Truth-in-Service: The Fabric of the Strategic World
One of the more difficult concepts to grasp in EBE is the truth-in-service. Like most concepts in EBE, the difficulty is not usually a mental body issue but an emotional one. In the same way someone a year into EBE can usually feel the valences of primary subpersonas in others, an experienced EBE facilitant eventually can detect a truth-in-service by feeling. Because truths-in-service are the domain of the Premier Sentinel, they represent the deepest and most subtle forms of our defenses. The other two sentinel aspects, the Punisher and the Provider operate with less subtle mechanisms that have been at least identified by other modalities to some degree. The operations of the "inner critic" have been known for a long time and many people can at least hear the echoes of this part of the emotional body without much self-inquiry. The concept of medications, the domain of the Provider sentinel, is also not new in EBE, though the definition, significance and scope of them are dramatically expanded. Still, the operations of these other two sentinel aspects, relatively speaking, are not unheard of in the world of personal growth. The operations of the Premier sentinel and its use of truths-in-service, however, have been invisible to every paradigm in the history of consciousness until now, illuminated through the lens of EBE.
The truth-in-service, in fact, is difficult to grasp by design. If it were easy to grasp, the strategic selves of the world would have been discovered a long time ago and the world would likely be a very different place. The French poet Baudelaire coined the phrase, "The devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist" which we can translate for our purposes into "The sentinel's greatest defense is convincing you that it is you." Please pardon the indirect comparison of an aspect of the sacred self to the erroneous myth of the devil, but the image is a powerful one.
The truth-in-service is literally the last line of defense between the Premier Sentinel and our deepest core wounds, and so our Premiers have a vested interest in us not understanding this concept. The best defense is always an invisible one. The other major defense category of the Premier is the self-image medication, but that is easily categorized as simply a kind of truth-in-service since it is an over-identification or other unhealthy relationship with some real truth. For example, it may be true that an individual is a successful CEO, but how that truth is used in service of covering core wounding is what makes it an unhealthy self-image. In other words, the defensive value of an unhealthy self-image is greater to the degree to which it is an actual truth put in service. If there was not some truth to the image, it would not function as a mask as it would be too easily seen through. This is important to note, that unhealthy self-image is a form of truth-in-service, when we look at how truth-in-service is the fabric of the strategic world later on.
In fact, it is not a stretch to view all medications as truths-in-service, since a medication by definition provides some kind of good feeling as it covers up one that does not feel good. The truth of that good feeling is in service of covering what is hard to feel. If there were no truth to the good feeling, the medication would not function. The Punisher sentinel, on the other hand, uses its keen observations to abuse self and/or other usually by focusing on what's "bad" or making things look worse than they appear. This is also easily understood as a truth-in-service dynamic, since self or other-abuse would likely have little effect if it did not contain some kernel of truth. The truth of the observation in this case is used in service of creating a punishing, push-away effect. That in EBE the healed, integrated form of the Punisher sentinel is Discernment tells us how much this part holds our truth-telling hostage. Our ability to discern and communicate truth is literally co-opted by this part in service of protecting Shame. A Punisher sentinel, it could be said, uses discernment-of-truth-in-service until it can heal and express simply discernment of truth as part of the integrated being. It should come as no surprise that the Provider and Punisher sentinels' modus operandi can be classified as types of truth-in-service, since both of them are downstream of the Premier.
All of this can help us understand why the truth-in-service is so difficult to grasp at first, especially the subtle way it is used by the Premier. It is hidden in plain sight and literally is the fabric of the strategic world. It is like trying to describe air, or how we might imagine a fish relates to water. It is the furthest upstream shadow context of our artificial realities. To understand this better, we can consider some metaphysics about the nature of reality and how the strategic self survives in it.
According to Theohumanity, there is nothing outside of God and everything is an Aspect of God. Because God is Love at Its Essence, that means that everything is made of Love. The fundamental reason we do not experience everything, including ourselves, as Aspects of God at all times in all ways is because of the three soul fears we incurred at our soul-birth that we carry as knots in the umbilici that inexorably connect each of us to Maker. These knots and their genesis are discussed in DS Barron's Enheartenment and will not be explicated here, except as a reminder that they consist of (1) core unworth, incarnational terror, and the terror of being, (2) the fear of ego-death, and (3) the fear of surrendering our life outcomes and growth requirements to Maker. Each of these fears is a contraction of our soul-being from the Love that Everything is. As Head-of-Household (HOH) is our soul in local personality expression, our Strategic Self is these soul fears in their expression: the secondary play-out of our core existential soul-fears, recapitulated by our childhood wounding, and continuing to contract when faced with the opportunity of abiding again with the Love that all things are.
