You put up a true fact against an exciting lie that nobody even pays attention, right? So in this time when lies are being spread very rapidly with great power, what do those of us who are committed to the truth have to do to stay okay? Well Ressa and her people found out that there is one thing that spreads as fast online as a lie, and that is inspiration.

So if you can get a truth that is inspiring, it flashes out into the populace just the way a brutal lie will flash out. And that means that there’s an alternative for us, those of us who are looking for something that is both true and very powerful, something we want to spread, something we want to make go viral.

So I was thinking today, if you just scroll through social media or if you let the people around you just talk however they want and you just don’t filter anything, if you just walk passively through the world and information is hitting you randomly, you’re going to pick up a lot of disinformation these days. Misinformation, mistaken information, and disinformation: deliberate lies.

And in a world like that, it’s become a little creepy up in here in this world because there are very few checks and balances on the truth anymore. People who want to lie online or lie publicly will get, it is possible, a very big audience, and people will actually really strongly believe a lie. For example, if they run across it 50 times, they will literally believe the world is flat and say things like without irony, “The flat earth, the idea of a flat earth is catching on around the globe.” That was something someone put online once without irony.

So those of us who are looking for something to receive and transmit in a highly receivable and transmittable world don’t need to be exhausted and depressed by the fact that lies spread so fast. What we do need is to deliberately seek inspiration. The lies will reach you on their own. They’re going out hunting, but we can go out hunting inspiration. And hunting is very different from just passively receiving.

If you’re just going to bird watch and you sit on your veranda, you sit on your front porch or whatever and wait for birds to fly by, you’ll see some birds. But if you’re a real birder, if you really want to see specific birds, you’ll go out looking for them. You’ll know where they hang out, you’ll know how to call them, how to disguise yourself so they think you’re part of their natural environment, and then you’ll know how to recognize them when they’re there.

So all of us have an opportunity now to go looking for what inspires us as if we were going birding. Not just allowing things to flow past us, but actively seeking something that can inspire us. So for example, I follow someone on Threads, the social media platform, who puts positive information into the internet. And from that person and from several other people, I recently got all kinds of information about the following scenario. In the Czech Republic there was a waterway in the forest that was drying up and it was eroding too much of the earth and it was problematic. And some ecologists wanted to dam the river in order to, or the streams there, in order to create the natural marshland and allow the local fauna to come back. They wanted to just heal the ecosystem. Problem was they were in debate for seven years about the funding for this and it was going to cost like $1.2 million. They couldn’t justify the cost. It was debated and debated. In the meantime, about a year ago, eight individuals showed up and they saw that the river needed damming and they built a dam. And it is very effective. And it was free because those eight individuals were beavers.

They just showed up on this river course and made a dam that was inspected by the people who were planning to make the dam. And it turned out that the dams were structurally sound and placed in exactly the right position to do the ecological healing that the humans had wanted to do.

I found that inspiring. I was inspired by the fact that nature can still do things for free that we, in our thinking that we’re so dominant, we’re like, “How do we figure this out intellectually?” And there are—eight beavers fixed the problem! That’s inspiring to me. It makes me want to be like a beaver.

So I started to think about how do we find the things that are truly inspiring? If we’re going out hunting online, how do we avoid things that are lies? They could be optimistic lies as well as pessimistic lies. How do we know what to hunt for and what to believe?

So for this, I looked again, where do I go for inspiration? I go to nature for my inspiration. And I thought to myself, how can we direct our behavior so that it is the true and the beautiful? I thought about this flock of starlings that comes past my house twice a year. It’s so interesting. I’ve been sitting in this very room when it happens. Huge flocks of starlings come and they fly straight at the window I’m looking at right now, and then they bank upward right at the last minute and go shooting up. And it’s almost like I’m looking at a storm where something’s moving up instead of falling down. And I go watch them and they’ll go onto the forest floor and then they’ll all land, not at the same time but close together. And then if something, if I knock on the window, they fly upward and it looks like the forest is lifting itself up. It’s so cool.

And a starling flock like this is called a “murmuration.” And if you want some inspiration for your soul, just Google “starling murmuration” and look at the way these massive flocks of birds fly in perfect conformation. They create these swirling sculptural forms in the air and they’re in perfect cooperation with each other.

And when I’m looking at us, we humans, there are so many of us, and if we want to be in a beautiful and coordinated social group that spans the whole world, which is what this Gathering Room hopes to take part in, we can follow the same simple rules in hunting inspiration that starlings or other animals like schools of fish or swarms of insects, the rules that they follow so that they’re always in perfect harmony with each other and that they create this extraordinary beauty that also serves everything, serves the flock, serves each individual bird, serves nature itself.

