The Price for Truth Is Everything
What you thought you couldn’t live without is exactly what can’t come with you.
Truth doesn’t offer anything. It takes.
And what it takes is everything. I’m not talking about in theory, but in the deeply personal, intimate way that leaves no room for pretending.
It takes your identity. The story you tell about who you are and where you’re going. The roles you've clung to. Your parents child, your childrens parent, the healer, the failure, the seeker, the leader. The roles you played so well you forgot they were roles. All of them.
It takes your ambition. The drive to become someone better. That inner engine that ran on the hope of becoming someone. The hope that things are leading somewhere. That there’s a payoff coming and that all of this will eventually make sense.
It takes your beliefs. And not just the spiritual ones. All of them. Every concept that made the world feel knowable. Every explanation you clung to about why life is the way it is, or why you are the way you are. Even the frameworks that stitched your sense of meaning together. The assumptions that gave shape to suffering. The stories that gave your choices weight. The hidden architecture behind what made the illusion feel real.
It takes your past. All the narratives you wrapped around your pain and your victories. The identity born out of trauma. The pride built from surviving.
It takes your future. Not just the plans. The one who was supposed to live them.
It takes your relationships. The sense of being someone to someone. The emotional contracts built on unconscious need. The safety that came from being known in a certain way. The projections. The stories. The false closeness that was never about truth, only about mutual reinforcement of identity.
It takes your comfort. Not because it’s cruel, but because comfort was just a sedative for the lie.
It takes your purpose. The one that made you feel important. The one that gave you direction. The one that made the pain feel worth it.
It takes your control. The belief that you’re steering this. That you ever were.
It takes your fallback. The part of you that still secretly waits for things to settle. That still believes awakening will lead to peace, or usefulness, or love.
It takes your ground.
It takes the one reading this sentence, trying to understand.
That’s the price. And it’s not negotiable.
You’ll want to keep parts of it. You’ll want to spiritualize the ego. You’ll want to stay the one who “knows the truth.” But that’s not truth. That’s decoration. That’s delay.
Truth doesn’t decorate. It demolishes.
And when everything false has fallen, nothing is left but what was never not here.
Just this.
No one to claim it. No one to lose it. No one left to say "I paid the price."
That’s the price for truth.
Everything…
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If something cracked open in you and you feel moved to give a gift, you're welcome to.
Not as payment. Not in return. Just as a quiet gesture of support, if that’s what stirs in you.
All gifts go toward what’s slowly unfolding through Suan Jai.
Indeed, truth strips everything. But something still laughs… if the space is planted.
🙏