When Truth Needs Permission to Exist

A reflection on how truth is filtered in our world — through science, law, media, and authority — and what happens when reality is larger than the systems we’ve built to explain and control it.

We’ve Been Trained to Recognise Truth in Only One Way

Most of us have learned, quietly and consistently, to trust truth only when it comes from an approved place. Over time, this training becomes invisible. We learn to wait for validation before allowing ourselves to know something, to distrust what cannot be clearly explained, and to dismiss whatever falls outside the accepted framework as unreliable, irrational, or even dangerous.

This conditioning shapes how we think, how we speak, and how far we allow ourselves to question. It teaches us that truth is something external — something granted by authority — rather than something that can also emerge through lived experience, pattern recognition, and deeper forms of understanding.

Science, Law, and Media as the Gatekeepers of Truth

We often say that science decides what is true. In reality, truth in our world passes through three interconnected gatekeepers: science, law, and media.

Science determines what can be recognised as valid knowledge. Law determines what can be acted upon and who is allowed to carry responsibility. Media determines what becomes visible, repeated, amplified, or quietly ignored. Together, they don’t simply describe reality — they filter it.

They shape what is allowed to be spoken, believed, taken seriously, and remembered. Anything that does not pass through these filters is quickly placed outside legitimacy — not necessarily because it is false, but because it does not fit the existing framework.

In practice, truth has become something that requires permission.

Why We’re Already Questioning the Media — and What Comes Next

This questioning has already begun, most clearly in relation to the media. More and more people have realised that media does not simply report reality, but curates it. That visibility is not the same as truth, and repetition does not equal importance.

Once this becomes visible, something irreversible happens. Trust becomes conditional. Discernment becomes necessary. And when one gatekeeper is questioned, the others inevitably come into view.

The next phase is already unfolding: questioning science and law — not to reject them, but to understand how they function, who they serve, and where their limits lie.

When Science Is No Longer Driven by Curiosity

Science began as curiosity — a genuine attempt to understand reality. Today, much of institutional science is shaped less by curiosity and more by funding.

What gets researched depends on who finances it, which outcomes are acceptable, which questions are considered useful, and which results are publishable. This does not make science false, but it does make it selective. Entire areas of inquiry remain marginal not because they lack depth or relevance, but because they are unprofitable, inconvenient, difficult to control, or incompatible with existing interests.

This is why systems that are far more nuanced than our current psychological models — such as symbolic, archetypal, or pattern-based systems like the Gene Keys — remain outside mainstream recognition. Not because they lack sophistication, but because they do not fit the dominant explanatory framework.

“We cannot explain it” has become enough reason to dismiss it.

Law, Authority, and the Question We Rarely Ask

The same pattern appears when we look at law. We are taught that law exists to protect us, to represent collective will, and to guarantee fairness. Yet we rarely ask the more uncomfortable question: who actually makes the laws, and for whom?

We live in systems that call themselves democratic, while major decisions are often made far from public consent. Laws are written, policies enacted, and directions taken by people and bodies that are not meaningfully accountable in the way we are taught to believe.

This does not require conspiracy thinking. It requires honesty about power.

War as an Example of Permissionless Power

War is perhaps the clearest example of this gap.

Entire populations are affected by decisions to escalate conflict, yet people are rarely asked whether they consent. There is no collective vote, no real choice. Consequences are framed as necessary, inevitable, or beyond discussion.

Here again, truth is managed, responsibility is diffused, and authority is centralised — while individuals are left to adapt to decisions they never made.

Why Non-Binary Truth Makes Us Uncomfortable

We have been trained to think in binaries: true or false, right or wrong, proven or conspiracy. This offers certainty, but at the cost of depth.

Non-binary truth does not offer fixed answers. It asks for discernment. It requires us to stay present with complexity instead of outsourcing our knowing to authority. This is uncomfortable — not because it is dangerous, but because it returns responsibility to the individual.

In systems built on hierarchy and delegation, that feels destabilising.

Why Tools Like the Pendulum Are Misdefined

It is not accidental that the pendulum is framed as a simple yes-or-no tool. That framing makes it easy to dismiss.

In reality, it responds to context, timing, probability, and relational states — not absolutes. A system that only understands fixed answers has no language for this. So instead of questioning the framework, the tool itself is labelled unreliable and pushed into the corner of the “unexplainable.”

This is how non-institutional ways of knowing are neutralised: not by being disproven, but by being misdefined.

Why We Are Always One Step Behind

Truth is only acknowledged after it passes scientific approval, legal structure, and media visibility. By the time something is officially recognised, its effects have often already been lived, its consequences integrated, and its damage done.

Early signals, pattern recognition, embodied knowing, and contextual awareness are ignored — not because they are wrong, but because they are not yet permitted. As a result, we live reactively instead of perceptively, always catching up to a reality that has already moved on.

This Is an Epistemological Crisis — Not Just a Practical One

This is why the crisis we are living in is not only political, medical, or social. It is epistemological.

Epistemology simply means how we decide what counts as knowledge, truth, and reality. The real issue is not only what is happening in the world, but the rules we use to decide what is real in the first place. If those rules are too narrow, reality will always outrun them.

An Outdated Framework in a Complex World

Reality has become too complex, too fast, and too interconnected for a system that only allows truth after validation, authority, and visibility. The crises we face today arise from a framework that confuses authority with truth, repetition with reality, and permission with knowing.

A Transition We Can No Longer Avoid

What we are living through is not chaos. It is a transition between frameworks.

A transition away from truth as certification, authority, and repetition, toward truth as contextual, relational, and multi-layered. This does not require abandoning science, law, or media. It requires releasing their monopoly on truth.

A Question of Humility in a Much Larger Universe

Beneath all of this lies a deeper question of humility.

Somewhere along the way, we began to believe that we could fully understand, control, and redesign reality. That with enough authority, knowledge, and technology, we have the right to intervene everywhere.

But what if that position is misplaced? What if we are living inside a universe far more complex, intelligent, and powerful than our systems allow?

Perhaps what is collapsing is not the world — but our posture within it.

Surrender as Intelligence, Not Weakness

Surrender is often misunderstood as weakness. In reality, it is an acknowledgment of scale. It is recognising that we are participants in a much larger system, not its managers.

This kind of humility does not reduce us. It re-orients us.

A More Grounded Closing Question

If we live in a world where something is only taken seriously once it has been approved by experts, institutions, laws, and repeated by the media, what might we be overlooking simply because it doesn’t fit those systems yet?

Photo: Surrender as a Way of Seeing