The Truth About Facts

The Truth is timeless. It does not change.

Truths are principial realities. They come from a higher order.

Facts are either incident or accident. They actually mean nothing outside of momentary context (ergo, they are transient and constrained by time and space). Modern science is based purely on such facts and this is its ultimate failure. It’s subject to change as we observe more incidents or accidents, so what is fact today can easily become fiction tomorrow.

Facts, therefore, cannot be used to prove or disprove truths. A fact may or may not be an observed manifestation of a truth, but the observer may or may not be aware of this truth, and his inability to observe or not observe something has no bearing whatsoever on the truth itself.

This is because something of a lower order cannot prove or disprove something of a higher order. To take a hyperbolic example, the existence of the sun is not negated by the fact that most days of the week you do not get to see it in the city of Manchester in the UK. If a person who visits Manchester on one of these days concludes that the sun does not rise in Manchester, then this person is clearly stating what they observed, and this observation has no bearing on the truth: that the sun does exist and it does rise in Manchester, but the gray cloud cover gets in the way of one observing this truth.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr said that:

There is nothing more timely than the timeless.

He further explains this with:

The truth is timeless, and by virtue of its timelessness, it is timely.

He also said that:

The tragedy of education today is that we don’t actually study (the Truth of) anything, but just its history (facts surrounding it).

Let us contrast truth and fact, first, linguistically, then mathematically, before digging deeper with an example.

In Arabic, the word Haqq (حق) corresponds to Truth. Fact would fall into the realm of Bātil (باطم), which we may translate as falsehood or illusion - something that is transient.

In Sanskrit, the word Ātman (आत्मा) corresponds to Truth and Māyā(माया) to falsehood or illusion (and facts really fall in this ream, because transient things that come to an end are essentially illusion).

Truth, or Truths, are timeless. One might say they are perennial because they are principial realities. They may appear in different forms in different traditions, but their essence remains the same.

Mathematically, the numbers 2 and above are incident. 1 is the principal. 2, 3, 4… cannot exist without 1. Nor can any other number or any amount of mathematics disprove the fact that 1 is the source of all the other numbers.

Let’s now look at an example of a statement of truth and how the facts around it are completely transient and meaningless, whereas the same truth has manifested itself over thousands of years.

Confucius (may God bless his soul) said:

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s own ignorance.

Few people focus on the truths that Confucius stated. Instead, they focus on the facts (the Wikipedia page on Confucius proves this) around his life, like:

• Confucius is a Chinese philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period
• He did in 479 BC
• He had 3,000 disciples
• Only 70 of these amounted to something
• and so on so forth…

What is the value of these so-called historical facts? They are purely incidental and have no bearing whatsoever on the above statement Confucius made. Ergo, humility is the bedrock of gaining real knowledge.

How do we know this is a truth? Because it is timeless.

More than a thousand years after Confucius (if the historical facts are to be believed), the same message of humility and knowledge was repeated in Islam (it was also repeated in Christianity and is stated in virtually every religions tradition, but one example alone should suffice for our purpose). Quoting from the Glorious Qur’an:

…and above every possessor of knowledge there is one who knows more… (Surah Yusuf (12), Ayah 76)

Truths matter because they are essential to existence, this is why they are repeated over time and tradition, irrespective of whether we choose to ignore them or adhere to them. They are Sacred. They exist and are always correct beyond the confines of time and space.

It is in adherence to these Truths that we become alive. In the words of Frithjof Shcuon (Isa Nur al-Din Ahmad al-Shādhilī al Darqawi al-Alāwi al-Maryamī) ق:

Something is only as alive in as much as it part-takes in the Sacred.

In the limited time available to you in this life, you might spend less time on collecting facts and more on understanding and living truths.

This is what the great Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (ق) meant when he said in his Mathnawi:

Seek not cleverness but wonderment.