In the Still of the Night

It's one a.m. I woke up about an hour ago struggling with fear and doubt and distrust. Plenty of problems but one in particular. (You don’t need to know it, you have enough problems of your own, I’m sure.) So, I got up to write. I nearly always find peace in writing. It seems to tap me into the veins of pure gold. 

At times like this I often recall what my mother used to say to me when I was troubled. “Just know the truth about it, dear,” and somehow even those words that had little meaning to me then would calm my mind and relieve me from distress. In my childlike way I’d say, “Know the truth, know the truth, know the truth.”

Error and truth are the tares and the wheat of our lives. They grow side by side but until the harvest, the time when both are ripe enough to be clearly distinguishable from each other and reaped, it is best not to try to separate them. From small quarrels to world wide wars, men suffer by imposing immature concepts of truth if not bald-faced lies on one another. 

So, how can we know truth from error? “By their fruits ye shall know them,” is the answer we find in most religions, philosophies and plain common sense. Nowadays it’s becoming more reasonable to leave the question of truth to the ages. “Don’t fight over it, children,” we say. But on the other hand as adults we see the necessity to rise in opposition to what is patently wrong, even if it means treating violence with violence, cruelty with cruelty. It is hard to trust in the power of right when wrong goes rampant but when we resort to using the enemy’s weapons it’s anyone’s guess who will win. 

The common enemy mankind has is ignorance. Just as children, we grab and hit, yell profanities and kick, complain and cry because we don’t know any better. In the middle of the night if I awake and some problem or problems keep troubling me, I find peace in the thought that there’s an answer to everything bad in the world. That answer is good and good does not need our defense of it, only our acknowledgment that it, good, is the only real. The power that good wields needs only to be recognized. The mere faith that for every wrong there is a right, for every pain there is comfort, for every threat there is safety, brings us to a first step in solving all problems. 

Thanks to the powers that be we can at least begin to distinguish what is good and what is not. Now the job is to recognize which, good or bad, has all-power and which has none. We need to stop giving equal rights to both truth and the lies about it. If good is real, then bad must be unreal, no matter how aggressively it appears real. They say, "Get real," when they mean "believe what you see." Truth says, "Get real" when it means, "between opposites there can be only one real. Which is it, good or evil?"  

Here in my quiet little home this person I call me can get up in the middle of the night and declare with absolute certainty that good will win. Why? Because good is true and evil is its opposite, therefore unreal no matter how terrible and aggressive it pretends to be. 

Do I need to prove this? No, I just need to open my eyes and my heart to see it working. I’ve seen it before and I can see it again. Knowing the truth is the same as to stop believing lies such as sin, disease and death. Take away belief in limitation too and you can have the rest. If this isn’t the truth, then pity us all, but I’ll wager my all on it. 

Now my “problem” has lost its sting because I’m giving it no power. If I can know the truth more and trust in it in the middle of the night surely the day will bring its proof. I don't doubt it will take a few more nights and a few more days, but although this path is narrow, it is leading me home.