This Stack and my forthcoming book offer advice on living with more integrity, authenticity, and resilience. What’s the simplest way to achieve this? Always tell the truth. As don Miguel Ruiz advised in his book The Four Agreements, “Be impeccable with your word.” If you tell no lies, you develop a reputation for honesty, trustworthiness, and reliability.
Telling the truth is simple but not necessarily easy. The more complex and valuable skill is distilling the truth from the sea of lies we all swim in. Speaking the truth helps build integrity, while knowing the truth develops a solid character of impeccable integrity, transparent authenticity, and unflappable resilience.
Sadly, we live in a time when truth has less and less value. Many people ignore provable truths because these truths challenge their core belief systems. Rather than attempting to fit contradictory facts into our beliefs, we simply consider our beliefs as truths and dismiss the facts. Because we ultimately choose all our truths, we can also always choose a new one.
I seek to challenge the false beliefs and false truths that prevent us from living our lives with integrity, authenticity, and resilience. Both individuals and our species need regular challenges to our beliefs to encourage choosing Better Truths.
Why? Because truths often change.
For example, after World War II, most believed the Soviet Union would never allow East and West Germany to reunite. That remained an accepted universal truth until 1989, when a group of people chose a Better Truth, picked up sledgehammers, and beat the Berlin Wall to dust.
This act of denying a commonly accepted truth demonstrates the power we each have to choose a Better Truth: to find our internal Berlin Walls that need to be pounded to dust and replaced with something better. What truths do you cling to, even though at the core of your being, you know they are not, in fact, true? To change your mind and your world, first, choose a Better Truth.
During my career as a holistic and natural living magazine publisher, I interviewed hundreds of researchers, authors, academics, and experts who taught me truths that bore little resemblance to some commonly accepted truths. These experts had plenty of scientific evidence proving their case but usually met fierce resistance from people who would or could not let go of deeply entrenched beliefs.
The suffocating amount of cognitive dissonance we experience reinforces these deeply entrenched false beliefs. This dissonance is the fiercest obstacle in our attempts to discern truth. The tension created by attempting to believe something we know is not factually correct has led to a breakdown of what I call the dissonant truths, those false truths that grind against our sense of integrity.
We can no longer accept the media, politicians, marketing messages, or religious leaders as truthful when so many have knowingly lied to us to suit their agendas. We also often face this tension when dealing with people we love or respect. Bosses, co-workers, family, and friends regularly ask us to believe things our head, heart, or gut tells us are false.
While we won’t discuss politics in this space, one only needs to listen to the political debate in America today to hear dissonance in action. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents are all 100 percent sure their beliefs are correct and that the clowns leading the other sides are con men and crooks.
Dissonance can be found in nearly every news story. Think about any ongoing issue:
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — described as both a traitor and a hero.
The vaccine debate. Being pro or anti-vaccine has caused family and friends to stop talking to each other.
Economics. Some people believe trickle-down economics builds a stronger nation. Some people consider it “tinkle-down,” which has caused the most significant disparity between the wealthiest one percent and the rest of us in history. When billionaires pay little or no taxes, and we pay 15 percent or more, you know someone is feeding us a big honking dissonance sandwich.
When dealing with clients, bosses, or family, we often must act like we believe in a dissonant truth. This causes more internal stress, as both the false and actual truths exist in our minds. Like Schroedinger’s thought experiment about a cat in a box, the cat is alive and dead until you open the box. Until then, it’s both. With many of the dissonances in our lives, we never get to open the box and discover the actual truth.
In this stack and my forthcoming book, Choose a Better Truth, I set out to open that box and explore a dissonant truth and a correlating Better Truth in each chapter.
Since my first post, I’ve streamlined and organized my list of Better Truths into eight to replace the tired, old, dissonant truths that no longer work. The book supports each Better Truth with science and stories and includes an invitation to change or expand one’s belief system.
