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title: Perspectives and Truth

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# Perspectives and Truth

What counts as true? What happens when different perspectives are not aligned in what they perceive is happening? 

Seems pretty philosophical to be asking these questions, and yet they also seem to be the actual gap in our present conversations. What counts as fake news? Few of us have escaped arguing with someone who seems to have different assumptions about how truth is determined. This is not abstract philosophy nor academic hand-wringing. It is our family dinner table. 

I propose some discernments that may be useful in your personal practice as well as some of the larger pressures in the systems we live in that bring this question to our dinner tables. 

Are we being asked for a preference? Are we sharing how we feel? The result of our own sense making? Are we being asked as a witness to an event? Or are we part of a jury for some conflict or violence? Which kind of truth shades the criteria for it. 

I have been turning this truth sensing over and over, and this is what I have come up with after years of contemplation and many many many conversations with others. You are welcome to disagree and offer your perspective.

## True for me: Truth about ourselves within ourselves

### Preferences
Being asked what your favorite color is gives you sole authority over the truth of that answer. It is your preference and you determine it. We could end up in a further debate if you say your favorite color is “shades of Spring” or “the color of water in the mountains” or other non-standard answers. We can end up in further debate if you say the color of that dress, and one of us calls that color blue and the other cream. Some of those gaps in alignment may come from the abilities within our eyeballs and the reference map we have for what our eyes perceive. But, as a preference, you remain the singular authority on the truth of the answer. 

### Feelings
Again, with feelings, this is information about your inner world. At best someone might be able to assist you with more nuanced words, but you are the sole authority on your feelings. Others can say, “It seems to me as if you are feeling…” but that “seems as if” is about their interpretation, which is the most they get to do, interpret. Maybe you do some personal exploration and realize that the tickling feeling in your belly is anticipation rather than fear, and you update how you describe your feelings to others. Great. But nobody else can say, definitively, that you are misreading your tickles as fear or dread. You are entitled to feelings and the interpretation of those feelings. 

### Personal Sensemaking
I gathered my inputs from people I trust and developed a story about something, say the election or the corruption in an organization. Great, this sense making is also “true for you” even if it is not true for others. Because it doesn’t have to have that intersubjective reality check, yet. All statements in this realm should be “I” statements. “I think that…” or “I have a story that…” And others can have other things they think and stories that they hold. This type of thing has been available and in use for a long time, but there are pressures in the current environment which make it more important to explicitly name them as an opinion. And restrictions on word count, for example, can lead to people not adding the qualifiers, “I think or I sense or I have a story that…” to save some characters. 

This personal sense making also causes conflict when there is a power gap between two or more people expressing their opinions, because those opinions may come with the weight of the power behind them. The upside of this coin might be use of personal mantras or positive affirmations. The dark side may be the denial of a reality others experience.

## True-to-us: Truth from within ourselves negotiated and held by alignment with others

### WitHness and Witness
Sometimes we are asked for our sense making as a witness. This one increases the complexity for truth. First, I want to distinguish between witness and witH-ness. Our friend may want to relate a story they have about something painful, some grief they hold. I call this witH-ness. We are not being asked to give an account of what we see from our perspective, we are being asked to observe their experience, to hold them lovingly without challenging their story about it. This witH-ness can be a powerful healing practice. It is not appropriate to debate whether the time was really 6:04. It may not even be the time to nudge the speaker to say, “I have a story that” instead of claiming it is somehow universally true or true for other beings or true for some set of beings who share alignment. The purpose of witH-nessing is to be with a person as they are and not to assess some intersubjective truth. WitHnessing allows us to be with someone in their truth, their subjective experience.

However, being a witness is precisely about helping sense make for intersubjective sense of what is true-to-us. When I say intersubjective, I mean between multiple subjects/people but not necessarily all people, a group seeking alignment or coherence about a truth to hold. Being witness is about providing an angle of view and when held in composite with other angles of perception can allow, if transparent, for a group to sense make a story together.

Think of this as how a human body works. The nose may smell something and the foot may bump into something. Their accounts may provide very different information while both providing the truth-as-I-see-it. And also, we may rely on the foot to sense texture or physicality while we may not rely on it to describe a scent. The nose may easily describe smell but not texture unlil the object is dangerously close. So we use the filter of what someone is good at, what their angle of observation is, as we listen to their testimony.

Criteria for Truth and Validity

Methods of Sensemaking such as Science
* Several ways in which we arrive at what we believe to be true, science, what we sense in our bodies, how we interpret those sensations as feelings, whether we include mythical sensemaking (the spirit moved me, or defining right/wrong action), the ethical frameworks we use, etc.

So when do we need to converge/merge our perspectives into an agreement about what has happened or needs to happen next?
