The Truth

As a natural born scientist, I’ve been experimenting with my life for many years now.  Diagnosing, postulating and theorising, based on the empirical evidence of my life experiences, and the results of the experiments run to prove or disprove my theories. 

One of my first experiments was to come up with a theory by which to enter into an uncertain future at the age of 16, when I’d left home under police escort to live with my sister in Bathurst, leaving behind my mountain home, family, friends, school, childhood religion, cat, dog, horse, piano, cello and at moments I thought my sanity.  For two weeks I played solitaire with a deck of cards wherever I sat, and ate cheese compulsively.  Grieving, pining, wondering what it was all about, letting go.  At the end of those weeks, and in the complete vacuum left by the absence of a religion which had an answer for everything…………from over the other side of a seemingly impassable void, inbetween where I stood, turned out from my religion, schooling and family KNOWING that I was stupid, ugly, knew nothing of importance and never would, and that everyone and everything was better than me…………..and the rest of the world that looked to me, as a sweet young thing, to be so incredibly clever, and beautiful, and witty and wild.  Especially surrounded as I was by passionate and creative university students in a hybrid uni-farming town, in the days before university fees, when young folks went there while they worked out what they REALLY wanted to do when they grew up.  Plays and performances and spontaneous music and beat poetry glittered in amongst the wild haircuts and clothes and crazy underground uni student homes, spread out through a picturesque countryside.   I very quickly realized that I’d been brought up as very white and middle class,  and was racist, sexist, and homophobic. So after my cheese eating solitaire obsessing binge, and after realizing all of that, and letting it all sink into the void, from across the other side came a very simple…..

The only truth is that there is no ultimate truth.

It worked for me.  And I set about trying to learn from each and every single thing that happened to me, and from everyone I came into contact with, especially the people that made me feel uneasy……cause lets face it, at that point in my life just about everyone made me feel uneasy.  My childhood had been pretty shit in general really.  Lots of unhappiness and loneliness.  Interspersed with moments of pure gold and gorgeous friendships of course, cause there’s always a seam of bright to the smudge, but it was about as crap as I’d want to experience anyway.  Dad died when I was 7 in the Granville train crash, blah blah, there’s a lot of blah there, but that’s not part of this story. 

I’ve done lots of things since then, and learnt from so many many people along the way, who have taught me all sorts of lessons and given me insights to so many theories, that I took along with me to experiment with on the way.  I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with a list of theories I’ve experimented with, but they’re so incredibly numerous, and I realize that what I’m trying to say is about all those other experiments, but mostly about the big theory I’m playing with right now, especially as I’ve gone to such trouble to outline the first very big theory, that I started what I consider my adult life with. 

Because it’s come full circle.  After thinking that I knew ‘the truth’ as  bequeathed by my childhood religion, I left it and came to ‘the only truth is that there is no ultimate truth’ and travelled for a long and lovely time through all sorts of panoramas and cultures and ecosystems and tribes, till I come to right here and now, where I’m going to tell you that I actually am onto ‘the truth’ again. 

That’s right.  I’m telling you that I know The Truth.  The Big One.  The Great Kahuna.  The Almighty And Omnipresent Truth Of Truthness.

And if you’re anything like everyone else that I’ve said this to since I’ve been experimenting with this concept, you’re rolling your eyes, or getting instantly distracted, and trying to work out how you can politely tell me that my truth is very cute, but it’s only MY truth afterall, or shuffling your feet and suddenly feeling an intense interest in the condition of your fingernails, or the other routines you go through when you come across another person trying to tell you what ‘the truth’ is again……..   

And I’ll even put in a little preamble, and tell you that this ‘truth’ comes to you via a million different reflections in a million different mirrors and truths and versions of truths, and self organizing symmetry, and the fractal nature of reality, and smidgins of shards of religion and spirituality, and lessons to be learned from the light and dark paths of enlightenment………

Are you curious yet?  Have you stopped the shuffle?  Are you ready for me to tell you THE TRUTH?

