To Master the Truth (Part 1)

★Let’s Gracefully Shed Our Old Selves

When it comes to truth, you could say that the fork in the road between coming to understand what you don’t understand and not coming to understand it is “whether or not you can take information from outside deep into your heart and receive it transformed into information welling up from within.”

In the common sense of physical humans until now, all information from outside was received on the basis of the perception that “everything I see and hear outside is something completely separate from me,” so many people couldn’t take it to heart and understand it as something welling up from within.

Even a talk like this makes no sense at all if you try to take it in with a consciousness that clings to the old views of human beings and of life from the past, right?

That’s why we say that, first of all, you must know who your true self is.

Among the things we always talk about is this: “The self you think of as yourself was not your true self,” right?

Because people don’t understand what a roundabout way it is to try to know the truth of life with a consciousness that isn’t their true self, they go around in circles in the same place. But if you gracefully throw away the values of the past and simply jump openly into the truth of life, then once it’s behind you, you’ll see it was actually no big deal.

If a person standing on the side of a consciousness that can’t fully let go of the past self wants to know their true self, they must not sidestep life’s great question: what in the world is a human being?

Or rather, it’s not that they must not; it’s that there’s absolutely no way to know their true self while sidestepping it, so keep that in mind.

★What Real Truth Is

You could say that real truth is exactly what wells up from within you as first intuition, in the form of realizations and flashes of insight.

People with the attitude that “if I don’t know something, I can just ask others” can never understand, however much they hear the truth from others, as long as they miss that intuition from within.

Just to be clear, this is a completely different matter from trying to find out shallow, worldly things you don’t know.

For example, it’s a completely different kind of thing from going out into town to see a movie, not knowing where the theater is, and asking someone, “How do I get to the movie theater?”

Truth concerns the essence of life, right?

And the essence of life is a world deep within everyone’s heart.

No matter how much you hear from others about that world deep within the heart, unless you feel it within yourself and truly sense, “Ah, I see, so that’s what it was,” what you heard from others stays only “knowledge” and doesn’t become your own truth.

That’s why we say that truth you try to learn from others must be taken firmly to heart and directly grasped as inner realizations and flashes of insight. (To be continued)