Paulo Coelho
On January 30, 2001, I read the following piece of news in the Spanish newspaper “La Vanguardia”.
“What is truth? The President of the Court, Josep Maria Pijuan, had to check which of the versions of rape offered by the girl victim, 11-year-old J., was closest to reality. The lawyers attending the questioning did not believe that she would manage to avoid contradicting herself in her deposition.
“At a certain moment the judge asked a rather philosophical question: What is truth? Is it what you imagine or what they asked you to tell?”
The girl stopped for a minute, then she answered:
“Truth is the bad they did to me.”
“Lawyer Jufresa, a renowned and prestigious jurist, said that was one of the most brilliant definitions she had heard in her whole career.”
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The truth goes out of the mouth of the children, as it is said
To stay “child” is thus an importance for all
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I guess only truth that i know is my existence…because it cannot be manipulated..thats the only truth that i have to bear till the time i m not dead…rest every other thing is relative, subjective, context dependent and above all vulnerable to manipulations!!
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Yes Truth is not beauty.
And I think there is no reality without truth,
so I think it’s very important to express the truth so that what you lived can become reality for you and people around you.If not you become mad because people don’t consider what you lived as real and you become to doubt about your reality and it’s a confilict in your spirits.
Love
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She was brave …
I wished I had been so brave after the same thing happened to me.
But I thought I protected my family because my grandmother was dying in cancer in the same time when the rape happened to me.
I thought there was enough sorrow and I didn´t want my mum to go through even more sorrow.
So I didn´t tell anyone until a year after, when I broke down sort of speak.
I couldn´t be quiet anymore, but it was to late to caught the perpetrator.
Because it happened aborad in another country.
I wished I had told someone right away, but I also feel ashamed even though it wasn´t my fault.
Typical for children to blame themself and thinking what if I didn´t where thoose clothes, or if I hadn´t smiled and so on.
We have to take what children say seriously and believe that they tell the truth, why should they lie about something like that?
It is very easy to break a child, we need to protect them and listen to them very carefully, love them unconditionally, don´t judge.
Love Jessica
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Candie -
I know how you feel.
Love
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A very succinct and incisive answer from the girl. BUt what is truth? Over my many years I keep thinking I have found the truth about myself; but I am always surprised when a situation or a challenge presents itself and I realise that I do not know the truth for that moment, the truth I knew is now history.
Truth is a grail that we should seek, but cannot find, we should always challenge our concept of truth. But this can only be done with knowledge, insight, and a confidence in ourselves.
C
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Thank you
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***
Fawzia was standing near the Magic fountains in front of National Art Museum of Catalonia when asked Master about the Truth. He indicated to a little girl holding a purple balloon in her right hand and looking at Fawzia. Suddenly balloon slipped out of girl’s fingers and flew way high in the sky towards the sun.
Master: “That is the Truth.”
Fawzia: “???”
Master: “Her thoughts belong to the Universe.”
Fawzia: “What is she thinking about, Master!?”
Master: “About YOU.”
***
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We all know how courts and lawyers function. ;] Imposing ideas and putting leading questions.[ The scales, dear/est Paul from Austria]. The truth and justice very rarely …reside in Court’s decisions! Justice in not blind! There are the ’signs’, the signals, money, phone-calls, interests, fear, prejudices, every judge’s inferiority complexes etc. A rape, sometimes or rather most of the times, turns against the … victim. How many times have we heart, that they prefer to stay silent because of shame and fear and disbelief in the system??
The truth must be objective and free from any influences. Violation of the rights of any human being, is a crime. Violation of the rights of children is a crime with many consequences in his/hers innocent soul for the rest of her life.
LOVE,
Thelma
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Truth, exactly like the child tells, it is not always beautiful…*
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So in a case like this how would you apply the phrase “the truth shall set you free”?
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truth is the light shining upon a single flower, and so to must it be the shadow caste…
truth is the ripple in the pond, and so to must it be the reflection obscured…
truth is an hint of a smile competing with a glimpse of a frown, only to be unified at the doorstep of the eternal…
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Yes dear candie? I’m with Santosh to salute the courage you have to tell.
The title fits with your story. Have a great night. :)
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Larmes aux yeux.
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Candie,
I am really sorry after hearing your painful story in your blog. The world is full of stupid peoples who commit stupid deed.
Well, it is easier to say in words without own experience of such a pain. But anyways, life does not end there…
Yes, “Life is pain so is love”
But anyways, I hope you will get over it and let it go.