The Great And Ultimate Truth Is The Synthesis Of Every Single One Of Us Being Who We Are Born To Be.   In being true to our authentic human selves, and living our own truth, no matter what that may be, we are actually BEING ‘the truth’.  Living our part of the great and universal truth that is the combination and synthesis of us all and everything there is, and all of our experiences, and beliefs, and truths, and hearts.  Because it has to be.  Any great truth, or god, or spirituality, or science or belief has to hold us all.  Has to hold us all with the unconditional love that we all deserve and respond to.  Between all of us is The Truth.  And the best way to get there is to follow the paths and the fractals within us, being led by our desires and loves and passions.  And learning from our pains and griefs and tortures.  Equally from both.  The Pleasurable and the Painful.  Pleasure and joy are easy to learn from, but it takes the true dedication of a scientist to elicit lessons, opportunities and gifts from the Painful experiments of life.  Our Shadows are parts of ourselves that we pull away from ourselves in order to externalize and attempt to understand.   Blame, Fear and Denial keep your Shadow at bay, but eating it back into yourself brings the seeds of enlightenment at the heart of your shadow within you. 

Just like Ashoka, the rough young king that came into power in India, towards the end of the apparently Dark Ages, that was only Dark in fact around the Roman Catholic Church, we could really get, that to pick one way or truth or belief or god as supreme overall, is a bit insulting to others and their truths really, and bound to cause conflict and warring.  And instead we could all create Universe Cities within our minds, where all the beliefs and truths and experiences could come together as equals, and have a great rap about what they’ve got in common, and we take the bits that resonate, and respect the equal truth of the rest, and go on our merry own paths. 

And whether you call it God, or Great Spirit, or Buddha, or Self Organisation, or Chaos, or Creation, or Evolution, or Consciousness, or Allah, or Goddess, or Anarchy, or The Law Of Every Action Having An Equal And Opposite Reaction……..it seems that they’re all actually the same thing.  It’s that bit that happens in your life that defies all expectations of coincidence, serendipity, and random occurrences.  That bit that makes you inherently aware that there’s a great design or purpose to the things that happen around you, and they’re all leading you to a logical conclusion.  The bit where you realize that you often get what you need, instead of what you want, and that all the things you get are actually as good or bad as each other, when you see them as lessons, opportunities, and gifts.  The bit where you know in your very being and soul that you’re not alone, but are surrounded by a host of guardian angels, or in connection with DNA and the energy that’s constantly moving round in our universe and remembering where it’s been, or with The Ancestors, or with entities and deities and devas all around us, or the particles that make up the 4 billions parts of information that our eyes see every second, and that we only consciously recognize 2 thousands parts of.  The bit that helps you to see everything else as kin and connected, and that what you give out, is what you get back.  The bit that encourages you to empathise, be compassionate, and do to other people what you’d like done to yourself.

The Great And Ultimate Truth Is All Of It.  All our lessons and learnings and pains and joys and wars and peace and truths and denials and fears and trust and realizations and knowings and feelings and doings.  The synthesis of all of our trials and inner knowledge and traumas and love.  The Truth within us, is the same as The Truth without us.  And we are all an integral part of it. 

Take it for a test run at least, and then let me know what you think of The Truth.

After Birth - But that's not all.......

So.

Last post I was talking about how I've learnt about the evolutionary adaptations our bodies have gone through to create the baby/adult experience and relationships we have today, and how in my experience, we live out the patterns we learn in our wombs, birth, and infancy, with the survival imperative that all the other animals follow.  A very scientific, instinctual, evolutionary, and behavioural approach.

But that's not all there is to it, is it?

There's also the soul, fate, destiny, spirit, consciousness, collective soul, and all other things spiritual that come into it, isn't there.  Not to mention all the 'scientific' examples of thought creating reality that Quantum Physics has highlighted, that are surprisingly similar to the wisdom of Lao Tsu and Chief Seattle.  Not to mention the discoveries in genetic science, that tell us that we share the same DNA as every other living thing in our world - about 11,000 libraries worth of information contained within every strand of DNA - and the blueprints for creating every single living thing on the planet.

I've always tried to treat my babies as I would want to be treated if I was in a helpless body, with my consciousness intact.   And I've had a lot of reason to be supported in that belief.  When I was pregnant with mine and Currawong's first son, my 9 year old daughter from a previous life was not too impressed about his choice of birthday.  He was due on the same day as her.  She vowed to hate him forever if he was born on her birthday...so he wasn't.  But that wasn't all, she also had 10 days after her birthday of special events that she didn't want to miss due to birthing, and vowed to hate him equally for all of them. So he wasn't born on any of them.  In fact he waited till the morning of the very next day after her last 'special' day, to gently start his journey to the world.  In the evening when the expansions were 5 minutes apart and I started contemplating leaving the bath at home and travelling to the hospital, I rang my mother to come and be part of the birth.  She was an hour away.  From the moment I got off the phone, my expansions went back to 10 minutes apart, and as soon as she walked through the door they went back to 5 minutes......  I spent a gentle, musical, laughing, and peopled birth journey in the spa bath at the hospital, telling everyone how very considerate this little baby was.

