Reality Isn’t Always Truth
When I was very young and still living in India, some of my most beautiful memories were with my Didu, my maternal grandmother, a formidable and magical matriarch. In her hide-and-seek friendly house in Kolkata, and under her loving protection, I could explore being a child freely and happily. As long as she was there, I was safe from harm.
Me on the bed with Didu, my sister petting Didu's fiercely loyal German Shepherd, Devil, and my dad in the background
Lately, I’ve been remembering some of the music that was often part of the diverse soundtrack to our times Didu’s house: Rabindra Sangeet, songs written and composed by one of India’s greatest poets and philosophers, Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
Through the remembering and revisiting of this music from my early childhood, I’ve been diving back into some of Tagore’s writings and poems.
One of the things he wrote about is the unbreakable relationship between beauty and truth - that when we feel beauty, we know it as truth:
“Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.”
When we experience beauty undistorted, as in a perfect mirror, we recognize it as truth. For Tagore and for so very many of us, this undistorted beauty of truth is most clearly felt and experienced in the temple of Nature and the wilderness - which isn't capable of lying and deception.
Tagore’s words, pointing to this undistorted perception of beauty as truth and truth as beauty, have been a wayshower for me recently - especially in this particular reality tunnel we’re collectively traveling through, which doesn't feel all that beautiful.
If the inseparability of truth and beauty feel true to you, then could it be that this unbeautiful, unnatural and distorted reality that’s being reflected back to us is not based on truth?
Come, let’s see if this elicits an inner yes for you…
In themselves, beliefs are not true. They’re agreements and constructs around which we - often unconsciously/non-consensually - organize our behaviors and create our realities.
But then we - individually, and as part of the collectives we identify with - behave as though our beliefs were irrefutably, absolutely true. And for this reason, our beliefs become the accepted and agreed upon truth of our reality constructs; because beliefs, whether generative or otherwise, are self-fulfilling prophecies.
Beliefs are containers in which the formlessness of consciousness can take on a particular form or shape. Or, otherwise put: states of consciousness create systems of belief (the building blocks/constructs of our reality.) Systems of accepted belief then create systems of culture, society, economy, etc.
But states of consciousness and the systems they create are not static. They too are subject to the inevitable process of evolution.
(Our beliefs, and the realities they construct, can be infused with truth when we attune to what feels beautiful and true.)
So going back to the axiom that the subjective perception - the felt sense - of beauty is the recognition of truth, when we look around at our lives, at the world, can we see through all that feels unnatural and unbeautiful as not true?
Yes, they’re here in our reality: what are the beliefs that we have invested the energy of our consciousness into that are creating this particular reality construct? Are those beliefs conscious and consensual agreements? And most importantly - do those beliefs feel beautiful to you?
Because if they don’t, could it be that they’re not true? Unlike the truth that we unequivocally recognize and feel as true when we perceive the beauty of Nature - which we're inseparable from.
If you’re still with me, let’s go a bit deeper…
Nature gives us that universal experience of beauty = truth = beauty.
And what feels beautiful - and therefore true - to me is not necessarily going to be the same for you.
Within the universal experience, we’re each having our own individual experiences and expressions of beauty + truth that are aligned with our authentic, undistorted values - which are a portal to the soul, our larger Self (which in turn is inseparable from the universality of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul.)
(Our authentic values become distorted when they’re infiltrated by the ‘shoulding’ voice of externally imposed imperatives. Again, we can turn to the felt-sense: if it doesn’t feel beautiful, it’s at odds with our soul and not true for us.)
And what of this felt-sense of beauty + truth? How do we know when we’re feeling it? You will have your own nuances with this - but in general, there’s a feeling of expansiveness, spaciousness, the relief of release, a peaceful recognition and knowing. An easeful inner yes that’s free of urgency and grasping.
Our capacity to sustainably feel and root into this, to wholeheartedly attune to it and create the reality of our life from this place will depend on the state of our (colonized) nervous systems. It will depend on a daily practice of waking up, remembering and unhooking from belief systems based on trauma, suffering and struggle as the (untrue) foundations of reality; unhooking from the swampy, stagnant impasse of this is just the way things are.
It will depend on taking incremental steps towards creating the capacity in our bodies and nervous systems by becoming intimately familiar with and returning home to what feels beautiful and true to us. And it will require the trust of leaning into feeling the safety of this, of pivoting away from outsourcing our safety from harmful systems of domination, and turning towards what feels beautiful and true: our inner sovereignty.
The more we do this, the more we’ll feel and know when we have forgotten, when we’re being forced into investing our energy and consciousness into belief systems and realities that are unbeautiful and therefore untrue for us, for our souls.
And from here, rather than becoming enmeshed in or bypassing the horrors that are being forced on us as reality, we can see through them as untrue instead. Our acting and doing in our lives and in the world, our advocacy and activism for ourselves and others becomes infused with the frequency of attunement to the beauty and truth of our authentic, undistorted values.
To be clear, the practice of seeing through is not a turning away, a denial - which carries the energy of disembodied fear. Instead, it's a resourced engagement with the unbeautiful and untrue realities of our lives and the world. We resource ourselves by rooting into the felt-sense beauty and truth of our authentic values, from where we rise into meeting, engaging with and stewarding the evolution of untrue realities.
Wholehearted courage and flexible resilience are required - especially when we’re confronted with a mandated taxation of our consciousness, our energy, our resources, into fear-driven belief systems and realities that are unbeautiful and untrue for us. Courage and resilience become the soul-body’s loyal familiars the more we commit and recommit to the beauty of truth, and to creating realities from here.
For me, this felt-sense attunement to beauty as truth as beauty has been a trusty and resourceful guide lately. I highly recommend you give it a go. And when we regularly attune to our felt-sense of this, we organically begin to create more capacity, more resourced resilience in our bodies and our nervous systems to meet life and its myriad realities.
If you've made it this far, here's a simple practice to get you started on attuning to this felt-sense of beauty as truth as beauty (here’s a guided audio if you prefer):
Start by feeling yourself here, now in your space. In your body. Breathe into your body. You have a body, come back to it.
Look around you. Find something that feels beautiful to you - it could be an object, a pet, a plant, another human, a smell or a sound, the way that the light is streaming into your space. Anything.
How does this feel in your body? Take some time to gently notice. If you're not used to this/don't yet have the capacity for it, your mind might come in with its chatter about how this is all nonsense. That's totally natural. For now, gently turn back towards noticing the sensation of the beauty you're relating to.
How does it feel, as sensation?
Does this feel like truth to you? Allow the answer to arise from within.
If it feels like truth, rest in this place for a few moments, a few minutes - whatever you have the capacity for right now. Can you begin to make a home here?
To close, can you make a quiet commitment to your Self to return to this felt-sense as you go about your day and meet unbeautiful realities? And when you do, pause, and let your doing and acting come from a resourced rootedness to your felt-sense of beauty and truth.
Play with it. This is just one portal into attunement with your felt-sense of beauty + truth. Create your own explorations, and create your value-aligned beliefs when you feel anchored in what feels beautiful and true to you. Welcome and deepen into the nuances that show up for you, and allow them take you on the journey you need to go on. And most importantly, allow the process to evolve through you and with you.