We received the following email from a reader:

A quote from the sign

"We are neither liberal nor conservative, neither left nor right. We strive to present the news from the point of view of the Soul. Our concern is how the events on the planet, not only those within the US, affect our spiritual evolution"

please tell me how this is helping evolution of spirit with comments and songs like this by the sign of the times

"If you like music but don't like Bush, then check out the latest Signs of the Times production, You Lied. The words are now translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese."

All I see is the same finger point and hateful comments that the bush and his people do. How does this make anyone better? How does it help us grow?

Is this how we help the spiritual evolution?

Do you think that these type of games are childish?

The truth speaks for itself it does not need childish comments or games. The truth is harder to see when you add your games.

We are here for the truth.

s. (United States)

"The truth speaks for itself" according to our letter-writer. We are curious to know how S. thinks this transparency of the truth works. We hope he will reply and explain because our experience shows us that finding the truth is very hard work, and let us be clear that we do not think that we "have" the truth.

Perhaps we have different understanding or definition of what is meant by the word "truth" than our reader, and he will be able to clarify that for us. For our part, finding the truth is a process of acquiring knowledge about our world in order to have the most accurate description, analysis, and understanding of our reality as possible, as close as we can come to an objective view and understanding of that reality. As we say, knowledge protects.

As we work to acquire this knowledge, we learn that there are others who are actively at work to hide the truth, to suppress it, to wrap it up in a thousands lies, and this occurs in every domain where man sets his hand.

There are many different levels to knowledge. There is scientific knowledge in the language of mathematics such as the equations that describe quantum and classical physics. Obviously more needs to be done to create the theory that will embrace the two. Such a theory might well put ideas of hyperdimensions on a firm scientific foundation so that we could understand more of the various anomalous manifestations that are described in myth and legend, as well as of modern Fortean phenomena. It might even permit us to move in different ways through space/time.

Another scientific understanding that is sorely lacking is the description of the human body that would give us a scientific understanding of the alchemical transformation. Were our understanding of physics complete, then it might also help us to comprehend our place in the grand scheme of the cosmos and show how, where, and why the alchemical transformation fits into it.

These are only a few examples, but there is quite clearly much, much more work to be done to arrive at these mathematical and scientific descriptions of reality.

Moving to a level of reality with which we are more familiar, we come to our planet and in our solar system. We know almost nothing about these systems. There are discoveries made regularly that put into question our understanding of the solar system. The Voyager spacecraft, having left the solar system, is encountering a drag on its movement that current theory cannot explain. There are conflicting theories as to the formation of the solar system, not to mention the possibility of electrical transference between celestial objects. Is the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter the remains of a planet that blew up long ago? Is there life on other planets of our system, or was there? Might this life once have been similar to ours, with beings that might pass as "men"?

These are not questions with easy answers. We think that working towards the truth means working to find them without excluding answers that might appear to us unbelievable beforehand.

Moving from the heavens to our own planet, what do we really know of its history or of the history of mankind? There is a truism that history is written by the victors, but to what extent do we take that into account when we learn or recite the history that we consider "ours"? There is general agreement that Hitler was a madman. As we look back to the Germany of the 1930's, we pause to ask how it was that a "madman" could have become the leader of a country that had produced so many of the lasting works of European culture? To what extent does the victor's portrayal of "Hitler as madman" now hinder us from seeing what is happening in the United States?

Moreover, there are people alive today who were alive when Hitler came to power who can give us first-hand reports, and yet we still fall victim to simplistic explanations of "a madman". How much more problematic is it, then, when we look at events that occurred two or three hundred years ago, the American revolution for example? Or two thousand years ago when a man who has come to be known as Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth? Hundreds of millions of people believe the "history" of the gospels. How easy is it to see the truth of the life of the man known as Jesus amidst the passions and belief structures built on his name?

And what if we go back many, many thousands of years?

