The Trinity of Truth.

We have inherited a strange idea: that religion, science, and spirituality are at war. That you have to pick a side. That to take one seriously is to betray the others. The scientist rolls their eyes at the mystic. The believer distrusts the laboratory. The seeker drifts away from both, certain that the truth is somewhere neither one is looking.

I do not think the war is real. I think it is a misunderstanding about what each one is actually for.

Three questions, not three teams

Here is the simplest way I know to put it. Each of the three is built around a different question.

Religion asks: where did we come from? It is the keeper of origin, purpose, and moral order — the stories a people tell about why anything exists at all.

Science asks: how does it work? It is the discipline of measurement, of testing, of the thing you can replicate and show to a stranger and have them find the same result.

Spirituality asks: who am I? It is the felt, first-person investigation — the part of the inquiry that cannot be outsourced, because no one else can sit inside your experience.

Read that way, they are not rivals. They are not even answering the same question. They are three different instruments pointed at three different parts of one enormous thing. Every civilization that has lasted pursued all three at once. The ancient Egyptians were deeply religious, scientifically advanced, and spiritually sophisticated, all at the same time, and saw no contradiction in it. The idea that these are separate warring camps is recent. It is also, I think, the most damaging illusion we carry.

The blind men and the elephant

There is an old parable, usually traced to the Jain tradition of India, about a group of blind men who encounter an elephant for the first time. Each touches a different part. The one holding the side declares the elephant is a wall. The one holding the tusk says it is a spear. The one holding the tail insists it is a rope. The one holding the leg is certain it is a tree.

Here is the part people miss: every one of them is right. Each is describing exactly what he touched, accurately. The error is not in what they found. The error is in the word is — in mistaking the part for the whole.

Religion, science, and spirituality are the blind men. Each has touched the truth. Each is right about what it found. The trouble starts when the scientist insists that the trunk — the part that can be measured and tested — is the entire animal. Or when the theologian insists the tail, which speaks of origin and meaning, is the whole thing. Or when the mystic insists on the vast warm side, the irreducible felt experience, and calls the others blind to what matters most. Each of them is describing something real. None of them is describing everything.

What happens when you walk around the elephant

The invitation is not to abandon what you know. It is not to pretend all beliefs are equally correct on every point — they are not. The invitation is to let what you know be one true thing among other true things, and to stay curious about the parts you have not yet touched.

When you do that, something quiet happens. The conflict you assumed was built into reality turns out to have been built into your grip on a single part of it. Most of the arguments people have about belief, examined honestly, are arguments between the parts of the elephant they happen to be holding. Loosen the grip and the argument has nowhere to stand.

And then a single truth begins to show through all three at once — the one I think is worth holding onto above all the others: that everything came from one source. Call it the Universe, the Creator, Source, God; the name changes nothing. Something cannot come from nothing. Whatever that source is, we are not separate from it, and we are not separate from each other. The separation we feel so certain of is something we manufactured, in our own minds, and have been defending ever since.

Why I keep returning to this

This idea sits at the center of Behind the Curtain, and it runs underneath everything in the Divine Karma trilogy as well. Not because I want to flatten the differences between these traditions — the differences are interesting and worth keeping — but because I have watched the assumption of war keep good people from the truth that was sitting in plain view, divided into three pieces, waiting to be set back together.

You do not have to choose. You were never supposed to. The whole elephant has been here the entire time.

— David