Truth, Illusion, and the Practice of Sensing Together

On February 12th, we gathered in a Conversation That Matters on the theme: Truth, Illusion, and Collective Sense-Making.

What unfolded was not a search for answers.
It was something more vulnerable than that.

Again and again, the conversation returned to a shared feeling: confusion. A sense that the world is increasingly difficult to read. Deep fakes. Misinformation. Competing narratives. Certainty amplified and nuance erased. Some spoke of tuning out the news entirely to protect their nervous systems. Others worried that tuning out meant becoming naïve or complicit. Where is the boundary between awareness and overwhelm? Between engagement and self-protection?

There was a longing beneath these questions—not for more information, but for orientation.

One voice wondered whether the tension and aggravation we feel might actually be driving us toward truth, if we dare to look more deeply into the shadows rather than turn away. Another asked whether we might make more sense of the world if we learned how to cohere more skillfully together. Perhaps the problem is not simply that truth is elusive, but that we are not yet practiced in sensing it collectively.

The conversation moved between the personal and the planetary.

Nightmares surfaced. Not as pathology, but as shared experience. What is sanity? What is identity in a time like this? Hearing that others, too, were unsettled by what moves through the collective unconscious brought a kind of quiet normalization. There was comfort in discovering that what felt isolating might actually be shared.

We touched the weight of history—willful blindness, the seduction of certainty, the danger of not seeing what is in front of us. We spoke of hatred and prejudice, of the cycles of darkness and light described in ancient traditions. Some named the current era as a kind of last call before the darkness shifts to light. Others reminded us that what we invest in grows.

And beneath it all ran a recurring question:
What do I actually have control over?

The mind wants solutions. It spins, searching for an answer that will stabilize the ground. Yet several noticed how quickly this search becomes another form of drama. Perhaps sense-making does not begin with fixing the world, but with noticing what is happening within us when we try.

Boundaries emerged as a living theme. Not as walls, but as nourishment. One reflection lingered: "Boundaries are the distance between us in which I can love myself and you simultaneously." Protection is not withdrawal. It may be the very condition that allows connection to endure. For those who are highly sensitive, the absence of a protective "force field" can feel overwhelming. Yet in our small circle, a different kind of field formed—one not built to exclude, but to hold.

We asked what resilience means in systems and communities. What is healthy resilience? Is it constant engagement, or selective investment? Can we be aware without feeding what depletes us? Can we feel the powerlessness and overwhelm without being consumed by it?

Somewhere in the middle of the dialogue, a subtle shift occurred.

The phrase “I don’t know” stopped sounding like failure and began to feel like power.

Not knowing was not collapse. It was spaciousness. It loosened the grip of certainty and made room for something else to emerge—something quieter and more relational. A recognition that truth may not be a position to defend, but a field to sense.

There was a reminder that real power comes from within. That sustainable community requires skills of communication and conscious participation. That dialogue itself may be one of the ways we learn to metabolize what is too large for any one person to hold alone.

No conclusions were reached.

No final clarity was declared.

What we experienced instead was a small, living experiment in collective sense-making. A microcosm of what becomes possible when we create a space separate from our entrenched worldviews and allow listening to do some of the work.

Perhaps truth, in times like these, is not something we grasp.
Perhaps it is something that reveals itself when we soften our grip.

For those who were there—may this stir a gentle remembering.
For those who were not—consider this an invitation.

Not to solve the crises of our time.
Not to arrive at certainty.

But to practice sensing together.

Because what we invest in grows.
And coherence, too, is something we can choose to cultivate—moment by moment, in relationship.