QA165 QUESTION: I have come across the words “absolute truth” in my readings. Can you comment on those two words?

ANSWER: Yes. The absolute truth is the final reality of the spiritual nucleus where there is no division, where there is no duality, which transcends the world of opposites man is accustomed to, where everything is divided into: this is good and this is bad, this is right and this is wrong, this is black and this is white – the constant opposites.

Wherever man is still involved with the opposites, he is in relative truth. When he transcends the opposites and he is in the unitive principle where there is no either/or, he is in the absolute truth.

QA178 QUESTION: [1969] Now is the time of shifting events, where what appear to be revolutionary becomes, this evening, reactionary; and vice versa, what appears to be considered black becomes white or white, black. Is there any room for absolute truth?

ANSWER: Absolute truth is something that can be gained only very gradually, as an evolutionary process within an individual. And therefore it can spread very gradually, collectively, and with many curves, with many ups and downs. For if absolute truth is, at glimpses, available to the human spirit and mind, it lies particularly and specifically in what you might call the middle road, where the absolutes are always extremes and exaggerations and distortions of truth.

This can be found out in every individual’s life if a person desires to go deep enough, probe deeply enough within himself. The same truth is valid for humanity as a whole. A person who rebels is no more free and very often does not attain his freedom through such rebellion, any more than the person who conforms and who obstructs all changes.

So the absolute truth – for example, in this dichotomy between conforming and traditionalism and rebellion – lies in how this dichotomy is to be transcended. It can be transcended only when an individual finds that his true freedom lies in the openness, the lack of rigidity, the truth of facing perhaps the fears and the evil or the distortions or the destructiveness and the negativities within himself.

Then he will no longer need to rebel, because rebellion is no longer confused with self-assertion, and conformism is no longer confused with flexibility or with an openness of an accepting attitude. You can be accepting only when you assert yourself. You can assert yourself only when you’re free and open. Then there is no conformism. Then there is no traditionalism in the tight, over-structured way. And then there is no rebellion.

This is a question of development. And what happens in today’s times is that the old value system must go. The structures of old must go. This is very painful. Just as growing for an individual may be painful, so it is painful for society.

Now, this does not mean, however, that the exaggerated rebelling forces have glimpsed this necessity. They may feel it, just as the opposite side may feel the distortion and the destructiveness that manifests in the rebelling forces. And they both obstruct in their exaggerations and in their distortion.

Only those who are strong enough not to lean into any exaggeration will keep that precarious balance and be most instrumental for the new era, for a new expansion of inner values to gradually take place.

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