Yesterday my mentor shared a reflection on the Bull of Dharma. In the Vedic tradition, Dharma is not a collection of rules or religious commandments based on fear of punishment and guilt. It is the inner order of life itself, the force that allows a person to live in harmony with themselves, with others, and with the universe. This order is symbolized by the Bull of Dharma. During the age of Satya Yuga, the Golden Age, the Bull stands firmly on four legs: truthfulness, compassion, purity, and austerity.

As I was reading, I caught myself on clarity. I finally understood why some experiences in my life took years to heal, while one single realization changed everything within just a few days! Now I can see the whole process and what actually healed me. For a long time, I believed that time heals. Now I see it differently. Time can only soften pain. It can teach us how to live beside it. It can make the unbearable feel familiar. But if we continue living inside an illusion, true healing never really happens. What healed me was something entirely different.

Truth.

Not the truth my ego wanted to hear and not the comforting version of the truth. Not the story that allowed me to keep hoping for another month, another year, perhaps even another decade (yeah, I was willing to go into another cycle playing this game to earn the permission to exist?). Hoping that if I loved enough, understood enough, waited patiently enough, something would finally change. Hoping only to be hurt again in exactly the same place. 

What healed me was that real truth. The truth that didn't negotiate with my desires. The truth that didn't comfort me or promise a different ending. It simply asked me to see reality as it already was... I went into my truth and other people chose me their card decks they were dealt with... And in that moment, something unexpected happened. I finally understood why, in Kali Yuga, the age we are living in today, the Bull of Dharma is said to stand on only one leg. Because without truth, none of the other pillars can return! In fact, when I look around today, I wonder if, for many people, even that last remaining leg has begun to disappear. It did disappear for me! I prefered lies so I don't ache... a lot of people live this way also... Perhaps that is exactly why our world feels the way it does.

Instead of truth, we make deals... with other people, with ourselves, and with reality. We negotiate and compromise with what we already know because the illusion feels safer than the unknown. Instead of compassion, we learn to earn love. We believe we have to become more beautiful, more successful, more patient, more spiritual, more useful, more convenient before we deserve to be chosen. Instead of purity, we become divided inside ourselves. One part knows the truth, while another desperately tries to preserve the story. And instead of freely choosing one another, we act from hunger. Hunger for love. Hunger for attention. Hunger for validation. Hunger to finally feel worthy.

When hunger becomes stronger than truth, relationships stop being a meeting between two free people. They become attempts to fill an emptiness and deficits that no other human being was ever meant to fill. 

Perhaps this is why truth remains the final pillar of Dharma. The moment we are willing to stop negotiating with reality, everything else begins to return on its own.

When we hear the word truthfulness, most of us immediately think about honesty toward other people. We think about not lying, not deceiving, and keeping our promises. Or at least appearing to. We tell ourselves we are honest because we never say something that is technically false. Yet we quietly leave out the parts that matter most. We offer carefully edited versions of ourselves, revealing only what feels safe while hiding everything that might expose our fear, our motives, or our contradictions.

We tell ourselves we are faithful to our promises because, outwardly, we continue to play the role. Yet how many promises have we already broken in our thoughts, in our desires, in our actions, in the quiet decisions we make long before anyone else knows? What are you hiding with fear? The other person may never discover it, but something inside us always does.

Perhaps this is why the deepest form of truthfulness has very little to do with other people. It begins with the willingness to stop hiding from ourselves. To admit what we already know but keep explaining away. To acknowledge what our body has been feeling for months while our mind continues to negotiate. To see our attachments, our fears, our hunger, our need to be chosen, our longing to control the outcome. 

Truthfulness is not about becoming morally perfect. On the contrary! It is about becoming undivided. Because the greatest deception is rarely the lie we tell another person. It is the story we keep telling ourselves. 

Yet the hardest truth is never directed outward. It is directed inward. Truthfulness is the willingness to see your life exactly as it is, without excuses, without fantasies, and without clinging to hopes that no longer belong to reality. It begins the moment we stop telling ourselves a beautiful story about our masks and become willing to meet what is actually there.

That is what happened to me. I stopped explaining away someone else's actions. I stopped searching for hidden meanings where everything had already been revealed through actions. I stopped waiting. Not because I forced myself to, I just finally saw! And in that moment, it wasn't love that collapsed. It was the illusion. It hurt deeply, but this pain was alive. It moved through me.... It flowed... It completed itself... Within a few days and weeks, something happened that years had never been able to accomplish! 

Then compassion appeared. Not only for other people. For me! We are often far harsher with ourselves than we ever are with anyone else. We ask ourselves, How could I not have seen it?  How could I? Why did I wait for so many years? Why did I allow this? Why did I settle for crubms? We sentence ourselves as though loving someone were a crime. But every human being makes choices from the level of consciousness they have at that moment. The woman I was back then was not weak. She was not foolish. She simply did not know the whole truth! She did not see the full deck of cards! She was given only several cards. Naturally, she could make only those decisions she made! She loved with everything she had! Once I truly understood that, shame disappeared and compassion took its place. I stopped fighting my past. I stopped trying to rewrite it. Instead, I embraced the woman inside me who simply wanted to be loved. That embrace became the beginning of real healing.

