What the hell is True anymore?

Deepfakes blur faces like wet ink. AI slop piles up faster than anyone can sift it. Short-form feeds slice attention into confetti.

Every day, college freshmen like you sprint between lectures, friendships, and fleeting moments of joy—studying for futures that haven’t decided whether they’ll exist yet. Politicians steer entire nations like ships in fog. Scientists peer through microscopes and telescopes, squinting for signal amid noise. Content creators pour nearly a million hours of video into the internet every single day.

Globalization spins us into a single, churning whirlpool of perspectives, values, and truths, while climate change quietly tightens its grip, eroding coastlines, ecosystems, and the illusion that we’re separate from the world we stand on.

So yeah, if we were ever going to answer the question, "What is Truth?" it seems like a pretty good time.

I started asking this question when I was still a Junior in high school and all throughout my four years at Cornell University. It led me down the biggest rabbit hole of my life, answering questions like:

• How can I build incredible relationships?
• How should I study more effectively?
• What information should I consume?

Last and most importantly, it helped me dive into Spirituality, the art of growing your knowledge, love, and consciousness, to realize the fundamental Oneness of all things.

You see, Truth is foundational to everything. If you don't contemplate Truth, you'll use someone else's definition—your parents, your professor, your scientific communities—without even realizing it. Who's to say they know the best about relationships, reality, or this strange rock in space we call Earth?

That's why it's so important that we explore:

• What Is Truth And Why Is It So Hard To Find?
• How Can We Find Truth?
• Who Should You Trust When Seeking Truth And Why?

To get the most out of this exploration, you must contemplate everything I say for yourself. If you simply adopt my definition of Truth, you aren't getting any closer to Truth. Don't worry. You'll find it again. The nice thing about Truth is it's True regardless of perspective.

Let's dive in.

What Is Truth And Why Is It So Hard To Find?

The hilarious thing is Truth is devilishly simple. That's exactly what makes it so hard to find.

There are only two types of truth:

• Absolute Truth: What is always True, irregardless of perspective, person, time, space, and even realization of itself as Absolute Truth.
• Relative truth: What is true dependent on perspective, person, time, and space.

That's really all there is to it. And yet, the grand arc of history to the present day is one individual, group, or society, claiming it has access to Absolute Truth when its really only relative. Or much more sneakily, claiming it only has relative truth while continuing to act as if its Absolute.

This begs the question: Why is it so hard to differentiate Absolute Truth from relative truth?

There are two main reasons:

1. Relative truth can seem deceptively close to Absolute Truth
2. Humans are selfish and survival oriented

Firstly, relative truth can seem deceptively close to Absolute Truth

This is because relative truth has purpose relativity, dimensional relativity, and object relativity. All three of these are tied by one Absolute Truth about reality: It's nebulous. Just as a cloud can't be cut into clear boundaries or labels, neither can reality. Despite this, in all three cases of relativity, we tend to inflate each into Absolute Truth.

Firstly, relative truth has purpose relativity.

Imagine you wanted some water. So you ask me if there's water in the fridge. I say yes. You go to the fridge, open it up, and there's no water. Confused, you ask me where the water is. I respond: "In the cells of the broccoli."

This analogy makes it clear that what's true depends not on some universal law of the universe, but rather what we deem true relative to our purpose. In the above example, your purpose was to find drinkable water. So for me to say there was water in the fridge, was false for your purpose. All right, you concede, truth has purpose relativity. But science isn't relative, surely that's Absolute.

This brings us to the second aspect of relative truth: Dimensional relativity.

When does the color blue become green? Or orange become red? It seems like science should give us a clear answer. Wavelengths are Absolute after all, right? And yet, science only tells us what is, not what to make of it. It's up to use to differentiate those dimensions.

Even if we carve out those dimensions—say blue Absolutely becomes green at 495 nanometers—we can't get Absolute Truth. What about people who are color blind? Or who see colors differently even at the same nanometer? This hardly seems like Absolute truth.

Okay fine you say, truth has purpose and dimensional relativity, but objects are not relative. Objects have clear, cut in stone boundaries. That's Absolute.

This brings us to the third and last major aspect of relative truth: Object relativity.

Objects are in fact completely relative:

• What counts as a chair versus a couch?
• When does your body stop and the outside air begin?
• What is the nucleus of an atom versus the empty space around it?

