🇺🇸 On The Nature of Truth and The Truth of The Individual

🇺🇸 On the Nature of Truth and the Truth of the Individual

(A Parable in the American Philosophy)

A daughter sat before her father while he ate his supper.

She remembered his words from the night before:

“If I am seated at my table and my ice cream sundae arrives, and the whipped cream is not 2%, it is not I who will have the problem, but the jungle itself. I will destroy it.”

It was not the knowledge of milk or measure that mattered.

It was that this man knew the difference so precisely—

that his discernment, his taste, his care—

were bound somehow to the balance of the world.

It was not necessary for her to understand why.

What was necessary was that the sundae, when it arrived, be as it should be.

For her father’s truth was not simply preference—it was law.

And within his law, the jungle was spared

The daughter, after a quiet moment, asked him:

“Father, who is the Almighty?”

He looked at her, smiled gently, and said:

“My dear, the Almighty is the past—and you are now the Almighty.

For only what is almighty can question itself.

If one who is not almighty were to ask,

‘Who is the Almighty?’

the question could not be formed.

“This is why we go to church.”

“The power that questions its own power is that power.”

Then he set down his spoon and said,

“The one that questions that power without expense is the one who retains it.”

“Do you see what happens here, my daughter?”

“Every one of us—from the greatest to the least—seeks truth. The individual who seeks truth from highest to lowest but looks to his brother or sister first gains the insight of the Almighty.”

“All that we experience is a doorway toward truth,

or the closing of one.”

When I eat this meal, it is good, it is satisfying.

But when it is gone, what remains?”

She thought for a moment.

“The hunger will return.”

“Yes,” he said. “And that hunger, too, is my truth.

To satisfy it is only to know it briefly.

“That is my truth—but not the Truth.”

He leaned back and spoke softly, as though to the air:

“I am a doctor. That is true.”

“Yet am I always a doctor? No.”

“I am only what I am when the moment accepts me as such”

“I am your father, yes—but am I your father all the time?

No. That truth comes and goes like sunlight through trees.

It is love, yes, but it is not constant light.”

He looked to the window.

“But there are those, my daughter, who live as Truth all the time.”

“To be so is no small thing.”

“Such a one must remove himself from everything—to open the final door.”

“He no longer seeks satisfaction,

for even satisfaction is only the echo of Truth.”

The daughter frowned.

“But why would one want to remove themselves?”

“Because,” he said, “to live in Truth all the time is to live in silence.”

The moment becomes the law.”

.“The self becomes the witness.”

“The meal, the jungle, the father, the daughter—all of it serves the same purpose:

to reveal what is already true.”

He lifted his spoon again and smiled.

“Every difference and every similarity, my dear,

is but another doorway to that same Truth.

To recognize it is to see the likeness of the Almighty.

And when contemplation deepens into silence—

not the pause between thoughts, but the silence within all things—

then Truth stands alone.”

He looked at her with the warmth of the hearth behind him and said:

“In that silence, existence is brief.

But in that briefness, Truth is eternal.”

This parable reflects the American understanding that truth is both personal and universal, both a practice and a revelation.

The individual’s truth—bound by hunger, satisfaction, and identity—is temporal.

But The Truth—the Almighty measure—abides beyond condition, as law and silence alike.

In this, the American spirit of inquiry, conscience, and devotion to truth finds its highest expression:

To live not only as one who seeks truth, but as one who becomes it.