The Root of All Lies

It's my last morning here in the desert after an epic week of going out to lose my mind and tap into my soul.

Three themes ring prominent from this week: epistemology, finding beauty where no one would expect it, and reaching an inner knowing of truth.

Epistemology is the study of how you know something is true. What method do you use to decide what's real and what's not?

I started this trip with my dad in some deep philosophical conversations about epistemology, while simultaneously texting a couple of my friends who operate out of more of a traditional Christian epistemology.

Most people think there are two camps when it comes to knowing truth:

Camp One: You trust your own experience – your senses, your mind, your intuition. You observe reality directly and come to your own conclusions.

Camp Two: You trust a source higher than yourself – the Bible, scientific consensus, the Quran, some authoritative system that you believe knows better than your own perception.

Now, the Camp Two people have a point. They recognize something true: your thoughts lie to you all the time. You think you need that new car to be happy. You think that person insulted you when they didn't. You see what you think is a bird in the sky, but it’s actually a plane. Your desires cloud your judgment. Your fears make you see threats that aren't there. And your thinking, judging mind plays tricks on you.

So they conclude: "See? You can't trust yourself. You need something outside yourself – scripture, doctrine, external authority – to know what's true."

But here's where they fall short. They're right that the thinking mind is unreliable. They're right that it distorts reality. But their solution is like refusing to ever look in a mirror again just because the mirror is fogged up. Instead of wiping the mirror off and seeing for themselves, they just decide to let someone else tell them what they look like.

Here is the truth that most trad religion followers do not touch: Beneath all those thoughts and stories and egoic distortions, there is something observing all of the outer commotion. There's an awareness that watches those distracting, noisy, and often deceptive thoughts come and go. That observer – is actually you. And that’s the source of real knowing. That's what you can trust. But it speaks a very different language than what most people are used to hearing.

The traditionalists are half right. The thinking mind does deceive. They just don't realize there's something deeper you can access that doesn't.

And here's my real take: everyone is actually in Camp One, whether they realize it or not.

Even if you say "I follow the Bible above all else" or "I only trust peer-reviewed science," you're still using your own mind to make that choice anyway... At some point, you used your rationality, your intuition, your judgment to decide that *this* particular book or system is the ultimate authority. You observed the world, weighed the options, and concluded "this is the source of truth I'm going to follow."

Then you just turn off your brain after making that decision. Not completely, but at least a little bit - you turn it off when it contradicts what you perceive as contradictory knowledge in the book.

You've outsourced your knowing to something external, but the choice to outsource was still yours. You're still the one who decided what to trust.

This might seem like philosophical mumbo jumbo, but it's actually at the root of literally everything that exists and how people choose to live their lives.

If you've decided the Bible has higher authority than your own inner knowing, that shapes everything for you – you'll follow orthodox Christianity, avoid meditation or yoga or studying other religions because the book warns against it. If you've decided the Quran is the ultimate authority, you might believe women should wear burkas. If you've decided Hindu scripture is truth, you might become vegan. If you've decided Ayn Rand's objectivism is the way, you'll focus on productivity, sovereignty, Bitcoin. If you've decided Karl Marx had it right, you'll live and vote accordingly.

This, as you can follow the white rabbit, has critical consequences. We literally go to war over our beliefs. The books contradict each other, so we fight and kill who doesn’t believe in our book.

So… how we decide that we know a thing is really important.

My approach is to trust my own experience and observation, and retreat from my own mind and senses into inner intuition, while paying attention to overlaps between science, ancient wisdom and various belief systems throughout history. But I place the highest importance on my own perception, my own ability to reach conclusions about truth.

I believe most people are doing the same thing, but they skip over crucial steps and actually blind themselves to real truth by handing over their judgment to an external authority and never questioning it again.

Jesus said, 'Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones.' Matthew 23:27.

They had the external doctrine down perfectly but were spiritually dead inside. They avoided looking within for answers, which is exactly where Jesus pointed to as well in Luke 17:20-21, Matthew 6:6, and John 4:23-24 among other parables.

So what happens when you actually go within like Jesus said to? You discover some pretty shocking stuff… first being this: you don't author your own thoughts.

