Truth

"Truth is a savior and can only will for happiness and peace for everyone.  It gives its strength to everyone who asks, in limitless supply.  It sees that lack in anyone would be a lack in all.  And so it gives its light that all may see and benefit as one." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook 92, 5:3-6

"And you shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free." -- The Bible; John 8:32

What is Truth?  John Keats waxed poetic on this subject while pondering things that come and go... his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" faces his own mortality in the frozen images on an ancient vessel, and in his poetic way he discovered that the ideas and images embedded in the ancient urn are exactly like the images in any given life, the faces and bodies and scenery and relationships.  What is true about any of them?  Keats put it this way, as if the urn itself were speaking: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty... that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."  Keats was spiraling upward in his quest for Truth.  He saw that is exists not in the physical, but in the silent spiritual.  He saw that Beauty and Truth are synonyms for the One, and are not dependent on the physical or the form of things that come and go, but that everything reflects Beauty and Truth when it is truly seen, beyond form.

Jesus said we can and will know the Truth.  He said it is our very freedom.  The Bible, A Course in Miracles, Buddhism, Vedanta... they all use the word Truth as a synonym for enlightenment and our Real Being.  Some use the word God, others Self or Atman, but the meaning is One.

A Course in Miracles puts it very bluntly: "The Truth is true, and nothing else is true."  In this world where all truth seems relative, such a statement can seem as cryptic as a zen koan.  But let's look at mathematics.  No matter how you turn it, 2+2 will always and forever equal 4.  It is an unchanging truth, a mathematical principle.  In the same way, the Truth of Being underlies everything that seems to appear and seems to disappear.  It is the unconditioned awareness of Self, an all-inclusive awareness that is always here, always available, and is the very ground of Being.  It is the Source and the Substance of all that is.

So why bother even talking about such things?  We know 2+2 equals 4, but we don't think about it when we're picking out 4 apples or oranges at the store.  Talking about Truth is just philosophy, impractical and not grounded in 'real' life. 

Well, our daily life isn't always as benign as picking out a few apples.  Its very impermanence drives us inward, seeking to understand and to know, and this is a gift.  All struggles and challenges are really our best friends, because they move us beyond the complacency of everyday comforts to the inner awareness that is the Truth of Being.  This awakening to Self, to the Oneness of God, is our only purpose for being here.  This is the Truth that sets us free.

"Salvation is the recognition that the Truth is true, and nothing else is true.  Truth cannot have an opposite.  As God created you, you remain unchangeable, with transitory states by definition false.  And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in conditions of the body and the mind; in all awareness and in all response.  This is the all-inclusiveness which sets the Truth apart from seeming falsehood." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook 152