The true nature of truth is unknowable and inexplicable. Here is the reason:
To explain something we fall back on different tools and techniques, one of which is "contrasting". Like to explain darkness we contrast it with light. The same goes for good and bad, and many other concepts with discrete properties fitting in discrete categories. The contrasting works because we implicitly assume and rely on the fact that we already have an understanding on the thing we are contrasting the other thing with.
This technique is simple and powerful. It works by drawing boundaries between concepts to distinguish them, but it has its own limitations.
Imagine everything is white... EVERYTHING. And nobody has never seen black. Imagine some lucky person has encountered black, and back to all white people wants to explain it, using contrasting. The person says: "Black is the opposite of white, where there is no white it is black." But how do you imagine the absence of white, if all you have seen in your life has been white? You do not even exactly know what white is. Probably you do not even have a name for it. If there has been no way of differentiating whiteness from anything else, i.e. no separable characteristics to highlight, or any boundaries between the white areas (like if there was different shades of white), why would you want to name or define that "everything" that is "everywhere" in the first place?
So contrasting with white in order to define black fails, primarily because we had no means (or incentive for that matter) to define white as a starter.
Same goes for truth...
If truth is a fundamental nature of existence, it must be omnipresent. It does not have different shades, nor grades, nor forms. It is one. It lives in everything. It is just very much hidden* under layers of our biases and pattern recognition mechanics (hidden is not absence - being undetectable is not absence either, if you do not know what your neighbor's name is, and he or she never wants to communicate his/her name with you, it does not mean he or she does not have a name).
* We assume truth is masked. Meanwhile, and to make the matter even worse, the mask itself is also part of the masked. Even the thing that hides the truth possesses it.
But even not falling for this sort of complication (the mask being part of the masked) does not help with anything either. So let's play this game of assuming truth is hidden.
Consider this: To uncover the hidden we first need to know what is it that we are looking for, because otherwise how do we know when we reach it in our endless diggings and uncoverings? How do we know we are not already there, at the point of staring directly at the face of truth?
So, we have to define truth and all its characteristics, to know what is it that we are looking for, and to know when we are there. And this is exactly where everything falls apart.
Let us say we start by defining it. But if we have never seen it before where should we find pieces to put together our definition? We might imagine how it looks like, but our
imagination is built on past memories, so we can not precisely imagine
something that is not entirely made of memory fragments.
We
might opt for trusting someone who claims they have seen the truth.
But trust is not a reliable source as it is subject to deception. It is
easy to see how trust has failed throughout history numerous times.
We
might say I go on this quest, and whenever I bump into something bizarre
that I have never encountered before I call it truth. But that might be
many things that are bizarre and you have not encountered before. Those
things are not guaranteed to be the truth.
I hope you see how we are in trouble in this business of truth seeking.
Truth is like whiteness in that imaginary all-white universe. It is simply impossible to understand and define what white is if you are white, and all you see is white too.
The quest to find truth can not and will not have an end point. It is like a circle, without any beginning or end, and we are living on its perimeter indefinitely.
