Our modern age speaks glibly of the truth. We might even liken it to ‘knowing’ and entertain the idea that there is truth and Truth. The former would be a convenient or ‘conventional’ truth, a truth accepted as normal by the more prosperous world. But Truth with a capital ‘T would be an appreciation, a living understanding, and a state in which we could feel the presence of our inner being as it turned our discovery into a rightness of time, place, circumstance and heart.

We can adopt a catalogue of modern truths and know that it will take little effort to hide behind them in our actions. There is so much of this hiding in our ‘civilised world’ (and the politics that reflect it) that we would not feel at odds with the mainstream of life.

“Terrible about all those starving children but what can you do? Give money and it just ends up in the pockets of corrupt officials whose actions gave rise to the starving youngsters in the first place…”

All ‘practically’ true. But how do we feel in our hearts when we take such a stance? What happens if we face this cold attitude and challenge ourselves to find a personal answer that addresses that young child’s innocent and desperate eyes?

The degree of success is not the issue here. What matters is the engagement with what we know to be a cruel situation involving people whose lives are every bit as real and important as ours.

The core of this is a society that has taken the immediacy out of our relationship with living. Being shocked hurts. We value the stability and comforts of our way of life, so we build buffers that recognise and ‘front’ the reaction to something shocking that would rock our hearts.

Our fears run amok when challenged in this way. “I’d soon find myself selling my house and losing my job if I set off to help the less fortunate in a reckless way, like that…”

But the Truth in the situation is not asking us to do that. It’s really asking us to face something with presence and therefore know what is true in a living and personal way; to do some semblance of what we we do face to face with the ‘child’.

This state of presence is within us all. It is an unshakable knowing that we have a heart-based core that knows that every situation we face in life is special and different – and has something to teach us. It takes a degree of courage and lots of practice to come to rely on this inner part of us: our soul, if you like.

We cannot deal with any situation we are experiencing as though it is part of a formula of response. Each needs to be viewed as intimately related not just to us, but to this exact moment in our lives. Seeing it like this causes the presence within us to rise to the ‘control deck’ of navigating a truly conscious route through the present.

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©Stephen Tanham 2023

Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog