The truth, the whole truth and ....

..... nothing but the truth? The catch is in the last phrase of that oath in court: ‘nothing but the truth’. The witness may not give an opinion. ‘I saw the accused strike the victim’ – statement of fact. ‘I think he intended to kill him’ – opinion! opinion! Not allowed in court. I notice how BBC correspondents often say, ‘I haven’t been able to verify this’, when reporting something they haven’t actually seen with their own eyes. By contrast I notice how often newspaper headlines confuse fact and opinion. They want to sell their newspaper. They know we’ll go for opinion rather than simple unadorned fact.

Mentally, we spend most of our waking lives in the opinion field. Coming quickly to moment by moment decisions based on opinions is what we’re good at. Our minds are stocked with a huge database of past experience. Faster than most computers we can access our mental hard drives and compare what we find there with the situation we are currently facing. We do it more or less instantly a million times a day.

The trouble is that, like most computer hard drives, our minds are cluttered with bits and pieces of old data, some of it corrupted by years of storage and over-writing. And the human brain stores not only facts, nor even only opinions. We store the feelings, the emotions that we experienced when we were first forming the opinions. “Young people nowadays .....” (opinion coming up!). “Men/women are .... “(opinion coming!) “I always ....” (opinion coming!). “You never ....” (Wait for it! Opinon coming!). And it’s not just what we say, it’s part of so-called ‘normal’ mental functioning. A million times a day we whip up a commentary on what’s going on, not only out there in the world but here in the hidden labyrinth of the mind. Without even realising it we will have walked a hundred yards mentally going over a conversation we’ve just had which didn’t go the way we wanted it to. We can experience a sudden pain in the chest and in ten seconds we’ve got ourselves mentally into hospital with a major heart attack to be followed by a restricted life and an early death. The fact that we are continuing to walk in a healthy manner entirely eludes us!

Maybe that’s why Jesus said we should become like little children if we want to enter the Kingdom. (And, yes, that’s my opinion because no one knows for sure exactly what was in Jesus’ mind when he said it). Children certainly don’t have so much experience to go on and that is both an advantage and a disadvantage for them. The advantage is that they can approach each new situation with a fresh mind.

Suppose what Jesus meant by the Kingdom is a state in which it is possible to be much more a witness rather than a commentator? Suppose there’s a place, deep within us from which it is possible to witness all this mental chatter without any commentary? Actually from this still centre within us we can witness the commentary itself and just let it be. The miracle is that it doesn’t seem to harm our capacity for living effectively in this complex world. On the contrary, finding our witnessing centre actually enhances us: makes us more fully alive, our judgements and actions surer and much more compassionate. The database is still there. We have learnt how to access it more helpfully. We learn to do it through meditation.