“Truth is what the voice within tells you.” ~ Gandhi, Mahatma 3, p.144

Well, truth to tell, it’s not quite that simple. Certain it is that Truth is not what advertisers tell you, or in a way what anyone tells you, because for something to be really true for us we have to experience it ourselves. But for most of us ordinary mortals, we would be hard put to distinguish the voice of real intuition from the cacophony of random thoughts, most of them conditioned by outside influences (many of which do not have our best interests at heart) from the “voice within” that Gandhi is talking about. But we can get better at this by practice.

Meditation (which Gandhi certainly practiced, though he didn’t want to own up to it directly, lest he be put on a distant pedestal) is precisely a tried and true method for gradually getting the famous cacophony to subside, leaving the native love and wisdom to be heard again. Along the way, we can also benefit from careful attention to the feedback of our own experiences. When I have an “intuition” that turns out to be a disaster when I act it out, I go back and ask myself, “what did that feel like?” There’s a certain “feel” to true intuitions we can slowly learn to identify.

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About Daily Metta

Stephanie Van Hook, the Metta Center’s executive director, launched Daily Metta in 2015 as a way to share Gandhi’s spiritual wisdom and experiments with nonviolence.

Our 2016 Daily Metta continues with Gandhi on weekdays. On weekends, we share videos that complement Michael Nagler’s award-winning book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World. To help readers engage with the book more deeply, the Metta Center offers a free PDF study guide.

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