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SEEKING TRUTH

2/28/2020

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Thank you to writer Marla Sarle, retired counselor/teacher, member of Apple Farm board of directors​

Poor Pilate. His most famous question has made him quite notorious. “What is truth?” has almost become a cliché. But, I think, it still resonates because it implies that we haven’t got a clue…which can make us very anxious.

We want to know. We want the security of knowing. It was once suggested to me that fundamentalists have poor self-esteem, the result of not trusting themselves. They want someone else to tell them what truth is, the answers to life’s deep questions. And they want black and white answers with no ambiguity. They want to be off the hook. They don’t want to be responsible for the consequences of thinking for themselves. They are, then, likely to never find their own truth. It takes courage to search, seek out, and step into one’s own truth.  We set upon a hero’s journey, and it is risky, carrying the fear of, “What if I am wrong?”, “What if I make a mistake?” The bigger mistake might be refusing to jump into the fray with other truth-seekers, the result of which might just be a very boring life!

Scott Peck sums up the courageous soul: “Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.”

Carl Jung speaks to the need for truth to become our own through inner experience. He says, “But the most beautiful truth…is of no use at all unless it has become the innermost experience and possession of the individual. Every unequivocal, so-called ‘clear’ answer always remains stuck in the head and seldom penetrates the heart. The needful thing is not to know the truth but to experience it. Not to have an intellectual conception of things, but to find our way to the inner, and perhaps wordless, irrational experience…”

And from Clarissa Pinkola Estes: “Those who would develop consciousness pursue all that stands behind the readily observable: the unseen chirping, the murky window, the lamenting door, the lip of light beneath a sill. They pursue these mysteries until the substance of the matter is laid open to them.” It is a life-long journey of seeking what is before us, but has not yet become fully our own experience and reality.

Attention to symbol, the Jungian path, brings together what is before us, what we already know, with what we do not yet know. Symbolic knowing is archetypal. It is beyond time and place. It connects the eternal with human experience. According to Caroline Myss, “the symbolic mind is a fountain of strength and truth.”
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The Only Things We Had

2/21/2020

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Thanks to Marilyn Ashbaugh, a poet whose work has appeared in international anthologies and journals of Japanese short-form poetry. She is a member of the Apple Farm writing group. She writes: I recently attended a Florida poetry festival and am delighted to report that American poetry is alive and well.  There was so much truth shared in the prose poems read that I sat in awe.  We all did. We were awe struck by truth.  So below is my riff.

The Only Things We Had

flip flops and polka dots
bikinis and baby oil
sprinklers and kiddy pools
purees and steelies 
shooters and thumpers

rednecks and greasers
hard boiled and over easy
duck tails and teeter totters
smoke rings and cokes in bottles
five fingers and detention
banana seats and butterflies 
borrowed bikes and joyrides
Kool aid lips and sucker punches
hopscotch and holes in our socks

twinkies and tang and
T R U T H 
all jujubeded and slo poked


Marilyn Ashbaugh
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The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth

2/15/2020

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Thank you to writer BARBRA GOERING, retired lawyer and member of Apple Farm board of directors

Since at least 1189, and to this day in Anglo-American courts of law, a witness formally promises, by oath or affirmation, to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”  Nevertheless, courts, and society at large, have often not been content to rely on such promises. 

The concern with truth-telling, the anxiety over lying witnesses, goes back much further than 1189, of course.  Slaves in the Roman Empire were routinely tortured as witnesses; we have all seen dramatic reenactments of trial by combat and trial by ordeal; and on the Continent, as late as the eighteenth century, judges followed an elaborate process of judicial torture in an effort to guarantee that truth would be told.  As with later instances of torture by police, or in times of war, those efforts to achieve truth and real justice were a failure overall. 

Our time is not unique in being awash in lies, then.  Disinformation is nothing new, as the historic efforts to assure truth telling attest.  We may feel exceptionally buried in untruth and fake news, but we’ve been grappling with this problem “since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.”

I’ve been thinking of the struggle to see truth on many levels of life.  The topic is a hard one, vast and difficult to pin down. 

I do have one observation:  the more I seek my own inner truth, the more I am able to discriminate, mark and recognize truth in others.  The work to seek our own reality has no end, really.  But on the way it can open us to what is real and true around us.  I may never definitively find my true North; but I am convinced that the effort I am making on my inner journey, taking me closer to my true self, will enable me to perceive truth in the world around me. If each of us makes the sincere effort to achieve our own truth, we can contribute to clarity in our common weal. 

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No Place Like Home

2/1/2020

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Daniel Laguitton, Sutton, Quebec

    The folktale about the man on a quest for truth reminded me of the well-known Jewish tale told by Martin Buber in Tales of the Hasidism. In that tale, "truth" could easily be substituted for "treasure" or for anything one so often seeks "outside", like "the kingdom" or "Love".

It goes like this:
    Rabbi Eisik of Cracow (Poland), after many years of great poverty which had never shaken his faith in God, dreamed someone bade him look for a treasure under Charles Bridge which leads to the king's palace in Prague. When the dream recurred a third time, Rabbi Eisik prepared for the journey and set out for Prague. But the bridge was guarded day and night and he did not dare to start digging. Nevertheless he went to the bridge every morning and kept walking around it until evening.  Finally the captain of the guards, who had been watching him, asked in a kindly way whether he was looking for something or waiting for somebody. A bit embarrassed, Rabbi Eisik told him of the dream which had brought him here from a faraway country. The captain laughed: "And so to please the dream, you poor fellow wore out your shoes to come here! As for having faith in dreams, if I had had it, I should have had to get going when a dream once told me to go to Cracow and dig for treasure under the stove in the rabbi's home!"
    Rabbi Eisik bowed, traveled home, dug up the treasure from under the stove, and built the House of Prayer which is called "Reb Eisik's Shul."

     If truth, like rabbi Eisik's treasure, is not in our homes, we will not find it anywhere else...
    The story, besides indicating that the "treasure" is to be found "at home", also suggests that without a quest "away from home", it might never have been found by the rabbi... It is a classic pattern, Coelho develops it in The Alchemist with the concept of the "personal legend" that must be fulfilled to find the treasure "inside". There are hundreds of examples of that pattern, such as Du Bellay's 16th Century poem : "Happy he who like Ulysses has returned successful from his travels, Or like he who sought the Golden Fleece, Then returned, wise to the world Live amongst his family to the end of his age!" https://www.frenchtoday.com/french-poetry-reading/heureux-qui-comme-ulysse-joachim-bellay/
Dorothy had it right : there is no place like home. 
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    ...it is in part by our response to the great stories of the world  that we too can begin to find, each of us this individual story expressing the symbolic meaning behind the facts of our fate and behind the motives that determine the day-to-day choices of our lives.  -Helen Luke, The Inner Story

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