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Down through the ages, those who have sought the awakened life have been called the "Friends of Truth." These wise men and women understood in their time what we must now in our own -- that the more moments spent in the company of truly higher ideas, the more the life of these timeless ideas becomes our own, transforming our nature and making it new.
So how do we learn to recognize and befriend this living Truth that has always been present in our lives, even if we haven't been conscious of its kind and continuing presence all around us?
Can we see how the real lessons in our life, those that actually strengthened us -- even as they helped make gentler our heart for learning them -- have always been due to the simultaneous onset and startling realization of some formerly unseen truth as it concerned our self? And further how, all along until this moment of discovery, each of these truth-filled lessons had been an unknown need of ours, only we just couldn't see this secretly needful state of ourselves until certain other conditions had been fulfilled?
Now, if we can see this relationship between ourselves and Truth, and how its light quietly awaits our embrace long before we suspect our need for its guidance, then we are ready for two key lessons that must be learned at once: First, we must discover what it is that is keeping us from this full friendship with Truth. Then, through this same realization, we will have before us the facts we need to deepen our friendship with it. The answer to the first of these questions is simple to state, even if it can be difficult to see: We have been keeping company with the wrong friends. What does this mean?
Any thought or feeling that jumps up within us to explain to us why we are the way we are, that wants to help us justify ourselves after we catch a glimpse of something less than flattering about ourselves -- appears there within us for only one reason: It wants to pass itself off as our friend-in-need -- a feat it does by working to soften the blow of our having seen some formerly unsuspected truth about our present nature. This would-be friend is our secret enemy! Here's the proof of this truth: What is true never needs an agent of any kind to soft-pedal its presence. Truth is living light, and nothing is more gentle than that!
Keeping the company of Truth is as simple as always working inwardly to be as truthful with ourselves as it is possible for us to be. Said with a different slant, refuse to embrace the many false friends within us, or outside of us, each time they offer us their self-serving excuses for our pain.
This one conscious act of being truthful (with self) satisfies all conditions necessary for being a friend of Truth. It places us in the Now, where Truth lives; it arms us with the light of Truth that cannot be overcome by any darkness perceived; and it elevates us into its eternal kingdom by showing us that what it gives to us in the moment was ours from the beginning of time.
Remember your wish to be a friend of Truth. Choose over and over again to live in the light of its company and watch how the crooked places in your life straighten out by themselves.
This article is excerpted from The Courage to Be Free (pages 83-90).
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