This object relativity is most noticeable in our language. We label objects in our language so we can talk about them. But ultimately, these labels only represent the object, they don't define them. The label of student is not the same as the student itself. And no logical formalization could ever exhaustively account for what a "student" actually is. Is it someone in college? What type of college? What age? And on and on and on.

But object relativity also moves from language into the very objects themselves. Of course, I'm not saying objects don't have coherent, seemingly logical boundaries. They do! That's exactly what makes them so convincing as Absolute Truth. This coherence is something your mind is imagining on the object.

Imagine how hard it would be to use a tool if you're mind fully appreciated that most of it is actually empty space. Or how hard it would be to walk around your college campus if every object you saw you had to rigorously assess for "objectness."

What makes purpose relativity, dimensional relativity, and object relativity so detrimental to finding Truth is exactly how convincing they are. Most of the time, we don't appreciate the degree we are swamped in relative truth because it's the water we swim in every day. And like that one funny fish cartoon, if you swim in water every day, why would you think to ask the obvious: what's water?

Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying relative truth is bad or useless.

We need relative truth. Relative truth is incredibly valuable for communication, scientific study, survival, and more. A mistake here is making the Absolute Truth Inflation Trap. This is where you inflate Absolute Truth so much you reject relative truth. But an Absolute Truth that rejects relative truth is not Absolute. The art, as we'll explore later, is learning to differentiate between Absolute Truth and relative truth, and valuing both.

Purpose relativity, dimensional relativity, and object relativity are all weak sauce compared to the second thing that makes it so hard to differentiate between the two types of truth.

Secondly, it's hard to differentiate Absolute Truth and relative truth because of selfishness and survival

To navigate life, you have to differentiate between self and other. Usually, students attribute their body and mind as well as the clubs, political movements, and other things they like to their "self." Everything else, including matter, Spirit, and especially everything they dislike is "other."

Once this self-other differentiation is made, you selfishly act to better your self at expense of the other. That's literally what selfishness means. Here's some example:

• You eat animal products at the dining hall perpetuating the evil of the animal farming industry
• You go to an elite college while millions of other kids don't even get a college education
• You apply for clubs sometimes competing with hundreds of other students

I'm not judging you whatsoever.

Selfishness to some degree is inevitable, and deeply practical. It's survival. We can't all get in a line and sing Kumbayah. If we treated everyone and everything equally we would die. There would be no reason to prioritize one person, thing, or action over another and we would starve to death.

All I'm trying to point you towards is the appreciation of how you're being self-surviving. It's even more profound then you think.

We aren't just self-surviving on a physical level, but a psychological one as well. We're surviving our beliefs, our identities, and our relationships. Here's some examples:

• Bad mouthing Donald Trump is surviving your liberal identity
• Studying for classes is surviving your achievement identity
• Hanging out with a friend is surviving that relationship identity

How does this relate to Truth?

The mistake most students make is they understand how humanity is selfish and survival oriented, but don't appreciate how this co-opts Truth. If something is integral to your physical or psychological self-survival, you'll align it closer to the Truth, perhaps without even realizing you are. Of course you do! To admit otherwise would be to have to die to your current identity. And that's very threatening.

Here's the thing: when self-survival co-opts Truth, relative truth becomes Absolutized.

Cheating in relationships becomes Absolutely bad. Science becomes Absolutely true, over religion and Spirituality. Your political party becomes Absolutely correct.

It can go the other way too. You can adopt a false aura of humility by saying, everything is relative, no truth is better than another. When applied to culture, this is the classic Postmodern perspective. And yet, this view makes a performative contradiction, because by saying everything is culturally relative you are also putting this view as higher than other views, once again Absolutizing relative truth.

It goes even deeper.

This self-survival doesn't just happen on a individual level but a collective one as well: Collective self-survival.

Students and humanity at large construct paradigms—structures for interpreting reality—and then become Absolutely locked in that paradigm.

Democrats and Republicans get in endless political battles straw manning each other without seeing how they are both acting out of selfishness. Elite universities promote DEI initiatives without seeing how their incredibly low acceptance rate and bias towards more affluent students still perpetuates systemic inequality. AI companies claim they are bringing the future to the masses without sufficient appreciation of how many human jobs they are eliminating, artists work they are stealing, and energy they are using.

Again, I'm not judging any of these collective selfs.

To change would require many of the individual selfs to realize how selfish and survival oriented they are being, physically and psychologically. Of course, that's incredibly difficult.

The question then becomes...

How Can We Find Truth In College?

The great news is you're already doing the first step: Building awareness.

