Create 'truth' w/ me in dialogue tomorrow!

We cut down a tree in our backyard this weekend.

It was a massive silver oak that was dropping branches and leaves in our pool and also blocking the view of the ocean from my Creating studio. It took Jon Doyle, the third-generation logger we hired, about 10 minutes and an ax to bring it down. The squeal and crack as it leaned and fell were ominous. The sound has become a kind of brand for the evil of western industrialization. A breeze blew, and with it came a whiff of the Amazon. 'But ahhhhhh....now I can see the ocean from where I stand. Why go to the ocean, when I can cut down a tree and bring the ocean to me?'

There are infinite directions the mind can take us. Like currents of a river that splits over and over again in different directions. In one moment we're together and in the next, we're in totally different places. 

When I shared the video of the tree coming down on social media, I received a mix of different responses. Some experienced heartbreak, some relief, and joy.

While everyone, including myself, is truly having the experience we are having, none of our experiences are 'true' in an absolute sense. 

This is what I mean when I say, "Nothing you feel is real."

It isn't that you're not feeling it, it's that feeling something doesn't make it an absolute truth about the Universe.

My friend Pete is a botanist who travels the world studying the immigration and emigration of plant species. When he looks at a forest, he sees a city like London, diverse with races of plant life from all around the world. 

It was through looking at the world of plant life through his lens that I learned how much of what we call the 'natural' world is actually the result of human intervention. 

Silver Oaks, for example, are not native to Hawaii. They're native to Australia and considered a weed there. South Africa and Hawaii both consider them invasive species. They also happen to be toxic to humans and create a rash when touched by many people. We could continue down this river, and if we did, it wouldn't be more true that this tree didn't belong here. It would just feel that way.

So what are we to do?

How do we navigate when through being immersed in the Creating perspective, 'rightness' and 'wrongness' evaporates before our eyes? What do we do when the scale of judgment falls into a pile of dust?

This is the existential break. The great untethering that most try valiantly to avoid for without truth defined from without, what is there for us to hold onto?

We know, deep down, that eventually, this lack of truth as a safe harbor will come to the shores of our being. It will destabilize our sense of whom we know that we are. 

It is the existential angst, the threat of self-annihilation that keeps our inquiry at bay.

But rest assured, there is safety to be had. In fact, it is a safety greater than the faux kind found in tethering.

The higher safety is in taking the reins of creation into our hands. It is to raise the sails on the ship of our being and to set forward, for a ship is safer in motion than it is still and bobbing. 

To not seek justification from the world, but to BE the justification. To trust in your own center, not as right or just, but as the source from which the world before you has unfolded and will continue to unfold if you let it.

In the months ahead, we will sit by a fire burning the logs of the tree we took down. We will spread its wood chips over the ground where we plant numerous trees native to Hawaii, the start of our fruit forest here. 

Over those same few months, all of the different stories and tributaries that had divided us - not only me from others but also the divisive parts of my own being (I didn't tell you about all the birds who sang to me from that tree) - will come back together as they make their way towards the great ocean of everything and nothing. 

In the end, all rivers disappear and all stories dissolve into nothing. 

Interestingly, the word 'true' grew out of the Proto-Indo-European word meaning 'tree'.

Truths are born from seeds, and eventually, they are either cut down or they die on their own.

Part of what it is to create is what we call creation. It is to plant seeds.

And part of what it is to create is what we call destruction. It is to cut down or to let die.

Tomorrow, in my twice-monthly public talk and demonstration, I will be cutting down and planting seeds of truth in Creating Dialogue with a handful of volunteers. 

I'll also be sharing the powerful principle of Creating that I mentioned in my writing about my client, the CEO who is 10X'ing his company through flossing his teeth...and which has also appeared in this writing today. 

If you'd like to join us, please register now here.

CREATING DIALOGUE w/ JOHN PATRICK MORGAN

DAY: Tuesday 28th June 2022

TIME: 9am HST / 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT / 8pm BST / 9pm CEST

WHERE: Register for Zoom Meeting

Loving you, JPM

PS - If you'd like to volunteer to be in Creating Dialogue with me tomorrow, please reply to this email by answering the question: "What would you love to create today?"