'On-Chain' Truths

How to Hold Relational Truths in an Ascending World

How do you know what is true - true in the world, true in your life, true in this moment?

How do we come to accept what is true, half-true, false, a lie, an omission or an embellishment?

How do we handle hard truths and comfortable lies?

Photo by Daniel Páscoa on Unsplash

When I was young, telling the truth was not my daily practice. I lied often about things big and small, even when I had no reason to.

When I did have reason, it was often to hide a test score or a school complaint.
When I did not have reason, I think it was to exert a sense of control over the moment. Something small, like lying about if I brushed my teeth before bed, was a resistance against authority-type sentiment in my child brain.
When I wasn’t resisting authority, I simply and quietly did not have confidence or trust in myself to utter what I wanted to (I may not have even known what I wanted).

For many this is a phase of childhood, but for me it continued well into adulthood.

I would often mask my low self-worth in exaggerated half-truths. As well, I desperately tried to control my narrative and curate relationships and shared experiences to have a desired outcomes. These desired outcomes, I thought, would make me happy.

It took me a long time to get comfortable speaking and receiving truths - in all forms.
I had to learn that truths live in contexts and when something is revealed, that context and our place within it also changes; that can be both liberating and terrifying.

Truth & Authority

A few years ago, I got hit by a car (my fault) and while I was mostly fine, I had some fractures in my foot that needed healing.

Through previous injuries and fractures, I had known my body to heal itself quite fast and well.

The doctors who attended me in this particular situation had very different words for me. There was was a great mixture of talk from breaking the foot and surgically putting it back together, followed by not walking for over 12 weeks and perhaps living with foot pain for the rest of my life, and the caution that early arthritis may set in.
I couldn’t handle the information they were giving me.

It felt like information indigestion; I assumed that because I was in physical pain mere days after the accident, I was rejecting reality because it wasn’t what I wanted.

There may have been a grain of truth to this at the time, and I felt was despairing confusion, disempowerment in my body and what was happening to it, and a dreaded weight in my belly.

A few days later, I had a conversation with a Healer who I deeply respected, narrating this experience to her. She heard me out and helped me make the connect between medical truths based on evidence and practices and my innate bodily truths.

This was a place where both sentiments were true; the medical one I was hearing: ‘You will take months to heal and should prepare yourself for to live with light pain and maybe arthritis’ and my quiet innate one: ‘I am whole. I will heal brilliantly. My body knows how to heal fully.’

It is where I first consciously learnt that there are things in the world that are true, but they need not be true for me in my life, my context and my experience.

In previous health and medical experiences, I had taken medical commentary about my body as untrue, a lie, bullsh*t and pushed it away in rejection. I took delight in my rebellion and was often motivated by the desire to ‘prove the doctor wrong’ - this was f*ck you to authority. It helped on my path towards empowerment, as I was learning to find and align to my inner authority, and unlearn blind attachment to external authority.

This experience had different medicine for me, beyond my rebellion. It was learning to accept instead of reject, and learning to hold both truths, relationally.

Photo by Bruno van der Kraan on Unsplash

My foot did happily heal. During the healing process, I was nourished by family and friends and did tons of practices in breath-work and yoga to keep my system in harmonic healing mode.
In 9 weeks, I was back walking and pain-free. I did tons of yoga, physio and acupuncture to restore muscles mass and balance between my left and right side. I learned to paddle-board, enrolled in pilates and at the one-year anniversary of my accident, did a on-stage dance performance in heels. It was important for me to regain my strength, agility, balance and flexibility. This is also already who I am as a person and while I did engaged in more healing arts, I was already engaged in a lot of them.
So, my inner knowing turned out to be actionably true.

This did not mean that the doctors were wrong. Likely, their statistics, probability, timelines and prescriptions were grounded what they saw in their patients groups.

Two, seemingly opposing notions can both be true.
The deciding factor for me wasn’t to deem one as a lie or not-real, but to simply feel what was in health and alignment for me, focus on that, and just do me.

Here I got to learn how to interpret the vibration of truths and feel what is and is not in resonance with me in the now-moment.

Relational Truths

Imagine that you and 5 friends go to see a movie. Each of you has a different experience of liking it, ranging from heavily dislike to absolutely loving it.
What is true about the movie in that moment? Is it good or bad?

This seems like an unnecessary question, because when it comes to shows and movies, we are often allowed our varied perspectives. I can hate it and you can love it and we can talk about it, tease each other and move on to post-movie dinner.

Here we accept that truth is relational and diverse.

Imagine now that this question wasn’t about a movie. It was about the mayoral candidate for your city where you and your 5 friends live.
Is a party or candidate good or bad? Who are you or I going to vote for?

More often than not, we do not allow relational and diverse truths here like we did with our same 5 friends at the movies.

Certainly disliking a movie has limited repercussions in our life rather than voting for the people who will run our city.

But this question isn’t about the vote. This question is about how much we allow and can receive the our truths and the truths of others.

This question is a foundational pillar in what we understand acceptance, diversity and inclusivity to be.