One day you will get over it, hopefully.
Sorry again for what has happened to you ! :(
God bless you !
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Now if you want to,you can go and see my deposition.
This isn’t imagination,this is recollection.It took me a lot of courage so..I don’t know if you were waiting for us to heal ourselves putting that post but I took the floor and I feel,I don’t know how I feel.Those words are sincere though and this is my real name.
http://theancientsword.blogspot.com/
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..etcetera.The Truth is a revealed imagination,which became wisible,audible,touchable..
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“Truth is the bad they did to me.” Right: the truth is the thing that is, as it has been conduced by us all, each one of us, in our everyday life. That’s why also my brain has problems to figure out about this idea of being one. Because, in that case, who could say that child decided what happened? I guess that theory encouters its limits there. Or some clever mind could explain it to me?
Truth is equal to the seconds lived only once in infinite.
There are no two truths: only one; within the infinity of each moment.
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‘What is the truth they demand’, from the moment the crime occurs. They being the multitudes; parents, friends, siblings, doctors, nurses, advocates, lawyers, jurist, judges, media, etc. And she no longer knows. Why? Because every question proceeds and answer, not the reverse, often in the disguise of subtle implications. Every question the inquisitor demands of the victims ensures the answer the inquisitor wants. But is it the truth, and does the inquisitor care?
And so the child is taught to lie to herself. Even she no longer knows the truth, though she once did.
Therefore, children do lie, and worse they are taught to lie to themselves, raped twice. Remember that everyone in that court room is an authority figure that the child has been taught must be obeyed. The rapist was an authority figure as well.
And the child knows where that got her………and adding a twist of irony, not because it is funny, but because it is a perverse contrary………maybe she can plead insanity.
The little girl knew the truth, it had been stolen from her. Sometimes to stay a child is to have the truth stolen from you.
I think sido, that what you are trying to say is to find the child within and nurture her, because she needs it. To do that we must first grow out of our ignorance, otherwise we just rape the child again.
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Good question.Sometimes is only the one involved to know the truth,for an outsider might be hard to understand what was real,or what was subjective.But,indeed,at times,we could have as many versions as person inquired.That shows the relativity of facts.I should say that only God knows the truth.
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http://sido66.blogspot.com/
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In autobiography there is something called getting at the “emotional truth,” as opposed to the “factual truth” of a matter. Being “truthful” then, is saying whatever you have to say to evince the same emotion from the reader that you yourself actually experienced during the event or situation in question. Because the reader was not there, physically, sometimes it takes something a little more extreme than what actually happened in order to spur the reader to the same intensity of emotion. This, however, is not a conscious act on behalf of the writer…at least it never has been for me.
If I tell an “un-truth,” or, more politely, “alter the facts” on paper in order to create some semblance of the truth (what was actually experienced or felt at the time by myself, as the narrator, or by some other character), I do not set out, on a conscious level, to do this. In other words, I don’t sit down at my computer and say to myself, “Let me tell a lie, so the reader will get the truth.” Rather, I simply sit down and start writing, with nothing but the purest intention of telling it like it is/or was. But, in that act of writing, I get so emotionally caught up in the event or situation that I am relating, that something else happens entirely. I don’t even realize when I’m doing it - I’m just writing. But, later, when I go back to read what I have written, especially if it has been sitting there for a while and some time has passed, I read over it, and maybe, just maybe I am able to distinguish “actual truth” from the “emotional truth” that I have written there on paper. I may look at a piece I have written, and think to myself, almost shocked at the realization, “Now that isn’t really the way it happened, is it - not exactly?” Then, immediately upon the heels of this realization, will come another thought, “No, maybe it didn’t happen exactly like that…but it COULD have, it SHOULD have, it FELT like that.”
Because this whole process of transmuting the “actual truth” into the “emotional truth” is such an unconscious process, and because, even after the fact, it is sometimes hard to go back and detect where exactly and to what degree one has strayed from the actual facts of the event, I can see easily how in a case such as rape, especially in the case of a victim so young as the one in question, the “truth” could easily become a mutable thing. I know exactly what she meant when she said, “The truth is the bad they did to me,”: What she meant is - the truth is whatever I have to say to make you (who were not there) understand the horror and pain of what I went through. If she altered details to get at that, she probably did not do it consciously. There is this sort of subconscious mediator that kicks in in storytelling (whether the story is written, or conveyed verbally) that navigates a fine line between the truth of what actually happened and the comprehension of how the reader/listener is going to understand the words being told. This is where the shifts in truth take place - in this liminal space between the experiential truth of the event itself and the recreation of that truth (via storytelling) in the mind of another human being. In oder for the latter to mirror or capture the former accurately - in order for the listener’s or reader’s mind to arrive at the truth, sometimes “lies” must be told, the “factual truth” must be altered.
