No escape.

When I was nineteen years old I lived, worked and meditated in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales in the United Kingdom.

I was training in Transcendental Meditation whilst writing and performing songs with my closest friend Trevor, as a a duo called Sparrow. We were well received around the town and all in all, this was a formative and quietly exciting time in my life.

My girlfriend of those days and I worked quite close to each other and she would often come to meet me in the evening so we could walk home together.

On one summer afternoon she arrived unannounced just as I was preparing to go with a friend from work on his motorcycle. The bike would not start so we had to push it and then jump on. Just as we were pushing the bike along the street I saw my girlfriend standing on the opposite side of the road waiting for me. Our eyes met, but I ignored her, and we jumped on the bike as it roared into life and rode off through the streets of Cardiff.

Some hours later I met my girlfriend and she was furious.

She screamed at me saying that I had ignored her and gone off with my friend.

"No," I said, "I didn't see you."

"Of course you did, you looked right into my eyes, " she yelled.

"No, honestly, I didn't see you."

And so it went on until I persuaded her to accept the lie that I had created  that I hadn't seen her. However, so convincing was this lie that eventually I too believed that I hadn't seen her.

Although this simple incident was never an important story in my life l carried the lie with me for more than twenty years.

However, the more I became a dedicated disciple of Dhamma and practised earnestly every day, the more the past began to arise until one moment in my daily meditation, the clear and honest memory of that particular event returned.

Of course I had seen her. I looked straight into her eyes. I saw her bewilderment as I turned away and jumped onto the motorcycle with my friend. I deliberately ignored her so that I could do what I wanted to do, and then to save my own 'honour' lied directly to her face.

I had created a fantasy where I could regard myself in a good light, but eventually the truth caught up to me. Of course it did because this is the nature of honest Dhamma practice, to create the space for the meeting of truth. Our truth, the one we often don't want to see.

No matter how intelligent, conniving and persuasive we are, we cannot escape the truth and sooner or later we will have to meet it and accept the reality of what we had empowered.

So the teaching is always simple, don't wait twenty years for a moment of realization to arrive, but live with honesty and integrity right now.

What we meet in our meditation is ourselves and here, in the silence of loving acceptance, there is no where to hide.

May all beings be happy.