Truth

Some time ago I noticed that I seemed to be suffering. I no longer knew what I was thinking or what I was feeling. Perhaps I’d never known, I could not remember. I was not I, my thoughts were not my thoughts, my feelings were not my feelings. I had become a radio receiver for guidance from above. Someone else’s thoughts and feelings had been canned for my consumption and convenient regurgitation. All this convenience was a slow-acting poison, and all the while someone else’s thoughts were duly unable to even conceive such a thing. Someone else’s intuition was to turn to someone else again for the nth time.

By some stroke of luck the understanding came that I had to start telling the truth. Yes, my truth, the despised and ridiculed, un-conscious, un-magnificent, refutable, subjective truth. Not predisposing it, not knowing already what truth should look like adorned with a complex mesh of prerequisite operands. This was not easy, because I had been inculcated to respond acceptably. And yet it was easy, because I did not have to refer to any system, only to observe. It is an active process of investigation, of peeling away layers of correct behavior. Authenticity was uncharted territory.

Yes of course that’s dangerous. There is no spiritual guarantee clause that you will be right, that you will be safe if you start being brutally honest with yourself, if you give up control. We probably agree on that – we only disagree on whether it is something to be avoided. You may be left with nothing to hold on to – just your naked experience of not knowing.

And what of truth? Are we truth-seekers? Is it going to come to us one day from someone supplying us with more information? Will it be bought as a prize from the right vendor? Will it rub off on us if we maintain physical proximity to someone who thinks of himself as a special higher being? How about just enduring our own conscience, if we can be bothered to listen?

I do still see a deep tendency in myself to want to acknowledge the experiences of others as more authentic, more reliable than my own. That doesn’t just go away. And from a perspective of acceptance, it’s actually okay. It’s simply recognized as another search for a tangible self-definition. But there is no relying on others. Sure, you remain open and they serve as a reality check, but you don’t pick some to favor their ideas as a priori more true without falling back on your own experience.

If things are accepted the way they are, it means that whatever is called for, whatever arises, is allowed to happen, and is not controlled: whether it is action or inaction. Acceptance of the world does not mean that you should freeze and not interfere with the way things are going. As if you were not just as much a part of the world, as if you could be surgically removed from it! Instead, you accept even your own impulse to do differently, to change something, without fearing the consequences. Not trying to realize an imaginary idea of what “conscious” behavior should be, but rather being more aware and simply experiencing and allowing what is already going on. Not calculating with the future, not trying to make the present different. It is a non-resistance rather than non-activity. A radical trust.