Truth, with a small 't', is simply something that resonates with the Love that all things are. That you have ten fingers resonates with the Reality of What Is, and the statement that you have nine simply doesn't resonate as well. While on one mental body level this is a simple matter of observable fact, EBE teaches us that we process reality emotionally first and mentally second. That means the truth that you have ten fingers occurs first as a primary, direct, non-verbal feeling-toned reaction to our experience held in our capacity of heart, even though most of us do not operate that way; that is, you can feel the truth of having ten fingers without having to count. Take a moment and see if you can feel the truth of having ten fingers in your heart. The secondary symbolic representation of that truth held in words, concepts or images in our capacity of mind is the thought that secondarily follows that feeling. Of course the mental body is very useful for corroborating our feelings about things, but it can just as often distort them, as surely as an unhealed emotional body can. The greatest distortion of the mental body is the sentinel's conviction that we process reality mentally first and emotionally second. This is one of the most fundamental truths-in-service in the strategic world and it is justified a number of ways, including the fact that we can appear to change our mood by changing how we think, but this is not an a function of the core emotional body but rather our passing moods and feelings, which are downstream of our mental body thoughts and beliefs. The other justification is simply that our emotions are so unconscious to us that most people experience their mental reactions before their emotional reactions to reality, but EBE would say this is proof of how wounded we are, not as an artifact of the nature of how humans process reality--it is rather the hallmark of how our defenses incessantly protect the emotional body by turning our reality processing mechanisms into a pretzel.
It is in this pretzeling between the emotional and mental that the truth-in-service is born. A truth-in-service is the use of a reasonably accurate mental-body observation in service of resisting access to full embodiment of existential emotional pain. So when your initial, pre-cognitive emotional reaction to something triggers deep wells of unfelt pain, your Premier sentinel, out of Love for You, attempts to protect you by using the most powerful thing it can, truth, as a defense to divert the issue and not inhabit the pain. If a truth-in-service was not partially made up of truth, it would be impotent. In order to function as an effective defense, something must resonate with the nature of reality to some degree or fall flat. That it is difficult to support yourself financially doing something that you love is true. That sometimes if you tell someone how you really feel they will be hurt and you will lose them is true. That if you stand to your full height you may be terrifyingly alone is true. The issue is not whether the content of these truths has merit; the issue is the context in which that truth is invoked. In other words, the question is how the truth is being put into service. Is the truth invoked in service of your highest good via the growth and expression of your Authentic Self and its abidement with the Reality of Love? Or is it a contraction of your being from the opportunity to feel and then heal a downstream playout of a soul fear leaking out as your partially repressed emotional reaction to it?
To determine the answer to this question in any moment requires a high degree of felt self-awareness and metaspace around one's patterns. The reason truths-in-service are so hard to detect at first is because they cannot be tracked by the mental body. This is because they are created by the mental body. The way to 'sniff' them out is by feeling the emotional contraction that occurs when they are invoked. This can only be done when you have begun to actually inhabit processing reality emotionally first and mentally second, and then it is not even 'done,' it is just an aspect of how you experience reality, like hearing. The mechanism of a truth-in-service is for the mental body based truth-wool to be pulled over the eyes of the emotional wound. This is an act of repression that can be felt by an open heart because it literally hurts the smaller part being 'protected' and registers as an emotional repression event to an emotionally mature person. But to the degree a truth-in-service witness continues to operate with an active Premier of their own and its own collection of truths-in-service, that individual will sooner cosign the repressive activity rather than feel the pain underneath it and challenge the repressor. In this way it can be said that if you do not track a truth-in-service in another, then you likely have a corresponding piece that blinds you to it.
One of the primary ways in which EBE facilitation works is that the facilitator has already largely deconstructed their defense mechanisms, which here we are entirely reducing to various forms of truth-in-service. The defenses of a facilitant literally 'break-up' in the presence of the healthier emotional body of their facilitator. This is the emoto-energetic context in which all EBE processing occurs and is an easy explanation for why you can more easily see through your own defensive strategies when talking with your facilitator. You can literally witness the inability for your truths-in-service to resonate in a love field. Consider the flip side of this. For this dynamic of facilitation to work, it must mean that our defenses seek validation of their stories, strategies, and unhealthy ways of relating to life from other people. This means that the strategic world is made up of sentinels who are constantly negotiating and cosigning each others' truths-in-service: existential codependence. The facilitation room is the cocoon in which a facilitant learns to deconstruct their own truths-in-service, and process the pain they attempt to hide, so they can disengage from the codependence in their local and the universal unconscious and engage in a realer world.
