The Importance of Finding and Standing in Our Truth

a post by Paul Hellwig for the Tiny Buddha blog


“What I know for sure is that you feel real joy in direct proportion to how connected you are to living your truth.” ~Oprah Winfrey

If we cannot live in and from our truth, then we cannot be authentic. The process of self- actualization is not striving to become the person we are supposed to be. It is removing what is not true for or about us so that we can be the person that we already are.

The hardest part of living in my truth was coming to understand and accept that it didn't matter how anyone else experienced my childhood and my life but myself. That includes my father, mother, and three siblings. It also didn't matter how others were affected or not. For our recovery only our truth matters

Why is standing in our truth so important? It is impossible to build a solid life on a foundation of untruths, lies, denial, fabrications, and misinterpretations.

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What is information? Toward a theory of information as objective and veridical

an article by John Mingers and Craig Standing (University of Kent, UK)
published in Journal of Information Technology Volume 33 Issue 2 (June 2018)

Abstract

Information systems are a strong and ever-growing discipline of enormous relevance to today’s informated world, and yet, as recent reviews have shown, there is still not an agreed and explicit conceptualization or definition of information.

After an evaluative review of a range of theories of information, this paper develops and defends a particular theory, one that sees information as both objective and veridical.

By objective, we mean that the information carried by signs and messages exists independently of its receivers or observers. The information carried by a sign exists even if the sign is not actually observed.

By veridical, we mean that information must be true or correct in order to be information – information is truth-constituted.

False information is not information, but misinformation or disinformation.

The paper develops this theory and then discusses four contentious issues:

• information as objective rather than subjective;
• information as true or correct;
• information and knowledge; and
• information and the ambiguity of meaning.

It concludes with a discussion of the practical implications of the theory.

The Appendix which you can access here makes interesting reading but the full article will cost you.

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It’s Okay to Have Feelings, So Stop Saying “I’m Fine” When You’re Not

a post by Raphaela Browne for the Tiny Buddha blog


“I'd rather be honest and authentic and disappoint some people than to exhaust myself trying to keep up the façade of perfection.” ~Crystal Paine

So many people walk around each day masking their true feelings because they are considered the “strong one,” “the upbeat, bubbly one,” or, since they give so much of themselves supporting others, they’re not seen as having any emotions other than happy. If you’ve ever felt like you had to hold it together all the time to keep up a façade for others, there’s freedom in letting people know that you have feelings too.

Keeping it together has always been my thing. You know the phrase “never let 'em see you sweat”? Well, even in my worst moments, I would keep it all in place and poised for the public, but I’d be secretly dying on the inside, because of the pain or challenges I was going through.

It can catch some people off guard to see you be real, revealing that you don’t have it all together, and at times their responses can leave you wounded. I know that feeling all too well.

A few months back, I attended an event to support a colleague and I bumped into someone I knew well. He asked me how I was doing, and I responded honestly with “I'm hanging in there, but I'm fine.”

He immediately made a face and seemed disturbed by my response. He said, “Woooooah, you gotta change that. You sound too defeated and that's not what I want to hear from you.”

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Testimonial rallies and the construction of memetic authenticity

an article by  Limor Shifman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) published in European Journal of Communication Volume 33 Issue 2 (April 2018)

Abstract

This article traces the role of ‘testimonial rallies’ – Internet memes in which participants post personal photos and/or written accounts as part of a coordinated political protest – in the formulation of truth-related values.

Rather than endorsing the value of truth per se, rallies such as ‘We are the 99 percent’ or ‘I never ask for it’ valorize what I term ‘memetic authenticity’. This construction of the authentic incorporates four basic components: evidence, self-orientation, affective judgement, and mimesis.

By combining ‘external authenticity’ that relates to the aggregation of factual proofs with forms of ‘internal authenticity’ that focus on emotive individual experiences, testimonial rallies serve as a grassroots weapon of the weak against those in power.

While ‘external’ and ‘internal’ forms of authenticity are happily married in this genre, I conclude with a reflection on our grim future in the case of divorce.

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Take Back Your Power: Let Go of Blame and Focus on the Lesson

a post by Christine Rodriguez for the Tiny Buddha blog

“When you blame others, you give up your power to change.” ~Robert Anthony    

Blame is seductive because it makes us right and them wrong. For a moment, it feels good to say, “It was their fault,” but in the long run holding on to blame only hurts us and does absolutely nothing to help our evolution. In fact, it keeps us stuck.

But, I get it. When we feel wronged, upset, and angry, that person is the only one to blame.

I understand that some things are so egregious and so unforgivable that it seems impossible to not default to blame. It’s almost instinctual. We are hard wired to blame.

