Truth or illusion

Truth is stable, reliable; it sometimes leaves questions open, but that irritates only a few. Illusion, by contrast, is pure chaos: nothing is true or false, everything is possible. At least that is what one thinks at the first step. Yet one walks surprisingly steadily, if one can endure ambivalences. This leads me to ask: is truth an illusion, or—less often thought—is illusion a truth?

I do not believe that I can give an answer, because I simply do not know it. But perhaps that is already the wrong question. What if it is not about knowing? What if it is about conjecturing, but with a serious and at the same time radical claim.

But I can only do this because I have truth within reach; I can return to it when I lose my footing. The mind is trained in black-and-white thinking, even though this hardly occurs as frequently in nature as one might assume. Truth is singular; illusion requires movement. Both are fixed in their state, yet an image comes to mind.

When we stand—upright, steady—we are not easily knocked over, and we can also remain in this state without much effort. But if we want to move, we must give up this stability in favour of movement, and not just a little, but by fifty percent. That appears numerically unstable, but it is not.

One might then arrive at the image of a machine that reliably changes its states, predictable, plannable. But the condition for illusion is to forget this constructedness entirely—not like a book lying on the bedside table, but completely in its existence: no claim, no condition. If one follows the movement without it knowing that it is one, the gear fits together again precisely and truth resumes the lead. In this way it appears as a functional machine that both is and is not one, and whose condition may be that they do not know one another, yet are dependent on one another in an abstract way.

Written on 01.02.2026 at 12:35. © 2026 Whisper7. All rights reserved.