Is the myth of Atlantis only a myth, or were there flesh and blood Atlanteans behind the myth, people similar to ourselves who may have faced the same pressures and choices, finding themselves on the verge of a catastrophe that destroyed them? If so, are there things we could learn from that history so that we might make different choices to avert the catastrophe our civilisation appears to be racing towards with such nonchalance?

And were there other civilisations prior to that? How would it change our ideas of ourselves and of our species if we were to learn that we are but one of a long line of civilisations that have risen and fallen, stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, civilisations that destroyed themselves or came to a firey end due to planetary cataclysmes? Would we learn some humility?

Bringing ourselves very close to home, there is another level of knowledge that comprises the level of knowledge of ourselves. Many people identify very strongly with their bodies. They believe that when the body dies, they will die, that nothing will continue to exist except in the memories of those who knew them. Western culture is very much under the sway of such a conception of existence with its emphasis on technological toys that are said to improve our way of life. What they mean by this is that it improves our physical existence by automizing large parts of it, but at what cost to other aspects of ourselves?

But are we really no more than bits of flesh and bone animated by a high level of complexity achieved through evolution?

Others believe that life continues in another form, be it in Heaven at the right hand of the Almighty, or as a long series of incarnations. Is there a way of making the choice between these options clearer, a way of weighing the decision through the acquisition of knowledge?

Perhaps, here, there can never be any response given with certainty because it would interfere with our free will, our ability to chose based upon our level of being. Perhaps life must be ambiguous on some level to permit us to develop our capacity to discern between fact and illusion, between truth and wishful thinking.

Here we come to what is, for us, fundamental: who we are, that is, our level of BEing, determines what we SEE. Who we are determines how close we are able to come to perceiving reality objectively, uninfluenced by our socialization, our education, by the programmes laid down in our central nervous systems during our early years. This realisation opens up a new understanding of our work to achieve a scientific understanding of the world because it may well be that only people who have undertaken the work on themselves necessary to be able to see themselves as objectively as possible will be able to come to an objective understanding of the deeper mysteries of the universe.

In this sense, even if the truth did speak for itself, it would fall upon deaf ears until we developed our ability to listen to it.

If the description of the inner make-up of our species as given by the alchemists, by Gurdjieff and in the teachings of esoteric Christianity, and in other esoteric traditions is correct, the truth that speaks is within ourselves, it is part of those higher centres with which we have long lost contact. The work of rooting out our programmes, our subjectivity, is what clears the channels so to speak to permit us to reestablish the link with our higher self.

Our experience has shown us that one way to do the work on the self to renew this link is to watch our world as closely as we can. The editors of the Signs page are not mathematical physicists who can work out the equations of the grand "Theory of Everything". But we can work on a different level by bringing to light the lies and manipulations in the social world. We are not taught in school a true history of our planet or of the development of human civilisations. We are not taught about the cyclic catastrophes that wreak destruction on human society. We are not taught that our leaders regularly lie to us in order to keep us under their spell. We are not taught about ourselves in ways to make us critical thinkers with an accurate knowledge of how what is commonly known as our psychology works. We are not taught to see the material world as a place where we have lessons to learn before we are able to move on; we are taught to wallow in its sensual pleasures, taught that this is all there is, so make the most of it while you're here.

Yes, there are religious and philosophical systems that would have us place more emphasis on questions of the spirit, but most people pay lip service to them, if they pay any attention to them at all.

Finally, we come to the point that in our world there are forces actively at work hiding, obscuring, and muddying the truth. One of the arms in this battle is programming us with ideas such as "the truth speaks for itself".

If the truth speaks for itself, then why do so few people see it?

Take the events of 9/11 as an example. We all saw two airplanes hit the towers of the WTC. It was broadcast and replayed endlessly. We saw the fire at the Pentagon and the hole in the ground in Pennsylvania. We saw the FBI images of 19 Arab men who we were told had done this heinous act. We were given as proof that they had conveniently left an Arabic language flight manual in their rented car. We saw images of Osama bin Laden speaking out about the role of the United States in the Islamic countries and calling his people to jihad.

