The Truth

Grundtvig’s Church – Bispebjerg, Copenhagen

You cannot get away from truth. You may try. You may try as hard as you may. You may flee from yourself into some ideas, or chase wrong deeds, or hope for unattainable achievements. You may want to obtain what your feelings dictate, or what your miseries ordain, or what your selfish, envious self hungers for. You may go wilfully on that slippery road, but be careful. For sooner or later, you will have to be wiser. For no matter what, you will be called back to stay where you are, in yourself, as yourself. There is no escape from who you are. There are no ideas attainable, no deeds possible, no hopes to be granted, away from the truth of your self. This is your one, given, golden achievement — this self that you are and that you keep seeking in endless, groundless projections. Truth is not to be found amongst scattered objects. Truth is not desirous, impatient, not to be sought away from the constancy of your deepest self as being. This is what disappointment is, to seek truth where it is not, to miss the point, to not meet yourself where you are, at the very point of your most naked being. There is a whole panorama of being to be discovered when you do not disdain or disrespect the truth of who you are for a few adventures out of yourself. These adventures are all part of a big, forgetting scheme. And truth comes when you cease being forgetful, and remember ‘being’ to be your one and only truth.

Truth implies first that you have got it wrong. This is the first acknowledgment you need to make, that first bit of recognition, that confession, that step into humbleness. To repent: this indeed is a good part of the way towards understanding. You have been lying. You have been forgetful. You have covered your most sacred sense of being, relegated it in the background, overwhelmed it with a panoply of wrong identifications. You have choked it because you wanted to be happy. So you have been looking for something, for anything, to fill that void, that forgetfulness. So you have gathered as many pseudo truths as your mind was inclined to formulate. Forgetting appeared to be the safest, most judicious plan. Until it is no more. Until you want to be yourself at last. Until you prefer the plain truth to a boastful lie. This moment is a moment of truth. For truth is not to be found in any objective content, but in the recognition of being as the recipient for everything. This moment is the one when you let yourself be just who you are, when you are not being ahead of yourself, in thoughts, in concepts, in ideas, in anything objective in which you can only get lost. You have to let these go: all that you have believed you were, or could be, or should be, or will be. All these are like so many untruths, so many ghosts to chase that can never be you. For you are already that which is holding it all — this naked presence of being, this self untouched and untouchable, yet so undeniably present.

Notice that you can never quite get what you want. You are always short the mark, not entirely there. There is always something holding you from being complete, with no resistance whatsoever. We always carry a shadow in whatever we do, that prevents us to be fully contented. We may have had a good life, but has it ever been felt as a true life? After all, truth has a taste, that can be felt as love or peace. But we have made a parody of our self. This parody is our ambition to be something other than what we already are. There is no need to be more or better than this gorgeous being to whom we have been eternally married. Don’t look for truth outside of this marriage. Remember: Truth is here when you cease being attached or attracted to untruths. Truth is an un-forgetting, a releasing. Truth is when you stop lying. Truth is to notice that your relentless seeking is only there as a result of your forgetting who you truly are. Truth is this deeper sense of being only being, that precious identity that you kept as a secret behind yourself as it were, and that you never dared to bring to the light.

And please do not downgrade truth by saying that truth is many, that it has variables, that it depends on our idiosyncrasies and desires. Truth is for everybody, for it is invariably one. Truth was never a concept, something that you have to bring forth, to adopt, to agree with. It is quieter than that, concealed, untouched, unable to be sullied or disturbed. Truth is contained in everything that you are doing. It is always here, with you, amongst your mistakes, along your wrong paths taken, and in every crooked misidentification. Truth is what you are. If it wasn’t, where could it be? What could it be? Have you noticed that nothing exists away from what you are, from where you are? The fact is: you cannot leave yourself. Experience is pregnant with yourself. And should you want to find truth, you would have nowhere to go but staying where you are, in your very own sense of being. You have just forgotten its existence, for lack of interest, for having looked too long in the wrong direction, away from yourself. Truth is self-evident. It bears in and as itself the proof of its verity. It is that silent, compassionate friend present amongst your many battles.

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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