With this more precise understanding of how beliefs become truths and how truths are often dissonant truths, let’s explore my list of the Better Truths and some evidence to support them.
1. There is one mind in the Universe, and we all share it.
Most of us believe thoughts are private and can only be known by the person thinking them. Because of this assumption, many consider telepathy, psychic talents, and ESP a con or, even worse, a pseudoscience.
I learned this Better Truth the hard way.
As a young man, I had a psychic girlfriend who left me when she caught me thinking about someone else. It sounds like a punchline to a joke, but that’s what happened. That’s when I knew the old truth no longer worked for me, and I had to choose a Better Truth.
In this chapter about the mind, I detail my first psychic experience and also tell the story of that psychic girlfriend.
In this chapter, you’ll meet Dr. Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), the world’s premier organization for studying consciousness. (You can read that story here.)
We’ll examine IONS’s 50-year history with its Chief Scientist, Dean Radin. He details the history and current state of consciousness science, quantum concepts, and the direction of future research.
We’ll explore the practical application of quantum science with Kim Chestney, a best-selling author on intuition who worked with Dr Helene Wahbah, IONS Director of Research, and attended several IONS events while writing her latest book, The Illumination Code: 7 Keys to Unlock Your Quantum Intelligence. We discuss how quantum physics forms the foundation of our intuitive abilities and how best to harness them.
2. Your body is much smarter than you are.
The previous chapter provides a layperson’s basic understanding of how we think the quantum world operates. This chapter examines why the mind, untethered from the quantum world and ungrounded from the body, is an unreliable tool for discovering truth. We study how to keep our conscious mind grounded in our body. This is essential to knowing the truth from the chaff.
The first truth tells us that our mind is part of a universal whole; there is no individuality, just one consciousness we all share. The second truth explains that our body is a singular entity with a one-on-one relationship to the conscious and Universal minds. The body’s individuality and uniqueness are the core of its mystical truth-telling abilities. It’s why we’re told to “trust your gut.”
This chapter describes how this works. First, we’ll learn about Fascia, sometimes called a living matrix, the connective tissue surrounding every cell in the body. We’ll talk with David Lesaondak, author of Fascia: What It Is and Why It Matters, about this fascinating tissue and system of the body that most people know almost nothing about. He’ll explain some of the latest science, including how fascia is the conduit for mind-body communication.
We’ll also discuss facia with Deanne Juhanne, whose book Job’s Body is an essential reference for all serious bodyworkers, as it covers the crucial aspects of how the systems of the human body work cohesively.
We’ll delve into Applied Kinesiology (AK), a method of determining what the body believes to be true. It’s a rather esoteric practice that many chiropractors and holistic health practitioners use. Commonly called “muscle testing,” AK involves testing a client’s muscle strength in response to a stimulus such as a statement of fact. If the statement is true, the client’s muscles strengthen for a few seconds. If false, the client’s muscles become weaker.
Let me warn my manly readers that this topic tiptoes right up to the woo-woo line and perhaps sticks a toe over. If this sounds like complete nonsense, you can understand why skeptics, including Wikipedia contributors, call AK a “pseudoscience.” It may sound like magical thinking; however, I promise it will make more sense when you grasp all eight Better Truths.
I first saw AK demonstrated in the early 90s at a deeply woo-woo spiritual conference in Tuscon. A testee was asked to resist a tester as he attempted to push the testee’s arm down. He got stronger when an envelope of vitamin C was placed on the testee’s chest. When the envelope contained sugar, he got weaker. The testee had no idea what was in the envelopes and was as surprised as we were when he went completely weak.
I have received thousands of these kinds of tests. There are dozens of ways to test muscle strength in response to a stimulus. Many healers use kinesiology to diagnose conditions, determine which supplements best suit their patients, and determine an appropriate dosage.
