Truth
“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
- John 8:32 NIV
I have just published my book, Another Way: A Guide to Understanding the Inner Child and a Path to Reclaiming Our Divinity, and have had a little more time to read for pleasure. And so I’ve chosen to read the Torah for the first time (not the lightest reading, I know). Throughout my life I have heard the stories in the Torah, but reading it for myself has actually been rather exciting. It has opened my mind about certain teachings, including the one above by Jesus (from the Gospels).
This saying is perhaps the most widely known of Jesus’s, and yet it has taken on new meaning for me after having read some of the Torah. I had always thought “knowing” something was an act of the mind, so that to “know” the truth was to know it intellectually. But in the Torah, “knowing” is often used to refer to intercourse or sexual intimacy: “And the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain” (Genesis 4:1 Tanakh). With this perspective then, what does it mean to know the truth, and how does knowing it set us free?
I do not know what the truth is, but I can learn to know what my truth is, and what is my truth but my present experience? Therefore, to know my truth is to become intimate with my present experience or emotional life—my Inner Child. This is no doubt one of the most difficult things to do, for we are not often taught how to be intimate with our experience, how to be in relationship with it. What does it mean to feel our feelings? How do we love our Inner Child? It is a journey of exploration, of trying things on and seeing how they work… and we always learn when we try. When I choose to learn how to love my Inner Child—my truth of the moment—and as best I can be present to what is there, the result is a greater sensation of freedom. I feel more free and open in my body and mind, and heart.
And isn’t it interesting that the act of intimacy, referred to as “knowing” in the Torah, creates a child? While my Inner Child has always been a part of me, it is only through knowing them that they are given life, and that I in turn feel more alive.
The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan House, 2011.
