The specific capacities of our psyche are usually reflections of certain essential qualities that our soul possesses. So we can be bright and clever only because there is an aspect in our soul that is the pure presence of intelligence. And the more this aspect is integrated in our psyche—our soul—the more our understanding and our actions are intelligent. We can also know things in general because pure knowing exists on the essential level, as the Blue aspect. The same is the case with truth. We are able to discern truth—we can know what is true and what is not true in our experience—because inherent in our soul is a quality that is just Truth. Not a particular truth, but the presence of consciousness that is experienced as the presence of Truth. In other words, we can discern truth in experience in general because one pure element of our soul is Truth as such. We can recognize truth because pure Truth is a facet of our nature. The presence of Truth in the soul makes it possible for us to recognize it in everyday experience—whether in a particular situation or in recurring patterns—and on any level of experience.

In our path of seeking the truth out of the love of the truth, we encounter many forms and dimensions of truth. At some point we discover the essential truth, the actual presence of spirit, which is our true being. We discover many aspects of this essence and realize these aspects manifest on several dimensions. These dimensions are revealed as the inherent primordial structure of true nature, our essential being and the being of all existence. Each dimension reveals something fundamental to true nature and necessary for our life and experience. Our path unfolds these dimensions in a sequence of increasing subtlety and depth. The deepest and final dimension we find, the dimension that forms the ground of all dimensions, and of all manifestations, the ground of all grounds, is what I refer to as the Absolute.

So let’s see more about truth, lies, compassion, and the relationships between them. I think we know more about lies than anything else. We’re experts. Everyone’s an expert at lying to himself and others. We’ve been doing it for years and years. And it’s very important now to see that attitude we usually have: that truth is our enemy. That’s why there are such things as avoidance, repression, resistance. If we didn’t think that truth was our enemy, we wouldn’t resist and repress our emotions, we wouldn’t try to avoid seeing the truth. Not only that, but usually we aren’t even aware of the fact that we reject that truth, and fight it. If you can see that you resist truth, already one layer of lies is removed.

To give up the self means, “I am willing to not protect myself against the truth. I am willing to not defend or resist.” Most of the time, giving ourselves up to the truth means giving up our defenses, manipulations, positions, and strategies – all things we used to shore ourselves up or to continue to preserve ourselves. And because loving the truth arises from the place where we are willing to be selfless, we cannot try to figure out how to be selfless. The self cannot figure out how to give itself up, because in the very act of thinking, the self keeps on preserving itself.

So recognizing and appreciating the fact that motivation is our own personal interpretation of something much more profound, something much more natural, liberates the enlightenment drive to function innocently and purely, without being clothed in the qualities of compassion, love, and service. The enlightenment drive is liberated when we understand how we appropriate its dynamism as our own motivation. The enlightenment drive is the drive of enlightened awareness to become conscious of itself, to manifest and realize itself. In other words, the enlightenment drive is not that we, as individual selves, selflessly love the truth. It is living reality loving its own truth and loving to reveal it.

To live the life of truth means first to value the truth, and to value knowing the truth. It also means to value the truth such that you make it the center of your life, which means learning to be genuine, authentic, and sincere. At its heart, living the truth is a matter of integrity and respect—for oneself, for others, and for truth itself. The more our life respects and reflects the truth that we know, the more it will take us to ever deeper dimensions of truth, of true nature. There is an interaction, an interrelationship, and an inseparability between understanding the truth and living life. We cannot separate the two. We cannot be ivory tower philosophers and expect to discover truth. It doesn’t work that way, because inquiry is a journey of truth finding that constantly reveals the oneness of Being and life. Our spiritual philosophy must become an action philosophy. We have to let our souls become a manifestation of each truth we discover.

Love of truth for its own sake is actually the expression of essential heart. When one perceives the heart on the Being level, one can recognize that love is the expression of truth. Seeing that a necessary requirement for objectivity, which is usually considered a mental quality, is pure love of truth, which is a heart quality, we observe the organic interrelation between the various aspects of Essence. It is interesting to remember that the beginning of ego has a defensive character, and defense is nothing but hiding a certain truth of experience. So the requirement for inner realization is the converse of the most basic characteristic of the ego; defense and resistance are the enemies of truth, and love is its ally.

For a long time we say that we are inquiring because we love the truth for its own sake. But at some point, we are inquiring not because we love the truth but because it is natural to inquire, it is natural to practice—inquiry is simply what Being does. Being practices. Living Being naturally lives and manifests without motivation or goal, without point of origin or point of destination. Being lives, and lives its possibilities, and lives its possibilities consciously as practice—practice that is ceaseless and goalless. Practice simply expresses realization and continues to express realization, where realization is the self-revelation of true nature. The practice that is realization becomes the action of realization, becomes the way we live and express the possibilities of realization. And the practice that is realization is free from the need to end in any particular condition.

Relative truth means that it is relative to our history—the specific manifestations of relative truth uniquely reflect our personal situation and background experience. When the objective truth is independent of our particular history and situation—that is, when everybody experiences the same truth regardless of personal situation or background—I call it essential truth. That’s when we begin to experience Essence and its various aspects. Essential truth will usually arise when we explore a particular relative truth to the point where it becomes freed from our personal history. What will arise then has nothing to do with our childhood, with our history, but reflects the fundamentals of the human soul. The truth in this case is a manifestation of Essence, a quality of essential presence. It could be the presence of Compassion, of Love, or of Joy, Peace, Clarity, Will, Strength, Truth, Intelligence, and so on. It is objective truth, but it cannot be found in the conventional level of experience, only in the essential level. And when the objective truth, which is now essential, is independent not only of our personal history and background but of all mind and its conceptualizations as well, we call it non-conceptual truth. Non-conceptual truth is independent of the concepts of love, hate, strength, brilliance—of all concepts.