In this chapter, we explore Kinesiology with my dear friend Elaine Alker, whom I met at a Donna Eden Workshop two decades ago. Since then, she has learned all Eden can teach and developed a thriving practice. I’ve personally experienced her unique abilities enough times to fill another book. She’ll explain how she uses AK and some of the astonishing healing breakthroughs that have resulted from her work.
We’ll also talk to Wendy Borne, a Reiki Master and healer who uses AK to find wisdom in her clients’ bodies. She explains that we can tap into our body’s wisdom — our inner awareness — by shifting our focus from external to internal. We’ll also discuss tethering the mind to the quantum world while staying grounded in the body.
3. Nutrition is more important to your health than drugs and surgery.
While this may seem obvious, I find it disturbing how little time allopathic doctors spend educating patients on the importance of nutrition to their health. Instead, they prescribe drugs and surgeries.
Why won’t your doctor discuss diet or lifestyle choices? The answer to that question points out the vast deficiencies in our medical system. It also points to the need for you to be the captain of your own ship and make the best decisions for yourself on what to eat or not eat.
I learned this truth by talking with many nutrition experts, including:
Dr. Neal Barnard, author of over a dozen books and founder of the Physicians Council for Responsible Medicine (read my interview with him here);
Dr. Michael Gregor, author of How Not To Die and the genius behind the website NutritionFacts.org;
and Dr Lewis Mehl-Madrona, author of six books on how to heal when Western Medicine fails, including Coyote Medicine and Narrative Medicine.
I’ll also detail some of my close encounters with the American “health” care system.
4. Energy is the best medicine.
Most pharmaceutical drugs must pass several stringent double-blind, placebo-controlled studies to prove they work better than a sugar pill. Miraculous or spontaneous healings have often been dismissed as “only the placebo effect” even though, awkwardly, sometimes the placebo gets better results than the tested drug or procedure.
Such was the case with a study of knee surgery for osteoarthritis. A 2002 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported a study of two kinds of knee surgery compared to a placebo surgery. The researchers said of the results, “At no point did either of the intervention groups report less pain or better function than the placebo group,” and concluded the outcomes after the procedures “were no better than those after a placebo procedure.”1
This might have been the surgery I needed some years ago. After a few seasons of playing volleyball, my right knee hurt like hell and made crunching noises when I walked. I could barely climb stairs.
Broke, uninsured, and desperate, I went to a demonstration of Reiki Healing. Two people put their hands on my body, and the knee healed entirely and permanently in ten minutes. I knew I had to learn how to do this.
Maybe it was “only” the placebo effect that fixed my knee, but while becoming a Reiki Master, I had hundreds of similar experiences as a healer and healee. The latest research from the quantum world confirms that this kind of healing is not a miracle but rather a simple and loving way to heal with no side effects.
In this chapter, we’ll talk to two pioneers of Energy Medicine.
After Roger Callahan first discovered the healing power of “tapping,” Dr. Greg Nicosia worked with him and developed a revolutionary way to remove stress, trauma, and fear from the body. We’ll talk to Nicosia about the birth of the tapping revolution.
We’ll also meet Donna Eden, who wrote the book Energy Medicine. She’s been able to see peoples’ auras and chakras since childhood, but only as an adult did she realize that not everyone else could. In her mid-20s, she contracted multiple sclerosis and became bedridden as her organs began to fail. For two years, she “ran her energy.” (I’ll explain that in the book.) At age 27, she got out of bed and began teaching what she knew. In 2023, she turned 80 while continuing to run one of the most in-demand energy training programs available.
5. Trauma changes the DNA and stays stored in the body’s crystalline structures. Unless the trauma is processed, it passes on to the next generation.
Trauma lies at the core of most of our mental and emotional problems, individually and as a species. We don’t know how to heal it or eliminate the emotional triggers it causes. All of us have experienced shocks, pains, and tragedies. We all have traumas that need to be healed.
