Seeing the truth in all there is

More and more topics start unfolding around me in conversations in exchange and interconnection with my amazing companions over these past days. It gives me a whole lot more to think about, put pieces of my puzzles together, connect and break open more perspectives of transcending thoughts and ideas into new concepts of feelings and mind patterns.

Having stood by my deeply loved friends watching their relationship concept with all its pleasures and burdens they now have been getting stuck in conflict for quite some time and cannot at the moment seem to find a way back to each other in understanding but instead drifting from one another in their profound opinions clashing.

Me as the lucky person in the middle being embraced by both of them in deep trust, pouring out their thoughts and hearts to me I can say I get the best of both worlds, getting the opportunity to form new pictures, asking myself profound questions of our existence. Not only that it is interesting, transformational for me, opening me doors to knowledge and feelings that I couldn't otherwise maybe even understand but it gives me very many new perspectives on the different "truths" of people, questioning what truth even means and if we can argue over the different truths we all have and where we can find together in agreement. 

As inevitable and most fundamental the issue of the inability of understanding the other party lies in their different perspectives on honesty. At least that was the cover the pain hast used to come into light. A subject I have never asked myself questions about or at least I haven't ever tried to open the door for the possibility that consciously not being honest could be ethically morally or in whatever context a good deed. Being honest in a relationship, creating trust always seemed to me the basis of a working relationship. I've never questioned these values. If they are not given, there cannot be a relationship. What else would it be build on right? But is there really only this one dimension to the question?

I remember how a year ago I met someone from Syria. He told me very openly about his past relationship with a German woman that he was with for over 5 years just having arrived from Syria to Berlin. One of the parts he told me about was that she was very angry and deeply hurt when she found out that he hadn't told her the truth about everything in his past. That her trust was broken and they had big issues getting over this topic. Without a question I could understand and agree with that woman 100 %. I could not accept my partner lying. What my friend told me though, was shocking to me because he explained that in his culture, it is completely normal to lie, yes it is even expected of you as an sensible part of society. You are not asked to tell the truth at times, for different reasons. For one because it is not socially accepted for some topics to be discussed in public, meeting friends or family, for others because these truths would be painful and therefore better be kept inside to protect others and all other sorts of reasons. He said for him all his life being dishonest had a positive connotation. This was something I would have never even thought of before. I never asked myself the question if lying could have a positive effect, not in that matter anyways.

When I try to find common ground in these different views I see reason or intention in the least. We all act out of our own personal reasons and usually especially in love, out of good intention. That for starters is the basis, the consensus no matter if you speak the truth or lie consciously or even unconsciously. Most of the time we do not mean to cause harm with our actions. This again arises another question in me: Are we ever completely honest with each other, to ourselves? I would tend to say we all are never completely honest because of our fear and pains. They will try to cover up at times, trying to protect us in certain situations. From this perspective the basis of this discussion can not be "Brutal honesty vs. deliberate lying" but could be somewhat like "Unconscious lying vs. Conscious lying".

This thought will be the frame for my elaborations. Also I will not go into the topic of lying consciously, willingly to our partner but perhaps in some situations to other people in our lives for our own reasons. Our romantic partner remains untouched from this for now. The scenario: one partner promotes "brutal honesty" at all times and the other is sometimes consciously twisting the truth when they rather dissolve things on their own. Having an open relationship both of them allow each other to see other people, have sex and even if feelings get involved respectfully accept it and speak about it. In this exclusive relationship they claim to be completely honest with the other partner BUT only in this romantic relationship in trust.

The surface of the discussion is the view of one partner when they get to know someone they may like and would maybe like to have a relationship with them, they will not tell the person in question that they already are in  one but that they would would start dating, pretending to be single. His hypothesis behind it: Trust is a secondary feeling. Love comes first and is bigger than anything and can therefore overcome anything: Even dishonesty if the intention goes further, deeper to get something beyond than to where honesty could have ever taken him. (Which of course is also an idea because we do not know where honesty could have brought us if we haven't tried). When we get to the state of figuring that out being deeply in love, wanting to spend a life together, wouldn't that lie then kind of dissolve, become invalid, weightless in our love for each other?

