Somebody, seeing the title, wanted to know which portion of this is going to be truth, and which part is lies. But that's just it — you will have to decide. Don't believe the speaker.

v

Truth! We require it and fear it. Our religious movement has, in place of a creed, a covenant to "affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth."

True, in Latin, is verus, as in "veracity," and the Latin, as well as the English and German forms, mean "that which is." Truth is about: What is, and what is not. To add another dimension, the English word has a root meaning of honest and faithful, so you can say that a line is true, a machine is true.

But Truth. Truth is too vast to capture, cannot be reduced to a word or a book, is not static but vital and alive. It isn't something to be believed in, but to be discovered, encountered, welcomed, lived.

Truth, said the great spiritual anti-guru Krishnamurti,

is not in the distance, truth is near; truth is under every leaf, every smile, in every tear, in the words, feelings, thoughts that one has. But it is so covered up that we have to uncover it to see. To uncover is to discover what is false; and the moment you know what is false, and when that drops away, the truth is there.¹

Truth is the capacity to know what is and what is not.

v

So many ways we try to find truth and capture it.

You create a God, an extension of yourself and in your own image, but it is not truth, and already you have deceived yourself, you don't understand that you made the God yourself, in your image.

You try to capture it in a book, sealed, known — but the book holds only the past, what was, and the truth is alive and still unknown.

Truth is in a fact, when it is a fact — but it is bigger than any fact, vast beyond comprehension.

You want comfortable stationery truth that shields you from the unknown, and your mind mistakes habit for truth, and the mind becomes very stagnant — it creates, in that stagnant pool, something that William Blake calls "reptiles of the mind.".

You hope to find truth in the voice of some authority, especially if the particular authority is very, very old; but there is no authority but truth itself, unmediated through any authority. As Krishnamurti used to say, Don't believe the speaker. Or bibles or gurus, or any other authority.

v

We can get far from truth, very wide of it. Our minds fill with noise and tumult and clutter and then we cannot discern what is — and what is not, cannot tell the truth from a lie.

I cannot tell the difference until I observe my own mind: how it works, how it creates. If my mind has become enclosed in self-created memories, and wants, and fears, then it cannot experience anything directly, and if I am dealing with truth or if I am not is a matter of pot-luck. A resentment creates its own facts, which are generally lies. We know the universe of disinformation that fear can create. And want — want re-arranges the world entirely.

v

There are many kinds of lying.² Certainly there are necessary lies told to mislead or distract someone who intends to use the truth to do harm; or others told to protect confidentiality. Still, the practice of lying separates not only those lied to, but the liar, from truth, and from her essential self.

Some we tell because we want to be loved or at least liked or because we flinch from inflicting pain. Some are told to excuse ourselves or someone else from blame or from punishment. Some are told for profit. Others out of revenge, to get or keep what we think is rightfully ours or to avenge a previous lie. Some are told to mask previous lies, to protect our good name and character and reputation.

Consider the word "hypocrisy." It came out of acting on a stage, literally the characters answering each other — and it means acting off-stage, playing a false role in real life. But as Euripides said 450 years Before the Common Era, "Alas for the lie! It comforts us not; it hurts him who secretly forged it. And, however boldly launched, it is turned by some god backward and hits the shooter."

That is true, and so is this: liars, we know, are persuaded by their own lies to a degree that is downright astonishing.

Some lies are illusions that rise from our unwillingness or fear to face what is really going on, so we create another reality of illusion, fantasy.

Some lies are trivial — the lie told to gain profit by trying to deceive the public into thinking that something selling for $19.99 does not cost $20, or a gallon of gasoline that sells for a dollar and 89 and 9/10 cents is really selling for $1.80. Others are more serious.

Some lies are undertaken by those who think they are protecting a greater truth — a scientific discovery they cannot yet prove, a religious doctrine zealously held against all evidence.

Clashing against the modern world, religions sometimes founder on their sexual fetishes. Middle Eastern religions sometimes seem fixated on women as the source of sin and lust, who must be hidden. The largest western religion has its own fetishes. In the UK a recent BBC Panorama showed the catastrophic effect of the church's teaching on contraception causing widespread death across Asia, Africa and Latin America. And in all three continents, the church continues to repeat the untruth that condoms have holes in them that let the AIDS virus through, so you shouldn't use them. The president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family explained that the Vatican's scientific committee had proved it was true — but never comes up with the committee's alleged evidence. Meanwhile, the church accuses the BBC of trying to undermine it. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization struggles, and fails, to stamp out this omnipresent untruth.³

No one can compute how many people have died of AIDS as a result of it. I could go on. I won't. Anyway — it isn't just others. Sometimes we, too, go out of relation with ourselves and with truth, and, filled with conflict and tumult, lose our way.

v

The world is at this moment embroiled and enmeshed in war, in deceit and self-deception. The world, we know, is in possession of far more facts than ever have been known before. But where is truth?