We live in a strategic world because we have all lived as Strategic Selves. The strategic world is not some place 'out there' that EBE'ers have to deal with when they go to the bank or buy groceries. To the degree we still operate as Strategic Selves we are performing ongoing maintenance on The Matrix. This is the world where functionality is more important than health, getting along with others more important than standing for your truth, and stability more important than risking the loss of everything in service of healing your existential fear. When a sentinel invokes a truth-in-service it is literally a fork in the road where that part chooses togenerate and live in a strategic distortion of reality rather than an authentic one. If Theohumanity's picture of why we are here is true, then it is not an exaggeration to say the invocation of a truth-in-service is a resistance to the Will of God. At the same time, Maker knew when birthing Its souls that the soul contractions would occur and probably saw that the use of the truth-in-service was inevitable. Maker is both patient and merciless and in each of our lifetimes we surely heal some portion of our soul fears, whether it is one tenth of one percent or fifty, whether we consciously intend to in the incarnation or not. That is the nature of incarnation and the system in which we live. But we must face that all of the pain and suffering in this world is a result of our resistance to our own growth opportunities microcosmically and God Itself macrocosmically. In the same way the burning sensation functions as a signal to take our hand off a stove, the pain in our hearts functions as a directive to heal.
So as each of us creates a new world as our own authentic selves, we automatically create a new outer world simply by no longer cosigning the truths-in-service we come across; not as matter of intention, but as a matter of being. It is in this way the world can truly change: as an automatic, unselfconscious expression of our truest being. This is why all kinds of resistance-based activism, evangelism, and behavioral modification based change are so severely limited. The problems were mostly not created consciously at the level of intention in the first place. Why do people think they can be solved at the level of intention when the root has always been unconscious emotional motivation? As Einstein said, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."
The answer is, of course, because the fact that such attempts at change do work on some limited level is used as a truth-in-service by the Premiers in charge. A Premier sentinel is pro-change as long as it does not challenge them to feel their existential pain and they can point at progress as a justification to not demand higher orders of change. Beneath the impressive swirl of a visionary entrepreneur is the terror of the future and the pathological need to control it to not feel their anxiety. Underneath the self-images of so many environmentalists is the agony of the inability to care for themselves and how they feel as raped and destitute as the planet. Scratch the surface of a political idealist or successful business leader and you will find deep wells of unworth and helplessness being compensated for such that their thirst for power and money cannot be quenched.
As long as the truth-in-service, the fabric of the strategic world that holds it so barely together, is not addressed all attempts at change will be tragically limited as such attempts on some levelcannot resonate with the architecture of Reality Itself. This dense level of being was designed by Maker to evoke our soul fears so that they can heal, and the truth-in-service is fundamentally a fractal aspect of our original soul-birth contractions from the Love of Life and an exercising of 'free won't' against It. 'Free won't' is the choice to abdicate responsibility of our unconscious shadow aspects that are the root cause of all human suffering. In this way, a truth-in-service is the local content expression of free won't. Because we are emotional beings first and mental second, we can create all the positive and productive intentions, actions and outcomes we want and still be unwittingly exercising free won't by refusing to look at our shadows which will in turn severely distort those downstream intentions and actions. This is exactly why despite 2500 years of psychospiritual seeking and the countless modalities humans have created, we as a species are still struggling with figuring out how to not kill each other.
The cause of suffering is no longer a mystery, a tragic inevitability of our fundamental flaws, karmic punishment from past lives, or a symptom of the "human condition" (all often invoked as truths-in-service). If our root emotivity is in conflict with our downstream intentions, those intentions are fundamentally split at the source and stand on a foundation of shifting sand. "Thou shalt not kill" is a perfect example of this: a good intention overridden throughout the history of Judeo-Christianity by the larger foundation of emotional congestion upon which it stands. Instead of looking at the disconnect between the stated intention of a world-view and its manifested outcomes as a psychospiritual, paradigmatic problem, this issue is swept under the carpet and justified via truth-in-service, as for example, every "Holy War" has been. The same paradigm even holds that "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" and yet continues to promote intention and downstream action-based change.
To appreciate fully how the strategic world is so tenuously held together by truth-in-service you need simply look for what the core truth-in-service is at the heart of any system, business, religion, institution, dharma, methodology, etc. A simple method for tracking down a systemic truth-in-service is to first look for the limits of the paradigm and/or their subsequent corrupt expressions and to keep asking 'Why?' For example, the tendency for neo-transcendental teachers to engage in teenage sexual mischief points to the inability for such paradigms to address what healthy intimacy involves. Why is this? Because the paradigm claims that there is no individual local personality, how could it provides guidance on what to do with that personality in its relationship with other personalities, except to just 'get' that it's all illusory maya. Why? The truth that Buddhistic paradigms operate from is that the individual ego cannot be experienced, but they go on to claim it therefore must not exist (or in more benign forms, that you shouldn't worry about whether it exists or not which is just as invalidative). Next, you can ask "What emotional truth is being repressed via the (mis)application of this other truth?" In Buddhism, you can observe how often depressed and disconnected seekers are attracted to these paradigms; in other words, people who on some level don't want to exist in the first place. So the truth that the ego cannot be experienced is put in service of validating the wounded reality-picture of the hurting subpersonas whose experience of Life is so awful they don't want to be alive anymore. This is something that is not difficult to feel in others, once you have deconstructed some of your own depression and disconnect. The feeling of subpersonas buried by Sunyata is painfully difficult to bear, especially when it is covered by a smiling, transcendent self-imagic sentinel that sees you as still stuck in duality.