With awareness, comes appreciation, and then change. More concretely, finding Truth in college comes in increasing your grounding structure and state, as well as finding sources grounded deeper in Truth.

Let's explore both.

Growing Up And Waking Up To Find Truth In College

In finding Truth, there are two primary pathways of development defined by Transpersonal Psychologist Ken Wilber: growing up (structures) and waking up (states).

Growing up is all about developing how you make meaning—the structure of your worldview, the complexity of your thinking, your level of perspective-taking, and your capacity for wisdom. These are the developmental “levels” studied across psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, moral development, and cultural evolution. This territory has been mapped primarily by Western traditions.

Waking up, in contrast, is about developing what you make meaning of—the depth of consciousness from gross waking experience into subtle, causal, and ultimately Enlightened Non-Dual states. This territory comes mostly from Eastern contemplative traditions.

For most of human history these two spectrums have been separate. People grew up psychologically without waking up Spiritually, or woke up Spiritually without growing up psychologically—leading to massive Spiritual blind spots, self distortions, and developmental “ceilings.”

Modern Integral Spirituality developed by Ken Wilber changes this.

The highest form of Spirituality and Truth seeking integrates both:

• You Grow Up (develop psychological maturity)
• While you Wake Up (experience higher states of consciousness)
• So you become someone who can actually hold, express, and embody Truth in a functional, wise, grounded way

To understand the nuances of Ken Wilber's Integral Theory I highly recommend you check out his book, The Religion of Tomorrow.

Here's a rough overview of the structure-stages outlined in Integral Theory:

• Archaic — Infrared
• Magic — Magenta
• Magic Mythic — Red
• Mythic — Amber
• Rational — Orange
• Pluralistic — Green
• Integral — Teal
• Super-Integral — Turquoise
• Illuminated Mind — Indigo
• Meta-Mind — Violet
• Overmind — Ultraviolet
• Supermind — Clear / White

Once you understand the basics of structures and states you can journal to uncover where you are grounded in each. This will give you huge degrees of insight over your relationship to Truth based on the connection between both your grounding structure and state.

For example, if you're grounded in structure-stage Green (which many elite college students are), you likely have this relationship to Truth:

• Truth means we must listen to our heart more instead of just our head
• Truth involves helping alleviate systemic inequality
• Truth is culturally relative

With these relationships in mind, you can reverse engineer how you might be able to grow into the next structure-stage and progress in your relationship to Truth. But it won't be easy. The biggest thing keeping you from growing on the path is your shadow.

Your shadow are the parts of the self you unhealthily attach to during development, forming an addiction or an allergy.

In a addiction, you're so tied to that aspect of your self, you can't fully appreciate the harm its causing you. For example, addiction to grades, procrastination, or a romantic relationship. An allergy is the same as an addiction but done from avoidance. For example, overly avoiding parties, understanding the conservative worldview, or journaling because of the fear of what it would reveal.

Going more into the shadow is outside the scope of this article. But if you want to actionalize everything above, you can check out my free Cosmic Journaling Kit. It's a gamified journaling system that helps you grow your emotional intelligence, self-understanding, purpose and closeness to Truth in just 15 minutes a day with 1,000+ journaling questions and 5+ templates.

Now that we've explored growing up and waking up to get closer to Truth, let's understand how you can find sources grounded deeper in Truth.

Finding Sources Grounded Deeper In Truth

You can only trust yourself...

What I'm saying is very radical. I don't mean you can't trust other people to help you ground deeper in Truth. What I'm saying is the authority you give other people, is given by you, not some inherent Truth quality those people have.

If you give science authority, you give science Truth. If you give religion authority, you give religion Truth. If you give me authority, you give me Truth.

What influences you is not some inherent Truth quality of these things—it's you giving authority to those things. This isn't necessarily bad if you're aware of it. But if you're not, you're just replacing Absolute Truth with relative truth again. You're creating an identity and surviving it. The same old game we've been exploring this whole article.

So, you can trust others when seeking Truth, but you must be incredibly mindful of how you're giving authority to those people.

Luckily, I created a rubric for helping you assess how close a source is to Truth. Use this to assess your classes, your relationships, your own understanding of Truth, etc. Please, question this rubric. Otherwise, you're just taking what I say Truth is as your own.

The Truth Compass: A Rubric For Assessing The Truth Quality Of A Source

Holism

• Meta-Source: Pulls from many other sources of differentiated information each that are also high on Truth quality.
• Systems Thinker: Thinks in systems.
• Holistic Thinker: Thinks in Holons and holons even if they don’t call it that.
• Theory & Practice: Balances between theory and practice.
• The Map Is Not The Territory: Doesn’t mistake the map as the territory.

