In this essay, we're examining the extra-ordinary Reality and meaning of Truth (symbolized as Naked Truth, to the right):

1. A transcendent elemental and spiritual reality
2. An aspect of the eternal, supersensible, spiritual realm
3. The language of the supersensible realm
   
4. What the Deity and Higher Beings convey to you, and when you understand what they convey, you know the Truth.
5. A mind-set; a person is either a truth-seeker or a falsehood-seeker.
6. You must work to attain awareness and understanding of the Truth.
7. "Unvarnished" and naked
8. Like all negativities, falsehood depends on Truth; falsehood is perversion, contradiction, or destruction of Truth.

"Goodness is the measure of evil; it is not because of stupidity that we know stupidity but because of intelligence, which makes recognition of this privation possible." Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence

  Like all positive and worthwhile elements in human life, truth cannot be given to us, we must work to attain it. Even if we're fortunate enough to be told a truth, we must work to attain understanding of it; truth is not something that you can mindlessly memorize.

  One of the extra-ordinary aspects of Truth is the Truth about human life:

• The Divine creates and sustains a world which provides precisely coordinated learning experiences transcendentally matched to our current needs and capabilities.
  
  
• The Divine has the power to take all human actions and use them to assist us in our evolution. Each person receives exactly the experiences from which they can best learn what they need for their personal evolution--and at the same time for the evolution of all humankind. The Divine does not create negative elements, those are created by human error and perfidy through the exercise of human freedom.
  
  
• We can only understand the True Meaning of human mortal existence and eternal being if we achieve consciousness in a Higher Reality than the ordinary reality of terrestrial, bodily awareness. With this Higher Consciousness we are able to commune with the Divine, with Higher Beings, and with Forms.
  
  

"The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. We are at length restored to consciousness by awakening in a real universe, the universe created by the One Mind as opposed to that perversion of it which has been created by our egocentric selves. We then see the visible world as the expression of the immanental life of God, the Divine in manifestation. In relating ourselves to it we live in that Presence subjectively in the depths of our mystical being. And in the properly integrated personality the two processes have become one." Lawrence Hyde, The Nameless Faith, (1950)

  We must recognize that the present political-economic-religious-social reality is merely a temporary scene in a vast drama being played out on Higher Reality's eternal stage, that humankind's experience within history is being used to bring about all beings' spiritual evolution.

  If the current mindless rulers delude themselves into believing that they control human life and human destiny, we're able to see through this chimera. We don't have to be taken in by their distortion of reality. We can retain our own humanness, our ability to understand and our capacity to care for one another even in the face of the prevailing dog-eat-dog capitalist and Republican fascist ideologies.

  If you don't recognize that we're living in the time of a transcendent, spiritual struggle of Truth against devastation and falsehood, you're simply not awake enough to have much hope for survival. At this point in human history, we either overcome our deadly delusions and work to attain the spiritual power of discernment, or the human race may continue to descend into increasing barbarism and ultimate extinction.

"Imagine if you can a world in which truth is one general and something we will call blindness is the opposing general. These two simple factors one must choose between. There are no neutrals. We are frankly for or against and hold our positions by the force of the effort we put forth. The great struggle is not only to conquer our opposing forces, but to reclaim and form them into fighters for the truth." Betty and Stewart Edward White, The Betty Book

Plato's Concept of the Two Worlds: Truth and Delusion

Plato spoke of two "worlds."   1. The world of Truth                2. The world of delusion and tyranny

  All of Plato's writings are a kind of ongoing struggle against the world of delusion and tyranny and a championing of the world of Truth and Higher Reality. The participants in Plato's dialogues represent one or the other of these two worlds.

  In The Commonwealth, Plato identified a genuine philosopher as "one whose heart is fixed on reality itself." It's clear that what he means by "reality" is not what we now take it to mean in ordinary thought.

"What is at issue is the conversion of the mind from the twilight of error to the Truth, that climb up into the real world which we shall call true philosophy."

  Plato speaks of "ordinary reality" as a "twilight world" and the higher world which only seekers of wisdom can discern, "the Truth," "the real world," or "true philosophy."

"When the mind's eye rests on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and comprehends them, and functions intelligently; but when it turns to the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its beliefs shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence."

  To understand what Plato meant by the world of Truth and Reality, it's necessary to consider what he intends to convey through the concept of the "twilight world" of delusion, ignorance, and tyranny.

  Most people assume that Plato is denigrating "ordinary reality" by saying that it participates in such qualities as change, mere opinion, and time. They think Plato is describing the "sensible world" by contrasting it to his "World of Forms"--which many identify as a realm of unreal ideas that are actually (as Aristotle claimed) mere generalizations and conceptualizations abstracted from "hard" realities such as shoes and ships and sealing wax.

  We can only understand what Plato meant by "twilight world" if we think clearly about our current political-social situation. At present, we are faced with a demonic cabal which has created a false reality in which:

• They lie and make people believe it is the truth; they can "get away with murder"--do whatever they want to without any possibility of facing consequences.
  
