The following is a contemplation on something I’ve come to appreciate after some years on a spiritual path. I began as a philosophy student in college and studied for years, seeking to sift the nuggets of truth from the vast “tailings” of baffling experience and the bewildering speculations of so many pundits, scholars, scientists, writers, and experts of all kinds. This is what I’ve come to see and am yet learning to realize. I share it here for those who, like me, are on a similar path.

Reason can rarely steer one right because it cannot see the road upon which one is driving. It merely infers its existence and its contours from the observations of the senses (which everyone knows can be deceived), and through the inculcation of experience and the pronouncements of others. The basic principle here is that logic can only be as sound as the substance on which it feeds. Without true premises, there can only be false conclusions. How does one evaluate a truth?

Reason cannot originate truth. It produces only analysis, which is more likely to be false, at least in some measure, than true. Even if reason stumbled upon a truth, the knowingness that it was a truth would escape one. The only hope of truth is in knowing Truth, directly, without such intermediaries as reason, or a teacher, or a book, or some other external source. Knowing truth is a condition of conscious being, not of thinking. This is the great conundrum of philosophy, science, thought, and the source of human struggle.

The bridge from one’s current state of not-knowing-truth to the truth, is Consciousness. But this faculty, this beingness, must be awakened. That is the real challenge of life, the missing Philosopher’s Stone that can turn the perpetual struggle in darkness into a rewarding discovery of endless gold. It can only be awakened by associating with another whose consciousness is already fully awakened. Nothing else will do.

It appears that the answer to the woe and ill of earthly travail may be quite simple, so plain and evident that it escapes notice. Attached to the intricate machinations of thought, we may be overlooking the obvious truth. An awakened consciousness. We’re told by great ones of the past and present that that can only be achieved through associating with another who is awakened. Such a soul, like a tuning fork, will set one’s own consciousness resonating inwardly. That inward “sound” attracts one to it and becomes a center of discovery and action. Then, as one lives in that state, consciousness expands to embrace all of one’s life. After this, they say, one is free, for truth is simply one’s own true nature, which is immortal, conscious, loving, and free.