But I have come to learn the hard way that when we blame others, we avoid seeing the truth about ourselves. When we focus on what someone else did wrong, we’re not able to see our part and learn about what we need to do differently going forward.

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The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News

an article by Robinson Meyer for The Atlantic [via 3 Quarks Daily with thanks]

Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information



“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” Jonathan Swift once wrote.

It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study published Thursday [9 March] in Science.

The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence – some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years – and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.

“It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”

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Hazel’s comment
I think one aspect of fake news stories, whether intended to be serious reports or inconsequential items, is that they have a longer shelf-life than the truth.

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How to tell the truth about climate change

an article by Kellan Anfinson (University of South Florida, Tampa, USA) published in Environmental Politics Volume 27 Issue 2 (2018)

Abstract

Scientific knowledge, it is argued, is insufficient to overcome climate skepticism. Spiritual truth is proposed as a way to do so.

First, the cases of Eric Holthaus and Paul Kingsnorth are examined. Though they knew about climate change, they were only able to tell the truth and act on it after a personal collapse that transformed them. Telling the truth in this way carried a political force that their previous advocacy did not.

These figures help animate and adapt Foucault’s notion of spiritual truth for climate change.

Finally, this theory of spiritual truth is compared to Naomi Klein’s argument that climate science determines political truth and Bruno Latour’s argument that politics should decide the truth of climate science.

Spiritual truth accommodates the insights these perspectives provide while adding transformation as a key element for telling the truth about climate change.

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A pre-history of post-truth, East and West

an article by Marci Shore published in Eurozine December 2017

In 2014, Russian historian Andrei Zubov was fired from his Moscow professorship for comparing Putin’s annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Two years later, at a festival in the post-industrial Czech city of Ostrava, Zubov spoke to a large audience about the task of historians. ‘My dolzhni govorit’ pravdu’, he said. We should speak the truth. This declaration – all the more so when uttered in Zubov’s baritone – sounded quaint, even old-fashioned. In particular, the Slavic word pravda – truth – invoked with no qualification and no prefix, suggested a bygone era. Who believed in truth anymore?

The end of ‘The End of History’ arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter Pomerantsev described in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, in the Russia of the 2000s, distinguishing between truth and lies became passé. In this world of enlightened, postmodern people, ‘everything is PR’.

Reality television has rendered obsolete the boundary between the fictional and the real. Truth is a constraint that has been overcome; ‘post-truth’ has been declared ‘word of the year.’ In Washington, the White House shamelessly defends its ‘alternative facts’. At the beginning, American journalists were taken off-guard: they had been trained to confirm individual pieces of information, not to confront a brazen untethering from empirical reality. The New Yorker captured the desperation with a satire about the fact-checker who passed out from exhaustion after the Republican debate. He had to be hospitalized; apparently no one replaced him.

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If Your Life Story Depresses You or Holds You Back, Change It

a post by Kelly Pietrangeli for the Tiny Buddha blog


“The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”
~Pema Chodron

Too often we let stories from our past define us. We tell them over and over to ourselves and to others until it becomes our truth. What if, without deviating from actual facts, we choose to tell different stories? What if these new stories could bring us more freedom and strength?

Below are some true facts about my own life. I'll follow each one with the stories I could be telling myself about each one, followed by the story I choose to go with.

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This post has had a powerful effect on my thinking. I have not followed through with the ideas yet but I know that I need to.
I need to change “my mother pushed me away when I most needed support” to “my mother did what she thought was right for my younger siblings”.

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Feeling Lost? A Single Word Can Help You Find Your Way

a post by Eve Hogan for the World of Psychology blog



As you likely know, I write articles. I also write books. I pour thousands of words onto pages of paper or digital media in an attempt to help people access their higher selves, create healthier relationships, and walk a higher path through life; a path of love, joy, integrity and self-mastery.

A while back, I was at a tradeshow where I spent hours setting up my display. I had all of my books out, and several dozen rocks with individual words engraved in them including, “Love,” “Peace,” “Gratitude,” and “Namaste.” As the day wore on, I started to recognize a clear reality that was rather uncomfortable as an author: I was selling rocks with a single transformational word on them at a rate of about twenty-to-one over my books full of words.

The next tradeshow yielded the same results. Mind you, the price wasn’t the issue as the rocks were nearly the same price as the books. It was then that I came to a intriguing realization. One word can carry as much, if not more, potential transformation than thousands.

Really, how many words do we need to read to remember to love? Is not “compassion” alone enough to remind us to be kind and caring of others? Is not “generosity” enough to remind us to give? Is not “courage” enough to help us overcome our fears?

Perhaps a lot of words are particularly handy when we need to know how to be courageous or loving or giving, but once we know how, a single word can guide us back to our path when we have lost our way.

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