WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

The last person in recorded history who genuinely asked “What is truth?” got a vacant stare and a reverberating silence from someone who actually knew the answer. In that blank ego-less gaze was the answer. But what was it?

For Pontius Pilate it had already been a bad day. Over breakfast, his wife had complained of a sleepless night of troubling dreams, and begged her husband not to go to work that day. Now the native medicine men, a bunch of oily troublemakers with whom he had to keep the peace, were having a field day with him, conniving to get him to condemn to death one of their country’s hundreds of crackpot prophets. “Honestly, there must be something in the sand of this benighted province”, Pontius groaned inwardly. He put on a show of interrogating the poor blighter, but now the ragged young man was going on about truth! Determined to shut this waste of time down, the scholarly Pontius said archly, “OK smartypants, you come in here rabbiting on about truth. If you’re such and expert, you tell me, what is Truth?” That’s when everything went quiet and Pilate began to wish he’d listened to his wife. Since there was nothing coming from the mind of the prisoner before him, Ponty could only hear the sound of his own ego clanging away inside his head and feel a kind of powerless confusion gnawing away at his gut. He got it. That was his truth in that moment, and he was in the presence of someone who knew something deeply disturbing. In the presence of this man who looked as if he’d never hurt a fly, Pilate felt deeply threatened and perturbed to the core of his being. Finally, he couldn’t stay still any longer, washed his hands of the whole affair, and was never heard of again.

What is Truth? Good question? We mention Truth a lot – it gets a lot of press. But when pressed, few people seem to have a handle on what it is. The ultimate answer is, of course, to be found in silence, but I can’t give you that tonight because this is radio, and if I stop talking for more than 8 seconds, alarm bells will go off in the station’s computer, and the silence will be replaced by nice, irrelevant music.

So, seeing I cannot give you Truth, the best I can do is talk about it, and leave you to look in the direction I’m pointing.

Let’s begin with the possibility that there are at least two versions of Truth – on the one hand there is The Truth, and on the other hand there is your truth (and my truth, and Aunty Freda’s, and Malcolm Turnbulls, and the Pope’s……..)

Let’s see if I can point to THE Truth. How’s this? The Truth is the infinite entirety of What Is, as it is. Truth is what remains when every skerrick of not-the-truths, half-truths, obfuscations, mis-takes and downright lies (or un-truths) is washed away.

Which immediately raises a couple of problems for the human mind. The first is that truth is infinite and it is evolving, and the egoic mind is not. So anything finite and fixed cannot possibly contain the infinitely evolving. That would be like trying to stow a car into its ashtray while it’s being driven along the freeway.

The second problem truth has for the mind is that mind is a device for thinking-about. That means – 1) It cannot be in the present, which is the only place truth can be found; and 2) Mind cannot BE truth and, on its own, cannot take you to truth; the best it can do is think about truth, and commentate just like I’m doing now.

The third problem for mind is that it has a limited range of views. It cannot see the whole thing. And it has this function of taking up points of view which it has to be right about and calling all of that “reality”. You know this. You know you have a reality, and someone else you know has a very different reality, and you both think you’ve got a hold of “the truth”. You don’t. I don’t. We cannot. Whatever we think is “the truth” – ain’t. It may be a sliver of the truth. But that leaves a LOT out there unseen

Truth is NOT dogma, ideas, concepts, judgments, opinions or beliefs. We're up past our eyeballs in all that stuff, and we're no nearer Truth than when we started. Try this on for size -- anything you can be certain about is NOT the truth. The best it can be is your truth, your reality, which means you have to separate yourself from those who don’t share your reality, those who see it another way. Sure, you may get some agreement from some other “others” that your truth is the real thing, and you may build a congregation on it. But there was a time when everyone knew the Earth was flat. That didn’t make it so. It just meant that we had a limited point-of-view that  didn’t include seeing it from outer space.

Dogma, opinions and beliefs are clung onto by those who are not aware that what they think to be “the truth” – isn’t, that some of their other truths might not be, or are too frightened or not yet ready to allow those possibilities, or just can't be bothered to search for the truth.

Figments of the mind like dogmas, ideas, concepts, judgments, opinions and beliefs position themselves in duality on positions of either This or That. Every position creates opposition. – [That is not a belief of mine, by the way; it is a ruthless rule of reality. Like the law of gravity, it doesn’t give a damn whether you believe it or not – it just is.]

Absolute Truth is utterly non-positional – it is both This and That, with no feelings attached. Truth is what it is in the moment; everything else is variable, negotiable, depending on who’s involved and how you feel about it.

Why do our minds just hate that? It goes all the way back to when we were growing children. Our parents and other role models in our life taught us how to think and, in a lot of cases, what to think. And we had natural feelings about those times. But most of us were taught to shove a lot of those feelings – the “unacceptable” ones -- under the rug. We got a lot of instruction about what feelings were OK to show and ones that were not, but we got precious little conscious training in how to healthily manage all our feelings as they arose. Problems began to fester apace when our training turned to schooling and training us how to override our feelings by logical thinking, reasoning, and downright denial. Young people who were to become “somebody” and make “something” of their lives had, we were told, to behave in certain ways. And feelings about such disciplines, especially negative ones, were downright discouraged. During the external instructing in which the mind became the authority, and feelings were trained to be subservient, these same dynamics, at the same time, were internalised.

And to this day, when the chips are down, your mind lords it over your feelings. What mind sees as “truth” is based on its opinions and beliefs, and these rarely change to be appropriate to a situation. In fact, mind sees to it that you will see each situation in such a way that it will “prove” its opinions and beliefs to be correct.

Your mind cannot know Truth except through a period of willing co-operation and partnership with feelings. A period long enough to dissolve the iron grip that the almighty mind has over your seeing. Then you will be able to drop your memories, beliefs and feelings about a situation and accept it for what it is, just as it is.

The truth of a situation has no emotion. No likes or dislikes. No need to assert or defend. Truth is what-is, with every component in plain sight.

The quiet, calm voice or feeling which is not tugging at you for attention, but just noticing facts and neutrally observing relationships between them – this is your inner voice, the voice of Truth. It invites you gently always to let go and surrender to what-is.

So how and where do we now clear away the distractions and noise, and access this still, clear voice of Truth?

Well, by going inward, and by asking –

Is this the truth I’m seeing/hearing here?

Every time you find yourself reacting to some situation, especially if there’s a feeling behind it, just observe what’s going on in your mind and body.

Is my experience of this being distorted by my memories of past experiences, the feelings that are tied up with them, and by conclusions I reached then that blinded me to the truth of that original experience, and those that followed it which I lumped into the same bin?

See if you can remember when this reaction has gripped you before, and know that, in this state of mind, you were mistaken then, and you are not seeing this situation now clearly as it is. Let that be. Just notice it. Don’t try and “fix” it. The seeing is enough.

Long entrenched mis-truths may come back again and again for a while, but you’ll notice each time that they carry less and less emotional charge, and you will be more able each time to see what-is, without emotion, more clearly.

And don’t be fooled into thinking that if your stop “feeling” about it, the situation will engulf you. It won’t. In fact, the opposite will happen. Habits that you let be, will in time, let you be.

And you’ll be left in peace with Pure Truth.