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This essay is intended to explore the ideas of truth and truthfulness from their inner dimension, through the phenomenological method. To begin with, all we can know for certain is that we experience a 'now' state of being from the first-person perspective. This state embeds ideas, emotions, desires, sensations, and an intuitive sense of all these being temporally extended in memory and in anticipation of future states. We have a certain intuition for the lawfulness of this transformation, which we can condense into our concepts of ‘natural laws’, ‘psychic mechanisms’, ‘rules of logic’, and so forth. How our state of being will transform is a result of both our intuitive intent and factors beyond our control. The latter serve as resistance to our intents so that our ideas can only manifest themselves in the flow of experience in certain ways and not others. For ex., we may have an artistic imagination to compose an elaborate symphony, which we have even worked out in detail, but if financial constraints have made it so we can only afford one instrument, we can't fully manifest that intended idea.
We know that the transformation of our state meets certain resistance within different layers of experience. In the layer of pure thinking intents, we meet the least resistance. We can summon the mental image of a 'triangle' and transform it in various ways. The perceptual flow we experience will synchronize very closely with our intuitive intent. In the layer of feeling, on the other hand, there is more resistance - if we want to summon a state of intense joy, this will be more difficult than summoning a mental image of 'triangle'. The state of intense joy will not enter into our perceptual experience in such close synchronization with our intent, if at all. We meet even more resistance in the transforming layer of sensations – our perceptual experience of sunlight and warmth will remain firm outside on a hot summer day even if we intend to observe the starry skies on a cool winter night. Likewise, if we intend to move our leg but it has been paralyzed by a debilitating illness, nothing will happen. Notice how all the layers must first be reflected in our thinking before we are conscious of them – we don’t have any ‘direct access’ to feelings and sensations independent of our thinking state.
In that sense, there is an implicit contextual hierarchy through which our thinking state transforms just as a word is meaningfully embedded within a phrase, which is embedded within a sentence, which is embedded within a paragraph, and so forth. Our intuitive intents (I) are normally felt to be embedded within the context of our thoughts (T), feelings/desires (F), and sensations (S). The latter modulates what sort of intents and thoughts can be concretely realized from the infinite potential of possibilities. If I intend to transform my thinking state from the context of ‘bed’ to ‘couch’, my thoughts, feelings, and sensations give me feedback on how to effectively fulfill this intent. On the other hand, if I intend to transform my state from the context of ‘Earth’ to ‘Mars’, they give me feedback that the intent cannot be fulfilled. Such intents then naturally drop out of the palette of options that can transform my state.
Clearly, we cannot perceive our inner life from the side as circles like we do above – these are only symbols for our completely first-person flow of experience. Let's say we set an intention to accomplish a certain goal such as putting some new furniture together, like a new chair. Now we start thinking about the goal and all our thoughts are concentric with the intention - we have thoughts about what the finished product will look like, what tools will be needed, what steps to follow, and so on. Since we are eagerly anticipating the finished chair (maybe it has excellent lumbar support), our feelings are also concentric with this goal - we are emotionally inspired to fulfill our intention. We set our bodily will in motion and start building the furniture, and now all our sensations become concentric with the goal as well. The colors, sounds, smells, and textures that emerge as we read the instructions, lay out the pieces, put them together, tighten the screws, and so forth are all generally related to the core intention. In this way, our flow of experience is concentrically aligned across the contextual layers. We will experience the task in a harmonious way – it may even inspire some sense of faith, hope, and courage in the face of life.
Things are rarely as idealized as the above scenario and, in modern life, we have gotten quite used to doing daily tasks while our thinking swings around to many unrelated topics. Working on the computer to finish some project while also browsing a dozen of different open tabs, including comments on our favorite Discord servers, is a prime example of this. Generally, our feelings and sensations are more stable and aligned with the core task we are engaged in, although this can quickly stop being the case if extraneous events are introduced into our stream of experience. Perhaps we get a cramp in our arm or leg while working on the chair and now our sensations are out of alignment with the intent. Since we are rarely laser-focused on tasks, it is often the case that the 'circles' of our inner life lose their concentric alignment and oscillate wildly like a three-arm pendulum.
