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Living a full life through the power of truth. Discovering the truth that is on full-display in our own lives, and letting it guide us back to ourselves.
Mindful monologues to awaken your consciousness and nourish your soul.
In this introspective podcast, I aim offer you heartfelt rumination to inspire your own growth and self-discovery.
Are you seeking deeper meaning, truth, purpose or peace in your life? Join me as I unfold observations and awareness along the spiritual path - what I have learned, struggled with, found insight into.
Let these moving soliloquies gently prompt self-inquiry as you contemplate the deeper questions we all face: why do you suffer? How can you cultivate more inner calm and wisdom?
There is no dogma here, only my pondering as I illuminate and ponder our shared experiences living.
My hope is that by modeling raw exploration rooted in courageously questioning “why?”, these thoughtful meanderings awaken self-understanding and nourish your soul.
Consider these unconventional audio journal entries as a way to inspire and awaken your own internal wise teacher, taking your hand to guide you in looking within your own mysterious inner landscape in a new way. Feel less alone. Find inspiration to expand your self-awareness and consciousness with me each week.
The Union Path Podcast - Encountering Truth
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One of the obvious aspects of a high quality life is truth, and more specifically is telling the truth. Telling the truth to ourselves, to others, of building a life of integrity, building a life of wholeness,
of where we're not operating in multiple storylines at the same time, we're not playing multiple characters. We're grounded in something more fundamental, more reliable, more real, and that's truth.
Truth is a pretty simple concept, on it's face it's either true or it's not. True or false, there's no third answer.
But that's not entirely true. Truth is far more nuanced, far more complicated, far more obscure then I think we like to think it is.
Truth takes work. Often, truth takes discovering. Often, finding truth takes a fair amount of fumbling before we finally discover something real.
And then what we discover is that there's levels to it. There's truth and then there's deeper truth and it keeps going on and on and on like that.
There's always deeper truth from wherever we are, no matter how deep we excavate the situations in our lives,
ourselves, our relationships, there's always more. It's never ending. It has ties to infinity. And I like to think that's one of the ways we know it's actually real.
It's not bound to any finite definition, or circumstance, or person, place, or thing. It has its own definition. It's its own idea, and it's limitless.
When we endeavor after truth, we pursue the infinite. And truth has unique value in our life, it's almost like a treasure. Sometimes that treasure we find on the surface, sometimes we have to dig for it.
Sometimes we have to excavate for it. Sometimes we have to be tricked by seemingly countless caches of fools gold before we find the real thing, the real real.
But that's also what's so enticing about it, is when we find it, it's always valuable. It's always useful. It's always interesting. It's always compelling.
Sure, sometimes it could be hard to look at it first. There's a lot of truths that are very uncomfortable, but they don't have to be. They're usually uncomfortable because they butt up with our expectations of what should be.
But that's the thing, expectations and beliefs aren't necessarily true. The truth is true, and it takes the willingness and the courage on our part to actually reckon with the truth, to actually reconcile the truth, to actually integrate it into our experience. And we do this because we know it's valuable. We know it's trustworthy, we know it's real.
When we encounter truth, it's undeniable. And conversely, when we don't know if something's true or not, well, that means at the very least it's incomplete, but more than likely, it's not.
So that's the thing, as we go through our lives living based on our definition of truth in this present moment, what are we really looking for?
What are we really after? Why is this truth thing so compelling? Why is it so uncomfortable when we live not in our truth? Why is that internal conflict so uniquely de-energizing and grinding? Why is it so hard to live a false life?
I think the answer's pretty obvious, because when we're not living in truth, we're not really connected with ourselves. We've constructed a false self that we're living through, and we maintain it through effort and will.
But those two things are very finite. And when our efforts pay off, the reward somehow rings a bit hollow. It's not really as fulfilling as we like. When living through a false self and we get what we want, or we get what we think we want, it doesn't really hit the spot. It's kind of like being thirsty and drinking sea water.
In the immediate moment, it might quench our ideas of our thirst. But ultimately it just makes us thirst for more. It's never ending, and we can end up chasing all sorts of things and we can end up bouncing from pursuit to pursuit to pursuit.
And our current one, we're pretty convinced, this will do it. Once I achieve this, once I am that, now I'll be okay, now I'll be living the life I want. Yet, if that life isn't grounded in truth, isn't aspiring to the greatest and deepest truth possible, then that's not really our life, is it?
When we connect with truth, we connect with the deepest possible part of ourselves. And when we pursue truth, we encounter deeper and deeper parts of ourselves. And that's the thing, the deeper we go, the stronger that sense of truth is, the more real it feels.
And when we encounter those sorts of truths within ourselves, then the satiety is real. The satisfaction is real. The cessation of hunger and striving is real. Because ultimate truth, at least the ultimate truth that's accessible to us is ultimately satisfying.
But in our pursuit with the truth, we can and usually do, bump up against a whole bunch of different things. A whole bunch of different ideas about who we are, who we should be, what we do, what we should do.
