' Speaking 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, distortion,

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.



Truth is much more intimate than that. When we tell

the truth, it has the sense of a confession. I don't mean a

confession of something bad or wrong, but I mean the sense

where 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 the belief structure we have 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.


- Adyashanti