her other books—the person who is excruciatingly identical with her ideas, the person who is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit.

Which philosophers live. their ideas? It is an insult to the practice of hypocrisy. She was admired by Leon Trotsky, the head of the Frence Marxist party yet died a Christian mystic and intellectual influence on Pope Paul V1.

The infinite and perfect good refers to objective values. The depths of the seed of the human soul is attracted to objective values initiated by the forms rather than pleasure initiated by our senses.

We know that science reveals the objective facts of the world. Only a few are aware of the human ability to experience universal objective values through remembrance or anamnesis. Awakening to the complimentary relationship between objective facts and objective values can save the world.

The complimentary relationship between objective facts and objective values experienced through objective conscience is not the same as the relationship between facts and pleasure.

I believe that one identical thought is to be found—expressed very precisely and with only slight differences of modality—in. . .Pythagoras, Plato, and the Greek Stoics. . .in the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita; in the Chinese Taoist writings and. . .Buddhism. . .in the dogmas of the Christian faith and in the writings of the greatest Christian mystics. . .I believe that this thought is the truth, and that it today requires a modern and Western form of expression. That is to say, it should be expressed through the only approximately good thing we can call our own, namely science. This is all the less difficult because it is itself the origin of science. Simone Weil….Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, Random House, 1976, p. 488

Is Simone referring to the benefits of the pursuit of truth and objective facts or the pursuit of pleasure? Which comes first in the balanced human psych; truth or pleasure. Since humanity lives out of balance in Plato's cave, pleasure comes first.

Truth is pleasure

Truth is pleasure — Huh

The Four Noble Truths is the basis of Buddhism. The First Truth is that life consists of suffering, pain, and misery.

Yet somehow you believe this first noble truth is really pleasure by definition. Please explain

Suffering isn't caused by truth it's caused by being unable to withstand it.

Suffering isn't caused by truth it's caused by being unable to withstand it.↪Nikolas — Huh

Buddhism says Suffering is truth. You say truth is pleasure. So what is truth?

Its all just context, you can't just have a one sided coin.

↪Nikolas Its all just context, you can't just have a one sided coin. — Huh

Suffering is one side of the coin and pleasure is the other. What reconciles this duality as ONE? That is truth

Suffering pleasure and truth are all the same.

Suffering pleasure and truth are all the same. — Huh

When you e suffering it isn't pleasurable. When you are experiencing pleasure you are not suffering: the duality of yin and yang. Yet there is a higher level of reality in which they can be reconciled and experienced as ONE. That is the direction leading to truth. They are not all the same.

Chocolate gives you diabetes and studying makes you smarter.

↪Nikolas Chocolate gives you diabetes and studying makes you smarter. — Huh

Women can sometimes give a man an experience similar to the effects of Hemorrhoids. So if nothing else, women prove the relationship between truth and pleasure.

Why bother with the need for truth when a person has easy access to pleasure. — Nikolas

We can bring this down to practical matters. One of the things to ask yourself about being let go from your job is "Was I treated fairly?" Instead, many people would like the positive narrative of exit interview with words like, "We'll provide you with good references".

What makes you think truth, the encounter with it, is not pleasure itself? — tim wood

:ok: