For a long time I was pretty sure that truth was what you got when you confessed to having done something bad. Kind of a George-Washington-I-cannot-tell-a-lie sort of thing.

Later, due to the discomfort of the consequences that came along with confession, I got smarter and switched to a variation that I thought would take the heat off me. A point-the-finger-and-be-honest-at-all-costs kind of truth, as in: I cannot tell a lie, that’s a seriously ugly tie.

Always, there was another truth, the major-big-deal-capital-T kind, hanging over my head in the form of an elusive Old Man In The Sky Who Knew The Way It Was.

Any other renditions of the truth took a back seat to these three, which had one thing in common. They all felt awful.

Desperately Seeking Truth

Aware of it or not, I’ve spent most of my life desperately seeking truth of the shall-set-you-free kind. I’ve always wanted truth to spell relief.

In graduate school I thought I was onto something when I discovered the difference between simple and easy while writing a thesis called, Life Made Simple.

Later, it became clear that truth, like life, is simple, all right. But it’s not easy. I found that out by writing a newspaper column called Simple Truths.

Every week I locked horns with an ordinary experience of life that inevitably turned enormously complex in the process of seeking the simple truth within it.

Truth That’s Too Simple to Tell

Out of all this desperate seeking, I’ve discovered that the truth is simple–and elusive. It’s as though the truth is too simple for us. We can look right at it and not see it. We can experience it and not know it. We can think we’re telling it even when we’re not. It’s like being stuck in a box with the “how-to-open” instructions written on the outside.

As kids we learn to lie to protect ourselves and then, as adults, we’re stuck because the truth looks dangerous. We go against reality when we go against the truth. And we’re unhappy, all the while thinking more lies will shore things up.

The truth is essential to a lucid moment. In fact a lucid moment is the truth right there, all at once, bare and clear.

On this Lucid Moments blog, some of the things we can explore in the Simple Truths department include:

• How to get out of the box by telling the simple truth.
• How to reclaim some essential things we’ve lost–freedom, authenticity, intimacy, passion, and aliveness–for starters.
• How telling personal truth, truth with a small “t,” puts us on the path to the Truth with a capital “T.”

I’d love to hear your experience with truth telling. What’s the hardest thing for you about telling the truth? Please leave a comment. Enquiring minds want to know!