Most people don’t get through childhood without having many experiences of being wounded for telling the truth.
Along the way, someone told them, “You can’t say that,” or “You shouldn’t say that,” or “That wasn’t appropriate.” As a result, most of us have very deep, underlying conditioning that tells us that being just who we are is not okay. We have been conditioned to believe that there are times when it is okay to be truthful and honest, and there are times when it is not okay to be truthful and honest. Most human beings actually have an imprinting not only in their minds, but in their bodies and their emotions- that if they are honest, if they are real, something bad is going to happen. Somebody is not going to like it. They fear they won’t be able to control their environment if they tell the truth.
But telling the truth is an aspect of awakening. It may not seem like it, because it’s very practical and very human. It’s not transcendent. It’s not about pure consciousness. It’s about how pure consciousness manifests as a human being in an undivided way. We must be able to manifest what we realize, and we must also come to grips with and start to notice the very forces within us that keep us from manifesting truthfulness in every situation.
Almost every time I’ve given a talk like this in public, someone will come up to me later and say, “You know that talk you gave on truthfulness and honesty and all that?” And I’ll go, “Yeah, I remember the talk.” And they’ll say, “Well, somebody came up in the parking lot afterward and decided that she needed to tell me all the rotten things she thought about me – in the name of honesty.” And I just kind of shake my head. I hesitate to even give talks on this topic, because it’s so easy to misunderstand.
Truth is a very high standard. Truth is not a plaything. To tell what is true within ourselves is not to tell what we think; it is not to tell our opinion. It is not to dump the garbage can of our mind onto somebody else. All of that is illusion, dis-tortion, projection. Truth is not unloading our opinions onto someone. That is not truth. Truth is not telling our beliefs about things. That is not truth. Those are ways that we actually hide from truth. ids worls
Truth is much more intimate than that. When we tell the truth, it has the sense of a confession. I don’t mean in a confession of something bad or wrong, but I mean the sense that we come completely out of hiding. Truth is a simple thing. To speak the truth is to speak from a sense of total and absolute unprotectedness.
To tell truth with any consistency, we not only have to meet every place in ourselves that is afraid of telling truth, we also have to see our personal belief structure that tells us, “I can’t do that.” Those belief structures are by their very nature based in unreality. To know this is not enough; you have to actually see it, to really perceive exactly what you believe. What are the exact belief structures that cause you to go into duality, that cause you to go into conflict and hiding? Only then can you tell truth in the way I’m discussing here.
— Excerpt from The End of Your World by Adyashanti
