Have you ever had a time where the perceived benefits of remaining silent or bending the truth seemed to weigh heavily against the potential consequences of telling the truth? Such decisions can be challenging, especially in situations where you stand to lose someone or something valuable in the process.

Truth, in the world as it now is, is often received as a hard saying. Speak the truth, for instance, and you might lose a friend, the respect of your peers, your job, or worse, your life. Speak the truth and you might find yourself attacked by those whose lives and livelihoods might be threatened by what the truth might bring to light.

“Truth hurts,” they say, perhaps because speaking the truth is fraught with a fair measure of risk of outer loss. If something is built on lies or on an amalgam of truth and lies, the expression of truth brings pressure on the mixture. Living in the mixed state is uncomfortable, uncertain and fraught with danger. Truth sets you free from the mixed state of being. This is why truth is called “the Comforter.”

Truth is amazingly potent because love dwells in its core. Love is the only power in the universe and love intensifies all that it touches. Align with love and truth, live in accordance with the spirits of love and truth, and you will live a fulfilling life. It may not be a universally happy or easy life, but a deep and abiding sense of tranquility and assurance will remain with you and in you, always.

Fail to speak the truth, however, and you incrementally lose something less outwardly visible, but much more substantive: your integrity and as a result, your dignity. Each time you turn your back on truth or fail to express it when you are compelled by the “still small voice” within you to do so, you become less than you know you are capable of being.

To speak the truth and nothing but the truth requires courage. That courage must come to focus in relation to you internally. There is tremendous adventure in telling the truth and that can be daunting if you’re not used to living a life of adventure. It may not be obvious, but the life of adventure of which I speak is much more demanding than a life of recklessness. This adventure centers around navigating the pitfalls of human nature, rising above ethical traps that have destroyed the lives of countless millions if not billions of people on earth, and revealing meaning by virtue of assuming complete responsibility for your thoughts, words, actions—the spirits you express—regardless of the nature of your circumstances.

Think about it this way: whatever happens as a consequence of telling the truth is the best thing that can happen. It may not be pretty, you might lose your coveted reputation among your peers, you may lose the identity you have constructed for yourself, you might struggle and suffer more than might seem fair, reasonable, or even possible, but through it all you will maintain your integrity and you will be able to walk with your head high and your heart light, no matter what the world throws at you.

Fulfillment does not always come dressed as happiness, it is much deeper than the fleeting emotional state called happiness. Fulfillment comes on the heels of meaningful function and it is known principally as a result of assisting others in finding their fulfillment. There truly is no greater expression of love than to lay down your life for your friends in this sense, not by dying, but by truly living.

Sometimes the fruits of right function take more time than you might imagine to ripen. Moreover, when you dedicate yourself to truth you find that you rarely know what will happen as a result of your steadfast orientation. The beauty of it is that once you dedicate yourself to the expression of truth you find that you are no longer constrained by the expectation of results. You simply speak truth, let love radiate through all that you do, without concern for results. In doing this, you find yourself overcoming all that has imprisoned, limited, and confounded mankind for an unnecessarily long time.

And that, dear friends, is the ultimate adventure.

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