For my weekly writing spot on this site, see the One-Minute Mystic, with a new meditation posted every Monday. Also see The Village, the story of Misty Longings, England's most beautiful village, posted episode by episode earlier this year.       True words     'Ladies and gentleman,' says the lone figure on the stage. We lean forward, agog. It's the speech. What will we learn about this speaker? And what will we learn of ourselves? Oratory, eh? The Party Conference is all about the leader's speech. Much else happens, mainly in the bar, but nothing focuses media attention like the oratory. This is hardly surprising. Ever since Moses addressed the Israelites with some interesting new commandments, the press have loved a speech, whether from Pericles, Cicero, Jesus, Elizabeth 1st, Cromwell, Disraeli, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, Kennedy, Reagan, Mandela or Obama. But is oratory a friend or enemy of truth? Some people see it as little more than 'domination by voice.' So for truth seekers everywhere, here's a checklist to consider as the speaker takes the stage. 1) Do they speak from their own experience? Borrowed truths, wherever they come from, lack integrity. President Kennedy was one of the first orators to use speech writers, which is the end of the true word. From here on, you're a performer of other people's tricks and assessed only as an actor. 2) Are they defined by their enemies and therefore editors of reality? Stalin used 'class war' to gather people around his sick self and Hitler used 'race war'. Both had to edit a great deal. Lobby groups, religious groups and ethnic groups are also good at avoiding their own sickness by selective use of material. 3) Do they make unreal promises? Only insecure egos are desperate to promise things to people. Nick Clegg declaring 'Every child can do great things!' is grandiose puff because it has no present roots. The genius of Lincoln's 272 word Gettysburg address – the most quoted speech of all time after the Sermon on the Mount – was that it took a young country brutalised by civil war and gave it a reason to continue and a light to walk by. But no promises; the speaker's task was only to make people present to themselves. 4) How long are their words? Kennedy's scriptwriter Theodore Sorenson told the president that the secret of the Gettysburg speech was the short words; they're more rooted in the soil of reality. Einstein said that if you can't say it simply, you haven't understood it; we might go further and say that if you can't say it simply it simply isn't true. 5) Does the speaker display negative capability? Coined by Keats, this phrase describes someone 'capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.' In other words, avoid the airless world of your favourite truth system. Speech is to serve reality not our ideology. 6) Does the speaker surf the tide of prejudice? William Hazlitt believed the orator should 'build upon the habitual prejudices of mankind,' and 'add feeling to prejudice and action to feeling.' Oratory is a gift not a virtue; and if it builds on prejudice then it is a satanic gift. More writings © Simon Parke