And we have to juxtapose these ideas against the backdrop of what actually is. And then we have to have the wherewithal, not to mention the awareness, to actually integrate what we've found.
It seems to me that our path through life is not as static and linear as we'd like it to be. That although there seems to be, over the long term, a general order to how things work, in the short term, things seem a lot more circuitous and random. But this is simply our own unique path to discovery.
This is simply our own way to encounter and engage with ourselves and our own lives, based on a perspective of what is rather than what should be. And we can fight it. We can make a lifetime out of fighting what is. We can quarrel and wrestle with the truth for as long as we want.
Because that's the thing, the most inescapable quality of life is free will. We are the ones who are doing what we're doing. We are the ones who are being who we're being. We are the ones who are what we are.
So the root of our own behavior, our own thinking, our own perspectives and attitudes is choice. And that's a beautiful thing. Because if we've realized we've spent a long time, probably way too long, pursuing something false, well then that realization is the perfect time to pursue something different.
If free will and choice undergird everything, then we can choose to do something different whenever we want. We don't have to wait for permission. We don't have to wait for someone else to do it first. We don't have to wait for it to be someone else's idea.
Because we know. We know when we're pursuing truth and when we're pursuing falsity. We know when we're doing the right thing. We just know it, and we can trust it.
It's really shame that so many of us give such short shrift to our own reliability, even though we demonstrate to ourselves over and over and over again,
just how reliable and trustworthy we really are. How we ignore our own feelings and intuitions at our own peril. How we tend to get whatever we believe we will get, or what we beleive we deserve .
That our outsides tend to match our insides. This pursuit of truth seems universal, and it seems like the principle quandary that we're all gifted with in this life.
It's almost like a game, like a game of treasure hunting. Were dropped here seemingly, as these little helpless babies, blank slates, and our challenge, it seems, is to go through life and find the treasure that's here for us and only us.
But we're not given any obvious tools. We're not handed a map, we're not handed any sort of external guidance. Instead, we have to discover our own guidance within ourselves, our own truth meter within.
And not only that, we have to eschew and buck a whole lot of influences around us, between our parents, our teachers, our bosses, our organizations, our cultures.
For most of us, it seems, we're brought up with these ideas to intentionally lead us astray. It's kinda like when we're at a birthday party when we're kids and we're playing pin the tail in the donkey,
and the first step, other than the blindfold, is to spin you around a bunch of times to disorient you, because otherwise it would be easy. You're standing there, you saw where the picture of the donkey is. Blindfold or not, I can just walk right over and nail that tail almost every time, but disorient me first now it's a bit more of a challenge.
Now I have to rely on my feelings sense to guide me. But with all these influences around us that are telling us what we should do, what we shouldn't do, who we are, who we aren't, what's good, what's bad,
it's not like these are malevolent forces. Inculcation, on a whole, is a good thing. We'd have a pretty hard time living in groups if we were all just feral barbarians. That wouldn't be a very fun time for most people.
But there's a limit to the value, and like everything else, balance is an order. Balance is needed. We need to balance these influences from the outside with our influences from the inside. We need to know when to follow our cultural and developmental training, and we need to know when to ignore it.
We need to know when to follow the well worn path that seems to have been laid out front of us, and we need to know when we need to stray from that path and blaze our own trail. But here's the rub of it all, here's the thing that I think makes it such a challenging, yet such a compelling game, is only we know.
No one can tell us where to go, what to do, who to be, how to be it. We have to discover all of this on our own, or from another way of thinking about it, we have to rediscover all of this on our own.
We have to figure out who we really are. We have to figure out what our path really is, and the best indication is truth. The best way to engage with truth is honestly. Now, that sounds simple, that's also where this gets highly nuanced, because we can interpret, these incredible brains we have,
we can rationalize and spin the truth in all sorts of different ways, because we live through our interpretations and impressions, not from the raw signal of life. Everything gets filtered through ideas of what it really is, because they're feelings, they're encoded. It requires perception, it requires interpretation.
And as we are pursuing deeper and deeper truths, at the same time we're developing our skills of perception, our skills of interpretation. We're taking these feeling and symbolic experiences, and we're interpreting them into attitude, belief, and action.
We're taking this energy that's flowing through us, and we're shaping it into behavior, and it never ends. Part of what makes it so compelling is that it can never be perfect, because once we've really mastered the game, well, what's the challenge in that? What's the fun in that?
If we had perfect vision and perfect action, that's not much fun. Why bother? If everything is already completely predestined, if everything is already completely known, that's not very interesting.
Because the joy, the delight, sometimes the rapture comes in the discovery. Even if whatever we were before we came here already knew all of this and that this entire life is simply a game to get back to whatever we were before we came here, but do it in physical form,
it's still a compelling game. The challenge, although it can be overwhelming at times, ultimately, is what drives us. What keeps our experience novel. What keeps us coming back.
