Culture and the Mind Ground

Is there a way to truth or ultimate reality in this postmodern world?  The answer is a resounding yes but here is what we are up against.  It is radical relativism which is fed to us under the guise of tolerance, openness to alternative perspectives and lifestyles.  This means that we are, basically, to accept and celebrate diversity.  This smell, if we can call it that, is from the stew of postmodernism.  One quickly learns that the search for truth or ultimate reality is folly.

This opens the door to nihilism where self initiative becomes a problem.  What is ultimately real is little more than the product of one's imagination.  Why do anything in such a postmodern world?

As far as culture is concerned, the absence of a search for truth and truth, itself, produces a kind of narrative that comes from the purveyors of postmodern culture.  Here, the narrative begins to undermine the distinction between facts and opinions.  Even if we admit to a kind of everyday truth, each person's truth-view is as good as any other.  We fall prey to credulity or believing in nothing.  

The way to truth is very important because if we take the wrong way or no way, we will never find the truth.  If we choose the interpersonal way, that is, modes of social adjustment and third-person knowledge (knowledge that does not require a knower/ātman), our account of reality will always be incomplete and in adequate.  On the other hand, if we choose the intrapersonal way, that is, knowledge occurring within the self we would be expected to get closer to the truth and maybe even attain truth.   

What Buddhism teaches is the intrapersonal way which involves the contemplative activity of setting aside all conditionality.  This culminates in the direct intuition or gnosis of the unconditioned which we can think of in modern terms as something like a non-spatiotemporal reality which grounds our spatiotemporal reality.