I might as well say at the outset that I have no authority for these teachings. I learned them, but they were not taught. Nobody owns the truth. A lot of people try to own up to it after the fact. But it doesn't belong to anyone in the first place. It can't be copyrighted.
     When I was in the fourth grade, I came to school one day not remembering that it was Halloween. You were supposed to come dressed in your costume. I left mine at home--a Chinaman, I remember, with a straw hat, pigtail and a sabre. But I wasn't about to admit being so stupid. When it came time for the class to get in line and go on our parade around the school grounds, I went along as a Human Being. Among all the ghosts, goblins and spacemen, I had the oddest outfit of all.
     I've been trying to become a Human Being ever since. It's my fantasy.
     What is truth? More pointedly, what is the truth?
     In Washington, it's whatever you can get away with. It's some colorable version of events.
     On Madison Avenue, the truth is mixed with lies.
     In ivory towers across the country, professors proclaim truth to be an opinion, something relative.
     Truth is not relative if it's "the" truth. By definition, the truth is a single, eternal, living thing, an expression of the Great Spirit.
     The entire Western system of knowledge is founded on references and cross-references and getting and giving credit. All these concepts make truth into intellectual property.
     For instance, if you have a great idea or make a scientific discovery you have to go to the library to see if it has occurred to anyone before and already been published. In other words, it might not be your idea but rather someone else's.
     Publication does not so much make a thing public, to be held in common by all, as it stamps something private as individual and proprietary. No trespassing!
     I have often wondered why prayer books and Bibles are copyrighted. Even hymns are Used with Permission. You'd think that worship--talking to God--would be as free as the air. No. . . all rights reserved!
     In establishing your truth as valid, you have to present your credentials, give your sources, show your evidence, build your arguments, go through all the motions you would go through in a court of law. The Western academic tradition requires truth to be "arrived at" and "accepted."
     What if truth is something we all know and have, a spiritual gift like God's grace, the dew and the sunshine?
     The Christian religion is based on scripture, and the Roman legal system relies on a written code. Both are founded on books and writing, and still constitute the dominant culture in Europe and the Americas.
     The Middle Ages was all about producing a synthesis between the two--Rome and Christ. Most lawyers were clergymen. Modern citation systems were worked out by canon lawyers in eleventh and twelfth century Bologna, site of the first university. In philosophy, the name of the game was reconciling Plato and Aristotle.
 In theology, the big challenge resided in proving faith--trying to show that revelation and authority were the same thing.
     They aren't, of course. One is inward, the other outward, one private, the other public, one peaceful and productive, the other inhibitive and, ultimately, destructive.
     Whoever said "The truth will set you free" had in mind the truth that nobody owns. The truth presented in scientific journals, newspapers, and government hearings is part of someone's agenda. It can only be temporary in nature--tied to a  person's passing influence or term of office, for example. It is policy, not truth.
     Our culture turns truth into a product and a commodity. We are owned by our possessions, you know. We treat truth as a material object to be improved, passed around, bought and bartered. We seem to want more and more of it, whereas a little truth goes a long way. We can't leave it alone.
     The Native American notion of truth is totally different, just as the Indians' attitude toward the land is different. Truth is sacred. If the chief or council of elders asks you to tell the truth, you tell the truth plain and simple. It isn't worth lying. Not telling the truth would be worse than any crime you could commit. Who murders a witness in broad daylight, thereby compounding the crime, to cover it up?
     don't mean to suggest Indians don't know how to be dishonest. In the old days, it was alright to trick your enemies. Surprise and deceit were the mainstays of war. And it didn't matter much if you fibbed to a white man. He wasn't part of your community. Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies.
     We are no longer at war, though. The red men are part of the white man's community whether they want to be or not. They obey his laws and have adopted his customs. But they haven't entirely given up their own ways. Therein lies much conflict.
     Always tell the truth but make sure first you want to tell it. Consider the listener well. This act of reflection ensures what you say is deliberate. Often an element of intention is lacking in truth-telling. An individual easily finds himself in a predicament. He is telling the truth but the audience doesn't think he's telling the truth. Well, never tell the truth automatically. That is naive. It's the mark of a thoughtless or arrogant person.
 W. B. Yeats, who was a powerful spirit, summed up the wisdom of a lifetime when he said, "Man can embody, but he cannot know, truth."
     Ultimately, truth is always as plain as the nose on your face. It is never more apparent to one person than to another. All find it who seek it. The only thing you have to do is ask. As the Bible says: "Ask and it shall be given; seek and ye shall receive; knock and it shall be opened."
     A Hopi wise man has said, "You have to speak from the heart to speak to the spirit in another person."
     This is a profound saying. It brings up a subject one of my friends recently asked me about:  How do you talk to a spirit? Or rather, how do you communicate with spirits? What language do they speak? How do they communicate with us?
     I think it's just as the Hopi medicine man said:  you communicate with spirit by means of spirit. They touch the energy and emotion in you, just as an animal looking at you in the woods elicits feelings--fear, awe, joy, admiration, pity, aggression. The organs of perception are the heart and lungs, not the eyes and ears. No one can truly be in the presence of a living "wild" creature and be unmoved. That's why zoos exist, to give jaded city dwellers a chance to be a little more alive, to emote. Animals are pure spirit.
     I dreamt once I was in a cage in the jungle. I don't know how I got there, but I was locked securely in that cage. I think I had put myself in it and staked a position in a clearing to watch the wildlife. Next thing I knew, two lions ambled over inquisitively and stuck their noses in. The way they looked at me! It was as if they could walk right through the bars if they wanted to. I realized they were not "wild." They were just free. And I was the opposite, a thing controlled and controlling, a creature to be pitied. My world was small and of my own making. It did not contain lions. Theirs, on the other hand, was the all-embracing world, the universe. They were part of it. That world contained me, too, though I was not part of it, because it was "out there." I had tried to create a space within space, but I had sealed myself in a vacuum, something nature abhors. My envelop of experience was no more substantial or significant than a bubble in an ocean wave.