If I rage and scream at a family dinner because you chose a political candidate that I hate, that reveals it my intolerance of your thoughts and opinions.
In this case, I cannot behold your choice and any chance of allowing diversity (of thought, expression and experience) to bloom in killed.
If you get defensive, angry or simply shut down in return, then we are both stuck in this dance.

Often we find ways to blame or shame each other. I may find character flaws in you that help me rationalize your ‘stupid’ or ‘unwise’ or ‘ignorant’ choice, and you may do so with me.

We can live here our entire lives, day after day, decade after decade floating the surface of our intolerance of relational truths.

The wild part of all this is, if we were to accept each other’s choice in candidate for a few moments, in love and respect of each other, we would ask the next obvious question with openness: ‘Oh interesting, why do you like that candidate?’.
And then an amazing thing would happen.
We would radically listen to each other, genuinely.
We would not ask the question superficially and create all the debate responses in our head waiting for a break in the conversation to argue.

When this has been impossibly hard for me to do, I realize that it is because I’m not in the vibration of love and respect - for myself or you. In that moment my goal is to engage in a cerebrally spar with you as I try and work out an unconscious power dynamic, one that I wish to win at all costs.

This is the great gift of learning to behold relational truths, as they also teaches you to activate the practice of patience, listening, love, respect and how to keep your heart open in the face of difficultly.

The other beauty with relational truths is that they can evolve, just like everything in the universe that speaks the language of change.

Imagine if we took this practice, beyond our dining tables into our houses of parliament. Each representative practiced in listening, holding their truths along with the diverse truths of others and having conversations in solution and community consciousness.

On-Chain Truths

One of my musings about relational truths is that they can all exist at the same time attached to a context.

My analogy for this comes from the Blockchain, where an entire list of transactions within a timeframe are stored in information blocks. A block is connected to the next block through a cryptographic link, which is the relationship between multiple blocks.

Simply, since Blockchain technology is like a ledger, everything exists in massive data blocks. As well, it evolves every few minutes as new transaction blocks are created.

The way I see it, this is a bit like how we store information in our consciousness. Although, it is not as linear as timestamped blocks of information, the way we interpret our world creates impressions and we store them in data blocks in our mind.

When we learn to deal in relational truths, we constantly allow new information blocks with updated relevant information to get created.
Perhaps yesterday, we didn’t consider a new independent entrant in our city’s mayoral election because we held the belief that only big parties are the real player.
But after some research and conversations, that transactional thought and belief got exchanged with the transactional thoughts, ideas and beliefs of our friends.

A new block of thought got created and perhaps we are more open to considering independent candidates today than we were the day before. Whether our vote (the external action) changes or stays the same is irrelevant. Within, we have experienced expansion in our ability to allow and accept the choices of others.

Transactions in a ledger, especially relating to currency are only valuable
when they are exchanged (rather than hoarded), my transaction relates to yours and creates a truth for you as well. All this lives together in our individual and shared consciousness. And so perhaps, even though we may never know it, our friendly political conversation has created a chain of events that has evolved the consciousness of our friends as well through these exchanges.

It is as thought, relational truths are on-chain - always there, open, collaborative and available to evolve and be exchanged.

The other fun part of this analogy musing is how truths are controlled.

On-Chain truths are more decentralized.

When truths are centralized, a narrative is scripted, created and has to be maintained with great effort by an authority. Everyone else is relegated to an often disempowered flock of receivers. When something opposing rises, the use of aggression or discrediting is often employed, as we see in most political campaigns.

Decentralized truths then, are far more interesting, in that they are different, experiential, human, and diverse.
Here is where, if we can allow it, real and raw authentic ranges of conversation happen, that allows truly diverse interaction of what is rising different people and groups who share space in a city or commune.
By no means is this easy, but it allows to listening, negotiating and dialogue. Once trust is built, the opportunity for progress without cutting corners or paying too high a price becomes a touch more achievable.
A conversation about wanting to pave over one of the last natural green spaces to make more houses due to perceived need, may reveal a truer problem. That truer problem may be that housing exists, it is just unaffordable for anyone living and working in the city. This isn’t a problem that will be solved by chopping down the last of our trees so that we appear to be ‘doing something’.

Accessing Quantum Truths

Decentralized, on-chain, relational truths can feel challenging, painfully uncomfortable and can feel downright impossible at times.

Especially when we come from the mind where we all desperately try to figure things out.

The way I see it, the Heart and Spirit consciousness within each of us are able to hold messy interconnectedness, seemingly opposing sentiments and can allow for truths that change as the world spins on. All that is unseen, unknown, intuited and felt are can also be accessed here and from this place our Truths encompass far beyond the comprehension of our rational minds.

We no longer hide our intentions and Truths from ourselves and each other, they simply rise and reveal themselves. While this may be ugly, it is also inevitable in our ascending and evolving worlds.

But as we welcome the start of the new year, I believe we are already on our way and this is already happening under the surface for a lot of us. The work is to practice allowance of expanding and diverse truths by holding ourselves and each other in moments of courage, respect and love, especially when we are in disagreement.

This is one of the ways, we lift each other up, by being ourselves and letting the other be who they need to be.