“Truth is not conceptual. We can never understand or realize it through concepts and ideas. Truth is not to be understood. Rather, it is meant to be experienced, tasted, like nectar. There is nothing to understand about nectar. One must taste it, drink it, and experience it. The truth is like that. It is to be experienced and realized, not speculated about.”
~ Anan Thubten

Right now, I've made a conscious choice to check in to see if what I believe is really true.

What I understand so far is that, in an instant, I can inspire and conspire the brush strokes that paint my world, and what feels ‘right on kick-ass true” is that there exists a platform and a process streaming my on-demand life onto the world I am experiencing.

For example, my mom died of Alzheimer's in early January. It was traumatic - we were splintered ... pulled apart in unimaginable ways.

She was suffering, and, watching her suffer caused us to suffer. But, after a very painful and long while, my mom was no longer suffering; and, though that part that made my mom 'mom' was no longer visible to us, to varying degrees, all of us who had watched her suffer for so long could not let go of the idea of her -- took on and projected that suffering forward, which confirmed that the identity, "I am suffering" would meet us in the future.

You can imagine, unable to recognize that her own suffering had subsided, this captivity immobilized us from processing our own suffering - from the justice of grief.

And grief gets angry when it's met with the injustice of denial, and the many ways it is denied due process.

On a neurological level, unprocessed grief rewires itself as spasmodic, emotional confirmations - we are volleyed between fight or flight spikes of anger, fear, and confusion that send our nervous system reeling through adrenaline highs and cortisol lows - it feels like taking cocaine to get through the day and then taking barbiturates to sleep, exhausting and numbing.

This cycle disconnects us from the rhythm of the body and nature, from free will.

Psychologically, being gripped by unprocessed grief disables us from seeing beyond the body of belief -- it believes in wrongness - "It's your fault" - in injustice "It's not fair" - and in the burden of bearing witness against itself - "It's not true" - fearing the risk that what we may have believed is not true.

And, soulfully, when left unattended, this anger and doubt keep us from the wisdom of this suffering, without purpose and without power. Without awareness, we take on the very real conditions of suffering.

Eventually, with loving awareness, the shared experience of suffering we experienced preceding my mother's death shifted from what I believed I was defending (mine, hers ... what I could observe and prove), to a deeper knowing (ours ... how I was feeling and responding); and, so, for the benefit of ours, there was something reliable and noble in the process of asking the questions, "Is this true? Is my mom really gone? Is this story of her all there is?"

I asked out of Love so that I could be released into the limitless ways my mother is still here.

And, in the desire to cultivate a love for the truth (what is also called beauty, harmony, a song), I was ushered to the precipice of spiritual power and purpose and opened myself (personality and soul) to healing and healing began.

There are principles of spiritual justice that support Truth and Love:

that it must work forward and backward.
that it does not exclude new witnesses.
that it welcomes wisdom yet is intentionally free of ideational attendance, bias, and identity that restricts new information and growth (nor will it be used as a vehicle of harm, or deliver vengeance or retribution).
and that, in the absence of knowledge (the body of truth), we have the freedom to discover new meaning.

We use this mind in ways that defy the fear of the death of the body (that something may not be as we thought or believed).

We live it through the desire to expand.

But if we do not slow down enough to live it – if we do not stop defending it and stop attacking it - we will not recognize that the power is in stepping back to recognize it, so as to allow it to rise up through the ground of our feet, and lead us through the illusions - to allow truth to stand forth.

To Trust.

AND SO, already, the truth is unfolding, and it is here that we meet, at the junction of freedom - travelers, guides, brothers, sisters, teachers, students and strangers - awakened from our collective grief and well on the path of love. We meet in taking ownership of the world around us, in attending to the pain bodies that are calling to us, 'I am you and you are me'.

And, in the recognition that the power of Love (which is the power of Truth), lays within this one intention:

Will I enter my day with something to prove, or will I allow truth to rise and become Self-evident?

Sometimes that means that what we believed was true must die. And that may cause much grieving.