Truth Matters

Following up on the last two posts on Wikileaks and the general changes going on in the world, I want to describe one of the essential factors in this "new energy", and that's the open society and the end of secrecy. There's some great comments and questions on the Wikileaks post that I want to answer in detail in another post, but I will address the central point here: (And my apologies if this comment didn't get posted immediately. For some reason blogger saw it as spam and segregated it. Will try to correct these things):

Lying, truth telling, the question really is, what is most often the motivation behind communication in general? On the Net, on the radio, on the street corner? The attempt to persuade.

I don't see the attempt to persuade others as a form of lying. There is such a thing as honest persuasion, which is how conversation occurs in an open society. I'm not talking about some ideal society in which everyone agrees on what truth is and how to understand or live it. There are always going to be differences of opinion, perspective, and experience, based on the immense complexity of live in all its multi-dimensional insanity. The question, and it's really very simple, is how are we going to live together in the midst of that complexity, and yes, even insanity? Duality being, you know, dual, there's basic two options: an open society, or a closed one. We don't have to get all new-agey about this, we can also simply use Popper's basic cultural notion of an open society, an open cognitive process, and the tolerance of uncertainty and difference on a grand scale, to see what can come of this. Not heaven on earth, nor hell on earth, but at least an earth in which both heaven and hell can talk with one another.

Now, perhaps even that is a kind of heaven, and if so, fine, but let's not presume it's impossible, because really, it's not asking all that much of the world. It's a realistic heaven, in other words, well within our grasp. I say this because there's already quite a few people who are already living this way in the world. We can see stark evidence all over the place, and I don't just mean in western intellectual circles, but everywhere. In fact, western intellectuals are probably not even the lead edge of this movement, they are in some ways merely responding in an intellectual manner to a process that is much deeper and more profound than they seem capable of understanding as of yet.

In new age circles there's the general suggestion I've come across that the kinds of changes being discussed in the world don't really depend on a vast majority of the people on this planet making this kind of spiritual transformation. Numbers like 0.5%, or about one in two hundred, is often deemed sufficient to create a "tipping point" which slides us into a new stage of human culture. And that 0.5% may not be the people we often think it is. It may be people all over the world who aren't even much involved in new age spirituality or progress politics and so forth. Because it's not an intellectual matter, it's not even about thinking, it's a matter of deep feeling and the conducting of energy in an open way. Yes, that open energy does manifest once it hits the intellect in an open-minded mindset, but that's a reflection rather than the origin of the change.

Ramana Maharshi was once asked about how to change the world, and he replied that "An old woman who finds the peace of God in her prayers does more to change the world than all the intellectuals combined." This is the root of the kind of change we are talking about here, people finding real peace in their hearts, in their prayers, in the relationship with God, and allowing that to simply "bleed out" into the world at large. I'm not suggesting an anti-intellectual bias here, I'm certainly one to talk of course, I'm merely suggesting that the root of change doesn't occur in the intellect, it occurs at much deeper levels of our experience, our feeling, our awareness of self and other.

In many respects, it only takes one person to change the world, because if that person changes at a deep enough level, he creates a different world without even trying, but merely as a result of the fundamental truth that the world emerges from our own mind and psyche, and not the other way around. We are not fundamentally separate from that one person, and thus each of us creates one another. This is not a fixed process outside ourselves that we must attack or transform like a sculptor chiseling on a block of marble. We are the very thing we are shaping, and thus we have a different set of tools at our disposal.

So the commenter above is correct that we need to ask what the motivation is behind either our lying or truth-telling, because that will determine what course we end up taking in relation to either. What we have seen throughout the world as lies and manipulation is not merely some attempt to persuade others to their point of view. It's something a lot more insidious, which is the attempt to control others and to do that by imposing a point of view upon them by force and deception. This is what "cultism" is about, the attempt to control others by whatever means one can. Key to that is lying, deception, manipulation, and the keeping of secrets. It's almost impossible to control others without those tools. Cult leaders and authoritarian politicians are essentially the same animal, motivated by the same desire to control others by deception and secrets. That is why so much of both religion and politics is about keeping secrets and using those secrets to control others.

Therefore if there is to be any real change in this world, these tools need to be taken away from those who would try to control others. And I think we are seeing a long process of just that happening. We could indeed go back many centuries and see a long if slow and inconsistent progress in undermining the use of these tools to control people. What we see in recent decades, years, and now even months is an acceleration of this process. Part of what is different now is a subtle transformation of the energy underlying the planet that makes these tools of control and manipulation increasingly ineffective. It's not that the motive is gone, it's that the tools don't work so well anymore. It's like using an old 120V appliance on a 240V outlet. What used to work now gets burned out, because the energy is different.

This is the result of many, many long hard-fought battles that have gone on here for centuries. But the real battle is not so much the outer one we see in history, or even the intellectual one we see in philosophy and thought, but an inner battle on the level of deep feeling, deep emotion, and spiritual sensitivity. Learning to conduct the energy of the deeper personality into this world is quite a difficult struggle, but it is bearing fruit. It already has happened to a significant degree, and this makes it easier for others to open up and create a wave effect that sweeps more and more of the old energy away.

