posted May 10, 2007 09:02 AM         

In today’s stressful world people often want safety and security rather than something as noble as truth. They don’t believe that the truth will set them free. When the primitive brain is activated through the stresses and challenges of life, we revert to its primary objective: assure personal security above all else. Often we feel more secure if we simply align ourselves with the collective thinking, and adopt what society or others believe and hold to be true. There is a price to pay for this way of gaining security, albeit a false security. That price is loss of soul. Soul demands personal sensitivity to what is real and responsibility for expressing that truth.

The pursuit of truth often puts one at odds with this social security. When we pursue truth we do so using the prefrontal cortex of the brain and the intelligence of the heart. When these two most developed physical organs are active, our truth detector, the soul, can function through us. For this to happen, we must go beyond concerns of safety and security and be willing to take the responsibility of sharing and loving as a response to the awareness of truth we will discover.

"I am the way, the truth and the life." These words are attributed to the incarnation of Divinity, thus to the soul. Soul is the way or the path upon which the individual meets one’s universality. This is where Human and God become one. This oneness is the truth of who we all are in our essence.

Truth is reality - what is. Truth is universal, but our experience of it is invariably relative. Universal truth means that it is present everywhere and always. There is truth on form levels as well, but here truth is relative - i.e., relative to the level or dimension in which it exists. Gravity is a truth on the physical level, which means that we live in a world where gravity affects us as a fact of life. Anger is a truth on the emotional level; it exists in our earthly reality. A thought is a truth on the mental level; we have minds, and we have the ability to reason and think. And since these form levels are experienced by individuals with these bodies, the experience of truth on these levels is not only relative, but also subjective. We do have what are called ‘objective’ truths, but these are probably more accurately described as ‘consensual’ truths - things that we collectively, or in large numbers, agree upon.

Truths are formulations of universal realities. All relative truths are expressions of universal truth, as they are particulars of the universal.

Most of us have been conditioned to rely on external authorities to tell us what is true and what is not true. These authorities were originally parents, then society and culture, and perhaps also religion. We tend to believe as true whatever is reported by the media because the media says it is true. Most people have not developed trust within themselves to detect truth, and so they call truth whatever they want to believe. Thus truth becomes relative to one’s beliefs, having abandoned the quest for universal Truth.

The word for truth used in the phrase, "I am the way, the truth and the life," is alethe in Greek. It means ‘not to forget.’ It suggests that if we are to remember who we are, our universality, we must identify with soul which is imbued with Spirit, our ultimate Truth. We must go within to find the way, and allow our heart to guide us on our way, for it is capable of knowing Truth, of knowing what is real. To remember means to put ourselves back together again with who we really are, connecting our individuality with our universality, our relative truth with our ultimate truth.

What makes anything true is the degree to which it contains universal reality, the degree of its beauty, its goodness, its love, its intelligence, its response to fulfilling needs, its contribution to the whole. We have a Truth Detector within us. When we don’t trust it we live in illusion about ourselves and others, thereby hurting ourselves and others.

No one person’s truth is greater than another’s, and no one person can grasp the whole. It is together, collectively, in the grasping of the various truths of life, derived from our experiences, that truth itself, can be approached.

To be able to know what is true and what is not we must develop two mental senses: discernment and discrimination. We must first of all develop discrimination - the mental ability to make a distinction between things and know the definitions of things. Then we must develop discernment to be able to relate to the inherent quality of things. (This requires soul influence on the mind.) The quality of things are revealed by their relationships. When something is in relation to something else it is the quality of the being or thing that makes the actual connection, not something external. The level of relationship discovered depends upon the observer’s ability to sense or be conscious. We discover the ultimate quality of anything when we can see its ultimate relationship to the Spirit cause of its existence, when we know the universal reality or law that maintains it in existence. This awareness is soul consciousness. The most universal quality of anything that we can detect is its recognition and support of the value of everyone and everything in the whole of life. It is completely selfless.

Our 21st century calling is to be a revealer of truth. That sounds rather pompous and presumptuous. And it is - for the personality. But it is not for the soul conscious one who is willing to serve. Fears and rationalizations of many kinds will surface in the face of this invitation. But understand it correctly and we see that there is nothing to fear. Mistakes will be made, of course. But we learn from mistakes.

We can reveal truth by teaching, creating or demonstrating beauty. People are more open to beauty than they are to truth because beauty touches one in the heart. People do not yet know very well how to perceive truth with the heart, and therefore usually reduce it to mental perception where truth becomes personalized as ‘my truth,’ thereby creating illusion.

Soul expression is creative. That is the only life there is for soul consciousness. It involves the manifestation of truth in beautiful forms and in all expressions of mind, heart and action. This is the new consciousness now seeking to manifest in the world.

Exercises:

1. How much do you allow your heart to guide you to what is really true?

2. To what extent can you let go of personal beliefs that inhibit your experience of what is more universally true?

3. To what degree do your fears and your desire for security block your soul-centered sensitivity?

4. How developed is your sense of discernment?

5. How developed is your sense of discrimination?

6. What beautiful forms (actions, words, thoughts) do you use regularly to express your experience of universal Truth?