“Which Story Do You Want To Live?”
Last week I finally read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I’d heard about it for years, but never got around to reading it. As you may know, it involves a re-telling of human history with a different storyline then we have been taught. The interesting thing to me is how drastically this history is changed by simply telling the story from a different point of view.
I started to think about how we are bombarded every day with “facts” about our health, our opportunities for advancement, and our safety, to name a few. Then there’s the whole realm of political persuasion, in which every elected official and pundit assures us they speak the “truth” with their “facts.” Isn’t it funny — a large percentage of our U.S. population believes the “facts” spouted by one political party, while an equal or greater percentage sucks up the “truths” of the other.
What’s going on here? Can that many people be wrong? How do we separate fact from opinion and truth from “truthiness” before the next generation of history books are written? I’ve noticed that we are now being lied to. By everyone. All the time. I’m no longer referring to politics alone. Oh, no. Apparently the rules changed without fanfare a while ago while we as a nation were collectively napping.
Suddenly it’s not just OK — it’s a “strategy” — to lie about the free trip to Florida you’ve just won but didn’t really; the “natural” ingredients in that jar of peanut butter; how much weight you can realistically expect to lose on the latest 98% caffeine diet pill; how you, too, can qualify for this shiny new house (car, boat, whatever) even with that basement-level credit score.
All this has got me wondering — who determines where we go next as the most advanced brainstems on this planet? Telemarketers? Political operatives? Fortune 500 corporations? In other words, who will we, as sovereign individuals, allow to not only determine the course we take from here on in, but also interpret the story of that course for future generations — if there are any.
I keep coming back to the lowest common denominator — personal truth, the kind you can only gain by experience and observation. We tend to reject personal experience out of hand in our society — it can’t be measured in a lab, so it’s fairly worthless stuff. If that’s ”true,” I ask myself, then why does my life keep improving and feeling increasingly authentic and “safe” the longer I do all my own testing in the laboratory of Diane’s daily life?
Each of us has to make a decision based on the following question: ”Do I need to look to others for “truth” and hope that I follow the “ right” authorities, or is there an innate wisdom within me that I can tap into and allow to guide me safely through life?” Once we know the answer to that question we can make one of the following our conscious decision: “I will put the future of this planet into the hands of those whose agendas I cannot know” or “I am now ready to take responsibility for my role in determining the success or failure of the human experiment.”