A Corner On Truth

I think about truth a lot. It’s fast becoming my life’s greatest interest – far out-pacing money, music and the Yankees. Daily dealings with all the various concepts of the word “Inspirational” seem to focus my life more and more on the spiritual, and I know that’s a good thing. So I’m not resisting it; in fact, I’m opening up to it. And it’s certainly opening up to me.

We’re in a spiritual age. Looking back through history, these ages come in cycles. This is the next one. Go into any bookstore. Books for seekers abound. Christian music is the one genre of music that has actually grown during this terribly trying time in the music industry. Oprah announces discussions with Eckhart Tolle on line and millions show up to partake. Never before has content for seekers been more available.

I study my own religion, but I read voraciously Wayne Dyer, Yogananda, Ram Dass, Spalding’s Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East, Joseph Smith’s Book Of Mormon, The Gospel According to Jesus, Tolle’s A New Earth and on and on. I like to say, “I’m getting’ it any way I can.” Truth, that is.

One thing strikes me along this road. Why is it that so many people think they have a corner on truth? How preposterous to think that the Christians are right and everybody else is wrong – that the Sunnites are better than the Sheites. There’s gotta be truth to every religion – otherwise, why would people be drawn to it in the first place

I suggest it’s not religion that separates us, but language. “The words are different, so the philosophy’s gotta be different” is the mistake we humans make. And we Christians are some of the worst offenders. How arrogant to think that only Jesus got it right. Jesus did get it right, but he wasn’t alone. Confucius, Lao Tsu, Marianne Williamson, Mohammed, Billy Graham, Buddha, Mother Teresa, Mr. Tolle, Mary Baker Eddy – they all got it right on one level or another.

In Spalding’s Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East which I happen to be reading now, the great Masters recognize Jesus as “the greatest teacher”, “a true prophet”. He is revered, studied and taught right along with their own prophets and gurus.

Why are we so exclusive?

Ultimately, fear and ignorance. Fear of being wrong. And so we wall ourselves off in single-minded blindness to the truths available everywhere. This fear creates in us an ignorance of the great teachings of thousands of deep thinkers that have come before us and are right now among us. A great human mistake. No one has a corner on truth.

God makes truth available to all mankind in all languages. We’re all reaching for the same thing. All religions have found it on some level or another just as all religions have also confused it on one level or another. It’s a human thang.

The book I’m now reading says it very well. “Those associated with the churches must realize that the church but typifies the one thing, the Christ Consciousness in all mankind. If they realize this, where can the diversity lie but in the concept of man’s mortal mind?

See what this diversity has led to, the greatest wars, the intense hate engendered between nations and families and even individuals, and all because one church organization or another has thought that its creed or doctrine was better than that of another. Yet all in reality are the same for they all lead to the same place… The church organizations and those associated with them are coming closer each day and the time will come when they will be united as one. When all are as one, there will be no need of organization.”

“Yet the fault does not lie wholly with the church organizations. Few people have awakened to the realization of what life really holds for them. We find the greater majority drifting through life, dissatisfied, dazed, crushed, or uncertain. Each must learn to lay hold on life and begin to express from his own life center, with purposeful, definite action, the gifts that God has given him. Each must unfold his own life.”

Certainly one reason that the individual turns to a religion is for a meeting of the minds. Then, often, that religion separates itself from the rest of the world in its exclusivity. This is one place where we humans get lost instead of getting found. This is where the seeker gets complacent thinking that he has found the truth, when, in fact, he has only found a corner of it. The whole world of truth lies before us. Stay on the road. We’ll never find it by lingering on the corner.

I Am A Seeker

The short and incomplete history of a seeker

I am a seeker. “What do you seek?” you may ask. Perhaps first let’s get on the same page with what it means to seek. Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary says, to ‘seek’ is, “to search, to pursue, to explore, to try to learn or discover.”

What do I seek? I seek truth. Again, our dictionary says that truth is “the real or true state of things.” So by definition a seeker is an ‘explorer’ of the ‘real or true state of things’.

Many people seek through their religion. I do too, but I’ve learned in life to grab it any way I can from any place it comes – as long as at its center there is truth.

When asked how he could possibly break through and smash the traditions of music with his historic and monumental work The Rite Of Spring, Igor Stravinsky said that in order to break the barriers of music, one has to first have studied and know all of music to begin with.