When I attempted to heal my childhood trauma, I discovered a trail of trauma that led back to my great-grandfather, who fought for General Lee and the South in the Civil War. Our family continues to recover from that group trauma that occurred over 150 years ago.
Learning that, I chose a Better Truth about trauma. I learned to process it and heal the triggers that caused so much distress in my life.
In this chapter, I discuss this topic with three experts in the field. We’ll talk more with Dr. Greg Nicosia to hear how he used two Energy Medicine techniques to help a 9/11 survivor who lived as a hermit in the woods for seven years. Nicosia helped heal the trauma wounds in just a handful of sessions.
We’ll meet author Dr. Jamie Marich, who became inspired to treat trauma while working in post-war Bosnia. Today, she travels the world teaching EMDR, which is now considered the gold standard for treating trauma. (You can read my interview with her here.)
The idea that trauma can pass to the next generation is supported by a study published in The Israeli Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences in 20132 that showed the children of Holocaust survivors “may have been marked epigenetically with a chemical coating upon their chromosomes, which would represent a kind of biological memory of what the parents experienced.”
Additionally, a 2018 study in Environmental Epigenetics provided evidence that “exposure to traumatic stress in early postnatal life in mice induces several behavioral alterations that are transmitted across several successive generations.”3
We’ll talk to Mark Wolyn, author of It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, about the implications of these studies. He’ll explain how and why a family changes after traumatic events and how to heal it.
6. Toxins almost always defeat all efforts to heal.
Dr. Donald Dennis, an ear, nose, and throat specialist in Atlanta, Georgia, believes that 93% of sinusitis cases are an immune reaction to mold or fungi. Therefore, he demands that all patients live and work in a mold-free environment before he treats them. He tells patients he won’t waste his time or their money until or unless they remove the source of the problem. He enforces this rule by testing everyone’s clothing for mold spores before he lets them into his building. If he detects too much mold, he cancels the appointment.
He keeps this rigid rule because he understands one of the essential strategies for healing mold poisoning: Recovery from toxins is impossible in a toxic environment. You can slow the decline and possibly hold your ground, but healing and curing are impossible. In such situations, there are three choices: move, remediate, or continue to suffer and possibly die.
My nearly lethal battle with mold typifies the experience of someone who hits their toxic load. That’s when the body can no longer remove toxins faster than they come in. Once people hit it, their lives change forever. Every toxin attacks with the same ferocity. Until they find a successful detox strategy, their health will continue to spiral downward.
Mold is a fierce, insidious, and ubiquitous toxin. Being poisoned by it taught me many strategies for dealing with all toxins. This chapter details my mold experiences, and we’ll talk with Charmaine Rose Bassett, NMD, DM, NAP, MW, the woman whose expertise and clinic (Anyana Kai) saved my life after a mold-induced heart attack.
We’ll also meet the trio behind Exposing Mold, an online platform that promotes avoidance as a method of attuning your body to know when mold is invading your body.
These and some other experts will provide their best advice on dealing with various toxins.
7. Light is the foundational vibration from which everything erupts.
I invite you to consider this a Higher Truth more than a Better Truth. Some might think it is the Highest Truth. Jacob Liberman, a pioneering researcher in the fields of light, vision, and consciousness, told me this truth in a podcast. He’s written four books on the science and philosophy of light, including Take Off Your Glasses and See, Light: Medicine of the Future, and Luminous Life: How The Science Of Light Unlocks The Art Of Living.
Speaking with Liberman, I felt uplifted by his voice and the depth of his knowledge. He effortlessly switched from scientist to philosopher as he described light as the divine spark that guides our life’s journey.
He explained that according to the Bible, God’s first act was to say, “Let there be light!” This ancient text likely refers to a different kind of light because God didn’t create the Sun until the fourth day.
Many faiths call this “divine” or “spiritual” light; I prefer to call it “universal light.” Regardless of one’s opinion about the existence or absence of divine entities, some kind of presence permeates the core of all existence, all consciousness, that we can’t ignore or deny.
