Steve is away at Lake Tahoe.
We hear it said so often, “Well, that is my truth. What is your truth?” Or “Well, that is the truth of the moment.” Or “What is true on the Third Dimension is illusion on the Fifth.”
So what is the truth … about the truth?
Perhaps we can look at that.
How does Webster’s define the truth? “The real facts about something : the things that are true.” And so what is “true”? Again, Websters: ” agreeing with the facts : not false, : real or genuine.”
Of course Webster’s doesn’t take into account that dimensions of life exist, what the purpose of life is, or that a fact, real or genuine on the Third Dimension, may not even exist on the Fifth. So what’s the truth?
First Principles
Could we start by reminding ourselves of the most basic design principle of life? You’ve heard me say this a few times but there’s no escape from the need to repeat it.
Life is designed so as to reveal our true nature to us, the truth of who we are, the truth that God exists and that each of us, right down to the slenderest blade of grass, is God. If God is everything, how could we not be God?
The Divine Plan for life, the universal laws, everything about life conspires to take us eventually to that realization.
But that’s not the ultimate truth (believe it or not). It’s just the truth of us. Right away we come up against the need to make a further distinction if we want to see the larger truth, the whole truth.
The truth I just gave describes the purpose of life, its basic design principle, from our vantage point. The greater part of “us” (or perhaps the lesser part, depending on your yardstick) is illusory and therefore not true. This body is not ultimately true. All our other bodies are not ultimately true. This world we live in is not ultimately true, etc.
The ultimate truth would be the truth from God’s vantage point. And from God’s vantage point, according to terrestrial sages, life was created so that God could enjoy encountering itself in a moment of our enlightenment. At that moment, God meets God.
Hindus call life a leela or divine play. All sages realize that life is a divine game. That’s one reason why so many laugh when they become enlightened (“It was all a game!”). There’s actually nothing happening here except this leela.
Imagine that you were so big that you took up all the space of the room you’re in. How would you meet yourself? You can’t move your arms to reach your camera. You can’t reach the phone to call a friend and ask his or her help in seeing something about yourself. There’s no friend, no telephone, no other.
So God divided itself in two (in illusion or maya) and tasked the created side with realizing the uncreated side as God and in that moment God met God.
In the final analysis, there is only one Truth and that’s God.
To use Webster’s language, God is the great “fact” of life. And all of life, which the One, the Source created through its aspect as the Divine Mother, exists to lead us to and show us that Truth.
So this is why the truth is important. It reveals God to us and releases us from the only real task we have in life: to know ourselves as the Divine. All of life was created to lead us to that truth.
The Absolute Truth
What makes God true and all else illusion? As far as I know, there’s no other phenomenon above God. God is the supreme Source of all there is and its absolute destination too. We follow a broad loop lasting eons and eons, from God to God.
God perpetually exists after everything else is shown to be non-existent or only temporarily existent.
Everything else but God, is not lasting and not ultimately real. Even the division that God (Parabrahaman) made of itself into God the Father (Brahman), the still and silent Transcendent Void, and God the Mother (Shakti), the active and sonic Creator of life, is not in the last analysis eternal and real.
Granted that the Mother is very real in the sense that she’s God, but the division of God into a passive and an active phase, a silent and a sonic phase is not ultimately persistent and therefore not ultimately true.
Moreover, of everything there is in the world, only God never changes. The Mother presides over a world of change, but underneath the changing is the changeless, which is God.
So the absolute truth is characterized by being real or existent, persisting through eternity, and being eternally unchanging.
So what is God about you and me? The divine spark in the heart – the soul, the Self, the Atman, the Christ. Jesus called it the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in a field, and the mustard seed. So many of his parables were hints at how to realize it.
Ooops. Even the Self merges back into God, the All-Self, as I saw in my vision in 1987. (1) So even THAT, the divine spark, is not the ultimate truth because it doesn’t persist eternally.
There’s nothing in or outside this world that’s real save God. But then, paradoxically, everything is God. Let me leave that last paradox for you. (2)
Footnotes
(1) “Ch. 13. Epilogue” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/16244-2/the-purpose-of-life-is-enlightenment/ch-13-epilogue/.
(2) Hint: Paradoxes arise when two things of different dimensions are compared as if they existed in the same dimension. Identify the different dimensions and the paradox resolves itself.