to live in truth

To live in truth is

To live in the unknown

Have you noticed how hungry the thinking mind is, to know things? We listen to the news in order to know what is happening in the world, even though most of the news will not affect us personally in any way. we study in school and college, building up enormous reserves of knowledge. Information is power, it is sometimes said, knowledge, information,

This whole pattern of acquiring knowledge is something that we need to change when we set out on the spiritual journey. For the spiritual journey is about living in truth, whether the truth is comfortable or uncomfortable. And the simple truth is we don't know anything for sure. Our knowledge is really a set of beliefs. Often a set of beliefs agreed to by society, endorsed by the establishment, but nonetheless a set of beliefs.

I believe Socrates said the only thing I know is that I don't know anything. But we are hungry to know. And that hunger misleads us. It gives us the feeling that we do know things. And then, of course, sooner or later, life throws up some exception. And it is traumatic for us, not because of the event itself, but because our belief, that we held to us knowledge, has been shown to be false. This knowing is so important to us that human beings have killed each other for the sake of their ideas: their religious ideas, their social ideas, their economic ideas. It is ideas that people cling to above all: knowledge, thoughts, concepts. And none of this is truth.

Truth is a much simpler thing. But we can only live in truth when we drop all our knowledge, when we realise that it is nothing but a set of beliefs, when we no longer hunger to know. And this is one of the great challenges on the spiritual path, to drop the need to know.

Usually when we set out on a journey, we think we know where we are going. We think we know what the destination is. And with a spiritual journey it's very clear that we do not know. We have no idea where we are going. And if we do manage to put together some concept, it will be wrong. The demands placed on the seeker are strong indeed. Not only do we need to give up the illusion that we know things, and give up the illusion that we can know things, not only do we need to give up, somehow let go of, that urge to want to know things, but we need to go a step further even than that.

It may be strange to quote Donald Rumsfeldt in a spiritual talk. He was the secretary of defense for the US during the disastrous war in Iraq. And not much good came from his service in office. But he did become famed for the phrase "unknown unknowns," and here he had a point. He felt there were things that we knew that we know – he was wrong there – there are things that we believe we know, but we are mistaken. He also could see that there are things that we know that we do not know. That's fair enough. And what he added were the unknown unknowns, the things that we don't know we don't know. And this really is closer to the realm of truth.

It's not only that we don't know something specific, but we even don't know what it is that we don't know. We have no feel at all for the realm of truth, in our knowledge, in our thoughts. They do not touch truth at all. They are a world apart. And our spiritual journey needs to take us that far into the unknown, that we can see for ourselves that our thoughts have no bearing on truth, none whatsoever. They exist in a completely different domain. If we can really embody this understanding, then we do not put so much energy into our thoughts. They lose their significance for us. And then, in that space, our consciousness can begin to exist in a different mode, a different state altogether, a space of silence and intense awareness, a presence. In this space we come to truth.