At Sychar. The nothingness of the gods. The worth and nature of truth and the way to it. The real Gordian knot. The mystery of love. Head and heart. The key and seat of truth.

1. Say I, 'Dear friend, your ancestors mean nothing, and still less the gods they honoured; because your ancestors have already been dead for a long time, and their gods never had an existence outside of human fantasy. There had never been a reality behind their names and images. Hence there verily is nothing in leaving a most void belief in your gods; because they can feed your soul no more than can painted foods your body! There is therefore nothing to all this, as stated, but everything in pure truth and the life in and through this one truth!

2. Because if you live within the lie then life itself is nothing but a lie, and can attain to no reality in all eternity; but if your life goes forth from truth and is itself truth, then whatever your life brings forth is also fact and reality! No man can however see and recognise truth through the lie, because to the lie everything is a lie. Only for him who is born anew from the spirit of truth, becoming truth within himself, and that fully, for such even the lie becomes truth!

3. Because he who recognises the lie as a lie is himself truth in everything, because he forthwith recognises the lie for what it is; and this also is truth! Do you grasp this?'

4. Says the chief, 'Friend, You speak aright, and there is deep wisdom in you! But the great, glorious truth, where is it, and what is it? Are things true the way we see them or does the eye of a black man see it differently from us perhaps? A fruit can taste sweet and pleasant to one, whilst to another it is bitter and repulsive! Thus sundry human tribes speak different languages; which one among them is true and good?! Much can be true for any specific individual; but there can in my view be no general, all-encompassing truth, - and if there be one, then show where and what it is and consists in!'

5. Say I, 'Verily, My friend, therein lies the old Gordian knot you well know about, which so far has not been unraveled by anyone other than the Macedonian hero you heard about.

6. Whatever you can behold and feel by means of the flesh has affinity with the flesh and its tools, and is similarly changeable and transitory; so whatever is changeable and transitory, how could same offer you substance for ever-constant and immortal truth?!

7. There is only one thing in man, and this great and holy One is love, which is a proper fire out of God, dwelling in the heart; within this is love, and nowhere else is truth, because love is itself the arch-foundation of all truth in God, and out of God within every man!

8. If you want to see and recognise things and yourself in their full truth, then you have to see and recognise them from this solely true arch-foundation of your being; everything else is delusion, and man's head and what is in it belongs to the sphere of your familiar Gordian knot, which no one can unravel with mere deliberation.

9. Only with the cutting power of the spirit of love in man's own heart can he hew through this knot, and then begin to think, see and recognise in the heart, and only then along such path to get at the truth of his own and every other being and life!'

10. Your head can create countless gods for you, but what are they? Verily I say unto you, - nothing but vain, lifeless patterns produced by the brain with its loose mechanisms; only in the heart shall you find a God, and this One is true, because the love in which you found the only true God is itself Truth.

11. This Truth therefore can be sought and found only in Truth; but the head has done its share if it has delivered you the key to Truth. Yet everything that urges and draws you towards love can be a key to truth; hence follow such attraction and urge and enter upon the love of your heart, and you shall find the truth which shall free you from all deception!'