We explore this truth with Jacob Liberman and other surprise guest experts, so stay tuned. I promise you’ll find the science “illuminating.”
8. Love is not an emotion. It is your very existence.
This truth is borrowed from the title of a 2012 book by His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (aka Gurudev): Love Is Not An Emotion… It Is Your Very Existence. I invite you to accept this as another higher—or highest—truth. Far deeper and more profound than the facile yearnings of the heart, universal love is the true substance of the fabric of reality. As Gurudev says, “Love is our nature.” Like universal light, this substance has a presence that cannot be denied or ignored.
Gurudev first studied under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru who taught the Beatles to meditate. In 1981, he founded the Art of Living, an organization now operating in 180 countries that has taught millions of people how to meditate through the power of the breath.
I met him when he came to Pittsburgh nearly 30 years ago. He shares his name with the famous sitar virtuoso, who also influenced the Beatles. I went expecting to hear an evening of sitar music. Instead, I discovered Gurudev’s incandescent character. He genuinely lights up a room with love. I met and studied with him on several occasions, both in large and small groups.
Over time, I realized that practicing yoga and meditation, including specific breathing exercises, provided the best way to access and bath in this kind of universal love.
After studying with a handful of gurus, I found a home at the Himalayan Institute (HI). Pundit Rashmani Tinginaut (aka Pundiji or PRT), Chairman and Spiritual Head, planted deep seeds in me for a profound appreciation of the fundamentals of yoga. I’ve attended his classes, met privately with him, and interviewed him and his son Ishan.
He gave me a mantra that focused on the love of the Divine Mother. Because of my distant biological mother, who disapproved of most of what I did with my life, the emphasis on a divine, unconditionally loving mother filled an emptiness I didn’t know I had. I feel at home every time I visit. In this chapter, I tell the tale of my first visit to HI.
I talk with author Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., a ground-breaking researcher from Harvard who has studied the connection between mind, body, and spirit. We discuss “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”
We also chat with Andrew Harvey, a prolific author on all things spiritual, about how to put love into action, or what he calls sacred activism.
Both explain how we grow as human beings when we tap into universal love.
Edgar Mitchell echoed this idea of universal love, an unconditional love that constitutes the substance of our universe. On his way home from the moon, he experienced a transcendent experience during which he felt physical ecstasy along with a oneness, a unity of consciousness. He said, “Unconditional love is the organizing principle of the universe.”
Baby Steps to Better Truths
I frequently remind myself that I do not live by these Better Truths in every way on every day. I consider The Better Truths more of a compass setting, a way of staying aimed at a goal. I seek to become a better person, little by little, every day. Call them baby steps, but I’m moving in the right direction.
Consider these Better Truths as eight compass points to help you calibrate your truth detector. Each chapter explores a truth with stories and science and offers an opportunity to change or expand your beliefs or truths.
The book includes a postscript on my vision of the future. I see all civilizations moving towards a tipping point. Much like those sledgehammer wielders in Berlin in 1989, a crisis lies ahead that will force us to Choose Better Truths about how our civilization operates.
Society will shift when enough of us become fully telepathic, have a solid mind-body unity, eat healthy foods, adeptly read and use Energy, heal our traumas, avoid and cleanse toxins, and consciously spread light and love wherever we go. Most problems that seem unsurmountable today will simply return to dust, with or without the help of a sledgehammer.
Fifty years after its founding, IONS remains committed to understanding that all the global crises today are crises of consciousness. The climate, increasing wars, social inequities, and all physical world problems can be healed, fixed, and overcome by raising the consciousness of everyone on Earth.
Edgar Mitchell told me raising consciousness is the only solution to these problems. I support this mission with my book and this stack.
Please share the most dissonant truth in your life in the comments below. Tell us the one untrue truth that annoys you the most — the one that begs to be pounded to dust.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24029109/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6190267/