We experience a certain inner friction and cloudiness when these contextual layers are not aligned properly. For example, if we intend to build our chair but get distracted somewhere along the middle of the task, a level of indirection is introduced. Perhaps a family member calls us and we get in a heated argument with them over the phone. Now we finish the phone call and return to the chair-building task but our feelings are swamped in the argument and our thoughts keep returning to what we said and what the other person said. Perhaps the argument was so bitter that even our blood pressure is up, our breathing has become jagged, and we are sweating a bit. Now even many of our sensations have lost their concentricity with the core task. That makes it harder to orient ourselves properly to the task and experience reality as a lawful experiential flow. If we recognize that our days consist of many such tasks, it is easy to see why these frequent misalignments can interfere with our ability to lucidly comprehend the living structure of reality.
Modern thinking habits have conditioned many people to habitually feel that 'truth' must mean: what we think or say corresponds to some objective set of facts 'out there' in the World state (the 'correspondence theory of truth'). In other words, understanding the truth means using our thinking state to model a separate, objective World state that is independent of our thinking. However, if we stick to only the givens of phenomenological experience, there is no warrant for imposing this duality between our thinking state and the World state. Instead, our flow of thinking states should be considered a 'curvature' of the World state along which our existence transforms as something whole (see Cleric’s ‘Symphony of Minds’ essay for further reference). From that perspective, we only grasp the Truth in so far as our thinking state becomes concentric with other layers of the World state which modulate the former’s becoming, beginning with the most proximate layers of our personal soul life - our assumptions, likes, dislikes, interests, preferences, etc. That is when the arms of the pendulum stabilize and move in harmonious rhythms, which we experience as 'insights' and ‘knowledge’ about the living flow of reality.
In that sense, to approach the inner dimension of truth, we have to examine the reason why stating or misstating a set of facts about the World state is truthful or untruthful. In the former case, it is because our sensations, memories, feelings, thoughts, and intents are all aligned, whereas in the latter case, they have become misaligned. When we misstate a set of facts about the World state, our sensations and memories are out of alignment with our intent, feelings, and thoughts. For example, we tell a police officer that a car involved in an accident was bright red, when in fact we remember it as being white. We intend to convey a different perceptual state of being than the one we remember experiencing, and the thoughts that we condense into words to communicate with the police align with that disharmonious intent. Moreover, the feeling of experiencing a bright red car doesn't align with our memory experience of the white car.
As we see, the idea of Truthfulness goes well beyond the specific instance of reporting objective facts about the World state. We can also be untruthful, for example, when our intent and feelings/desires become misaligned with our thoughts. Perhaps we have thoughts about becoming more organized and disciplined in our life, let's say by eating more healthily. Yet we may often find that we are still indulging in unhealthy foods, skipping steps in our diet, etc. In this way, it is revealed that we were merely thinking about eating more healthily but didn't sincerely intend it or feel motivated to carry through with the intent. This sort of untruthfulness speaks to the inner reasons why the World state becomes disharmonious over time, since the World state is simply the cumulative effect of balances and imbalances within the depths of our inner organization. If we are paying attention, it provides feedback as to what within that inner organization may need to be creatively managed for its contextual layers to become more finely tuned.
In a certain sense, our cone of concentric experiential layers is always extremely fragile, always teetering on the edge of collapse into misalignment when our intuitive intents are only related to personal tasks. That is because the broader World state of sensory events, including our inner state of sense-based thoughts and feelings, wield lopsided influence over our intentional soul-life. These contextual layers continually get diverted into channels that are unrelated to our intents or even working at cross-purposes with them. The sensory events and feelings may become so overwhelming that we no longer experience ourselves as intentional beings who have creative input in the flow of experience, only helpless victims of external circumstances. Then we lose sight of the intent-driven flow altogether.
How many people feel like they are helpless victims of external circumstances, including their own soul tendencies? Their sympathies, preferences, personality, character, and so forth are experienced as immutable parts of their being that were allotted to them from mindless nature or a remote deity. With the rise of modern virtual technology, there are plenty of avenues to become more and more passive in the face of these circumstances, more and more resigned to what Nature/God/whatever has thrown our way. People may soon be able to stay in bed most of the day, with all necessities delivered to their doorstep and entertainment practically force-fed to them. All of this results because more and more people are losing sight of the Truth, that is, the concentricity of their first-person experiences with the intentional architecture of reality.
