Finding your own truth won’t be reached through books or advanced degrees but through your own life experience. Your truth is that you are created from the image of God. In consequence, you have something sacred, something original, and something creative. But you waste your time wearing someone else’s clothes and copying someone else’s life. God wants you to dig for your treasure that can be found in your experiences.
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Life is a brutal teacher while formal education is a cute one. In life we experience living through a series of setbacks and failures. You are put into a test after test with no guidance except your heart. By time, when the rates of failure become unbearable, we sit to reflect and evaluate our experiences. What went wrong? Why did this happen to me? Is there any pattern that I keep on committing so much so that the outcome is the same? There should be a meaning for all this. That meaning is THE TRUTH: the truth about yourself. The only truth that will guide you throughout the journey of life.
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Because of the severity of the test, we are more drawn to the fake teacher. The fake teacher is the education system. It gives us fairy tales about the so-called leaders who conquered the world and discovered new lands. That system seduces us to be like them. But someone’s experience is not your experience and hence not your truth. Napoleon Bonaparte’s truth is his and only his; extracted from his own experiences. When I like Napoleon’s story and acts the way he did, I am not seeking my own truth but somebody else’s. It will be a real story with a fake artist. But the fake system attracts the fake students.
Our today’s guest is Jamal Malik; the hero of Oscar award winning movie “Slumdog Millionaire.” Jamal is an 18-year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, India. Being one of the contestants of Hindi Version of the quiz show “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” everyone asked him not to join the contest because of his background. Having been surrounded by well-educated contestants, many warned him of letting go as he has no education whatsoever; he never been into schools. Jamal never listens and kept on answering all questions, unlike all other contestants. As Jamal is one question away from winning the 20 million rupees, police arrested him on suspicion of cheating.
The reason is the fact that: how come an illiterate “Slumdog” like Jamal wins this grand game show while a more well-educated and wealthy contestants have failed? Jamal’s answers, as he recounts to the police inspector, were drawn from his severe life experiences. Such life experiences made him intelligent while the other intellectual contestants have a borrowed and fake knowledge. Theirs is knowledge, while Jamal has wisdom. They can talk poetically about love, science, but never experienced it; therefore, never been living.
Unless you find your own truth, you can’t make your life your own. And you make your life your own not by theorizing but rather by experiencing. That was Jamal’s truth; how about yours?
