Universal Truth is Self-Evident Truth Revealed in the Moment of Truth
What is universal truth, and how is it revealed? Universal truth transcends relative truth – it is timeless, unchanging reality. When we drop all preconceived notions and meet the moment with beginner’s mind, universal truth may spontaneously dawn as self-evident truth. In the timeless now, unfiltered by mental constructs, truth shines with immediacy and luminous clarity. There are no intermediaries or abstractions – just the radiant is-ness of things as they are. The moment of truth occurs when universal truth presents itself unadorned, naked awareness recognizing naked awareness. When the mind relaxes its grip, universal truth effortlessly manifests as self-evident truth in the pristine awareness of the moment of truth.
Many people come to a spiritual path seeking truth, reality, enlightenment, awakening, or some such state.
- What is being sought?
- Where is motivation coming from?
- Is there a sense of something missing, or is it more a sense that something greater, deeper, or more profound exists?
Seeking truth or reality can have a sense of wanting to get to the ultimate, the bedrock of existence, the final answer, while enlightenment or awakening can feel more like seeking a purer state of perception or connection.
What are you seeking? Do you know? Take a few moments to really feel into this. I say feel because we need to get beyond the purely intellectual or mental to get closer to the full sense of things. We have our thoughts, ideas, and interests, but we also need access to the affect and kinesthetic qualities of our motivation and what it is we seek.
I say loving the truth instead of seeking it, because if you are seeking truth you might seek to avoid feeling pain. You might seek truth for another purpose, which will then make you not see the truth. But if you really love truth, then you will automatically want to see all of it, not for any particular reason but because you like seeing the truth. So loving the truth is not exactly seeking the truth, even though it might include seeking the truth sometimes. Loving the truth is the attitude of the heart. The heart falls in love. It falls in love with the truth, with an aspect of reality. – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, A. H. Almaas
What we are seeking is not unknown to us.
Think about it. Where does the sense of something greater, more real come from? Is it an intellectual extrapolation, or is there a felt sense that life has something deeper to offer?
Most people seeking truth and reality have, at least in part, that felt sense, that itch, that elusiveness at the edge of their experience that they can’t quite catch with their perception.
Is this you? Do you have that itch in your consciousness, that – there is something more to this that I can’t quite see, but I know it’s there?
Get Curious
The fundamental methodology of the Diamond Approach is open and open-ended inquiry. It’s all about curiosity, free-falling curiosity that recognizes reality and truth are not something we “get,” but more of a shift in perception that supports experiential knowing and understanding.
So curiosity, or the spirit of truth, is not just seeking the truth; it is not a goal-oriented activity. When the child is seeking truth by dismantling a doll, this is not time-oriented seeking. There is a joy in every second. The activity itself is full of aliveness, excitement, sensation, appreciation. It’s as if you put all of yourself in one point—mind, heart, sensation. – Diamond Heart Book One: Elements of the Real in Man, A. H. Almaas