So they just have three little things they know about: separation, stay a certain distance from the nearest other birds; and then alignment, stay aligned in direction with the average flight of your flock; and then finally, cohesion, always move toward the center of the mass of local flockmates to stay together.

Okay. So each starling is watching six to seven other birds. So it’s just the ones in a circle. If you think about being in the center of a circle and you’ve got six or seven people around you that you trust and you are inspired by—people you follow online, people you have as friends, people, for me it’s authors of books that may have been written a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. So make sure you have your touch points of humans that inspire you to trust and believe what makes you joyful.

Find six to seven other minds that are trustworthy to you and then always stay in alignment with those. Not in complete—don’t get too close. So the first rule: separation, stay a little distance away from each one. So here’s where your individuality is essential. You cannot give the responsibility for knowing the things you need to know to someone else. You can’t just find a cult leader and say, “Oh, that person knows the way to enlightenment, so I’m just going to let them do it for me. I’m going to believe everything they say.” It’s not that way. You are meant to have your own personal point of observation. And if you completely eclipse that, I saw a meme online the other day that says, “If there is a human being who you think is right 100% of the time, congratulations, you’re in a cult.” Okay? So get separation by knowing that you are you and that you have the right to question all authority.

But within that, choose the six or seven people you trust the most and align yourself with the things, with the ideas that triangulate, that match. So you find similar ideas being expressed, say in different spiritual traditions and oh, okay, I’m going to leave aside, for example, certain, you know, the various codes of how people dress or wear their hair, but I am going to choose this one point where truth is beauty and beauty is truth. Or truth is freedom or the truth will set you free. I’m going to choose that because there’s alignment with people I trust. So then, and this, by the way, is what the beavers were doing too. They were just hanging out and being aligned with the beavers they liked and they did the right things.

And then there is cohesion. So what is cohesion? The bird moves toward the center of mass of the local flockmates. What is the center of mass of our local flockmates? It is the love that pulls us together, the love of the truth, the love of each other. It is the sense of lightness, of joy, of deep peace, of creativity. It is that aliveness we sense when we’re with someone who really, really lights us up.

So this is how I want to go hunting every day of my life. I want to know who I am. I’m going to get enough information that I don’t absolutely believe any other person. So keep myself as an individual, separated. Then I’m going to align with people whose energy and words make sense to me. And then I am going to cohere toward love, truth, beauty, and the other things that connect me with the humans in my little flock.

And doing this, each of us just doing this will form what looks like a vast, coordinated, beautiful dance. It’s as if we sat down, a master choreographer sat down and made a dance for millions of people. If we just do this, if we just go out hunting inspiration and acting like starlings in a murmuration, there will be a coordinated beauty that nobody’s in charge of, that everybody is just finding because of our inherent nature and our desire to do good and to be good. So I truly believe that this is the kind of action that leads to worldwide positive change, no matter what even in these times.

So Tracy, here we’re going to your questions. Tracy says, “So they act like small cells that interconnect?”

Oh, I’m so glad you put it that way. I was walking along today, I went on my walk and I was thinking, how do we create a society that is just and true and fair? I don’t really see that happening too much around the world right now, especially not in the US. I was thinking, so what could we do? I just felt this sort of laughter from inside me. And it was as if part of me said, think of the cells of your body. Right now, your intestinal cells, your brain cells, your heart cells, the cells in your feet, they’re all doing magic. They’re all holding their own, being the kind of cell they were meant to be, moving in total harmony with trillions of other cells, but always doing their own job. Do you think you are in charge of that? And it was just this laughter saying, honey, yeah, we’re all just cells connecting. And the beauty of it is we’re born with the natural propensity to do whatever the healthiest job we can do. It may be yes, we are all small cells that connect and we are all small individuals that interconnect. And we are all small groups that connect, and everything about us is interconnective.

And it’s that interconnectivity that forms a phenomenon in nature called emergence. And that is when something greater than the sum of the parts emerges from the parts. So the cell is made up of atoms but is somehow able to transcend their capacities and the molecule transcends the capacities of the cell. And the body as a whole transcends the capacity of the cells together. The parts add together and create something greater at a completely different level. That’s the emergent property in nature. And it can also be among us.

So Jennison Fruit says, “Can’t I just sit under a tree and not pay any mind to anything but my heart?”

