What’s true for me may not be truly true. What I mean is there is Truth, and it’s not relative. We may believe whatever we want, yes. We have that freedom and that right, and no one can tell us otherwise. That is true. But that does not mean it’s True. Truth is not just whatever we decide to believe.
It’s fashionable these days for people to pursue their own personal truth, to define it for themselves, to “go within” and discover their own answers, even to encourage others to do the same. And that’s fine. I would encourage that too.
But know this:
Far below the level of what you may think is true for you lies capital-T Truth. And that Truth is written on your heart. It’s also written on my heart.
And here is the very important thing: the Truth that is written on both of our hearts is the same.
The same Truth was written on the heart of Moses, and Jesus, and the Buddha, and Ramana Maharshi, and many other saints and sages, from many other traditions. It expressed itself differently through each of them, based on their culture and their conditioning, but the underlying message was the same. The Truth that we are able — any one of us — to find within, when we go inside, is the same. It’s there to be found. It’s not easy to find. But if I can find it, so can you.
It’s not something we invent for ourselves, something that is convenient or expedient or culturally conditioned in any way. That would be the ego at work. The mind. And the mind is ever-colored by thought and emotion. Neither of these are stable or reliable. By their nature, they are impermanent. Untrue.
The Truth I am talking about is over-powering and all-consuming, ever-stable and ever-reliable. When it comes, it rushes in like a river of light. It shines. It blazes. It burns away the ego, false thoughts, emotions, vanity, the pride, the pain that sometimes make us accept things as true for us that really, if we are honest, we simply want to be true because they serve us somehow. That is self-absorption. In some traditions, it is called suffering. In others, sin. In any, it sucks.
Self-Realization, or Self Abidance (or Buddha Nature, Satori, Holy Spirit, or whatever our cultural conditioning wants us to call it) serves us by erasing in us that which needs serving — our individual sense of self, our ego. It allows our true Self to shine. It is not self-absorption, but absorption in what some traditions call the Self. In Truth.
Center yourself in this Self. This is not the same as being self-centered.
It is Peace. It is Consciousness. It is Bliss.
And it is written on the Heart. Yours and mine.
Discovering Nonduality 