I work in IT, and one of the problems that occurs with information within the IT
world is that different pieces of information are often stored multiple times in
different places. When you retrieve this duplicate information, you often find
that two supposedly identical records do not match. Then you have problems
working out which is the correct one, and conflicts and misunderstandings arise.

Neither source of the data is arbitrarily correct ot incorrect. The difference
may be due to an input or a processing error, but often it is just data recorded
at a different point or during part of a different process. Data in IT systems
is always in transition. People tend to forget this when they have their most
convenient view of the data, their preferred view of the data, in their hand.
It's easier to assume your view of the data is the correct one, than analysing
it and recognising and understanding the assumptions you have made about it

In IT you get over this by having a single point of truth. If the whole
organisation takes its data from a single source, in a single state, it will
always make sense and no conflicts will arise.

Living in this world, everything is in a state of transition, a state of
constant change, governed at every moment by the effects of time. A kaleidoscope
of information is available to us, changing in every moment. Each one of us has
a different point of view, and sees information slightly differently. We find
ourselves looking at what is apparently the same fact, and getting completely
different information from it than do others. No two people ever seem to come to
exactly the same conclusion about it.

The world looks completely chaotic. Different religions and different political
parties or activists or group members, whether organisations or families or
friends, try to share a view, and tell others 'this is how it is, this is the
right way of looking at it, and you're getting it wrong and need to change'.
This applies whether you're talking about the latest murder story in the
newspapers, whether God exists, the approach to take to terrorism, whether to go
shopping at 2pm or 3pm or put sugar in your tea.. Or, of course, the right way
to respond when Joe Rowling says Dumbledore is gay.

The result is conflict, which can never be resolved through discussion or
argument, because no two people are looking at the kaleidoscope of information
available in the world from exactly the same space and time, so the information
they synthesise to get the answer differs. And every one person's triumph of
knowledge is someone else's foolish error, and every person's rightness is
someone else's wrong, and every one person's light is someone else's darkness.

Your knowing you're right means you make everyone else wrong. Conflict. And yet
your point of view will change over time, and what seems critically important
today will seem less important either in five minutes, tomorrow, next year, or
in forty or five hundred or in five billion years hence.

Thus today's majority solution to global warming will become obsolete tomorrow,
and the murder story will become yesterday's news, the latest nobel
prize-winning scientific discovery will be superceded by a later hypothesis that
seems to contradict it, religions metamorphose, gaining and losing adherents in
the process, civilisations rise and fall, dinosaurs become extinct and mammals
succeed them, and are succeeded in their turn ...

There is a single point of truth in the universe. At that single point of truth,
there is no confusion, no chaos at all, and everything in the world makes
perfect sense and is completely understandeable.

This single point of truth is outside space, and it is outside time. Looking for
it within the confines of space and time is pointless. Within space and time,
everything is in a process of constant change, of growing and dissolving, of
forming and disintegrating, of life and death.

From this single point of truth, everything in our world emerges, flows
outwards, in a constantly changing kaleidoscope. From one universal source, a
single outflow is transformed into the myriad images, the myriad objects in the
material world. It is the process of eternity manifesting itself in time.

Any information you snatch from the world cannot safely be nailed to a mast as
the ultimate truth, because all it is is a piece of data that exists for a
moment within a change process. The moment you grab it, it ceases to be true.
Its truth exists just within that moment, where it is an integral part of an
ever-changing process.

If every human being did not rest until they had found that single point of
truth, discarding all the temporary data that becomes available to them and
letting it flow past them without trying to make it into an immutable law, then
there would be no conflict whatsoever in the world.

That single point of truth lies buried deep within every religion, every
political movement, every momentary occupation of our working or leisure time,
right there, within our understanding. It is available to us at every moment.

Why do we content ourselves with anything less? If we go within and start
searching for it, the possibility to resolve all the conflict in our world is
available to us.

So, beyond the mimimum requirements to keep oursleves clothed and fed, what is
the point of spending our time doing anything else other than searching for the
truth? It can result only in grief for ourselves and for others. Grief that we
cause to ourselves and to others, and which we have the power to remove entirely
within our own hands.

Chris
Who's now off to get dressed and have breakfast :-)