Absolutely, abso-frickin-lutely! Until your heart says, “It might be fun to go for a walk or it might be fun to have a friend come sit with me.” And when you listen to your heart, it will tell you to be still most of the time. But when you act, to act from inspiration. We’re hunting inspiration, and it’s very inspiring to hear you say you could just sit under a tree and not pay attention to anything but your heart. That inspires me. That sounds right. And you sound like a flockmate that I’m going to align with. And I did this yesterday. I basically just lay down for a couple of days. I’d been to—my son Adam had a pacemaker put in, and I spent a couple of days in the hospital with him. And when I got home I was just like, aghh. And I thought I’d never get up again. Seriously. And today I got up and I was like, “Now I want to go for a walk.” And I did, and now I’m here with you. And all of that comes from paying attention to my heart. But yeah, go sit under a tree first. It’s a great idea.

Karen’sMagicalPores says, “I trust beavers, LOL.” I’m going to let that speak for itself and not say that it is either from me or from the lesbian community in general, but just that it is Karen’sMagicalPores, that person’s trust. Thank you.

All right, Leanne Brun says, “How do we know who we can trust?”

It is when there is, first of all, number one, we have to be in integrity with ourselves. And by integrity, I mean all of our parts telling the same story. I wrote a whole book about this so you can go look it up, The Way of Integrity, but it just means that—it’s not being virtuous in any religious sense. It’s that there is no part of us that is pretending to believe something that we do not feel to be true at the deepest level.

So for example, if I am in a terrible job and I pretend every day that I love it, even if I pretend to myself, if it’s not deeply true, I’ll be out of integrity with myself. And that’s like being out of structural integrity. Integrity just means you’re one thing. And if you’re not in integrity, you can’t feel who else is in integrity.

So one of the things you’ll see about people who lie a lot is that they easily trust other people who are lying, and they’re not aware that people can tell when they’re lying. It’s fascinating. Because they’re out of integrity, they don’t realize that for a person who is in integrity, being lied to feels really different from hearing the truth. So what I would encourage you to do is really get to know who you are at the depth of your being, and if you have to do something you don’t like, don’t lie to yourself. Acknowledge that you don’t like what’s happening and that you are doing it for whatever reason, and then you’ll be back in integrity. And the more you live in integrity, the more you can tell whom you can trust. Oh my goodness, I have a lifetime’s experience to go behind that, I promise you.

Integrity in yourself leads you to people you can trust around you. And we can always take steps toward our own integrity in any given moment just by acknowledging what we really want, what we really feel, what we really know. Yes. And then do that for me, Leanne. And then see if you can trust this. And if you can’t, throw it away. If this doesn’t sound right for you—I’m doing my best, but I don’t know if I’m right for you. So your sense of trust will lead you.

Okay, Delia Lincourt says, “How do you create self-authority in order to have the separation, in order to be an apart of the inspired flock of friends?”

So she says, not a part, but the word “apart” to be apart from. And it’s the same as what I was saying to Leanne, know what you really know. Feel what you really feel and say what you really mean. Sit down with a journal if you feel lost and in chaos, not knowing what to believe, sit down and say, here’s what I’m really feeling. I’m feeling upset because blah, blah, blah. Or I’m in love with so-and-so even though I’m not supposed to be or whatever. And then go deeper. What I really, really feel is this, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, what I really feel down deep is this, blah, blah, blah. And then go to, here’s what I really know. And I used to ask clients sometimes, “Tell me something that you’re afraid to know even though you actually know it.” And some weird things would come out, like people would remember childhood abuse histories. They would remember traumas that they knew, but they were afraid to know they knew. Does that make sense?

So when you sit down and say, I am going to say what I really mean on this page, feel what I really feel, know what I really know, it’s like a therapy shortcut, which is another—therapy is another good way, by the way. And then you say, I know the feeling of truth for myself. And even if the person I love most says, here’s where you need to believe me instead of your core self, you politely think to yourself, I hear you and your way is not working for me. What I know to be true or what I believe to be true is what I’m going to trust. So there will never be two people—who said, “If two people agree on everything, then one of them is superfluous”? There are never going to be two people who believe absolutely everything exactly the same way. And knowing that it’s okay to not be the same as other people and to spot your differences and still love each other is part of getting inspiration from the flock. That makes you really safe because you know that ultimately you are the one who’s tracking your course.

Dr. Deadlift says, “Then why do people lie?”