So, when that girl, the rape victim, was telling multiple versions of the truth, she was not “lying.” Sometimes the truth is not contained in the actuality of facts.
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A Brilliant Answer indeed… bless her ♡… Children never lie about things like this… and so… the Truth just is… as is Love… as is God… as is the Universe… rarely, as in this case… is it humanly definable… God… The Universe… doesn’t miss a single… Truth…
Love, Paul
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Dear All,
The truth, according to the text above, would have three versions:
1. The truth as I see it
2. The truth as some see it
3. The truth as everyone sees it.
The truth, then, is when everyone sees what I see.
Wish you a great day,
Hernán Vilar
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Dear Paulo,
What you tell makes me think a lot of what I’m reading now in a book written by Rupert Ross: “Returning to the Teachings” - Exploring aboriginal justice. He is a Canadian criminal prosecutor focused on first nations (aboriginal) communities. His whole perspective of our western juridicial “fact driven” system is drawn to a deeper human and universal interdependence value system that is the basis of the First Nations Healing and Teaching approach to doing justice.
As I googled on his name, as by lucky coincidence, I found a link to a discussion paper he wrote.
http://www.lsuc.on.ca/media/third_colloquium_rupert_ross.pdf
I feel happy to be able to share this with all of you, because if I forget all the stories I have been told about justice - all this ‘important’ knowledge I was told to study- , and return to the teaching of the child that was abused, I know it is true what she says.
with love,
Rita
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I think there was some wisdom in the little girl’s answer. truth is the one thing that we seldom tell. it’s not that we always lie but we sometimes only tell the half of it.
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In the matter of law, we need to classify some manners, to fit it in the law, and have the outcome in the punishment/penalty which is later brought on to the ‘criminal’. For the society in general, it is important, for if we didn’t do this, people would go unpunished.
Of course the laws and penalties (how harsh or mild they are) change over time, but the marking of it stays. For the sake of keeping the society safe and guarded.
But for the ‘victim’ this classification (often, and also depending on a person) doesn’t matter. In case of this girl in the story: in here eyes, she still knows she has suffered under something and the way how the society classifies it, doesn’t matter to that little girl.
The fact that this is done to her speaks for itself. No matter how we call it.
~*~*~*~
For some people, it can bitter the soul, they may want to revenge, make the ‘criminal’ to get the worst punishment possible. But in case of this did not matter. All she knew was that this happened to her… and how we place it a form in front of the society, is secondary.
~*~*~*~
For some reason, it makes me say out a sentence - sometimes it is good to generalize too much. In the case of this girl - the details had little matter to her, and from her perspective. But the law’s perspective was to go into detail… which in the end, as they humanly saw, was not an easy task. And sometimes these things, as we humanly see, are better to be let go of, although there is still that contradiction: when should we start become humans and when do we stop being specialists (when do we stop doing our ‘daily work’). Sometimes we have to come back to the humanly level of life, out of our “daily roles”, just like the lawyer Jufresa did.
Sad story, indeed. And now I am thinking how this girl is coping in this world - I hope she is not afraid of “jumping in the river of life.”
Much love to all of You,
Liina L.
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“In thousands of our acts, the propelling power is truth or love. And we therefore consciously or unconsciously apply truth in regulating these relations.”
Here is one Newspaper article that I wrote long time ago-
Title of article: “Law of Truth”
http://mybheja.blogspot.com/2007/07/law-of-truth.aspx
Hope that answers, about “TRUTH”
If still not, then Remember-
“Only that person will be totally satisfied, who knows how to speak, listen, hear, see and act based on the laws of truth.”
Good day !
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This brought tears to my eyes.
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The thruth shines through the words of this little girl and this is her truth.
Probably we all have our truths one not stroking with another still there is always a connection…and this is truth for me…love.
When we listen to each other and hear our heart speaking then truth is openness to each other without judgements.
My truth is that he is she and we are one. When I see you in me and vice versa then our truth are truth. When our truth is love then love is truth.
Love
Hildegarde
xxx
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The truth goes out of the mouth of the children, as it is said
To stay “child” is thus an importance for all
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