The perspective of most spiritual teachings is that ego is a falsehood, and hence it must die for there to be truth. We will show that this is true, but that it is not the whole truth. We will show that the ego, with its sense of self and personality, has a truth hidden within its nature, a truth that is not necessarily visible from the transcendent and impersonal state. We will show that ego is a reflection of a truth, an attempt to imitate an absolute and eternal reality. In fact, we will explore how ego is nothing but a failed or aborted attempt at a real development. We will show that ego is a reflection, an imperfect one indeed, but still a reflection of true reality, the reality of the true human being. We will see that by understanding ego, rather than transcending it, we can understand and actualize the reality of what it is to be a human being. Only through this understanding and realization can we see what human life is. We will see that this truth that ego tries to emulate is what most people are seeking in their personal life, and that realizing this truth of what it is to be a human being is the aim of humanity.

The correct perspective from which you can do this work is always to be aware of whether you are interested in the truth of what is happening right now, or whether you are trying to achieve something. Are you doing the work now to acquire something, to arrive at a certain goal, or are you doing it because you love the truth? This is a shift in attitude that is needed for us to finally understand the hopelessness of the situation. You are caught and divided because you still have hope that things will be different. That hope creates desire, the desire creates rejection of what is there, the rejection of what is there creates division, the division creates conflict, the conflict creates suffering, the suffering then creates searching. The searching creates more rejection and more conflict and the cycle continues.

Truth is the fundamental ground of our soul, so the soul is fundamentally faithful to the truth. She always lives and acts out what she believes to be true. Yes we frequently act out of lies and falsehoods, but this is because the soul believes that they are true. When we act out being a little deficient kid for an instance, it is because the soul believes that she is a little deficient kid. When we act from anger, we really believe that the truth is that we should act out of anger. The difficulty is not that the soul loves or likes falsehood, but that she takes falsehood as truth and lives it out faithfully. For example, the soul will not let go of identification with the ego because the soul is totally convinced that this is who she is. The soul is convinced that she is the body, that she is this person, and so this is what she is going to live, act out, and defend until death. The soul is, in a word, ignorant.

Truth is really more the realm of the heart than the realm of the mind. When you discover the truth aspect of Essence, you find it is a heart quality. The depth of the heart is truth. Truth is not a mental thing. Truth is something that exists and the quality of truth in Essence is something you experience in your heart. What makes you know that something is true is a sense in the heart - not in the mind. The mind can investigate, but cannot give you the sense of truth.

When you take the attitude of truth, you will understand that pain and suffering will increase for a while because what you've been rejecting will start manifesting. This will happen until you understand it. Then things will change. Things will change, but the change will be slower if you are interested in the change. The change will be facilitated if your interest is in the truth. The truth is nothing mysterious. The truth is always what is there, your experience at that moment, not in the past and not in the future. The truth is now, and your life is now.

As we get more present in our bodies, in our bellies, we can get closer to our Essence which is truth, which is what makes us know what is true, what is false, not from logical deduction, or from the unconscious. You just know. You are close to that subtle sense which is truth. After a while you see that for you, truth is no longer a judgment of certain situations or statements, but has an existence of its own. Essence is truth, then. Then you will know where that satisfaction and joy has been coming from, every time you feel the truth in you, the truth about you in a situation. All this work we do on seeing the truth has been to lead to that truth, the truth of Essence.

Truth is one of the aspects of Essence, which expresses its property of essential Truth as the very existence of Truth, rather than as Truth related to some object or idea. This aspect reveals that Truth is ultimately a Presence, a self-existing quality of Being, and not only a quality which qualifies something else. Truth is then experienced as a dense and substantial Presence, solid and real. It is a Presence that has luster, warmth, intimacy, and realness. It is a solidity that is not corrupted by lies and falsehood, but can expose all lies and falsehood. Although it is dense and solid like gold, Truth possesses heart qualities like warmth and intimacy.

As I said, it is challenging to see that the true motivation is no motivation. It’s difficult to face that the true force that makes practice happen, that expresses practice, that engages the path, that engages the teaching, that uses all the various practices, is not our heartfelt motivation. Our heartfelt motivations, regardless of how deeply we feel them, are not what drive the revelation of truth. When you feel, “I have this very deep, profound, selfless compassion and motive to really help all these people,” you are full of delusion. You are full of compassion too, but it is adulterated, it is mixed with delusion. When we love truth for its own sake, it is actually truth loving itself. It is truth manifesting in our consciousness, manifesting its love for its reality to appear. We experience that through the lens of the individual self as, “I love truth for its own sake.” Although this orientation is definitely an advance over not loving truth and over loving truth for our own sake, it still is incomplete. The love of truth is not ours, or is ours only in proxy. So the issue we are dealing with here is appropriation—how we appear, cohere, and persevere through appropriating these things that don’t belong to us. We never imagined that the love didn’t belong to us. We didn’t know that we were appropriating. We thought that we were knowing and describing reality.