Grounding a post-truth era trip
How to deal with our divergent, fragmented notion of truth as a collective?
It’s like our hardware - both on a species and social level - hasn’t caught up to our newly updated software. The amount of information we have about the world does not compute. How do I make sense of so many different perspectives? How do I make sense of my own perspective in the midst of the diversity of perspectives? And then what does that mean for our notion of truth and justice as a society? Our institutions of law and order?
My knee-jerk reaction to starkly different views is critical. I put the other person down. Instinctively, subconsciously. “You’re wrong. You don’t know as much as I do. You don’t have the right information or right view point.”
As my mind expands out and sees how we all create our own realities, how our realities are shaped by so many different factors and influences I watch myself begin to disappear. For I know that my human experience is made up of my own internal biases; my specific algorithm of genes, personality, upbringing, social world and more. I know that as a human I have shadow sides - parts of myself that I can’t easily see but that affect my thoughts and behavior. The unconscious and subconscious world.
If everything outside of me feels like it’s lying, like it’s untrustworthy; if the institutions and media and books and public thought are not trustworthy, then what is?
I turn to my human experience.
But I know that my human experience is developed by… [repeat previous trip]
So then what do I grasp to? I find myself floating in a dissociated abyss of questions. With nothing to hold on to.
It puts to question the societal notion that truth is an objective reality. That notion of objective reality is dying.
That’s where the spiritual comes in. Let’s reckon with this: Yes, my human experience and my belief system are biased. Yes, it is a product of a specific algorithm of events and happenstances. Yes, it is imperfect and lacks “objective truth” within a certain set of standards.
And what if that’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be? What if I fully trust in the presence of this specific, complex web that is me? Trust in its presence in this point in time. That even in the face of adversity that it has a place here, a right to be here and is needed.
My body finds spaciousness and breaths. YES. This is my home in this madness: A deep faith that my specific human experience is valuable to this point in time, even if it doesn’t answer any of the questions that exist. Even if there’s the possibility of it being wrong or only partially true or jaded or manipulated. I HAVE to trust in its presence. Because that’s my spiritual duty to this life experience - to TRUST in it. Not to be complacent in it but to trust the larger wisdom that it’s part of, and trust that I’m part of that larger wisdom. That we all are part of this larger wisdom, this larger movement.
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Written in process during the Kavanaugh hearing
Hi, I’m Liz Moyer Benferhat. Writer, facilitator, coach, and development practitioner dedicated to the subtle interplay between how inner transformation feeds the outer transformation we need in the world. Welcome 🌿