Where?

The people — the millions of Americans, the billions who inhabit this world — have entrusted great powers in the hands of governments, from which they expect little truth, so little truth. Far too often, governments stand alongside the vast corporations as mass-manufacturers of deceit.

We want, and our wants distort and misshape what we see, and we have departed from Truth. We are afraid. We resent.

How many layers, how incomprehensibly many layers of deceit and self-deceit compounded layer upon layer must lead to what we have seen in the months since those doomed airliners rammed into the New York towers — how many layers of deceit in the months prior!

Did Mr. Rumsfeld really think he knew where weapons of mass destruction were stored? Did they really think the United Nations is irrelevant, as they said, and that the U.N. inspections had failed, so that America must intervene? Did Secretary Powell actually think those aluminum tubes had something to do with nuclear weapons? Did Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld really think the cost of the war would be paid for with Iraq's oil revenues? Does any of them still think those weapons are there? Does the thought intrude that any of this has anything to do with oil and the oil industry? Do they actually think Iraq had anything to do with September 11?

When the President tells us that he never reads newspapers because he relies on more objective information from his own officials, does he think they are telling him the truth, better truth? Does he think they know the truth? None of us can know, can look into their minds and know. It's all far too complex by now. But surely the present situation was not born out of a love of truth.

And the press, for so long ignoring evidence and stories contradicting the administration's claims — what, to them, was truth, and what, to them, is its worth?

How is it that a large majority of the public think Iraq was involved in September 11, and, as a study this past week showed, a much larger percentage of those who watch Fox News think so, and the Fox viewers further think the evidence of weapons of mass destruction has aclready been found.

On the other side: some of my friends insisted that Saddam was a pretty benevolent ruler who loved his people. In saying it, did they think they spoke truth?

v

A campaign season has begun. I myself have a couple of favorite candidates — one who I hope will win; the other, whose voice I want to keep going in the public arena for as long as possible until he has to drop out. Do I rely on them for pure truth? I had better not. From them I can only hope for a higher understanding of truth and a deeper fidelity to it. I could be let down.

One day — precisely, on the morning of Sunday, September 8, 1867 standing just about here where the pulpit was then — in a time of flawed national leadership and mass delusion, Emerson himself, speaking to this congregation, said that truth was — his words:

never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defender, were it William Penn, or Luther, or Paul, whose shortcomings or treacheries are told us, — we say, 'Well, what if he did, it was only Penn, or Luther, or Paul.' We attach ourselves fondly to our teachers and historical personalities and think the foundations are shaken if any fault is shown in their patron. But how is the truth hurt by their falling from it?⁴

There is a spiritual crisis. It begins right here, and here is the necessary transformation. There will be no mass deliverance. Greed is right here, and fear, and resentment, and habit, and all that separates us from Truth, — and what separates us from Truth, separates us also from Love. It is only the solitary heart that can invite the unknown truth and be capable of love. And then the world changes.

There are times when truth will set us apart, alone. It is a good companion to those who love it.

v

Where is truth, and where shall we find it? — ah, but we cannot find it by traveling abroad in quest of it. It's not far but near. It is much too vast to find, except by a quiet mind, a mind that is free and without borders. When the mind is kept quiet and attentive, cleared of clutter, truth comes. It just comes, and there it is.

We are not likely to encounter it in a state of acquisitiveness. Rage and desire and hurt can crowd it out. But the acquisitiveness itself, and the rage, and the desire and hurt — they are part of the truth, and we must observe them, and understand them.

The present war grew out of these things. There is rage out there, and the mind, resentful and fearful, invented gods of revenge and fury and death, commanding their followers to martyr themselves in response to years and centuries of defeat and despair. Do we understand that there is rage out there? and fear?

When there is deception in our own mind and heart, we must carefully observe it, as from a quiet distance, and understand.

The mind is an extraordinarily creative thing. In quiet freedom, its creativity is gorgeous. In tumult, in the heat of hurt and fear, its creativity is not pretty at all.

v

The mind that would receive truth must be quiet, and free, not simply clinging to old truths. There is always a truer truth.

But truth begins within, when you embrace and understand the truth of your life; — when you learn to see yourself as if from a distance, observe yourself as a witness — and observe your thoughts and reactions, your opinions and beliefs and passions, your defenses and dependencies and hungers. The fact of all these things is also truth, not denied and despised, but to be embraced and understood.

