“The truth will set you free” is a statement from John 8:32 and which Jesus Christ addressed to a group of Jews who believed in him. There are six important declarations within this one statement:
- There is non-truth.
- There is a truth.
- There is captivity.
- There is freedom.
- The non-truth leads to captivity.
- The truth leads to freedom.
I like this saying because it states everything I need to know in my moment. It reveals that I am captive, my objective is to escape, and the Truth is the key to my prison. There is no more direct way to describe my condition and the solution.
However, before I go on, I must first repossess this phrase, for it does not belong to me when I say “the truth will set you free”. I imagine it being spoken by someone else to me. That is a falsity, for there is no one other than me. I repossess this phrase: The truth will set me free. There is no one speaking to me. All the voices I hear are my own. In my illness, I have given away the power to define truth, and in so doing have forgotten the meaning of it altogether.
There is only one truth more fundamental than this phrase: I am. I exist. What differentiates this truth from all the other statements I might consider to be truthful is that I know it with every fiber of my being. Every “truth” that comes after I am is weaker, more tenuous, and less knowable. What changes between I am and the knowledge of the world is what I call potency. Potency is the quality of truth. The more direct a proposition is to I am, the more potent it is, and therefore more truthful.
The truth will set me free describes what awaits me when I liberate myself. If a piece of knowledge does not help me escape my captivity, then it may be many things, but it is not Truth. The Truth is that which liberates me. If I spend my time imagining a world of people, places, and events beyond my experience, then I am living a life of impotence. Truth is potent; the truth is knowing without any doubt. It requires no effort other than to see beyond the walls of my prison.
So what is truth? When I look upon the truth, I am the truth. The truth is not outside of me; the truth is me. Truth is that which sets me free. What is freedom? Freedom is the lack of desire; the want for nothing. Freedom is being who I am. No one has the keys to my prison except me. And therefore the truth is not something I can get from anyone else. The truth is something that I can and must know, not something I cannot know. Therefore anything I cannot possibly know is not part of the truth I seek that will set me free.
The only objective of the Truth is to free me from my captivity.
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What is “repossession”?
Repossession is the act of systematically undermining those beliefs I maintain, which contend that there is something other than me. In the context of this incantation, I am specifically referring to the elimination of the falsity that “truth” is something possessed by “others” who I believe are not me, or something that I must strive to reveal and understand. Dispossessed, truth is something outside of me; but repossessed, truth is an integral aspect of my being in my moment. The act of repossessing is a matter of conviction work. Repossession is expansive and beyond truth and into all other aspects of my demiselfist experience
What is “my moment”?
My moment refers to the entirety of existence. In selfism I know that my experience is the totality of existence, and it is always occurring in my one moment. I could say “every moment”, but that would imply that there are multiple moments, which there are not. I also do not differentiate between my own experience and the totality of existence, because the two are one and the same. There is only ever my moment now; everything else is imagined. And imagination is illness.
How do the details about the Bible and Jesus Christ fit into my analysis? How does this play into this statement?
This is what I call the “chaff”. Every kernel of truth will be surrounded by non-substantial, imaginary chaff of decreasing importance and potency. It is the fragrant blossoming flower which catches my eye, not the stem. It is the fleshy pulp of the fruit which draws me in, not the flower. It is important not to be drawn away from the fruit by the prickly shoots of the stem.
So Jesus Christ and the Bible are just the “prickly shoots”?
In the context of this kernel of truth, yes. Imagination is the domain of demiself and demipotence, weakness and suffering. Imagination is the activity that draws me away from what is. The truth spoken is the flower, the rest is merely the delivery device I created to sneak the truth in front of myself. The flower does not require me to imagine for it is bulging with the color and ebullience of truth.
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