We pursue truth because it's hard. We endeavor to find the right path of our life because it's difficult, because it's obfuscated in some way. Because when we actually discover those progressively harder and harder truths, it actually is rewarding. It actually is fulfilling. It actually is satiating and satisfying.
That's what we actually want. As hard as it is, what we actually want, I believe, is to be alive. To be alive and a life that's actually real, that actually means something, that isn't just someone else's idea, even if it's our own, of how things should be.
A life that actually feels true to us, that actually feels like the whole us. We want to live a whole life, and we want to live it with our whole selves. And it seems pretty clear that the path to doing so is identifying and jettisoning falsity, the untrue whenever we encounter it.
And when we do encounter it, that's really useful, that's really helpful. Sure, it can be frustrating at first, but if we have the courage to actually work through it to find a more perfect path towards our own truth,
the more of those real rewards, the more of that real life will encounter. And I believe we've all experienced it. We all know that ultimately there's nothing more fatiguing than the artificial.
Even if it gives us the short term payoff we're going for, over the the long term we know it'll ultimately be unsatisfying. And there's the choice.
When we're walking through our lives, when we're walking through our life today, in this moment, what direction are we going? Are we going towards truth or towards the artificial? Are we going towards what's real? Are we going towards some other end that seems more expedient or convenient or virtuous to other people and maybe ourselves?
But I believe, if it's a full whole life we're after, we don't really have a lot of choice. We can choose to live whatever kind of life we want, but if in the life we're currently living, if we want more, more life in our life,
the answer is usually we're looking for more truth, we're looking for more realness. We're looking for a life that actually looks and feels like ours rather than someone else's.
We want something to attune to, we want something to follow. We want a sense of direction in our life. And again, we get to choose. We get to choose our North Star. We get to choose the what we are going after.
When we choose truth, when we choose a more perfect truth, then all the way finding tools that we need are already within us. We don't need a map. We don't need advice. We don't need anyone or anything to tell us where to go or what to do.
Of course, those things can be helpful. It's not like this is entirely self generated, but it is entirely self-integrated. No matter what information we get from the outside, that has to be run through our own internal senses of what's true and what's not.
Ultimately, we ourselves are the only ones that hold the keys to our own lives. And when we come in, these keys are hidden. These keys are devalued. These keys are held up as false, as untrustworthy, as silly, but that's our work.
Our lives are entirely experiential and we can use that experience to actually see what's true and what isn't. The truth is self-evident, and we discover it by trying.
We discover it by following this advice, following these social and cultural mores. Through doing the things that we think we should do, and then being honest with ourselves of how it actually feels, and then using that information to guide our next step.
When we're trying to get to where we want to go, going the wrong way at first is actually really helpful. Because that can turn us in the direction of where we actually want to go, and we know it because we can feel the difference.
The challenge is we have to actually listen. We actually have to have the courage to do the things that our own internal sense of truth is gently but persistently guiding us to actually do. If we want a full whole deep, meaningful, connected, rich life, we have to connect with the deepest part of ourselves we possibly can,
and we have to actually listen, and more than that, we actually have to integrate what we learn. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is pretty empty. Same with wisdom, same with anything useful. If it's not applied, it remains just an idea. It remains just a potential value, it's not converted into real value until it's actually put into action.
And when we encounter those truths and when we do put them into action, we encounter something really interesting, that oftentimes when we live those truths, they supply their own energy.
It's not necessarily effortless, but there is a great sense of ease, and that ease is created because we're no longer splitting our energy into so many pieces. We're no longer forcefully controlling our life to be this or that. We're grounded and connecting to and expressing what is.
We've moved from trying into being, we've moved from fractional to fullness. Operating from this place of wholeness, the energy of life can flow through us much more easily, much more cleanly.
It doesn't get refracted into all sorts of confusing and unhelpful shapes. Life can flow through us openly and fully, and we can feel that too. It may not be as instantly gratifying as our mind would want it to be, but that's not really the point, is it?
If we're looking for something deeper, if we're looking for something more real, then it's this flow, this ease, this pleasant and persistent progress that we can make through acting out of and acting from what's actually real.
Because I believe when we're lost, when we're confused, what we're actually looking for is wholeness. We've lost ourselves. Usually we've split ourselves into multiple different people, and we've lost the thread on which one of those is the real one.
We're in a house of mirrors and we've gotten so used to simply encountering our own reflection, we've forgotten there's a real us on the inside. And the way back to truth, and the way through life on a path that actually feels real, feels ours, feels complete,
is to reacquaint ourselves with who we are on the inside, at the deepest level we can access. From a place of wholeness, from a place of integrity, from a place of truth, feel that inner glow, and use that as the origin that we act from.
Use that as the guide in our life. Use that as our own beacon, our own guiding light, showing us the way to really be whole, really be ourselves, and to live that full life we want by living it with and through our full selves.