THEN YOU WILL KNOW THE TRUTH, AND IT WILL SET YOU FREE
Read John 8
We only experience truth as the exercising of a life lived in growing freedom, and that always happens as a risk. There’s even the risk of knowing truth when it unmasks our own self-deceit and shows us that our freedom is still slavery in disguise.
Truth sets us free, but freedom is what brings about the growth of truth in life.
Without freedom, truth is, at best, an anatomy class where the body is dead. Just as faith without works is dead, truth without freedom is nothing but the arrogance of the doctrines.
The preachers of freedom usually don’t know anything about it, because if truth produces freedom, it’s freedom that causes truth to be life. And nobody can know truth if not in life, in the core of the being’s experience of existing amid all paradoxes. Therefore, knowing truth always hurts, and hurts a lot. In fact, it tears you apart entirely. And because the preachers of freedom aren’t willing to be torn apart, they talk about what they don’t know.
In existence, we know truth not as an intellectual understanding of it, but in the core of our beings.
Preachers of truth who don’t know it as freedom remain in bondage to all sin, especially the sin of stating that they know what they’ve never tasted because they never took any chances as an experience of freedom. Truth is freedom’s main existential fruit and its only experiential proof.
People stuck into the fear of living will never know truth, because truth takes place as a risk, as vertigo from freedom, and as a result from the person’s giving himself/herself over to life, to existence, with no fear of being, let alone be scared at his/her own face unmasked by the light from that which is.
If truth doesn’t settle down in the innermost self, it will not create freedom, but an ever-growing anxiety and ambiguity.
When I say “truth” I’m certainly not talking about doctrines, but about an assuredness that doesn’t need to be explained. To human beings, truth is existentiality.
That’s why those who know truth can never deliver a persuasive speech on it. The true persuasion of truth is the delivering action it performs in one’s being, even when it tears it apart. Therefore, the one who was hit and torn by it doesn’t have much to say about it, but he/she becomes brave enough to be because of it and despite it.
All the talk about truth isn’t ridiculous because it lacks good contents, but because it lacks trust in its real promise of liberation, which only manifests as such if there’s freedom as an expression of life in the existence of the one who claims to know truth.
Anxiety as an expression of existence is what reveals the most if truth has got into the core of a human being or if it only hit him/her as an “intellectual agreement” and not as a visceral covenant.
Anxiety disguises as orthodoxy and conviction, but it actually is nothing but insecurity about the truth, since whatever truth that doesn’t bring about liberation from fear isn’t liberation yet, because it hasn’t yet become an essential part of the self. This makes the “announcer of the truth” a priest of anxiety and fear. That’s why he has a need to be intolerant. In religion, anxiety creates uncertainty, and uncertainty brings about the orthodoxy of fear.
In this way, the more you talk about truth the more you deny it, since the one who announces truth as a speech is doing nothing but trying to save himself from his own uncertainty.
That’s why the religious are so insecure, and their insecurity make them so overbearing. People who are on the side of truth (real people) don’t have to prove anything, because their living in freedom is proof of their own conviction and faith.
So, to me, the “truth apologists” are the most insecure people. They spend their lives trying to prove to others just what makes up their own uncertainties and qualms. That’s why they’re so fragile, so orthodox, so intolerant and fanaticized by insecurity.
People on the side of truth don’t have to prove anything to anybody. They would only have to prove something if their lives themselves weren’t the proof and, at times, the counterproof, even though in the process of surrendering to truth.
Freedom is the only thing that proves that someone knows truth and freedom, because when you know truth in life, it sets us free for freedom, even if it’s the freedom to err in order to know truth as pain and, eventually, know it as peace.
Therefore I say: Sow me your truth by your doctrines and I, with no doctrines at all, will show you truth by my courage to live in freedom in spite of myself.
After all, the Truth is nothing but Everything. And this Everything is nothing but Jesus.
Think about it!
Caio
