The Inner Experience of Truth

In our experience of truth, perceiving, feeling, thinking, and expressing are all parts of a lifelong process that is equivalent to inhaling and exhaling. What Is Your Relationship with Truth By Mark Nepo     Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. ~ Aristotle   I have always felt most alive when telling the truth when the sudden utterance from within—be it a question or a feeling—rings through the entirety of me. And though I’ve been trained to focus on the objective rewards of truth, such as insight and understanding, I realize now in my sixties that it is really the experience of truth—the empowerment of the authentic—that has kept me going. While uttering the truth or questioning the truth, electricity is turned on that connects us to that immeasurable vastness so close but always out of view. When experiencing the truth, especially the truth of feeling, I feel most like a dolphin breaking surface only to dive. The affirming thing about such moments is that they are wonderfully contagious. In a room full of skeptics, one truthful utterance can shift the entire ground of dialogue, even if no one else dares to say a word. As a young man, I had no idea of any of this, any more than a hawk is aware of its aerodynamics. Now, I can see that this desire not to be alone in truth-seeking and truth-speaking is what made me want to be a teacher. I really didn’t want to talk about anything outside of truth. I wanted to examine everything by sharing, reflecting, and questioning whatever I would meet through the lens of authentic feeling. With the exception of a few friends, I couldn’t find such companionship readily in the world, and so, without realizing it, I…

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