Let us begin with the truth of our own lives, and let our lives be an homage to truth. We are great when in simplicity and without pretense we attend — not to outcomes and results, or success in the eyes of others, — but to the pure quality of what we do with the time that is given to us to live.

But we never see much truth until the thick smog of acquisitiveness, fear, resentment — until all that is burned away. Until then, all we have is opinions.

The truth of our lives: when we go deeply into that truth, with the embrace of love, the terrifying things will not terrify us.

Let us go there in silence and emptiness. In that vast space beyond silence, there is a great energy that makes us whole.

It's not far but near. When the mind is quiet and attentive, cleared of clutter, truth comes. It just comes, and there it is.

In the silence, hear the truth that speaks from the Immensity Beyond Silence.

¹ On Truth, 12.

² See Sissela Bok. Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1978, 1989.

³ Polly Toynbee. "Twenty-five years on, Karol Wojtyla's ultra-conservative Vatican deserves far more censure than praise." The Guardian, Oct. 17, 2003.

⁴ In The later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871. Ed. Ronald Bosco & Joel Myerson. Atlanta and London: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Vol. II (1855-1871), pp. 253-265. The essay has not previously been published.

Meditation

We gather as we are, just as we are, in silence and emptiness without pretense. There is tumult in us and contradiction, but we enter a sacred space, a temple made not of brick but of the architecture of soul, hte great powers of Life itself. Compulsions and anguish melt in its flame. Whoever you are, wherever on your journey, now let tight gripping hands relax, compulsions cease, tumult be hushed. Tears may cleanse your eyes. Finer air fills your lungs.

Know the love that embraces the core of you, forgiving, renewing; — and from this place see deeply, with spacious vision and clarity.

In this silence. In this silence.

Readings

Krishnamurti:

From On Truth

I wish we would be very honest with ourselves. Honesty is one of the most important things, like humility. Humility cultivated by a vain [person] is part of vanity. Humility has nothing to do with vanity, with pride. It is a state of mind — a brain that says, "I don't know, but let me inquire." Never saying, "I know." . . . [117f]

. . . You must have a mind that is capable of investigating, looking, doubting, questioning — of not being afraid. . . . [121]

How can the conditioned brain grasp the unlimited, which is beauty, love, and truth? There must be the great silence in one. Silence means emptiness of everything. Where there is vast space there is immense energy.[132f]

We are the entire humanity. If you realize that marvelous thing, which is the truth, then you will not kill another, then there is no division between this country and that country, then your whole life is different.

Doris Lessing from Briefing for a Descent into Hell

pp 162ff

. . . [Y]our saying what you did that night began a remarkable process in me and this coincided with a similar process in a close friend of mine — and as we are beginning to see, in more than one of the people closest to us. . . . Can a yeast not know it is a yeast? [I]t is like the spreading of a yeast or some sort of chemical that has started working in one place and then moved out, feeding and inciting . . . We have been wondering, too, about the others who were there that night. Did some of them go away feeling as if they had been infused with a new sort of intelligence? . . .

Every person sitting there on hard chairs in front of you felt as if his or her potential had been left unfulfilled. Something had gone wrong. Some painful and wrong process had been completed and had left them, and even after an expensive schooling — most of those present were middle-class people — defective, unfulfilled, if not warped.

I was as if stung awake. I did not sleep. And I sat by the window that night and I thought: Don't let it go, don't forget it. Something extraordinary did happen. . . . I was certainly remembering what I had been as a small child. I remembered things I had forgotten for years.

And when I returned home to my flat in London it stayed with me. What stayed? Not the words that you used. It was the feeling of the quality of what you said. It went with recognition, as if I had been reminded of something I knew very well. I was possessed with a low simmering fear that I would forget again, let go — what I had been as a child. It was the same feeling one has after waking from a strong dream which one knows has importance for oneself, or for a friend. You wake fighting to keep the dream, its flavour, its texture. Yet within a few minutes of waking, that country of dream has gone, its taste and reality has drained away into ordinary life. All you have left is an intellectual conviction held in a set of words. You want to remember. You try to remember. You have a set of words to offer your friend, or repeat to yourself. But the reality has gone, evaporated.

But I was remembering. It was as if, in any moment of the day that I chose to revive it, there was a bridge across from that heightened moment when you were saying things . . . about all of us, and the pulse of the time I was in. I began consciously looking about me for that quality in other moments of life. Like testing one metal with another, ringing one substance on another apparently dissimilar. I had been stung awake by that night, and now I was restless and searching, and I was in a fever in case this restlessness might drain away like the afterglow of a useful dream and leave me tranquilly dead again.