The unethical aspect of this that I find very difficult to agree with is that you take away the birth right of a person to decide in their own free will, even if it includes concepts which you think might stop true love from growing and decide for another human being to be with you excluding a very important part of the relationship and being together. On the other side I see where it is coming from and I see that the intention is a good one, the intention is to give love a chance where maybe it couldn't grow otherwise. Also expecting a change in personality of our partner however well we might mean I would consider maybe an overstepping of personality. Having expectations of our partners to change, no matter in what way may not be constructive even in the best intention because that would mean that we are not accepting them fully in who they are and that is what is hurting them the most. When one is expecting something from the other one, asking them all kinds of questions, wanting explanations for everything, instead of giving them trust, the space they feel they deserve, not scrutinizing every thing they do. Trust in their action as long as it is not harmful in a way that we are forgetting ourselves. Supporting one another in our doings without judgement instead of questioning everything and expecting our partner to act in our own morals and values. What if we could step out of that space being fully in the energy of love including every aspect of our partner's true being? Also here: I don't want to support the view that we should stick to our partner no matter what. But I do want to open more space for love and look what our morals and values really mean and if they really are the reasons for us to go separate ways or if separation has another source way deeper that at times is hard for us to identify in our personal blur of identification with something else on the surface.

 I can imagine trust being the connector even in dishonesty. Too many times I thought that trust and honesty are inseparable. I do not think I have ever taken them apart and looked at them separately in the assumption that trust could be build in having a party involved that is dishonest. Now I think I can look at them under a different light.

I wonder if pain can really originate from someone else's behavior (when really other people cannot cause us pain but only trigger our own and be the mirror of what's already inside of us) or if the real source of pain is lying (no pun intended) in feeling our identity endangered. Couldn't it be that the trouble we face comes from our attachment to our construction of self identity? When I identify myself with being an honest person it offends the picture of myself, it disconnects me from who I think I am when it's not being served the way I believe it should be and I will struggle to accept it in any way, just as with everything else we consider part of our identity.

One truth of course is that we cannot be honest to other people if we are not honest to ourselves. As stated before this cannot be a given for all situations anyways, at least not in our blind spots. If I take this into consideration as a given truth isn't it then more honest to control and consciously choose the situations in which we are lying and in which we want to speak the truth? Isn't this intentionally chosen dishonesty more honest than most other dishonesty that we don't choose while we claim we are honest at all times, in all situations, choosing consciously when to communicate in either way instead of overlooking our blind spots but knowing there is things we are not ready to be honest about? Can we find brutal honesty in our deliberate choice of being dishonest? Isn't it in the end a more controlled way of communication than making ourselves believe that we always speak the truth to people when really we cannot no matter how hard we try? 

This is not me trying to promote the idea of dishonesty, I just want to open the door for the idea that we may in this aspect fool ourselves more than we might be able to see. Also I open up this new window of perspective because I wholeheartedly value these new opinions and ideas because they are deeply elaborated and are not coming out of being too lazy, close minded or stubborn to be honest in the name of morals and ethics but quite the opposite. We never have just one level of an idea or concept but multiple. It happens though that many times we overlook this simple fact. Can we really ask the question honesty OR dishonesty? Black or white? Right or wrong? Good or bad? In our world though everything is different shades of grey. Always without exceptions. Connected to this nature of circumstances there is the law of change, of transformation. Shining the light on that aspect even any truth could be changed into an untruth in any moment. Truth also only is a point in time, it is temporary as everything else is. But one thing, the only thing that is not attached to time or space is. LOVE.

One truth I have came to understand for myself is the fact that there is no oppositions in the sense that we see it in a two-dimensional way. Both sides of apparent opposites are two aspects of the same thing being the furthest apart from each other on a two-dimensional scale at a specific moment in time and at the same time they include each other. One cannot exist without the other and so is one inherently existing in the other. Maybe when we start understanding that our binary approach of perceiving the world, of feeling and seeing things is very limited we can start breaking open for a new dimension, something bigger, a space we haven't tapped into before where everything is existing as one and the same in its different shapes, transcending our concepts into something not yet discovered in ourselves. Maybe the only fundamental truth all human beings have in common is the fact that we act out of our own personal reason, our reason to form our identity, that is the basis to understand everything else. All different perspectives, ideas, world views, morals, values, and belief systems. If there is only shades of grey, no right and no wrong, no judgement, no condemnation, denunciation, but pure openness. Honest, frank, true openness then this must mean that there is space for conscious dishonesty, doesn't it?

Having just come out of the 10 degree cold Rhine river after 10 minutes of spring bathing, jumping into the hot shower to warm up, I realize I cannot distinguish between the temperature. Being in this cold water after a few minutes it became my natural feel well temperature not having the urge anymore at all to get out of it. Getting under the hot water of the shower it felt the same. Neither cold I could feel nor hot at all, both had become my natural environment as we quickly adapt to anything. Change. Isn't it ironic? Now you can argue that there is hot and cold water when you look at it objectively you can measure the temperature but in another dimension of feelings this objective temperature is dissolving into one and the same. So what use is there for "objectivity" if there even is one when we are all subjects in this world feeling differently from what objectively is?

Remaining in evolving in this...