Another way of circumscribing how the strategic world is held together by the truth-in-service is by understanding how false gods are also included in this concept. A false god is created when the truth aspect of a truth-in-service is elevated to paradigmatic level proportions. Said another way, a false god is a truth-in-service on steroids. For example, in mainstream psychology it is true that mental body reframing, values clarification, and belief examination can create downstream shifts in moods and feelings. This truth is elevated to false godify the mind and its control, in service of ignoring obvious limitations of the model, its practitioners and the fact that psychology has really only demonstrated an ability to treat symptoms and strengthen coping mechanisms and not create healing that would obviate the need for coping in the first place. A classic downstream effect of this is how many therapists, in order to avoid projecting onto their clients (counter-transference), maintain a cool, clinical distance from their clients. Does psychology have so little confidence in its ability to heal that even its practitioners must, in the case of psychoanalysis, not even face their client in session in fear of the distortions a more personal connection might create? But if the mind, and not the heart, is the focus, then this kind of personal disconnect makes sense, and so the issue need not be addressed. In this way, it can be said that a false god is a kind of parent truth-in-service that supports and breeds many smaller ones.
The false god of Islam is Muhammad as the "last prophet" and the Qur'an as the absolute word of God, both of which justify the self-righteousness, exclusivity and evangelism in the shadow of the religion. The false god of Christianity is Jesus and his supposed martyrdom which justifies its inability to address your feelings of unworth and the altruism it proposes you practice instead of healing why you can't healthily meet your own needs. The false god of Judaism is that Jews are the "chosen people" which is used to justify not looking at their contribution to their own persecution, and so enables suffering loops, clannishness, paranoia, and outright racism. The false god of Buddhism is non-attachment which justifies its identification of the nondual as the ultimate reality; therefore there is no emotional body to have to work on, only your deluded mental body to 'let go.' The false gods of business are profit and growth, which justify putting the company ahead of the individual which is metaphysically ridiculous because there is no company without individuals, and all of the dehumanization and fear-instilling control that comes from management from this perspective. The false god of Alcoholics Anonymous is the twelve step program which justifies unhealed shame by labeling alcoholism as a disease with no cure and so teaches victimhood to drugs, alcohol and Life to avoid healing the emotional wounds that cause substance abuse in the first place. The false gods of Deeksha are bliss and universal love which justify avoiding the challenges of personal love and healing our own suffering by offering its shakti transmissions that supposedly shortcut the way to enlightenment by dangerously short-circuiting our very real and precious egoic energetic structures. The list goes on and on....False gods are the largest, paradigmatic truths-in-service in which we live. They are both the product and the structural enablers of our own individual truths-in-service. This is the sticky web of the strategic world.
The tragic irony is that so many religions specifically warn against the worship of false gods, especially Christianity, Islam and Judaism, which were all founded in reaction to false gods as reforms of existing polytheistic practices. The problem has been that, before Theohumanity, there has not been a spiritual paradigm in history that offers a precise explanation for why false gods are created in the first place in addition to an actual process for deconstructing them through healing rather than simply replacing them. In broader terms, so far no other paradigm has understood the insidious dynamic of the truth-in-service such that false godification could be healed in its upstream emoto-spiritual context. If EBE's picture of the emotional body is true, any system that does not recognize the enormity, subtlety, and ubiquity of the truth-in-service and its connection to the architecture of the human emotional body will inevitably be distorted by truth-in-service, since our defenses always use best tools available to defend their underbellies.
So it is in this profoundly tragic way that the most powerful and true teachings in the history of our consciousness by definition carry the greatest distortions as well. It is not the falsities of paradigms that cause harm to human beings, but the emotionally repressive misuse of very powerful truths. And so the fabric of our strategic world has become a complex interweaving of truths-in-service, blanketed over our deepest pain and therefore our deepest Love, and constantly maintained by the strategic selves that live within it, prisoners who have in fear built the walls of their own prison. If EBE's understanding of the emotional body is true, then any time a group of individuals join together who are not actively confronting their own truths-in-service, they will inevitably cosign each others' repression mechanisms and together build structures, false gods, to validate their distorted pictures of reality and their continued suffering. It is exactly this way that our value systems are created by our wound-systems and then serve to hold our wounds in place, which is why any healing process that avoids challenging the value system of the individual will always fall short of the deepest healing possible, and remain amidst the fabric of the strategic world.