THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH,
AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
“All the things I will teach you are not necessarily true,
which doesn’t mean that I will lie to you,
but it does mean that I hope that my teachings will
be an invitation to find your own truth.”
This is one for the first things I tell when I start teaching my groups.I have been on a spiritual path for long enough to realise that telling people what to believe doesn’t work. Not only doesn’t it work, I feel it is also completely beside the point.
In 1992 I went to ‘pastoral school’ where they would teach lay people to be able to work in church on a level that would help fill in the gaps for the diminishing numbers of priests. It was a great course with lots of practical insights as well as spiritual and philosophical teachings. One of the teachers in the course was Professor Dr. Piet Leenhouwers, a monk and philosopher.
Up the point of his first lesson I had been quite unaware of things like a second language in the bible and the way the church had manipulated the written word through the ages. Professor Piet however started to teach us straight away that there is no absolute truth in religion and spirituality, only subjective truth and by doing so he opened a whole new world for me where my rebellious nature finally got acknowledged and I was openly invited to doubt everything that was often considered holy and... true. After that the church, the bible, the preaching of the priest, have never been the same again...
This probably also opened the door for me to explore different spirituality and I tumbled through a whole variety of Paganism and Healing traditions before I landed in the arms of Goddess. The thing that kept me moving on and on until then was not that I was looking for the truth, but actually the fact that I was looking for a spirituality where nothing was ‘true’ and where I would be invited to find my own truth, my own connection with the Great Mystery.
I personally found it quite scary to find so many truths and dogmas in the ‘old religion’, or at least in the versions that some had made of it. I of course do understand that all of that has been formed through centuries of human hopes and fears and searching for something that would guide them. But to hear people at the Wiccan Cafe say that I am wrong by having a stronger connection to the Sun then to the Moon, was a definite red flag for me!
I love that in the ‘reality’ of Goddess, She changes everything She touches and everything She touches changes. There are no given facts and truths, it is all about being and feeling into the moment, about our human experience of Her. What feels right for me in my connection right now, what feels right for the intention and what is it that creates Her beauty, joy and love in this moment!
In that moment my truth could be different than yours and that is great. You could tell about your experience and maybe I can resonate with that, or maybe not. And when we do, we can chose to come to an agreement to give form and expression to that experience, so we can share it with others in the hope that they will feel it as well. I am still amazed about how often this really works. This is what I would call the flow...
There is a real danger in confusing an agreement with the truth though. There could be a long time agreement within a group that for instance in The Wheel of the Year, we celebrate the element Fire in the East. This however doesn’t mean that Fire in the East is how it should be and it is a truth... Again it is all about awareness, which is the beautiful gift we got as humans...
Anyway....
Imagine, a world without spiritual/religious truths...
"You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one"
Marion Brigantia
November 2014