The truth speaks for itself, right?

Yet others looked again. They questioned why the towers fell after the impacts and fires when no other steel-framed building had ever collapsed after such a fire. They asked why the towers came down so carefully, falling neatly in their footprints as if they had been professionally demolished. They asked why the hole on the façade of the Pentagon was only a few metres wide and why the lawn outside showed no signs of the crash of such a large plane. They asked how it was possible for a plane to disappear, vapourised by the heat, while the bodies inside that plane did not and were supposedly identified using DNA testing. They asked why the firemen who were on the scene within minutes reported they saw no parts of the plane that first morning. They asked how it was possible for a plane that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania to have its parts spread over a radius of 8 miles unless it had been shot down out of the sky by the military jet seen circling over the crash site. They asked why it was that the "crash" came just at the moment the passengers were wrestling control of the jet back from the "hijackers". They asked why Mohammed Atta's father was able to receive a phone call from his son the day after 9/11 claiming he was being framed. They asked why seven of the alleged hijackers are still alive and proclaiming their innocence.

And they ask why these facts are not being reported in the mainstream press in the United States and did not find their way into the final report of the commission assigned to investigate. Surely, if the truth spoke for itself, there would be general agreement on what actually happened and who was responsible that took into consideration these inconsistencies and facts.

There are forces that do not want the truth to be spoken, who work actively to spread the lie. It is work to separate the two, to find the truth amidst the real and planted evidence. First of all, one must understand that there is such an entropic force at work, moving beyond the simple idea that people just see things differently or that people make mistakes.

No. There are people who consciously choose to lie and to manipulate others with those lies.

The question for those who wish to align themselves with the truth is what to do in the face of such an opponent -- for it is an opponent. There is an unbridgeable gulf here in our world, on our level of existence, between the truth and the lie, between creativity and entropy. We are engaged in spiritual warfare.

Therefore, to reach your desired aim, it is first of all necessary to stifle your own wills and finally to extinguish and kill them all together. And in order to succeed in this, you must constantly oppose all evil in yourself and urge yourself towards good. In other words, you must ceaselessly fight against yourself and against everything that panders to you own wills, that incites and supports them. So prepare yourself for this struggle and this warfare and know that the crown -- attainment of your desired aim -- is given to none except to the valiant among warriors and wrestlers.

But if this is the hardest of all wars -- since in fighting against ourselves it is in ourselves that we meet opposition -- victory in it is the most glorious of all... [Unseen Warfare, edited by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and revised by Theophan the Recluse, St Vladimir's Seminary Press, p. 81]

What do the words of these men, describing an interior battle with the self, have to do with standing up for the truth in the face of the lies of the Bush administration and its work to impose a theocratic police state upon the American people?

We discussed above the relationship between our level of BEing and our ability to SEE. The work on ourselves is the work to root out the lies we tell to ourselves, the lies told by the "wills" mentioned in the citation above. Many of these lies are unconscious. We are not even aware we are lying to ourselves. We know ourselves so little that we do not know why we do many things, why we say what we do; our actions and words are carried out and spoken by programming of which we are not aware. We are reactors, not actors. We are bundles of of competing and often contradictory "wills".

As we learn to see the lies in ourselves, we can then see them in others, and seeing the lies in others may help us to see them in ourselves. One of the big lies that we have bought is the lie that we are here to change the world, to make it a better place. We act upon this lie in our relationships when we try and change each other, a quest that is always doomed to failure, leading to pain and suffering for all involved.

As above, so below; as below, so above. An objective reading of the world shows us the same dynamic, that no matter how hard people have tried to make the world more just, they have failed. They seek to bend the world to their idea of what it should be, just as we try and bend our mate to our conception of how he or she should be. Yes, people and things change. We have what is called technological progress, but this progress affects only the outer shell of things. It is an expression of our own inner mechanicalness. To believe in progress is to believe a lie.

