Consider that the first four posts in this blog – Truth/Love/Aletheia – are the pre-requisite reading for creating the context of our relationship. Given the wide range of people that I’ve met in my life I have a sense that you’ll be left with a wide range of responses or reactions to the pre-requisite reading. I don’t intend to speculate on what those reactions may be but I want to provide this entry as a bridge. This bridge is pre-requisite reading as well. It begins to create the framework for my expression of being love present and experienced in the world.
Truth/Love/Aletheia just is. We’ve created the world as we know it today on top of, or from, that existing state of Truth or Love or Aletheia. It’s quite paradoxical, and that paradox is much of the reason that we can’t often see Truth/Love/Aletheia, that our current world as it appears to us is created from Love. There appears to be so much hatred and ill will, warfare, and genocide, not to mention non-stop political and social bantering that is primarily aimed at crippling or destroying others just to prove that one point of view is more “right” than the other point of view. Today these opinions are created not to even prove a point of view but just to drive increased numbers of clicks to increase traffic. From this fishbowl of reality in which we swim we’re left blind.
One part of the paradox is that you can’t “really” do anything with Truth/Love/Aletheia. It just is. It’s a place to come from, if you’re aware of it at all, or in the best case if you’re present to it. Coming from that place of Aletheia gives you the full spectrum, the entire opportunity set or range of possibilities, of available actions as a human being. Some evidence of what I’m referring to is pointed to by this research I’ve found on the website for the 2011 NeuroLeadership Summit “In the final session of the 2011 NeuroLeadership Summit, Philip Zimbardo, creator of the renowned ‘Stanford Prison Experiment,’ (www.prisonexp.org) suggested we all have the capacity for evil behaviour—that is far greater than is widely understood – and an equal or greater capacity to be heroes.” View the TED talk at TED.
At the other end of the paradox is that truth/aletheia can’t be proven, it can be pointed to or suggested, but truth occurs for each of us in our own way and in our own experience. I present the example above only as a pointer for you to begin to inquire and distinguish what is, to unconceal and reveal Aletheia.
Walking around in the world, or as I like to say Being in the world, as the space where Love is present and experienced is a great way to live. My wife refers to it as me “living in the clouds”, Katrina referred to it as walking on sunshine…but, because it can’t be used for anything I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years studying the experience to fork the jello. It’s slippery, this particular jello, because the moment you try to do something with it or use it for some purpose or grasp it as an in order to do something else it ceases to be what it is and you end up sliding down the slipperly slope that leaves you with dashed hopes and expectations and dreams which lead to resentment and envy and jealousy usually culminating in hostility, righteousness, warfare or blogging for political gain.
With that in the background I want to point to an orientation that I’ve found to be a useful place to build from Truth/Love/Aletheia. I’m not proposing this orientation as “the” orientation, or the “right” orientation, it is only an orientation.
Social Contstruction is a theory (dangerous to use any word to “describe” what it is) or movement (danger) or orientation (danger) that, if used coming from and present to Truth/Love/Aletheia can provide a framework for developing meaningful actions from Truth/Love/Aletheia. This Bridging/Correlation entry is not intended to explain Social Contruction rather it is intended to be a conversational bridge between the realms of being and doing. If you are interested in a brief overview this will give you the ten minute rundown (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVVWmZAStn8). Thank you to the good doctor’s for creating it.
Truth/Love/Aletheia is a state of being, an ontological realm, temporal in nature. Because of it’s temporal nature it will never be experienced in the future or developed or planned to occur in the future. For Truth/Love/Aletheia there is no future, there is no past. There is only right now where Love is experienced as a presence. It isn’t even really a thing – as soon as I call it Truth, or Love, or Aletheia or Truth/Love/Aletheia it ceases to be present. Mu. No-thing.
Experience shows that it can occur as more than just an individual phenomenon however. Truth/Love/Aletheia can occur for groups of people together sharing space. From and in that space conversation occurs and new social construction and meaning can develop from that place where Love is experienced.
Social Constructionism, understood by groups who are present to Truth/Love/Aletheia can create future realities that seem unlikely or impossible today.
Reality as it will be experienced without any notion of Truth/Love/Aletheia or Social Contructionism can, I assert, take on a shape in the future that is closer to Truth/Love/Aletheia by developing interventions now that alter the range of possible futures by creating social constructed realities from Truth/Love/Aletheia today.
Long ago we created meaning and somewhere along the way we stopped inquiring into that meaning, where it came from, how we decided that this means this and that means that. A notion of Truth was developed by Plato and Socrates (from what we’ve been told) and we’ve bought it and the conversation goes on and on. Question Truth from the being you are prior to language.
Let’s create ourselves, our organizations, our world from that place.
With Love,
Ed