Compassion naturally gives birth to purity. Not the kind of purity that means perfection or moral superiority. No, I am not talking about it. Real purity is the absence of inner division. It is when your thoughts match your words, your words match your actions, and your body no longer agrees to what your soul quietly refuses. Purity is a life without self-deception. It is no longer living in two realities at once. No longer forcing yourself to justify another person's choices simply to preserve your own hope. Your heart stops arguing with what it has known for a very long time. Something inside becomes quiet. Remarkably quiet.

Only then does austerity emerge, and I believe this is the most misunderstood of all four qualities. Austerity is not about denying pleasure or joy in life. It is not about living a harsh life or punishing yourself. True austerity is freedom... Freedom of real choice! It is the moment when your deepest hunger no longer controls your choices: the hunger to be loved, the hunger to be chosen, the hunger for attention, the hunger to matter. As long as that hunger lives inside us, we are easily manipulated. A few warm words, an occasional message, a handful of hours together... A little hope ("oh! one day we will live happilyeverafter)? And we are ready to abandon ourselves all over again...

But when that hunger dissolves, something extraordinary happens. True choice appears! And it IS freedom! I suddenly realized that I no longer wanted to trade my body and soul with people who were not choosing me in that truth. Nobody told me it was wrong. and I did not need to become morally superior. My body simply no longer wanted to participate in something that diminished my own dignity, my own worth, my own boundary... I no longer wanted crumbs of attention. I no longer wanted a place at the very bottom of someone else's list of priorities. I no longer wanted to fight for love. I no longer wanted to be a convenience, a thing in someone else's life. 

That was when I realized something.... I had not become stronger. I had become freer! I found my own willpower! THAT freed me... The most surprising realization was this: for years, I had tried to begin somewhere else. I tried to let go. I tried to create boundaries. I tried to respect myself. I tried to become independent. None of it truly worked! Now I understand why. I was trying to build a house without a foundation. TRUTH will give you all these pillars and will force you to find your own willpower... 

You cannot arrive at purity while continuing to live inside a lie. You cannot offer yourself compassion until you are willing to see yourself honestly. And you cannot become free from needing another person's attention while still believing that one day they will become someone they have never actually chosen to become! That was one of the hardest truths for me. It wasn't that I had imagined qualities that didn't exist. I had seen the potential. And the potential was real! But potential is not a life... Potential is not a relationship... Potential is not a choice... Every human being carries extraordinary potential within them. We all do. But potential remains only a possibility until the person themselves decides to bring it into the world. No one can love another person into becoming who they could be. No amount of patience, sacrifice, compromise, self-betrayal, understanding, or devotion can make someone walk a path they have not freely chosen for themselves... It is not in their Dharma! I was not in love with reality anymore. I was in love with possibility... with that future state! With who they COULD become. With what we all COULD become. With a future that existed only inside my own imagination. And that is what illusion does. It slowly replaces reality with potential, until we begin relating not to the person standing in front of us, but to the version of them we keep carrying inside ourselves.

The moment I finally accepted that, something inside me relaxed. I no longer had to wait for someone else's awakening in order to begin living my own life. Truth is not simply one of the four pillars of Dharma. For the human heart, it is the first one. The moment we stop confusing possibility with reality, everything else begins to grow naturally. Compassion becomes possible because we stop blaming ourselves for believing. Purity returns because we no longer have to split ourselves between what is and what we wish were true. And austerity is no longer an act of self-denial, it becomes the inner freedom of no longer feeding an illusion that reality has never supported.

Yesterday I came across a photograph of people I once loved with all my heart, and nothing moved inside me. I don't mean that I suppressed my feelings or became indifferent. I mean there was no inner drama at all! No longing.. No hope. No disappointment. Just a quiet, peaceful curiosity. I found myself looking at the photograph and wondering, Who are these people, really? And then it struck me that I didn't actually know them. At least, not in the way I thought I did. I knew my experience of them. I knew the stories I had created around them, the meanings I had attached to their words, their silence, their actions, and even their absence. I knew my hopes, my fears, and my projections. But the people themselves? They had always been living their own lives, making their own choices, following their own path. It was I who had woven a different story around them.

Reality had simply taken the place of illusion. Not because love had turned into hatred, and certainly not because my heart had grown cold. The need for the illusion had simply disappeared. And the longer "what is" present in my life, the choice becomes very simply inside - I don't need "this" anymore... For years I had been relating not only to who they were, but to who I believed they could become, to the future I imagined, to the relationship I hoped we might one day have. Once those projections dissolved, there was finally space to see what had always been there.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest gifts truth can offer. It doesn't take love away. It takes away projections. And when projection disappears, love changes its nature. It no longer clings, waits, bargains, or suffers. It simply sees the full picture. Maybe healing is not the disappearance of love after all. Maybe healing is the disappearance of illusion, allowing us to meet another human being, and ourselves, as we truly are. This is when true love can flourish, with full inner peace and satisfaction. 

Perhaps this is exactly what the ancient sages meant when they said that during Kali Yuga the Bull of Dharma stands on only one leg. The moment a person is willing to stand in truth, the other three begin to return. 

• Truth
• Compassion.
• Purity.
• Austerity.

One day you notice that you are no longer holding on to something that stopped belonging to you a long time ago. You did not force yourself to let go, truth had already done its work...

Perhaps this is why the sages called Kali Yuga one of the greatest opportunities for spiritual awakening. In an age filled with distraction, fear, guilt, illusion, and noise, even one honest encounter with reality becomes a profound spiritual practice. Sometimes a single step toward truth is enough to return a person to themselves.