Epistemological Integrity

• Process Orientation: Prioritizes the process of uncovering Truth more than the conclusions. If the process is solid, and leads to an uncomfortable Truth, they accept it.
• Epistemological Humility: Embodies radical ignorance.
• Epistemological Reflection: Profoundly aware of own biases, self/collective-survival, and emotional/thinking patterns.
• Skin In The Right Game: Is in an incentive structure that pushes for The Truth, not for some biased, profit incentive, collective self-survival ridden version of it.
• Skeptical of Argumentation & Debate: Doesn’t argue or debate opinions to win, or make opponent look bad, but rather to find the Truth and explain their thoughts better.
• Direct Experience & Source Mix: Utilizes a mix of direct experience and sources to come to Truth.
• Counter-Arguments: Presents counter-arguments alongside arguments for.
• Steel Man Differing Perspectives: Steel Man the perspectives of others instead of straw manning.
• Certification: If talking about something they should have certification on, has certification.
• Practices What They Preach: Claims about reality are reflected in decisions, habits, and trade-offs.
• Both/And Holding: Can hold multiple true-but-partial perspectives without collapsing into relativism.

Scientific Principles

• Context Aware: Adapts information to the context of their intended audience or tries to make it adaptable—often this means focusing on mindsets over methods and tools.
• Entanglement Appreciation: Appreciates how we as observers are fundamentally entangled with our result.
• Generalization Problem: Appreciates how difficult generalization is because of the need to control in science.
• Correlation Doesn’t Equal Causation: Appreciates that correlation doesn’t always mean causation.
• Confounding: Appreciates how difficult it is to find a pure causation line not confounded by something else.

Teaching Tact

• Upaya: Adapts teachings to the skill and understanding of the audience.
• Enjoyable & Engaging: Presents in an engaging, enjoyable manner.
• Simplistic Complexity: Communicates points simply while honoring their complexity.
• Insight Inactment: Helps you come to insight yourself.
• Contemplation Encouragement: Encourages you to contemplate points yourself.

Spirituality

• Expanded Morality: Moral compass expanded to the Universe as a whole.
• Absolute Love: Love expanded not only to one self but the Universe as a whole.
• Absolute Truth, Relative Truth Harmony: Doesn't inflate Absolute Truth to being vastly more important than relative truth—harmonizes both.
• Self-Reflecter: Takes responsibility for own quality of mind and reflects a lot to grow consciousness.
• Shadow Aware: Profoundly aware of own shadows and actively working on navigating them.
• Developmentally Aware: Aware of their own development in growing up and waking up and working on developing them.
• Construct Aware: Incredibly construct aware of themselves and others.
• Wealth of Experience: Holds a wealth of human experience especially in the areas they talk about.
• Spiritual Growth Aim: Highest aim is the spiritual growth of The Universe even if they don’t explicitly say so.

If you start using this Compass seriously, you’ll notice something unsettling: you won’t find many people, institutions, or sources that score highly across it. Not scientists. Not politicians. Not professors. Not spiritual teachers. Not even me.

That’s not because everyone is lying or malicious. It’s because humanity itself is still early in its development. We are brilliant, yes—but also young, reactive, identity-bound, and survival-oriented. Most of society is still learning how to tell the difference between defending a worldview and discovering what’s actually true. And that’s okay. That’s part of the process.

Truth, especially Absolute Truth, doesn’t reveal itself easily to species still figuring out how to cooperate, regulate emotion, and see beyond self and tribe. Expecting otherwise is like demanding calculus from a toddler. You don’t shame them—you help them grow.

Which brings us back to the question we started with: what the hell is Truth?

Maybe Truth isn’t something you stumble upon in a headline, a textbook, or a charismatic voice online. Maybe it’s something you slowly learn to orient toward—like a distant star you navigate by, not a destination you ever fully arrive at. In a world of deepfakes, noise, and chaos, the most radical move isn’t claiming you’ve found Truth.

It’s learning how to walk toward it—carefully, humbly, and awake.

If you found this post interesting you would love my free College Freshman Cosmic Journaling Kit (CJK). ✨📚

It's a gamified journaling system that helps you grow your emotional intelligence, self-understanding, and purpose with over 1,000+ journaling questions and 5+ templates in just 15 minutes a day.