Truth, ethics and complete physical, mental and spiritual freedom!

The purpose of these first three practice points is to reorientate our life, to reframe or restate it to ourselves, to reaffirm what the vision of our life is, to reconnect with what we want it to be on the most meaningful level, what we want it to mean. If we don't have a strong centre point of focus to our lives, what will be guiding us?

 

We all come from different cultural and religious backgrounds, different conditionings, we all have our own existential view points on life, so these fundamental guiding principles of truth, a strong ethical framework and living from a place of complete freedom of spirit might not be your primary focus. However, I’ve chosen these three principles for a few reasons. 

 

Firstly, they’ve always been a background part of my life and things that I truly believe in, especially this desire to be completely free of all constraints, not just personally, but as a general humanistic and existential principle. Secondly, these principles are not unique or unknown but expressed in all healthy and positive religious, spiritual or humanistic belief systems. They’re integral to the human journey towards higher consciousness and the evolution of mind itself, so in that respect, they are inherently part of our journey of growth.

 

This journey we’ve undertaken is entirely personal to us, we will live in a completely unique way. This isn’t supposed to be another religious formulation of spiritual dogma. Every single one of these practice points can be changed or tweaked to whatever is appropriate to you as you grow and evolve.

 

I read all these practice points every morning, but I also have others that I read every day as well that are points that need close attention for where I am at the moment. Having said that, I’ve found that the three focus elements of inspiration, awareness and warriorship stand as a valid system to focus on core areas of practice to facilitate our evolution of mind.

 

What is truth?

To embark on a conversation about truth is a prodigious endeavour as there are many philosophical positions on what truth actually is, these points have been debated over for centuries. For this reason, I’ll be dedicating an entire article to it at some point in the future, so keep an eye out for it

 

For the sake of the general definition of truth and how it pertains to living an authentic life of personal growth, I’ll be referring to the correspondence theory of truth. This is held to by the majority of philosophers throughout history, its basic principle is that any statement is true if it corresponds to or agrees with factual reality, with the way things are.

 

So, why is factual reality so important? It’s the fundamental basis of a healthy, organised and civilised society. As human beings, we are a successful species because we have a profound ability to take in information about our environment, and based upon the accuracy of that information come up with successful strategies to thrive.

 

If the information is inaccurate, the strategies fail. This promotes distrust and confusion, and in the case of civilised societies, it causes systems to either break down or become unhealthy or corrupt.

 

This applies to our own system, our mind, our psychology. When we don’t understand ourselves, when we lie about who we are and pursue harmful living strategies that don’t harmonise our system, we experience greater suffering. When we become honest, open to personal truth and implement nourishing ways of being that accord with our system, our lives substantially improve.

 

The fact is you can’t evolve without committing to the path of truth, of the real. The problem is that we’ll believe almost anything to make the conditions of our life work for us. This is all set in motion by our accumulated life experiences, predispositions and biases. This forms our overall reality that is unique to us. We are not really conscious of this fact or its ramifications and that there are almost no lengths we won’t go to protect and maintain it. Most shockingly of all, we will probably never realise that almost everything we believe is a lie.

 

Clearing the decks and becoming as rigorously honest with ourselves as possible is the starting point. We must come to believe that seeking truth and being honest is ultimately less painful than continuing to live a superficial life of confusion, falsehoods and willful delusion.

 

Realise that this is a long time habit so self understanding is a life time project, but committing to self honesty is something you can do in every moment. It will take time to see through your own rationalisations, justifying your decisions or positions, but with constant effort and greater awareness the onion layers of denial and illusion will peel away.

 

To live a life of integrity and authenticity, to honour oneself and one’s precious life is to embrace truth, to continually and unremittingly shine the light of truth on everything in our lives. In that process we discover something, the unexpected freedom of not having to live the lie, the constant juggling act to be something you are not, to deny your emotions, to protect beliefs that have no basis in reality, the constant background fear of being found out, to be discovered as a fraud.

 

If you’re not truly free to be who you are, how can anybody else be? It’s like society is caught in this viral lie we are all complicit in. And this has got everything to do with familial, cultural and societal expectations. We take all this conditioning in without a moment's hesitation or questioning. When do we ever stop and seriously ask ourselves, ‘what am I actually doing, is any of this really going to make me happy? Am I simply one of millions of cogs in the machine, living out existence with pretty much no clue why?’

 

The other aspect to living our own truth, is the existence or not of truth outside ourselves. Some state that we are now in a post-truth era, and it’s not hard to believe, considering the mis-use of social media, internet informationalism and AI created content indistinguishable from reality. For many years now, I’ve disconnected from all media input of any description including social media, viral internet information and any news regardless of how ‘relevant’, 

 

This was partly informed by an epiphany when I suddenly realised that everything I take in builds a reality in my mind of what the world is or at least appears to be. I realised that this is not what the world is, in fact it’s nothing like it, it’s a tiny microcosm of it, filtered through other people’s biases and conditionings and the hugely powerful media corporations who decide for us what’s news worthy, what to expose the world at large to.

