Lotus

What is Truth? – Part 2

“To thine own self be true.”

~ Polonius, from Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Press play to hear an audio enhancement as you read.

 

Some people become highly skilled at obscuring the truth. But there’s someone who always knows the lie … they do, themselves.

What is Truth?

Joseph Goebbels said that “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.” Likewise, if you speak the truth often enough, it eventually becomes recognizable.

This relates to more than words. We all develop a sense for authenticity but here’s the problem. A person can seem authentic when they genuinely believe the lies they have repeated to themselves often enough that they’ve become their truth.



A controversial case in point is the muddied career of bicyclist champion Lance Armstrong. Quoting from Deadspin, “Lance Armstrong went on Oprah, looked her in the eye, and admitted to the world that his iconic comeback story was fueled by the most comprehensive doping regimen in cycling history.” 1 For those of us who followed this story, his admission was jarring. Because, continuing with the quote, “The seven-time Tour de France winner and cancer survivor had spent his career brashly denying that he’d ever doped, going so far as to shoot defiant commercials about how clean he was and shouting down his detractors in public.”

Millions were deceived, because Armstrong had deceived himself.

How likely is it that we may be playing the same game of self-deception? What might be a lie that you’ve come to accept as the truth? Let’s start with the biggest one, that we are separate from God. Now, not everyone claims to believe in God and to those people I would say, “Don’t worry, God doesn’t believe in you either.” “God” is a word. We can use it or any number of substitutes, like Source, the Divine, Life Force, Love, the spirit, etc. By whatever name, when we refer to “it” as something/someone separate from ourselves, we are lying. And we’ve been lying about this so long we’ve come to believe that it is true.

It’s been 135 years since Friedrich Nietzsche declared: “God is dead.” Those three words launched 135 years of philosophical debate as to what he really meant and what were the implications. But he also wrote, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred yes is needed: the spirit now wills his own will.” 2

This infers both a connection between “the spirit” and personal will and speaks of choice: “a sacred yes is needed.” So, while the God of theory – that separate entity alive in the domain of belief – may be dead, Theoretical God has been replaced by the experience of connection and, taken to its logical end, oneness.

The lie? We are separate from “the spirit.” The truth? We are one.



This reminds me of one of the most memorable lines of movie dialogue in recent years, delivered by Jack Nicholson’s character in the 1992 film, A Few Good Men: “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

So, how about us? Can we handle the truth, this truth, that we are one with spirit? Imagine, if we were to truly, deeply, accept this as the truth how our lives would change. You may have seen the bumper sticker, “What would Jesus do?” Well, if we accepted an identity irrevocably interwoven with the Divine, what would we do?

We’d probably stop complaining, for starters! And speaking of Jesus, we might even follow some of his more radical suggestions like loving our enemies. That’s certainly not the attitude or behavior of most people today, including those who profess to be religious. Their faith is theoretical. For them, God – that God who lives in the domain of belief – never died. Worshipping that God seems to absolve them of the responsibility to be God-like. In fact, they likely would shout “Blasphemy” towards those who claimed oneness in spirit.

What is the truth for us? Do we cling to our separateness while yearning for oneness, or do we embrace our oneness and seize every moment as the opportunity to expand our experience of the Truth?

If we repeat the experience of being that which we have yearned for often enough we’ll come to believe it’s true! Because … it is.




References:
1. https://deadspin.com/the-ridiculous-saga-of-lance-armstrong-the-cheater-who-1802288537
2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

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