Our second child's birth was no less special in teaching us very different lessons about bonding and it's importance, and the whole experience kinda suited Lilly's nature and personality in a way that made the whole thing make sense in retrospect. Spiral-Moon's birth created a mad dash by us up north to buy a house that we basically birthed in and then left, and was perfect in every way for her in particular.  And with Balthazar, we were going to freebirth in another state, and were living in a isolated house that was to be ravaged by the terrible fires in Victoria.  Just before he was born, we changed round completely, came back home to family support, and were living on a community to have our caesarean baby in the best possible way, and with the best possible support, instead of living through a hellish fire.  And with the recent birth of my twins, not only did they choose to be born on different days, but these boys are completely different.  One's eating hand over fist, and the other is still purely breastfed.  They sleep at different times, and in all ways are two separate babies, with separate needs, happening at the same time.  In fact, funnily enough considering my last post, these two babies have completely rolled all over all my smug judgements about how 'continuum' and 'attachment' babies perform.  They don't sleep....EVER....day or night, and they scream their guts out for no particular reason, even while they're being held, fed, and co-slept with day and night.  In many ways they fit completely within the framework of my last post, and in many other ways they don't at all.

There's been a spiritual, conscious, 'fatefull', and destined element in all of our experiences, and birthing, and children.  Which is contradictory to the perspectives of my recent post about the evolutionary and behavioural elements of birthing right??

Well maybe to some folk yes indeed, but to me.....no, not at all.

I've come to the realisation that there really aren't any 'truths' at all, just an infinite universe of possibilities.  And a whole heap of people with differing experiences, 'truths', perspectives and opinions, that they base on their own experience, and argue with others versions of 'truth', with all the born again zeal of a mammal trying to apply the survival skills they got from their parents. And there's also their spirit, or collective consciousness that is leading them down a merry path that may be not at all what they expect, and may even challenge their 'truths' regularly.

And I've developed this concept of 'composite truths'.  Or a truth, that contains more than one perspective, science or whatever, and maybe even many - some of which can be completely diametrically opposed - that are all equally true.

To explain a bit more......when I look at Ethnopaediatrics, evolution, attachment and continuum parenting, and our survival skills that we learn from our parents, it all makes complete sense to me, and I can see the relevance to it in my life.  And when I look at us mob as a collection of souls, here to learn our own particular trips, and all the delightfully magic little episodes that have occured throughout my life, that bring me to the belief that I'm always in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.......that also makes complete sense and is relevant to my life also.  I tried for ages to decide on ONE approach or the other, and couldn't quite do it.  I swung from one perspective to the other, and there was always something that didn't quite fit completely into the picture.  But put them both together, (and don't sweat the contradictions or paradoxes, cause they're the nature of the universe), and it's PERFECT!!!  Room for both perspectives with a huge potential to expand in any direction.

I reckon there's a lot of areas in our lives that get swamped or avoided or stressed about forever because we try so hard to fit our experience into a pre-packaged box of belief.  Whether that's 'science' or 'religion', or 'evolution' or 'creationism' or 'right' or 'wrong' or 'good' or 'bad'.....  The dualistic arguments go on for ever.  But what if there was no box?  What if you could just mash em all together to get the particular colour of the rainbow that matches the colour of your experience?

The first time I really experienced this was when I was about 17, sitting in the back yard of my sister's friends house, having left home under police escort a year beforehand due to an abusive step-father.  Since I'd left, I couldn't quite settle on what I thought about him.  I hated him for what he'd done to my family, what he'd done to my sister, what he'd done to my life, but I also loved him, for the patience and care he'd shown me, and the protection he gave me from my rough older brothers.  He  noticed my sensitivity and creativity before anyone else.  And I just couldn't decide on how to look at him, how to deal with the situation, and whether I should love or hate him.  And I still remember to this day, and it was like trying to swim through glue, but as I sat out on the lawn in the sun it crystalised in my head.  I could do both.  I could love and hate him all at the same time.  And in finding that middle road I also found peace.

 I've applied this approach of 'composite truths' to many area's and decisions in my life, and it's always resulted in a delicious middle road, peace, and some very interesting theorising and philosophising.

It's an approach I can highly reccomend.