ENVIRONMENTAL & SOCIAL JUSTICE Telling the Truth: The Paradox of Peace As R/Evolution BY CAROL BURBANK
This self-centered projection turns facts into silly putty. Remember silly putty? We pressed an image into that malleable rubbery toy and stretched it for our amusement. Fun when it’s a game, but not so great when it’s information we need to help us make sense of a crisis or a conflict. Facts always intersect with our beliefs, but the truth doesn’t change just because it doesn’t mirror our hopes and fears. With dis- cernment we can trust our inner compass, but the answers we seek in mirrors are never as trustworthy as we might wish. We must have the courage to ask a lot of questions as we look for answers, living more in experimentation than certainty. Certainty po- larizes us. Because facts exist in an ever-evolving web, each one is in - fluenced by our understanding and by the questions we’ve asked to arrive at those answers. These answers always combine facts with our internal beliefs and constructs. That makes for good conversations, interesting insights, and innovative solutions to challenges we face. Which brings us to peace, at last. Peace is a process not a destina- tion, a negotiation not a rigid fact. We know peace is active because truth serves community, giving us a foundation from which to un- derstand, accept, and explore facts without distorting them. Peace al- lows us to understand, accept, and explore ourselves authentically. To co-create authentic communities. To bridge divides that we create by denying or stretching or misaligning the truths that make us who we are. Facts arrange themselves in sides, opposing columns, marching to mirror our small selves and smaller relationships. Some of them are irrefutable; others are only facts in certain situations and contexts. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. Yet facts are building blocks. If we pick and choose, we grow weaker. If we explore them with dis- cernment, we can construct something real, something that can hold meaning. Truths occupy a larger space, beyond the ego’s mirror, more com-
The world has always been full of questions, but lately, it seems like we are deeply attached to finding definitive answers. That always feels a little dangerous to me. Of course, like anyone, a convincing answer gives me comfort and a foundation. But I often find out that I haven’t asked the right question, and the foundation shifts uncomfortably. The truth seems no closer than it was before; peace feels far away. With our communities reeling from changes we never anticipated and uncertainties we cannot minimize, peace evolves slowly in the tenuous balance of expansive questions and layered answers. It’s hard to live with today’s realities. I try to gracefully navigate the pell-mell progress of the human machine, framed by technology and a desperate need for love and clarity, twisted by nationalism and depri- vation and misunderstanding and rage. But things feel so muddy, with all these alternative and real, uncertain and passionate “facts” circling like a whirlpool. I often feel certain about what’s right. I’m not often sure what’s true. Now is a time when we must find the discernment that can lead us into connection and expansion, because the stakes are so high. But how do we know what we know? How do we know that what we know is true? I’m not talking about that felt knowing that we value so much as spiritual people. That way of being and becoming is foundational to our personal evolution, at the same time part of our souls and re- sourced from something larger than our human lives. Many would argue that liminal knowing is part of our cultural evo - lution as well. But the challenge I see daily is that this inner knowing is too often intimately woven with the ego’s needs, obscured by our personal hopes, beliefs, fears, and dreams. Unconsciously, we weave the facts around these intuitive and aspirational ways of knowing as a way of constructing a mirror in the world. We can’t see what we can’t see. We don’t know what we don’t know.
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32—PATHWAYS—Winter 23
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