Truth is a sword.
Two-edged, no doubt. Daunting. Sovereign.
This symbol, like countless others, has been twisted and grossly distorted. It is feared. A sword can indeed be used to steal from others—life, limb, well-being, peace. But a surgeon’s scalpel can also heal, clear away infection or tissue which has died. It can remove poisons that are killing us.
However, the physical sword is only a symbol of a much more esoteric process.
In reality, the sword waits within us. In forging, quenching, tempering, and sharpening the blade we discover what it actually is. We discover truth. No, not all cosmic truth, and not all at once. We discover what is true stone by stone, building mastery and strength every time we face ourselves and all that we fear, cutting away illusion and lies. Finally, we realize we are the sword.
But long before that point we duck our heads, and turn away.
Why?
Fear. Confusion. Ignorance. But more than anything else—pain. We have come to believe so many untrue things about ourselves and about life. That we are bad. That our mistakes make us unworthy of love or any other good thing. That we have no right to think our own thoughts, or we’ll be rejected and left to fend alone. And maybe worst of all, that we have no right to acknowledge, never mind heal, the scarred-over wounds in our psyche—the unhealed, the disavowed. We all have them.
So better to forget what’s been pounded into us as “true”. Better to say what others are comfortable hearing. Yet both the truth and the lies are inside us, corroding the walls we’ve built around them, leaking poison and pain—in large ways or small—despite all our efforts to escape and deny. Turn away, and grab the anesthetic. The less we see inside, the less we see at all.
It feels “better” in the moment, obviously. We push off the truth until another day. But for a huge majority of people walking around, the day of confronting truth, processing through it, and achieving healing and knowledge—never comes.
So blame and misplaced anger continue; we run harder and harder to nowhere on the endless hamster wheel while more pain and more lies pile up. Meanwhile, time doesn’t just slip gently through the hourglass, it pours through it, as we blithely screw around mostly with stuff that doesn’t matter, feeling bitter that we fight the same obstacles over and over again. Years, then decades, just . . . vanish.
So this is like what, randomly universal? Cosmically accidental? No. There is a cause, then an effect. The longer we reject ourselves, the harder it is to even see that what is happening around us, in our daily lives, is a direct reflection of our inner state. The less awareness and clarity someone has internally the more threatening and nonsensical this sounds.
Funny though, how true it is. No magic required. What you don’t know can hurt you—and it does every day. If you don’t know your own emotions at an honest level, and you don’t know why certain things trigger you, and you never examine your real motives and expectations in relationships, and you persistently live in a numbed-out-bullshit-state—you’re not actually the driver of your own awareness. You’ll unwittingly give over to all kinds of outside opinions, dominating people, and control structures who will happily “fill it all in” for you.
They won’t just tell you how you should feel, they will tell you how you do feel. They won’t just tell you what you want, they will tell you what you need. You’ll have 23 types of toothpaste and 480 kinds of breakfast cereal to choose from, but they alone will decide what is right and what is wrong, and what will be done. Yes, their will be done.
If you have not built, brick by brick, healing wound by wound, fearing the unknown but going ahead anyway, allowing care to quicken your heart again in a genuine way, making mistakes and gaining wisdom from that . . . then you won’t have the inner strength to stand as your own person in the maddening, synthetic clusterfuck we call “normal life”.
It is nearly impossible to wield a sword while prostrate face-down in the dirt. It’s even harder to do it from the depths of a deep, dreamless sleep.
We as individuals are not responsible for all of the darkness, hate, fear, and evil in the world. Curiously, however, none of it—none of it—could continue for any length of time if we got truly right with ourselves.
It sounds so simple. But there are a thousand things every day, starting from birth, which suppress or ridicule knowing, and expanding, who we actually are. Fear and pain are always at the heart of it.
I’ve heard smart, decent people say—and really mean—these things:
“It’s too hard; I don’t want to think that much.”
“I don’t want to feel my emotions.”
“If I looked deeply into myself, I fear I would not survive it.”
“I have no power to change what’s in the world, and I don’t want to crumble into a blubbering mess, so I just don’t want to know any of it.”
I have had this one, too:
“I know who I am and what I want. I am fine. It’s you who are the problem.”
We are not stupid; we are wounded. We are not lazy; we are duped and have been crushed ruthlessly into duping ourselves. (The control system no longer has to do anything when this self-duping occurs—job done. We pick up and carry on their work ourselves.) We are not incapable; we are misled. We are not unworthy.
No excuses, no apologies, just blatant observations. Glaring patterns. I’ve probably used every excuse known to humanity at some point in my life, and they have done me no good at all.
Here’s a thing finally pounded into me: Without authentic self-knowledge, nothing makes sense. Nothing can make sense. Without it, we have little understanding, power, peace, and ultimately no freedom. Not really.
Maybe you feel you have these things? I invite you to suspend any initial reaction of denial, and in the privacy of your own mind to step outside your protective walls for a moment. Ask yourself: do you really have these things? can one “halfway” have these things?
Or blow off the question, that’s fine too. Every human being has the sovereign right to do with their will and inner being as they choose—including give it away. But understand that it is ultimately always a choice, and we alone are responsible for ours.
That is the sword in action, not violence. That’s the power.