It's important to recognize that truth really does matter. It's the most powerful force in the world. In the old energy this was recognized, but also feared. The power of truth made people afraid, and the response was to try to control the truth, to own it, to make it into a secret, and to use the power of secrets to control the world. Governments did this, religions did this, even families did this. It became the generally accepted way of doing business. Power was held by those who knew the secrets, and power was withheld by keeping the truth from people. Controlling people became the route to stability and strength, and losing one's secrets was tantamount to losing one's power and energy. So rather than persuading people in an open manner, priests and rulers used different means entirely. They used closed systems of thought and circular forms of logic that were all aimed at controlling the truth, and thus the cult became the principle of most human gatherings, and truth became the victim of every sacrifice made for the sake of the world's order.

But this has long been challenged, and even refuted, by a great many people, and so it's not exactly unknown to most people. In fact, it's all becoming rather obvious. Those who see it as obvious can't help but live a different way, because that is the power of truth. Once you openly acknowledge something as true, you can't get away from it, you have to start living that way. To do otherwise would be to refuse to live by the laws of gravity, say. Good luck with that.

What has been going on in the world for a long time is precisely something that stupid. It's a whole lot of people pretending that the law of gravity doesn't exist and govern our lives. The idea has taken hold in us that truth doesn't really have any power in our lives unless we acknowledge it. Well, it may not seem to us to have power over us, but it does have power, because it's true. Lies only have power over the mind, not the rest of us. It's the Wizard of Oz principle. If we believe in the Wizard, he can control us, but if we look behind the curtain and see that he's really just a scared old man, the fear disappears and so does the whole mindset that accompanied it, and we simply can't go back.

A lot of these dictators are proving to be nothing more than Wizard of Oz characters, and once the curtain is pulled back they just can't be taken seriously anymore. Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt, even Qaddafi in Libya have had the curtain pulled back on them. That's not the same as just having some new set of players do a secret coup and take over the controls behind the curtain. That's how changes used to happen, with say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss. Once one catches onto the game, it's not possible to believe in the boss at all anymore. And that's what's been happening around the world, going back to 1989 and the end of the Cold War, but now we are entering a more intense and pervasive phase of the process.

True, some of these Wizard do have guns and tanks and so forth, as we see with Qaddafi. In his case, he still has some loyal followers who haven't seen behind the curtain. But others have, and they just don't believe in his lies anymore. Increasingly, people are just not buying the bullshit they once did. Truth matters, and it has real power to permanently strip away lies.

So that's where genuine progress comes from - truth. One can cover up the truth, true enough, but if one does that, the truth is not less powerful, it is just contained and controlled. But that creates internal tensions that end up destroying things, as in the phenomena of cognitive dissonance. That can only go on for so long before truth breaks loose. And that is part of what is going on right now. Truth is breaking loose, and we are starting to see that the proper relationship to this immense power that truth has is not one of control, but of openness and freedom. That requires some kind of basic faith in truth that doesn't resort to the route of control and manipulation of truth in order to gain benefit from it. The truth is that there are actually more benefits to be gained from truth by making it open and free than by keeping it closed and controlled.

Some people are starting to figure this out, and it is making them very powerful in a way that no one previously suspected was possible. You can actually be richer than a billionaire while still having less money in the bank, if one is able to conduct that energy better. Most billionaires have gotten that way by trying to control their world and manipulate it to their advantage. That has made some people very rich but it has actually limited the total amount of wealth in the world. This world could actually be immensely rich, far beyond what our billionaires even imagine, if we would simply stop trying to control the whole process of life and energy and money. That applies to both businessmen and to governments, who have all been in league with one another to secretly control the world by keeping secrets from the masses and controlling the mechanisms of our life and economy and culture. They are the men behind the curtain, seeming to be great and powerful Oz's but in reality being scared old men desperately trying to get people to believe in them.

So the truth matters. The truth can dispel the illusions that control people, and once that happens there's really no going back. The impulse to control the world is based in fear, and it simply can't succeed, because fear limits the power of this world, it doesn't strengthen it or enhance it. Openness is what will actually make the world grow more powerful and prosperous and successful. We can already see that in many parts of the world where this principle has some support. It merely needs to spread and be seen and the ideologies that tell us otherwise need to be unmasked as impotent pretenders to the throne of Oz.

And yes, this is already happening, slowly in some cases, quickly in others, unevenly and with two steps forward and one back sometimes, but it is indeed happening. And one of the signs that it is happening is the release of secrets, of previously closely guarded truths that have been withheld by those in power. We are going to see more and more of that happening, not just in the news, but in our lives and culture altogether. Surprising things will happen, not all good at first glance, but things which upset the standard order of knowledge, of how things are controlled and assumed to be. It is an interesting time we live in.

There are new tools available for this, and we see them everywhere. The internet is one of those tools, obviously, and so are the new spiritual teachings that have been flooding the world for the last century. Combine the two, and you can get a helluva bang for your buck.