A Short Essay on Living one’s own Truth.

‘Most people…are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.’

It is clear to me that man has freedom to live fully only when he ceases to follow blindly the mould set by his conditioning. A combination of his environment and his conditioned temperament will to a large extent dictate his character so long as he does not rise his head above the herd and consider his own true desires; his own truth.

There is a very silent whisper that echoes from the most remote caverns of his being; he must listen ever so closely to the yearnings of his own soul; he must become adept at the translation of subtle intuitions into conscious action; becoming who he is to become, and living the life he holds within in potentiality, is an act of channelling that voice that resounds quietly from the innermost chambers of his soul out into the world: a bold commitment to his inner truth; such that the environment around him no longer dictates his life force, he has taken his own life into his own hands in a courageous act of defiance; of courage, of authenticity, of creativity.

For within man is, equal to the pull of the environment and of fate, a calling that may be heard late at night when eyes are weary and worldly issues softer on the soul; it is then that man may pick up on a faint essence within him that begs to be expressed. It is perhaps the most freeing call in the world; the most exhilarating, liberating! — if he puts his faith in it.

Say he chooses now to listen to his nature, and to express his souls energies into the world; to go beyond his ego; his vanity; his prison of self-definition; he may now find a world within him rich with vision and passion and love; a voice that guides him through desert storms and icy blazes in the blackest night; a calling that he did not choose and yet is most surely and intimately his own; he enters a landscape of intuition, of visions… of adventure. There is great potentiality before him; and yet he no longer idles and wanders side to side upon all that is and all that could be: he is a traveller, and there is a path before him far more exciting and enticing and intoxicating because it is HIS, it is the way his soul MUST go, and it is for him to discover what lays in wait; and what he must become in order to walk it. He becomes his own lawmaker, his own judge and jury; he learns to think for himself — to use his intellect effectively and with true purpose, to follow his inner guidance; his intuitions. And what a joyous journey to embark on! It is a journey that he does not have to force or control; he trusts himself to life, and as such he becomes truly free to live playfully, wholesomely, naturally as himself.

He may choose, during the early stages of this venture into the unknown, to turn back to the comfort of being not who he is; but who his vanity wishes him to be, and as such, he will live unsatisfied and under an illusory freedom, for he lives as a slave to his ego.

To be truly free, then, he must surrender himself to an unknown wisdom within him that seems to know; it is to follow that, or to remain in some way a slave to conditioning, compulsion, ego; clinging to a fabricated identity… that choice is his predicament, and it is also his freedom; for what better freedom is there than to be nothing but himself?

True freedom is the reliquishment of egoic control, of self-definition, of clinging to persona; it is complete surrender to nature, to his nature. As Krishnamurti asserted: ‘The only real freedom is to not have to choose’. It is then that he may truly play as a child in the world: that is, free from his vanity, free from his conditioning, and most importantly, free from himself — and yet more completely and freely himself than ever before! He becomes natural, light, completely unique and harmonious! He finds his own style, he grooves to his own tune. This is the journey of the Hero! This is the ultimate game to play; the most challenging, the most rewarding.

But to remember, behind it all, that the whole thing is infact a dance, a play; and not by necessity to be taken so seriously… to occasionally have the sanity to step back and have a good jolly laugh at yourself and all the rest of it — this is a wonderful quality, a wonderful truth. It is a mark of the wise man, the liberated man, the free man; that he knows himself and his life to be an elaborate play, ultimately without purpose. As such he rarely fears death, nor does he fear life, nor does he fear himself. As such he is free to walk his own path boldly, he lives by his own law; as much out of necessity as of curiousity: because it is an adventure… because he has been called.

It is only few who are called, and fewer who answer.

‘A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualisation… it refers to mans’s desire for self fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially.’

Axle.