And so, as a seeker of truth in music, I listen to the likes of Bach, Mozart, Tshaikovsky, Copeland, Gershwin, Lennon and McCartney, Dylan, James Taylor, Paul Simon, and Stravinsky among many others. As a seeker of truth in life, I listen to the Bible, Confucious, The Koran, The Dead Sea Scrolls, Krishnamurti, The I Ching, and Lao Tsu.

As a child I learned about the truth through the Bible and the amazing writings of Mary Baker Eddy – Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures and her Prose Works. These books and truths therein became my center and foundation, though not the circumference of my thought.

In the 1960s, as a young man, like many others of my generation, I experimented with drugs. I do not advocate this today for many reasons, but back then I pursued a deeper sense of reality through a careful and scientific experimentation of the drug, LSD.

This drug opened my mind like no other experience and taught me first hand that there was so much more to life than meets the five physical senses. The experiences set me on a determined life course to learn more about the unreality of matter, this illusion in which we live, and my relationship with a God whose definition seems to grow and change almost daily in its magnitude.

This naturally led me to Harvard professor Richard Alpert aka Baba Ram Dass who wrote a weirdly monumental book that I have read and re-read many times trying to absorb its truths, Be Here Now.

From Ram Dass I branched out to Rajneesh and read all his teachings in book form. The Mustard Seed, a study of the teachings of Jesus from the point of view of an Eastern guru, was pure enlightenment.

My year as a Hindu, or rather I should say in the daily study of that gorgeous structure of thought, broke my Christian barriers down and opened up a world of truths from the perspectives of different languages and cultures.

My readings and life study of the Dhammapada, the words of Guatama Buddha, taught me of the immaculate wisdom of this profound man and most importantly solidified in me the fact that we Christians did not have a corner on truth. I went through the EST experience with Werner Erhardt and learned not to blame others for what we ourselves choose in life.

My two mentors in life, though not necessarily spiritual teachers per se, also taught me incredible truths about this mortal experience. First, there was a great high school teacher and coach, Jack Eyerly, who taught me that I could truly accomplish about anything I chose to truly go after.

Secondly, there was Sanford Meisner, the great acting teacher, who taught me the science of being an artist. Though I studied acting with him for four years, he taught me unbeknownst to both of us at the time, more about composing music than any other teacher in my life because he taught me the workings of my inner emotional being. This understanding has been the foundation for my work as a composer for many years.

My middle years in life were spent in the mind-boggling trials and joys of fatherhood and the learning of my musical craft. As a provider, student and career builder, I must admit slipping off the seekers path and, in fact, settling for life as it came and oft times scrambling to keep up.

But as my much beloved son moved steadily away from under my tutelage, I found the time and the impulse to get back on that seeker’s path. I found myself fascinated with the recent discoveries of quantum physics and laughed that our world’s quantum physicists were ‘discovering’ what Mary Baker Eddy had ‘discovered’ almost 150 years ago in her book Science And Health and countless Eastern mystics had ‘discovered’ over the centuries — and of course what Jesus illuminated in his healings, his walk on the water and other defiance of material laws, including his raising of the dead.

And yet the study of quantum physics only further concretized my understanding of the unreality of matter and the interconnectivity of all being and the fact that “God is All-in-all”.

Though I have never struggled with alcoholism, a friend turned me on to the life-saving writings of the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the solid truths of his life guide.

I’ve been enlightened by the television talks of Wayne Dyer and several of his wonderful books, Inspiration and The Power of Intention, and that led me to my now absorption with the wisdom of Eckhart Tolle.

B.O. (Before Oprah) I read and studied The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle four or five times over the course of a year (I call it the sequel to Ram Dass’ Be Here Now) and that led me to A New Earth which, for me, has been my latest explosion of brain synapses in the discovery of truth.

What’s next? I can’t wait! Whoever’s out there figuring it all out, I’m grateful to you for clearing the path.

When we talk about Watchfire Music, our trans-denominational Inspirational music company, my partner, Jim Birch and I like to say, “Truth is truth.” We intend that to mean that no one person or organization has a corner on truth.

Truth can be found in all inspired works. And so we serve all religions and all walks of spiritual thought.

I don’t think God, in its infinite wisdom, picks out a few privileged people to own truth. I believe truth is available to all who seek, to all who quest to part the curtain and peer into the world and worlds beyond.

This act of exposing the true state of reality in the universe both spiritual and material, the true nature and largess of God and man’s relationship to God, and my own personal place in all this is fascinating to me. Often illusive, it is something, nevertheless, that I consider every day. I believe that it is the answer to the perpetual question, “Why are we here?” I personally feel that we are here to seek the truth of our existence.

And so I am a seeker.