Anybody reading this can observe this right now. If you simply find a quiet room, close your eyes for a moment and ask yourself, "What will my next thought be?"

And then you wait. You sit there like a cat waiting for a mouse to jump out of a hole, just waiting, awaiting what your next thought is going to be.

Try this for 60 seconds or so, and you realize you have no idea. You literally have no idea what your next thought is going to be.

This has major implications. I mean think about it. What does this tell you about how much free will you have? You don't know what you're going to think next.

How could you possibly know what you’re really going to do next? Whether we have free will is a whole other topic… But let’s keep going past the thoughts…

As you turn your awareness back in on itself, you also realize that the thought streams that normally make up your life are simply just stories that have been ascribed to us since birth about who we are, what's happening in this moment on this plane of existence that we call life. And the more we turn away from the htoughts, and into awareness itself, the more you realize you are the thing observing the thoughts.

You are not your thoughts. You are the one that observes the thoughts.

Many people skip over this reality of who they really are every day. And I believe it's the root of all lies.

The root of all lies is skipping who you really are, and believing the false voice inside your head that is constantly complaining, constantly desiring things, wanting things, constantly restless, constantly fearful, anxious, threatened, insecure, angry. Sometimes happy when you get what you want out of life, sometimes happy when your girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife does what you want them to do, sometimes happy when your paycheck hits.

But it's a hypnotic rhythm, a demonic hypnotic rhythm in the mind that keeps us trapped, that keeps us away from who we really are. It keeps us away from the source of all knowledge, the source of all knowing, and this source is our connection to God.

And when you retreat back into the seat of observation, you do reach the inner kingdom of heaven and a peace that passeth all understanding.

From this space, you can very clearly see where everyone is missing the point. They're arguing about the outer story instead of looking at what the story points back to. This is why Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Hindus, and even atheists, think they have so much to disagree about. They've simply skipped over the inner knowing and the point of observation, and they've gotten locked into the stories of the mind.

When you do not skip the observer and realize you're the observer. You can see that every single religious doctrine – true religious doctrine that was written by someone who knew this stuff – was trying to point them back to the kingdom of heaven within.

There's specific qualities of the kingdom. The Bible describes it as many flowing waters from the belly. The Quran describes it as a garden with rivers flowing underneath it. The Jews called it the Kol Mayim Rabbim, The Voice of Many Waters. Atheists might just call it tinnitus, lol. Zen Buddhists call it the great Om. Christians use the word amen.

At the base of the inner knowing, the more deep you go, you realize what these things mean.

Atheists recognize, and scientists recognize, that everything that exists is made of tiny vibrating atomic and subatomic particles.

This vibration emits a sound.

And when you go within, you can hear that there is in fact a very quiet soundless sound underneath the noise of the world that gets louder and greater the further inward you go – a sound or sensation of different chimes of what seems to be the long peal of a gong, or waters flowing. They’re called these the seven churches in the book of Revelations. Hindus call them the seven chakras, energy centers in the body that have each have a particular vibration and sound.

And when you go to the point of observation and ‘pray in your temple in secret’, you literally can hear the many waters, the om, the amen reverberating throughout eternity.

And from this point, this is where truth is found.

At this point of awareness, you know the truth. When you are still, you know. You do not have to believe in anything anymore. You just know.

This is provable to anyone willing to close their eyes and try it. The thinking mind will fight you. It knows that shifting from thinking mode to observation mode is its own death, so it will frantically throw thoughts and emotions at you to stop you from doing this.

And here's the thing – the more time you spend in this observation mode, looking inward, the more you experience that peace in your soul. And when you find it there, you stop looking for it elsewhere. You're no longer seeking peace in accumulation of money or things, in your relationship, in getting what you want from life. You've found the source. And as a byproduct, you're much more likely to actually be at peace, to be kinder, to naturally live the eternal truthful laws that Jesus and the great masters have taught – and not because a book told you to do it, but because you've touched the kingdom they were pointing to.

From this place, you're able to find beauty in the mundane. You're able to see the light, even in the eyes of your enemies. You're inspired. And hopefully you can stay there long enough to channel that inspiration into creations that carry the fragrance of this divine vibration.

So will you go in? Or keep searching for answers outside your Self?

Take a trip in nature.

Go out in order to go in.