Authoring Your Own Meaning + Getting It Wrong

It is so interesting to live in a time when intuition is being more widely accepted. At the same, the narratives of those who have been written out of history books are being unearthed, misinformation and manipulated data is being identified, and its propagation for profit by companies like Facebook is coming into clearer resolution.

We are collectively examining our relationship to truth; the narratives we hear depends on who is narrating a story. There's the old adage that there are three sides to every story, your side, the other's side and what really happened. But I think it's even more nuanced than this, because there is what we know on a soul-level, that eternal sweeping philosophical knowing, and then there is the perception we have as embodied beings on the third-dimensional plane who have to make choices, who have to see from our particular perspective in a particular point in time, very much affected by our own nervous systems, lineages, intuitions, traumas and mental and emotional states.

Can we ever be in intimate relationship with others without knowing what our own thoughts, ideas and opinions are? Can we own our perspective without accepting that we are subjective by nature.

Maybe it is because I am an Aquarius rising, but I used to search for the “TRUTH” as if somehow if I could locate it; Could the right book, the right idea, or right framework be the foundation to build my own thinking upon? Maybe. But at this point in time, I wonder what my motivation is for trying to find that universal truth. I even question the integrity of setting out to do so.

From my perspective, the assumption that as individuals we can have access to what's true for everyone else is a foundational assumption behind colonization, and the destruction of cultures and manipulation of minds assessed as less self-sovereign than the colonizer.

In a way, groupthink is a colonization of minds. It seeks to flatten natural diversity of thought and the natural evolution of our ideas, which, I believe, are meant to change.

And yet, wondering if what we are perceiving is the same as or at least resonant with what others are perceiving, is evidence of a desire to not be alone, a desire to connect. This wondering can be deeply beautiful and motivate us to create art, articulate our vision, and find ways to represent how we see the world, so that others might witness what we feel inside.

I hold a notion dear to me that there might be universal truths and experiences. That somewhere deep in our DNA we understand that connection between ourselves and all living forms, or all matter in existence, even if it just from the simple fact that our most current model for our universe's existence is the theoretical occurence of one singular event, one “Big Bang” that birthed “the existence of the observable universe" and everything in it.

But in the end, these notions, are just that, notions. The history of science itself is the history of making new models for what we believe the world is; even models from 30 years ago feel outdated, or just plain inaccurate. So why is it that we continue to seek an absoluteness to our perspective, as if the trail of inquiry behind us is anything more than a list of best guesses that have been proven wrong or at least revised?

Maybe when we were living in the wild, a wrong best guess might mean death. Maybe when we were running into people who were not like us far back in our lineage, it meant potential violence. Maybe somewhere along the way we learned to come to a subconscious agreement that if we sought out people whose beliefs and cultures felt safe and familiar, we could somehow put that fear away and learn to create communities.

And that is so beautiful, gathering around shared mythologies, holding shared models of the universe, and creating from these various collective consciousnesses, all of the world.

But… there is a feeling I have had ever since the beginning of 2020 that collectively we are going through a change, on an energetic, individual and collective level. When consciousness grows, so do all forms.

The Great Conjunction, when Jupiter and Saturn met at the same exact degree at the end of 2020, according to some astrologers, ushers in the Age of Aquarius. Aquarius to me is learning how to be a rebel while also understanding the story of humanity as a whole, and how we impact and affect one another. Aquarian genius is about going against the grain, in its immaturity it is contrariness for the sake of being “different" but in its maturity, it is contrariness for a deep respect and love for oneself and the collective of which we are all a part, which extends not just to our human family, but to everyone and everything, everywhere.

I find it very interesting to live in a time where we encounter sweeping statements about the right and wrong ways to act and the right and wrong ways to speak, while also being deeply averse to being treated as a monolith - whether that is within our societally-defined projections as women-identifying people, gender constructs, language hierarchies, classism, and all the other ways other people try to tell us who we are.

We are unearthing truths that have been manipulated, buried and covered up by powerful structures that benefit from us equating security with doing what we are told, but that same mechanism - of trying to centralize authority in order to create a sense of order - also makes its way into how we think about creating change in the world. The historically predominant cultural narrative about us- projects power structures onto our sense of identity. We have been racialized, pathologized and placed in social hierarchies based on our perceived access to power, money, status or education, and this structure is the basis of our economy and in turn how we relate to or value the world around us.

At the same time, I feel strongly that a much deeper knowing of ourselves is emerging. A remembering that there is something beyond this material experience or even this lifetime. I think the value of this emerging perspective is that it gives us the responsibility to create the world around us, rather than the assumption that we are meant to accept “the way things are” or “how things are done.” But it is also immensely nerve-wracking to feel the responsibility of understanding the world is MADE UP! The stock market was someone's idea. The digging up and valuing of precious gems and minerals was someone's ideas. There is a negotiation between the imagination and the material world and it feels like we are reclaiming the creative part of us, not as something to be siloed into specific industries or hobbies, but as the force behind the invention of the world around us. And as we all know, too many choices, can feel paralyzing, so this negotiation between going inward into what we imagine and finding ways to land our creativity in the outside world is a constant choice, which can be difficult in the era of distraction and vying for our attention in the digital age. We live in the distraction economy. And it is time to reclaim the creative resource of ourselves, so as not to become the product of someone else's inert data stream to be bought and sold.

This is why the idea of all of us reconnecting with our instincts, our feelings, our senses, and the choosing what we do with intentionality, feels so important. You don't need to be spiritual to benefit from meditating. You don't need to believe in having a soul to question your belief systems. But finding out what you believe, why you believe it and what you would rather believe is a reality-shifting action, whether you are in the world of Spirituality or just a human trying to sort out what is yours and what is not, and who you really are.

To me, the goal of this time period is not to replace one external authority with a new one. No, it is to accept our own power, responsibility and authority and to understand the world. In order to reclaim our right to be the makers of our own meaning (while of course, being discerning about misinformation and taking into account our individual biases), we must also allow others to have the sovereign right to make meaning for themselves, too.

What we need is not a new list of beliefs to all adhere to, but instead better tools to accept that so much is unknown, and to cope with the feeling of uncertainty that has actually been there all along, but was quelled by following the status quo, in order to get a false sense of predictability and safety. Swimming in the unknown means accepting that we can and will be wrong, and that our ability to relate to others, even within our intimate relationships, might not be because of sameness of thought, but instead respect for the subjectivity of the human experience.

Can we learn how to care for our own perspectives without making others wrong? What does that look like in romantic relationship, friendship or business? What does that look like when organizing, healing or creating? We don't know quite yet, but I think if we are willing to be accept the that we are always swimming in the unknown, we can help one another find out.