Although there is no room to discuss it here, those familiar with the work of Jean Gebser, Owen Barfield, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, and similar 20th-century thinkers will be familiar with humanity's evolution of consciousness from cultural epoch to cultural epoch. It roughly traces a development of consciousness similar to what we individually experience from infancy to childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. In ancient Greek times, the mythic image-based consciousness had already started decohering into more sharply defined mental images, yet these were experienced as being naturally ordered by ideal 'lines of force' which were collectively referred to as the Logos. Gradually, through the Middle Ages, these mental images were further refined and abstracted into the clear-cut concepts that we are familiar with today.
In that process, we have managed to convince ourselves that the concepts are 'subjective' and 'private' to our consciousness and that they are only useful to model a 'real world out there'. We feel ourselves to be the original creators of concepts that we arbitrarily configure, according to mysterious ‘rules of logic’, to mimic the perceptual dynamics of the World state. In other words, the archetypal Logos forces that structure the pictorial and conceptual life have been blotted out from modern consciousness. Our thinking flow has become dualized from the World flow. It is because we have lost cognitive sight of these forces that our intentional cone has become so unstable, our thinking dragged around helplessly by the lower layers.
Humanity has now arrived at the stage where the archetypal forces structuring its thinking consciousness should become more transparent again - in other words, thinking must begin investigating its own living structure and dynamics to rediscover the Logos more inwardly and lucidly than the ancient Greeks. We could say this task, in contrast to our daily personal tasks, is a Cosmic level intent that structures the World flow at the level of human cultural history. By extending our insights to resonate with such Cosmic level intents, we add a certain ‘top-heavy’ stability (symbolized by blue arrows) to our localized intent and our ‘cone’ of TFS experience. Our local intent is stabilized within the Cosmic intentional flow from ‘above’.
The TFS layers of the intuitive cone are, in a sense, personalized reflections or shadows of these Cosmic intents. By centering our local intents within the Cosmic intents and gaining intuitive insight into the latter, we also become more intimately familiar with the personal life of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. We become aware of more creative opportunities to harmonize the latter with the former. When our intentional life expands its sphere of interest to such Cosmic level goals, the balance of power begins to shift from the sensory and impulsive life to the purely ideal and moral life. We begin to live more in currents of pure ideality.
That is primarily because our thought patterns start to become living symbols and testimonies for the ideal potential, the higher-order intents, from which they have condensed and crystallized, just as the words on these pages are testimonies for my local intent to write an essay. When our thoughts are consciously understood as such testimonies, we gain exponentially more opportunities to extract Cosmic-level insight from them. At the same time, our feelings are continually inspired by these expansive Cosmic intents. We may even start to notice our sensations shift - colors and sounds begin to thicken out, so to speak, so they are experienced as not only flattened perceptual qualities, but also imbued with soul and spiritual qualities. They are the outer manifestations of living minds and their activity. In this way, the feeling and sensory layers are gradually depersonalized and relocated within their truthful Cosmic context.
This is how the phenomenology of intentional activity not only helps us understand the nature of lies and Truth, as misalignments and alignments of the contextual layers embedded within our transforming first-person ‘now’ state, but also orient our intentional lives within that pillar of Truth and pursue it to its furthest Cosmic reaches, into the realms of creative and moral freedom. This concentric orientation is greatly enriched when we take our phenomenological method through the portal of concentration. When we intentionally and inwardly direct our cognitive activity back toward the archetypal layers that structure it, we are seeking to live in Spirit and in Truth. These meditative moments can then become the most truthful ones of our lives, when our inner stream that we normally flow along with is made objective and laid bare before our cognitive perception.
even if just for a split-second. My personal favorite when I'm walking through the city streets, is waiting at a traffic light 
. It gives the perfect opportunity to freeze for a few seconds and make the whole spectrum - from the elemental to the Cosmic - in concentric alignment. With our mind we make concentric the lower circles while with our heart we allow ourselves to be made concentric to the Cosmic minds, in prayerful submission.
If you think this is an attempt to avoid your reasoning
I believe it was clearly put: "I ask you to ponder the possibility that this is not necessarily the expression of a twisted soul who makes up foolish cases only to vent unconscious antipathies. After all, there are other motives that could explain why I am writing this. I hope you will not just discard them by default."