I often hear people say there’s no such thing as “your truth,” in reaction to perhaps more touchy-feely people who use the phrase. There’s some logical sense to the objection, of course; truth is considered to be objective and singular/universal, probably by definition (at least insofar as definitions aim to describe popular usage), thus leaving no room for personal truth. After all, if all truth were personal, then there’d be no such thing as being wrong, discovering that you were wrong, or showing anybody else that they’re wrong, and all beliefs about reality would be just as legitimate as any other.
However, this simple cold logic misses a lot of nuance. For one thing, regarding how the term “truth” is used in popular usage, people always call their own beliefs with certainty “the truth”, naturally, because if you didn’t consider it to be the truth then you wouldn’t believe it, and meanwhile everyone has different, mutually contradicting beliefs that they call “true”, so, it would seem to follow that “truth” refers to something subjective even according to popular usage.
And one’s “truth” in this personal sense of the word is often integral to one’s perspective/worldview, perception/assimilation of reality, emotional reactions, hopes, dreams and desires, etc., and it can be the rule against which they measure all other beliefs. This is what’s referred to when someone says “your truth,” and that’s why the saying is useful and conveys meaning.
Also, in some domains there are many possible perspectives one can have on the truth/reality that are more or less equally valid. So, different people can have apparently different “truths” that are all legitimately descriptive of the underlying source—i.e., reality. It’s like the popular meme:
And not to mention that it’s questionable whether there can be any such thing as objectivity/objective truth or knowledge to begin with. There are the popular arguments against the idea of “the view from nowhere” (i.e., knowledge of reality independent of any particular perspective or relation to it), such as in Nagel’s book (https://personal.lse.ac.uk/ROBERT49/teaching/ph103/pdf/nagel1986.pdf), and there are my own arguments against objective truth that I make in my essays, https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/10/28/is-there-objective-truth/ and https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2022/01/19/the-truth-is-not-out-there/.
So, don’t dismiss it and deride or rebuff it too easily when someone says “your truth”; you could be missing out on a lot of truth. ;P
Edit: Oh, and to get a little metaphysical and risk undermining all of my points above, I’ve come to think tentatively that your beliefs, expectations, and perspective can act as a kind of vehicle to take you practically anywhere. How you see the world eventually causes it to manifest according to your view. I theorize that, if you could see the ultimate level of reality, you’d see that everything is true or nothing is true; all there is is your assumed framework for assimilating and interacting with reality, according to which everything falls into place. I’m reminded of a quote:
At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order. -Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune
It believe it’s possible for one’s beliefs to change their reality despite not changing yours and mine because all possible realities or current-reality-states exist, and we navigate them with our consciousness. Those quantum branches/versions people who share the same desires or beliefs about what reality to find themselves in all share a reality in the moment, and their branches/versions that make diverging decisions then go on to share their reality with different souls/minds/consciousnesses.
(I know this doesn’t explain why some people in our reality have beliefs or desires that contradict this reality, but that could be explained if there’s some kind of delay in the quantum branching, or if it requires the beliefs or desires to be sufficiently deeply held—that is, held on unconscious levels of being; I think the desires have to be on the superconscious level and the beliefs/expectations have to be on the subconscious level.)
So, don’t be too shy to create your own universe. Sounds scary, risking being delusional? After all, “man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” But granted, it would be a huge leap to take just on account of taking my word for it. But at least you could give others the freedom to believe what they want.
Well, I’m not sure a belief that directly contradicts permanent fact like “the Eiffel tower is in Georgia” is likely to it to manifest in their reality (but it probably could if they believed on a sufficiently deep level and/or in a sufficiently advanced way), but there are other domains of perspective to consider. And even regarding the directly and permanently factual, it’s entirely possible that creating your own inner world that serves you, enables you and uplifts you is more important than “being right.” Or, maybe you’d prefer to be right than to live under a happy lie. But maybe some others wouldn’t? (That’s not meant particularly to support the use of the phrase “your truth”; it’s more about the statement “But at least you could give others the freedom to believe what they want.” I digress.)
Of course, I guess you’re unlikely to believe any of the above five paragraphs for a second, likely considering it “woo,” but nonetheless you should take the previous section of the essay separately on its own merits.
