LIVING IN TRUTH

Living in truth here means living truthfully, authentically in our everyday practical life. I have often heard expressions such as “my life is a search for truth; I am a searcher after truth”. Mahatma Gandhi’s well-known auto-biography is called “My Experiments with Truth”. The fact of the matter is that we do not need to search for truth; truth is always searching for us. We are born into the reality of truth; our life ends in the reality of death. As fish is surrounded by water we are surrounded by truth everywhere. 

All mental disorders, all problems of adjustment to life situations arise due to one’s inability in facing truth. We have a guilty conscience because we did not say or do what was true for us. We pretend to be someone we are not because we do not feel comfortable in letting people know who we really are. We do not want to tell people what we really think about them because we want to “protect” them, because we do not want to “hurt” them. In reality we do not want to lose their “good feelings” toward us. So we all keep on playing various games to protect one another while we all live a life of lie. Thus we lose our authenticity and genuineness. We lose the authority of our own being, in effect, our own integrity.

The other day in a long phone conversation with a significant person who had some serious problems with his son, I took the risk of telling him that his son was doing to him in a more vicious way what he himself had done to a third party. He got upset with what I said, and cut the phone off. I reflected on what happened. After some time I called him back since he had approached me for some guidance. Soon after I called him, he started blurting things that I was not willing to hear. I told him that it was rude of him to cut the phone off, and that I wanted to give him a few suggestions related to handling his son positively, and that if he wanted to talk to me, he could call me back after I hang up the phone. He interrupted me rudely several times before I finished what I had to say. What does one do in such situations? Truth demands that one assertively sticks to one’s plan even though it would be too tempting to accommodate and placate. There is only one thing that we need to be concerned about: we respond out of empathy, and compassion, and not react impulsively out of our own hurts. I have often experienced in group therapy and other group meetings that some persons would not say what was own their minds for fear of not being in others’ good books.

Whether we want to be open to the truth of our life, whether we want to accept the truth that stares in our face, and whether we want to break out of the deep programming that distorts reality/truth for us in many different ways is the most important question in our life. We do not need to search for truth as truth is always in us and with us. We need to live it joyously

Swami Snehananda Jyoti