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ISSN: 1539-431X April 1, 2004 Follow-up: What Is Truth?
 What
is RSS?
John Cali Recently I had several bizarre conversations with someone I’ve known and been close to all our lives. We’ll call him Tom (not his real name). Tom and I grew up together in the same small town, in the same neighborhood, in the same extended family, in the same environment. And we had what I remember as a wonderful childhood. Oh, there were the usual "growing pains" but, overall, it was a happy time. Tom called me last week to talk about a difficult situation that had just come up in his life. The details are not important. But over the next two days we had several conversations. In one of those conversations we drifted back to our childhood memories. I was shocked to discover Tom’s recollection of our childhood was so totally at odds with mine. His childhood, he said, was terrible. Mine was happy. And yet we’d lived almost literally side-by-side virtually all our childhood years, and well into our adult lives. At the end of that conversation, I was beginning to wonder if Tom and I had lived on the same planet! I floundered around a day or so, reconstructing in my mind our earlier years. I ended up shaking my head in disbelief, and asking myself what the hell the truth was here anyway. Here are Joseph’s thoughts. Chief Joseph Truth can be an illusive commodity, can it not? You all have your own idea of truth, your own definitions of it. There’s nothing wrong with that. Where you run into difficulties is when you try to impose your version of "the truth" on others. Then you have situations such as you are seeing today in your Middle East–in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the American-Iraqi conflict, and so on. And this same thing happens to you often on an individual, personal level. John and his friend Tom obviously viewed their side-by-side childhood in a radically different light from one another. Which was true? Both were true. As we’ve said many times–and as many wise voices have said many times–you all create your own realities. Many of you have a hard time with that concept. But we have not ever heard one that explains your lives, your challenges on Mother Earth better than this one does. And so what is "the truth" about John’s and Tom’s childhood? They obviously lived in the same "objective" circumstances–virtually identical circumstances. Now, many years later, they have two nearly opposite memories of those circumstances. Each of those two sets of memories is valid–one for Tom and one for John. And their own perspective is "the truth" for each of them. The other one’s "truth" does not exist for either. You all have created, and continue to create, your own realities. And that includes your memories of "the past." All your realities are valid and, for you, accurate. It would behoove you all to move into a place of non-judgement here. And to simply accept all your brothers and sisters as they are, where they are, whatever they are–and to love them anyway. We shall speak more of this another time.
This article was originally published here.
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John can be reached by email here
or through their website (http://www.greatwesternpublishing.org). Copyright © 2004 by John Cali. All rights reserved. *************************************************************************
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