What is true and what is real?

I still remember the first time I found myself facing a situation that forced me to broaden my perspective. As a child growing up in a family where it was easy to trust what the adults taught and shared with me, I found this unexpected and potentially game-changing. I remember the mixture of disbelief, fear, curiosity, resistance, the feeling of not wanting to believe, alongside the inability to return to what I had believed before. These moments were intense, destabilising and tiring because no one had prepared me for that feeling of being momentarily lost, confused and conflicted…

New information entered my field of understanding and no one I trusted anticipated it for me. Sometimes this information was quite shocking – I’ve always been an eager reader and I was getting my hands on books much more advanced than intended for children that age. For a while I was suspended in that critical space between the desire to move further ahead and expand my understanding and the fear of opening a very dangerous door. Sometimes I stopped, but often I entered a deep inner conflict. The vastness of what I discovered forced me to question what I had received from those I loved so much. In some way, this new understanding was taking me away from them. 

Knowledge fascinated me, but I was afraid of losing something and, above all, of doing something wrong: what was true? Were the notions I held before true, or was my new learning right?

It took years for me to understand that no one owns the absolute truth about anything because everyone sees and experiences life from their very personal perspective. Our perspective is made up of a body, a personality, a soul identity, our karma and psychological archetype. Each of us sees, interprets and experiences the reality he or she filters and creates with his or her mental setting. So everything is true, but nothing is real, because it is our own individual perception. Our physical lives are personal projections that can be constantly enlarged, shaped, transformed, enriched, undone and remade. We exist and physically live within the virtual reality shaped by our beliefs, and we possess the truth only with respect to our singular experience.

The only real thing is consciousness, the essence that allows us to have this experience, that is a n inner knowing. 

In the physical life, nothing is absolutely right or wrong. Everything is just an experience. And this experience expands every time we allow new information to enter our understanding. Free will is the wonderful ability to choose what to let in, knowing that everything that enters transforms and moves and shapes us. We cannot always remain the same, and if we try, we pay a huge price in energy. To stay still, in a space that continues to provide us with information and choices, we use up a lot of energy, a lot of effort, and often, a lot of suffering. The beliefs we keep nurturing are the perimeters within which we allow ourselves to move.

From a collective point of view we have entered a very delicate moment in our evolution, a moment in which even those who have always attached themselves to the alleged ‘truth’ of some belief or group will soon find themselves adrift. They will be overwhelmed by information that dramatically broadens their horizons and causes countless ‘certainties’ to collapse.

What I feel like telling you, with all my love, is to be aware that the only real thing you can attach yourself to, that will allow you to stay afloat, is your conscience. Your inner feeling of what feels true to you. Get used to listening to yourself, turning down the volume on the cacophony around you. Countless truths will explode around you and everything will seem the opposite of everything. Countless certainties will unravel and break; do not attach yourself to anything, or face the desperation of seeing what you believe to be true shattered. You are ready to expand your experience; what is truly real has always been within you. Trust in that solid truthful part of you. 

(pic credits Kilarov Zaneit - Unsplash)