The Most Powerful Force on the Planet

n my last article I promised to keep you posted about reading the Triangle of TRUTH by Lisa Earle McCleod. It is based upon trying to find the Higher-Level Solution between My TRUTH and Your TRUTH. Instead of trying to compromise in the middle or fight about who is right and wrong. The Triangle of TRUTH provides a model for redirecting energies, honoring the TRUTH on both sides. But is promising to be so much more. It identifies how we tend to put people into categories and how this causes division.

She calls this “either/or” thinking when if one person is the bad guy, the other must be the good guy. This way of thinking affects every aspect of our lives, and it is very difficult to escape. When we descend into either/or thinking, we lose the ability to solve our problems because all creative thinking stops.

We believe that if we could only solve our conflicts and strife, we could solve all our problems. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our conflicts do not hold us back; it is quite the opposite, they are, in fact, the secret to solving our problems. It is this ability to face our problems, face what is opposing our progress, that helps us find solutions.

I am glossing over much of what she has presented to this point only to save time and space and encourage you to read it for yourself. One point, however, is important to share before going on. She calls it the “harnessing the power of And.” It boils down to the fact that the world is filled with dichotomies – things that when pitted against each other cause conflict, yet when harnessed together create great results.

By illustration, it reminds me of the story of the salesman traveling on a rural road when he suddenly encountered a ditch. He walked up to a local farmhouse to ask for help and the farmer took him behind the barn to show him his old, broken-down mule named Gus. The farmer assured the salesman that the mule could pull his car out of the ditch. With nothing to lose he said “sure, give it a try.” The farmer hitched up the mule to the car, cracked a whip and yelled for Gus to pull. He also yelled “on Bob” and “on Tom”, “give it all you got! Gus struggled at first but sure enough, soon pulled the car right out of the ditch. “That’s amazing, but tell me, why were you calling out those other names?” “Well, you see, old Gus is blind and thought he was pulling in the same direction of other mules.”

The real power of the Triangle of Truth lies in the ability to take the model from the abstract – from the intellect – into the world of emotions. It is hard to change the way other people think, until you change the way you think. This is quite simple to do, it depends on one thing…love. 

We fear and distrust others because we have filed them in a particular place in our minds. The opposite of fear is love. Love expands possibilities while fear contracts. Love does not actually solve our problems, but it enables us to start the process when nothing else will. I have written before, and I will write again on these two strong emotions that shape our lives in so many ways - love and fear. It is enough to say for now that love is one of the secrets of making the Triangle of Truth work.

Love is more powerful than fear, because when you come from a place of love, you bring more than just your mind into situations; you also bring your heart. Your heart is the connection to your soul, which is where the real power lies. In a future post I will lay out how this power is being used to help transform our current state of affairs in this country. The negative rhetoric of hate and fear is slowly being replaced by hope and patriotism love of country, and of returning power to the people as defined in our Constitution. Love has been the cornerstone of every successful endeavor in our country since the American Revolution, to the Civil War, to our healing as a Nation after 911, and even through the many challenges and problems of the Pandemic. We have survived, and even thrived as a Nation.

We can and must solve our problems.  The TRUTH is that we need other people to accomplish almost anything. If people know that you care, they will help. Perhaps Marget Mead said it best.

“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.”

But my favorite quote about caring is from Theodore Roosevelt... “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”