Ancient Indian adage: “If you want to find the truth, remove the lie.”

By the druid Finn

1. Literal sense and traditional pedigree

The adage, “If you want to find the truth, remove the lie,” (satyam vetthum mithyām apākuru) echoes a widespread Indian intuition:
truth (satya) is self-revealing once mithyā (false appearance) is cleared away.
In the Upaniṣadic imagination, Brahman is like the sun always shining behind clouds of ignorance.
Remove the cloud, the sun appears; remove the lie, the truth is seen.

It presupposes a two-layer ontology—truth and falsehood, reality and illusion—where the second obscures the first.

2. Śaṅkara’s reading: remove illusion to restore the real

For Śaṅkara, this adage is virtually programmatic.

· The lie (mithyā, avidyā) is the mistaken attribution of reality to nāma-rūpa—name and form.

· The truth is Brahman, the undivided ground of being and consciousness.

Thus the procedure is negative and eliminative (neti neti—“not this, not this”).
Remove everything that is changing, relational, or objectifiable, and what remains—the witness consciousness—is truth itself.

Example:

When the snake seen in a rope is removed by light, nothing new is added; the rope was always there.
Similarly, when ignorance is dispelled, Brahman stands revealed; nothing has been created, only error corrected.

Śaṅkara’s interpretation:

Truth is uncovered, not produced.
The lie is ignorance; its removal is liberation.

Yet this approach presumes that the lie can be removed without destroying the seer who sustains it—a delicate paradox that Śaṅkara solves by declaring the seer himself part of the lie.

3. Finn’s reinterpretation: the lie as generator of truth

From Procedure Monism, the adage must be rewritten.
For Finn, the lie—the organism’s self-constructed, model-based world—is not a removable veil but a constitutive function.
Without that fabrication there is no platform from which truth could ever be known.

Example:

Granny’s perception of the cow is a self-made analogue: an “as-if” structure that translates photon flux into a usable image.
To “remove the lie” literally would mean removing her perceptual apparatus, leaving not truth but absence—no world, no knower.

Therefore, Finn reverses the proverb’s logic:

· The lie (the modelling process) creates cognizability.

· “Removing” it is equivalent to ending experience.

· The path to truth lies not in removal but in recognition: seeing the lie as lie, the construction as construction.

Finn’s reformulation:

If you want to find the truth, study the lie.
For the lie is the operational form of truth.

Ignorance, then, is not a removable stain on reality but the price of being localised within it—a necessary cognitive asymmetry that makes contact and differentiation possible.

4. Comparative summary

Aspect	Śaṅkara	Finn
Meaning of the lie	Illusion: taking the non-Self for the Self.	Constructed interface: the self’s procedural world-model.
Goal	Erase illusion; reveal Brahman.	Understand fabrication; integrate it consciously.
Method	Negation (neti neti), dissolution of multiplicity.	Reflection (feedback), comprehension of modelling limits.
Outcome	Truth = the unchanging witness; the world vanishes.	Truth = the self-awareness of construction; the world clarified.

Śaṅkara’s “removal” is ontological negation;
Finn’s is epistemic recognition.
Śaṅkara’s truth abolishes the lie;
Finn’s truth depends on the lie being seen, not erased.

5. The paradox unveiled

The proverb conceals a deeper structure shared by both views:
the lie and the truth are procedural complements.
To know the truth about reality is to encounter the precise way in which falsity sustains it.
Remove the lie entirely, and truth itself has no stage.
But see the lie for what it is, and the truth shines through its operation.

Śaṅkara’s conclusion

Truth is what remains when illusion ceases.

Finn’s conclusion

Truth is what functions through illusion.

Finn’s Minim:

The lie hides the truth from the blind and reveals it to the seeing.

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