  
• They proclaim the delusions of their diseased minds as the measure of human and social order, e.g. Trump won the 2020 election.
  
  
• They manipulate most people's minds by controlling what ideas are disseminated--because they own the major communication outlets: TV, newspapers, publishing.
  
  
• In all presidential and congressional elections, they select candidates for both the Republican and Democratic parties by giving their "dark money" to selected candidates.
  
  
• As one Republican advisor said: "That's not the way the world really works anymore [reasoning to find the truth]. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

"When people like a politician's lies better than they like the truth, it's tough to change their minds, and even after lies are proven false, they can remain a powerful force in public life. . . Lies can still have power even when we know they're lies. . . "The president's ability to twist the truth, consciously or not, is extreme. So is his apparently unshakable conviction that no matter what the subject is, no one knows more than he does, which means he has no need to listen to anyone who tries to correct his misstatements. In a person with his power and responsibilities, those qualities are truly frightening. . . "Widespread and deep-rooted failure of critical thinking in American society today has helped make Trump and his enablers, like other liars before them, successful in the war against truth." Arnold Isaacs, "America's Aversion to Facts Didn't Begin With Donald Trump," The Nation, 9/20/2018

  We must work with this conception of a "false reality" made to appear as the "true reality" to comprehend what Plato understood the world of untruth to be. For Plato, the deception, ignorance, and tyranny of a gang of fascist thugs such as the current anti-democracy Republican Party is precisely what he meant by "false reality."

  We tend to think that Plato's conception of false reality as a "twilight world" involves only philosophical elements such as change, opinion, belief versus knowledge, and so on. When we look carefully at Plato's writings--considering the structure as well as the content of his dialogues and letters--it becomes clear that Plato's overarching intention was a continuing struggle against the false world of tyranny and ignorance, just as we are having to fight today against the counterfeit world of the fascist Republican Party and the Capitalist Democrats.

  We must continually keep in mind that Plato had already lost his dearest friend and teacher Socrates in the battle against the unrestrained oppressive power of Greek "mob democracy." This was not a dilletantish discussion or dainty debate; Plato's struggle against tyranny was a matter of life or death. He understood that he was battling against oppression in many forms to win the minds of young people who would be the future leaders.

  Plato saw the philosophical shortcomings of the "ordinary world," but he also struggled against social, political, and cultural corruptions which were a part of that deranged world. His fight against tyranny is clearly seen, for example, in his Gorgias.

  The world of delusion, ignorance, violence, and tyranny is so pervasive at present--has infected and deformed so many people's minds and souls--that most Americans don't even see it--or do anything about it even if they happen to notice it for a moment.

  Following the 2000 coup d'etat that allowed Bush II to seize power illegally, the 2004 election in which Karl Rove's Nazis rigged the votes and the vote counting, and the stealing of the 2016 election by Donand Trump, an entire "shadow world" has been systematically created. People throughout the world have become so accustomed to and benumbed by this "shadow world" of ignorance, repression, and tyranny that they delusively believe it to be the only real world.

"Thus truth progresses openly in spite of scepticism, when her advocates bear witness together, and over the mists of error and false interests establish her domain." Mary A. Atwood, Hermetic Philosophy and Alchemy, 1850

  The essence of Plato's philosophy was an ongoing battle against exactly the same kind of twisted, unreal, counterfeit world that we presently face. Philosophy--the search for Wisdom and Truth--arises out of the resistance of the soul to its destruction by a perverted world. The situation Plato faced--and we now face--is the life-or-death of our very being.

"To be deceived or uninformed in the soul about True Being means that 'the lie itself' has taken possession of 'the highest part of himself' and steeped it into 'ignorance of the soul.'"
Plato, Gorgias (382a-b)
"He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth."

Dr. Martin Luther King, "When Silence Becomes Betrayal"
[sermon in which he denounced the Viet Nam war], April 30, 1967

  In the era of the insane Trump, we now have new attacks on Truth. Trump's assistant, Kelly Ann Conway, dismissesd Trump's thousands of lies as "alternate facts." Some persons unconsciously (or consciously) programmed by Trumpean "false-truth" mind-twisting now claim that truth is generational: each generation has its own truth. If you are an older person, so this mind-distortion says, you will likely fall for the Coronavirus pandemic conspiracy and its efforts to control your life through forcing you to remain at home, wear a face mask, practice "social distancing," and get vaccinated as soon as possible. If you are an enlightened younger person from a later generation, you see through these illusions and therefore avoid wearing a face mask, practicing "social distancing," or getting the vaccine--and very likely contract Covid 19!

  Not working to discover--and realize--the Truth and not having reasoned opinions about what is happening in the world is a way of being complicit in the tyranny that's continuing to destroying working class lives by the hundreds of thousands.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." George Orwell

Notes:

¹ Previous studies of Platonic forms:

• Goodness
• Justice
• Beauty
  
• Commonwealth
  
• True Being
  
• Wisdom
  
• Love
• Understanding
  
• Freedom

² Minion: A loyal servant of another, usually more powerful being