 

The truth is, what appears in the news is entirely arbitrary and of absolutely no import to my life. That doesn’t mean that all the tragedy and loss of life that gets reported in the news is not important, but for every story reported, there are thousands of others we’ll never know about.

 

One of the basic aspects that upsets the health of any system is the decay of fundamental values and truth. If we can’t trust in the information we are receiving, if we can’t trust that the reality we are being presented with is true, that reality breaks down. We don’t know who or what to trust, insecurity and anxiety set in, we are then forced to question everything, not in that healthy aware way, but in a way where there is nothing reliable to depend on.

 

Truth and those that live by it are dependable and reliable, it’s one of the most important aspects of the journey of growth and is intimately connected to the practice of awareness.

 

The relevance of ethics

This topic has been addressed to some extent in the main introduction but it’s specifically relevant in this practice point and restating it as an essential part of personal growth is critical. Initially, I had framed this point as connecting to goodness, which is not different from practicing ethics, it’s very much a part of it, but the focus on striving to live an ethical life addresses its fundamental principle, which is the practice of non-harm.

 

There’s no doubt that we are in this for selfish reasons. We want to be happy, to achieve things to live a rich life. That’s ok, it's completely understandable. However, if we aren’t aware of others in the pursuit of our goals, we miss another whole dimension of life that adds so much richness and abundance.

 

The basic desire of most human beings is to be happy and free of suffering, regardless of how that may be expressed. We can’t expect to tread the path to true freedom, self agency and happiness if we walk over the rest of humanity to get it. If we are harming others on the journey to self-fulfillment, we may not recognise that consciously, but somewhere inside us we know. We don’t live in a vacuum.

 

In this increasingly over-populated world, we’re ever more faced with the reality that to be human is to live in community with others. If by seeking our own freedom and happiness, we are consciously or unconsciously taking it from others on that road, there will always be a cost.

 

Staying connected to basic humanistic goodness should be a conscious part of our journey. It should be a guiding principle that informs everything we do. And this doesn’t even need to be a spiritual or religious belief or practice, it’s just a reasonable and logical principle of being alive in the world with others.

 

Every aspect of our lives is affected and connected to the activity of others. Just think about the most basic aspects of your life, how food gets on to your dinner table. The hundreds, maybe thousands of people that are involved in that process, all trying to live out their lives as well, trying to make sense of their world.

 

Like it or not, we have an ongoing relationship with that world, we might as well make that conscious instead of living in our own isolated reality, denying this basic fact of life. Embrace it, be a part of this flow of human activity instead of fighting and raging against, being in competition with it.

 

If we fully realise our interconnectedness with humanity, with the whole living world, it forces us to recognise our responsibilities for what we do in life goes much further than just carving out our own little slice of existence in the modern world. Paradoxically, to become more conscious and responsible is to become freer, to become more alive. Responsibility is for the brave and heroic, not the weak and selfish.

 

Why freedom?

Isn’t the fundamental truth of all life that we should be able to pursue our own lives freely, to find our truth, to potentially evolve through that process? We are unfolding inexplicable phenomena working out the kinks of existing. Does anyone have the right to impose their will on that? As we want to be free to choose our existence, doesn’t all life, even if it’s not self aware?

 

Many of us are lucky enough to live in relatively free democratic systems, but the majority are not. And even in free systems, there’s the hidden oppression of ever increasing controls and monitoring of your every move, the eating away of personal freedoms. We all experience so much conditioning that causes us to be limited in our relationship to the world. Fears, psychological limitations, systems of thought, cultural and religious biases, the list goes on and on. All these things have a conditioning effect on our mind. Almost everything we think and do is a limitation in some way.

 

Actually, it is entirely up to us what we believe. Even if it’s unconsciously or habitually, we are constantly choosing our own reality. Mostly we don’t realise that we continue to live in a prison cell of our own making, one that’s been foisted upon us by all the conditionings that have come before, but also by our own lack of awareness that it could be any other way.

 

Part of finding our true freedom is deciding to consciously start seeing and unpicking the tapestry of our mental and emotional conditioning. We can literally choose to believe anything, we can choose to believe what leads to personal empowerment, to freedom of mind and heart.

 

I don’t mean believing in anything that suits us and potentially deluding ourselves further, I mean consciously and with clarity of mind, investigating one’s beliefs and systems of thought, filtering through the dross of personal lies and stories we tell ourselves to feel safe. Decide for yourself, what you truly want in life, and research the highest thought on the subject in how to achieve it. If you don’t know what you want, fully acknowledge that truth, sit on it, let the question simmer.

 

Start listening to people. Hear the stories they tell themselves, what you tell yourself. ‘I could never do this, that, it’s too hard’, ‘I’m too lazy’, ‘I’m a slow learner’, ‘I’m too scared’, ‘I’d never make it’. These are unconscious lies we tell ourselves, they have very little bearing on the actual reality of things. It’s challenging to go against these ideas, it takes energy and commitment. It’s much easier to stay in a small pond, but the riches of life experience you’re missing out on?!