Live your truth

His disciples asked him, 

"Do you want us to fast? 

How should we pray?  

Should we give to charity? 

What diet should we observe?

Jesus said, 

"Don't lie and don't do what you hate 

because all things are disclosed before heaven. 

After all, there is nothing hidden 

that will not be revealed, 

and there is nothing covered up 

that will remain undisclosed." 

Gospel of Thomas, vs. 6

There is only one truth and that truth is love and it sounds like a child laughing and singing wildly engaged in the utter joy of his or her self expression and self discovery in play.  

A parent watches a child grow up and then suddenly the child has leaped from kindergarten to college graduation. The years were beautiful, full of child's laughter and joy which will ring through life forever. What parent would want their child to be mournful? What parent would want their child to follow their edicts so correctly that their joyful laughter no longer resounds through the house?  

It's simple, really.  Live your truth.  Too many people feel they have to "find" the truth as if it were a distant star out there somewhere and they spend their lives reading endless books, and the more ancient the better, because they think the truth is buried somewhere out there. 

Can you imagine a beautiful, healthy, energetic, bright child sitting in his room on a beautiful sunny day, while his friends are outside riding bikes, playing, laughing, creating imaginary worlds right under his window, searching for "the truth" while all along it was right there under his window, inside his own imagination, in his own heart, in his own joyous free abandon. Too much of the world is like that child looking for the truth everywhere else, but where it is.

The heart never lies. Our hearts always bear the truth.  Our hearts are the tree of life. They know good and evil. They only speak the truth and they know what is our truth. Our hearts want to feel and experience love and in that greatest of all experiences they want to laugh and dance, rejoice and rejoice more and more, singing away this world as they transcend all the bleak darkness that has shrouded us all from the true light of the ultimate experience of all - Love.

As parents we know there are things from which we need to protect our children. So we carefully teach them to play nicely with their friends, not to play in the street or take what is not theirs and share their toys with each other. We teach them a basic code of civilized conduct.  We teach them to reach for their greatest potential and we teach them the skills to do that.  Yet, in that quest, do we rule them too harshly?  Do we attempt to control them and force their sweet, dear, precious little round spirits onto the world's square pegs?  Have we been so good at conforming to the rules and regulations of our world, on so many levels, that we have forgotten who we are, really? Do we teach them to find their truth in their joy and then do we encourage them to be true to their truth?

And, if we could remember who we are - bright shining stars lingering for awhile in these incredible human bodies - would we live our lives differently?  How might we be different?  How might we join together as a family, a community, globally as a world?  

To live our truth is to listen to our hearts and to tell the truth is to live out of our hearts, rather than follow the rules of a religion that asks us to sit inside on a sunny day and seek the unfindable.

What kind of truth is it to fast, to follow the rules of an old (primitive) religion, written for another time, another occasion, another world, really, while suppressing the truth of one's own soul that only wants to shine out into life joyfully, in love because it is love, joining with all others around it?  

How many people do what they hate because they feel they should do those things and after too many years of following blindly the world's dictates, do they even know who they are or what they love anymore?  Have we become a community of seven billion slaves to the various (and too often conflicting) dictates of the power brokers out there, "blind guides, as Jesus once described the religious leaders of his own time?

To find the truth is to allow your heart to sing and then listen to its song. Once you feel it, listen more and more, allowing the joy and the love and the life to swell up inside you, do you have the courage to be true to that love, to that life, to that joy? It takes great courage to find and be your own truth, but it begins by refusing to do what you don't want to do. If your religion tells you to kill someone and you don't want to because to kill another bright shining star (too often disguised inside an angry broken mind) is to violate the highest truth of life which is to live, not kill, then don't do it! "Don't do what you hate."

Our truth is to be alive and in that "aliveness" open ourselves to the flow of life itself as we become part of that creative flow of life. To kill is counter-life, it stops that flow which is what life is, of which we are part. In order for us to kill, a part of us would have already been closed off from our truest nature and - in that state of separation from ourselves - we are already dead.

In our truth, we don't want to kill.  We want to live and we want everyone else to live also. It is in our truest nature to want to "prosper and live long."  It's not a mystery why Moses would have instructed the people "not to kill." That statement is not conditional. It sounds pretty firm to me.  "Thou shalt not kill." Period!  That might be one truth we could balance against all of our own inner personal little lies to our inner selves that allow us to separate ourselves from our own inner truth, further fragmenting and fragmenting ourselve from ourelves, each other and life itself.  It's like falling down the rabbit hole.  After awhile it's so dark down there we don't even remember what it was once like living and being in the light.

To reach for our truth, and even to begin the journey back to our truth, we have to start somewhere and we begin by not doing, not even thinking about what we hate.  Then we can begin to invite the truth to emerge from within us by thinking about, and reaching for, what we love. We will know what we love by the love we feel, the happiness, the joy, the creative flow of life itself coursing through us as we open the gates to heaven within us.

Then, we will find the path to heaven opening up inside us. What would it be like if we followed it?  How might our lives be different if we did that?  I wonder if we have the courage to find out.