To refuse a lie is to stand against the mechanical nature of ourselves and the world, to stand firm against the descending current of the stream of entropy.

Refusing a lie as a conscious choice is an alchemical act. Something within ourselves changes. We become magnetized to the truth. Each time we choose to defend the truth, this magnetizing becomes stronger. Returning to the metaphor of the stream, from simply holding our own against the current of entropy, we can begin to make small steps against that current. For those who have not yet begun to work on themselves, standing up for the truth in the face of Bush's lies can be a step towards seeing the higher truth that we cannot impose our will upon the world as they realise that things are as they are for a reason.

Spiritual work is neither separate from nor isolated from our daily lives; this is the premise of what is known as the Fourth Way. We are in a world where men like Bush rule. By studying them we can learn about psychopathy. By seeing the majority of the people around us react in ways so foreign to our own, we can understand the organic portal. We thus gain knowledge of this world, to better protect ourselves from its draining influences and to better learn how not to be feeders ourselves. As we learn to conserve our energy by defending ourselves against psychopaths and organic portals, we change our BEing, increasing our ability to SEE. These lessons help us to really SEE that the world is as it is for a reason and that it is arrogant and presumptuous of us to think that we can impose an answer or a way of life on anyone else.

The most we can do is learn to use our own free will consciously and with awareness of the effects of each of our choices. And then we can begin to give back to this world to even the balance for all that we have been given.

The Pentagon Strike flash is an example of this giving back. As of January, over 300,000,000 people had seen it. By now it may be well over that number. In a world where the truth is hidden to such a degree that many people are not even aware of what questions to ask, the Pentagon Strike served as one means of heightening people's awareness of the questions the official story tries to gloss over. Such a heightening of awareness might be the first step for some of them in finding their way out of the labyrinth. It was a selfless and creative act, a giving back to the universe with no anticipation of what its effect might be. It presented questions on the Pentagon crash in a way that made them accessible to people who otherwise might never have come into contact with these questions. It opened a door to the truth.

We may never know all of the details about what happened at the Pentagon that day, about what happened to the people who were on the real Flight 77, where they landed and how they were killed. For that we can thank those who are working so long and hard against the truth.

We can thank Darren Williams for his contribution to unmasking that cover-up.

The song You Lied that our reader finds "childish" and "name-calling" might serve the same purpose. We don't know yet. It presents an overview of Bush's reign in a format that makes it readily available to a wider audience than the Signs page. It is another way to pass through the wall of deceit the administration has imposed upon the American people.

Both of these efforts are examples of finding creative ways of getting important questions out to a wide audience, bypassing the filters put in place by the media.

Each of us sees the world in a slightly different way depending upon our background, our culture, the way we were raised, our language, and many other factors. This difference is not a problem or hindrance in our work; on the contrary it is essential to the work because we each bring a piece of the puzzle to the table when we consciously decide to align ourselves with the truth, when we magnetize ourselves with each conscious choice to stand for the truth, with our creativity. Each piece that is shared with others brings us all a step closer to that truth; it hilights another facet of reality and increases the shared knowledge and understanding of everyone.

Perhaps we could say that "the truth" is not a noun, it is a verb describing a feedback loop cycling from perception to action and back again, with each choice of doing what we think is necessary to align with the truth in any given situation then creating new conditions for our ability to perceive and discern the truth in the next situation. Sometimes we will see that our action was in accordance with reality; other times we will see that we missed an essential fact and our action increased entropy. Then we have the chance to go back and understand how and why we erred, recalibrating our reading instrument so that we will make a better choice next time.

The truth does not speak for itself. It must be spoken by each of us, through us, in each of our choices, our words, and our acts. If we do not, then truth will not be manifest upon our earth.