Reflection on the Yamas: Satya

The second yama is satya. Satya is regularly translated as ‘truthfulness.’ Barbara Stoler Miller fleshes this out as, “When one abides in truthfulness, activity and its fruition are grounded in the truth.” The observance of satya, truthfulness, requires an alignment between an impartial self-awareness that develops our self-knowledge in each moment and an outer expression that arises out of that awareness and knowledge. Staying grounded within the sphere of an impartial awareness allows for the truthful engagement with whatever arises and is revealed.

The difficulty of observing satya in practice enters when we begin to question what the truth actually is. How is it that what we say can be truthful, let alone having a true thought? How can our actions be false, or untrue? True to what? What is the difference between abiding in truthfulness, and the dichotomy of a true or false statement?

Truth is slippery–a double-edged sword. We might normally think of truth as being some sort of duality, or a statement that is either true or false. This is in accord with schools of western science and logic. What we say can either hold truth value, or it is a lie and holds no truthful value. Is it a spectrum? Can there be a degree of truth? Do these questions fit when we drop the realm of statements in speech or writing and begin to think about truthfulness in action? What about the truth of our self-knowledge?

We can answer a question given to us with a response that doesn’t fit the question. The response seems truthful, but it bears no real relation to the question being asked. Someone asks, “how’s your day going?” and the response is “the sun is shining,” but you just found out your family member is in the hospital, and you’re feeling anxious. Is this being truthful? Or, is it an evasion of the question? If it’s an evasion, does that necessarily make it a lie?

On the flipside, perhaps you ask someone, “how’s your day?” but you really don’t care to know. You’re only making pleasantries and you actually desire that the person you are asking gives you an answer of, “good,” so you can continue on in your day with the uncaring attitude. Is this being truthful?

Another example may be in going to work at a job. You are working to make money to pay your bills. However, your job asks you to do something you feel internally repulsed by. You are vegan, yet you work at a barbeque restaurant where they primarily serve meat. Watching them cut, cook, and serve this meat is completely against what you feel is right and yet you continue to work there. The money is good. Is continuing to work at this restaurant an expression of your truth? Maybe in one way but not another.

In the above examples, the actions and speech don’t fit the thoughts and feelings of the individual. There appears to be a subjective miscommunication in expression. The felt truth of subjective life doesn’t correspond with the external actions and circumstances. Something doesn’t cross between them. How do we find the truth within ourselves to live it outwardly? How do we practice living the truth? Can a person practice living in truthfulness? Or, is it a zero-sum game–either you are living truthfully or not?

To go on a slight digression, Sri Aurobindo writes on three methods for discovery and expression of truth. He shows that what’s required is actually a kind of poised skeptical attitude, an impartial attention that observes all things and the truth which may arise. 

In brief, the first method is the religio-spiritual which seeks an implementation of a revelation out of spiritual experience. Next is the philosophical method that works to construct a reasoned approach out of the mind’s rational faculty. The third is the scientific method, (initially purporting to end the need of the prior two but has been unsuccessful of this), which is an intellectualization based on empirical observation and experimentation of the physical world and its processes. None of the methods have so far been successful at giving a whole vision and understanding of the truth.

What Aurobindo suggests is a kind of amalgamation of these methods that unite in the form of an attitude towards our lives and lived experience. This attitude is skeptical in nature, and requires an impartial observation of the inner experiences as they reveal themselves to us. These experiences are continuously reintegrated through philosophical reasoning and inquiry into the physical processes of the world through scientific experimentation. This attitude can be understood as a practical approach to understanding satya.

But what is the source of the truth within ourselves? How do we know our own truth? It may be that there are different methods to discern and express the truth, but the truth relevant to what? What’s important regarding the topic of satya is that there’s a part of our existential makeup as human beings where truth arises from, where we connect with reality. The source of that part is in the very fact of our existence.

The source of truth to be found within ourselves is the ‘I am.’ There is nothing that we can do which negates the truth of our existence. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj states, “By no effort of logic or imagination can you change the ‘I am’ into the I am not.’ In the very denial of your being you assert it. Once you realize that the world is your own projection, you are free of it.” We must begin with the simple fact that we exist, that ‘I am,’ like a Cartesian meditation.

Coming back now, the practical relation to satya and truthfulness begins when we start to search within and discover the truth about ourselves as it’s revealed to us–through our inner experience. Without shutting out any kind of experience, we can be open to the arising of anything (e.g. intuition, vision, dream, or anything else we may not even initially consider possible, or consider at all). It’s an unforced openness.

Out of this openness, any inner impression of ourselves can reveal aspects of our nature that we may not have been conscious of. This might be an intuition about why we act, or react, in certain ways towards specific people and events based on past experiences, or why we think particular thoughts based on our formal education. This openness to experience can slowly bring more subtle experiences of intuition and vision concerning the nature of reality. This openness is towards the source of our awareness. Consciously engaging with that central part offers the possibility of abiding there, in the truthfulness as it is revealed to our unique individual selves.

Now that we become more open to the various experiences of our inner lives, whatever they may be, it becomes possible to act from what is revealed to us about ourselves–to act in accordance with our self-knowledge. Abiding in truthfulness, we find our center in the simple knowledge of our existential reality. Knowing that ‘I am’ opens a freedom to explore what ‘I am.’ 

To be in accordance with truth and being is the freedom to open out the truth within our hearts and minds towards the world. Abiding in truthfulness is freedom. This abiding is consciously staying in a state of awareness that observes the subjective fluctuations of the inner mind and the incoming external impressions, how they intermix within our experience, and allow for a knowing action from that awareness of the processes. There is freedom because the actions then occurring stem from a being that is fully aware of the truth of their inner thoughts, feelings, and other inner arisings. One part does not reject anything from another part.