Well, people lie because they want to get gain. They lie because they want power, wealth, and status. They lie to manipulate other people. There have been studies showing that most women tell lies, people identified as women to make other people feel better and happier. Where most people socialized as men will lie to make themselves look better to other people. And they’re two sides of the same coin. And I’m not blaming men, it sounds like, “Oh, women are virtuous and want to help and men just lie to make themselves look good.” That’s what the evidence suggests, but don’t forget, it’s all socialization. They’ve all been trained. We’ve all been trained to lie in certain ways, but you’re trained to lie from the moment you are a little tiny baby, and you notice that your parents don’t like it when you cry or when you seem angry or when you seem greedy or whatever. And you notice their displeasure and you go against your own inclinations, your own nature, in order to please your social group.

That’s what my whole Way of Integrity book is about. Why do people leave themselves? Almost always social pressure. Sometimes trauma where you just repress something that happened and that’s involuntary. But even keeping it repressed is part of fitting in with a social group. You pretend you’re not upset, you pretend everything’s fine, you pretend to go along with everyone because otherwise they will beat you to death with sticks and rocks, potentially. Just depends on the group you’re in.

Oh yes, somebody said they want to do a Still Point Session in Wilder. Yes, after, let me just mention this for those of us who are in the Wilder community, which is the community that Rowan Mangan and I run online, I’m doing a Still Point Session meditation in that group right after The Gathering rRoom at well, at four o’clock today Eastern Standard Time. Sorry, someone wrote that in and I just wanted to cite it because I haven’t mentioned it yet.

On to interesting question number five, City Lotus says, “I’ve transformed so deeply in the past four years that I no longer have the flock I used to have. How can I develop this?”

This is all about what hunting inspiration is for. I am sorry that you find yourself not jiving with other people so much, like the flock you were with is not flying in the direction that you wanted to go. To use another metaphor in my coaching system, I call this the elevator effect, the empty elevator. You’re on a certain floor of your own personal development and you want to go up, and it’s like getting in the elevator of a building and you realize that if you go up a ways, you can see a much better view, and it’s cool up there. You want to explore. So you say to the other people on the floor with you, “Get into the elevator with me. There’s a great view from up above,” and no one wants to go, or maybe a couple of people want to go.

So you end up in the elevator and you are climbing and you’re leaving people behind and it can feel like you’ve been abandoned. But be very careful because the truth may be you’ve walked away from something that wasn’t working, from a flock that wasn’t flying in the direction you wanted to fly in. So what happens then? Go hunt inspiration. Hunt for the things online, in your personal circle of human beings. Go to the local library or bookstore—I’m a bookish person—or go to a place where people gather, a meditation session, go to yoga class, go to wherever you find people who you think may be aligned with your direction. And you’ll feel a sense of resonance with the people whose hearts are in a similar orientation to yours in terms of what they want to do with their lives, how they want to function in the world. And if you walk through the world knowing that you’re open for that, you’re not in a flock yet, but you’re open to a flock, and look for things that inspire you, like, “Wow, that’s impressive. I would love to be part of that.” Go toward those things.

Okay, Lady Chichi says, “How can I fire up the inspiration light inside myself?”

What a great question. You could do it by going, get a journal. I’m very big on journaling. I think it uses a different part of the brain than even speaking or typing. Get a physical journal and write down times when you were brave, times when you were confident, times when you made something interesting, times when you ended up looking back and saying, “I’m proud I did that.” So you become your most inspiring self. Instead of being negative toward yourself, which is very common in our culture, really, really emphasize the things that you’ve done right and dwell on them, and it will make you more of the best person you’re meant to be. And that will take you flying right in the direction of a flock you may never have met, but it will be full of other people who are inspiring themselves and inspiring each other in the way you did.

So Free Spirit finally says, “How can I integrate forgiveness more into my life?”

Well, you can start right now by saying, “I was not trained to go seeking inspiration. And I did a lot of cooperation with systems that weren’t serving my truest nature and did not serve my happiness. And I am learning from each of those, and I can grieve each incident and I can forgive myself for having sought inspiration in places where it wasn’t.” Because that is the way of a hunter. Even a fox who’s a brilliant hunter, only succeeds only when he’s facing north, by the way. Or she. Only succeeds 80% of the time on a really, really good hunt.

So for every time we go hunting inspiration, we must be prepared to meet with things that are uninspiring or things that turn out to be false. And the correct response, not the correct response, but the healing response, that generative response to that is grieving that this is not our flock. This is not a person we can trust or that we want to be with. Grieve that and forgive ourselves and forgive the situation for not being the inspiration we wanted. And then forgiveness heals and the grieving process ends and we mend stronger at the broken places. And when we do find inspiration, we lock in there with our new flock and we end up creating this murmuration that can move all over our planet just by us connecting in The Gathering Room and other places.

So happy hunting for inspiration, folks, and always tell the truth. I love you. See you later. Bye.