Consciously Becoming Transparent to Integrate Others’ Perspectives

Let’s have a transparent talk.

I want to share an experience that left me thinking.

In one of the Uber rides I took while visiting Boston, the driver, upon hearing my accent, asked where I was from.

“Venezuela,” I replied.

He turned to me and said, “A lot is happening in Venezuela.”

Yes, these days, Venezuela is in turmoil.

Venezuela, the country where I was born and raised (beyond the patriarchal bias of the society), was a place of freedom, allowing for free expression, spontaneity, and transparency. I appreciate my parents’ choice to raise me there. In 1999, Venezuelans chose Hugo Chavez and the socialism model as an option to escape corrupt leaders. But Chavez didn’t meet their aspirations. Instead, he started one of the darkest periods of Venezuelan history. Chavez died in 2013, and Nicholas Maduro assumed power, catalyzing a process of chaos and decay.

I shared with the driver what Venezuelans are going through. Once the richest country in Latin America, Venezuela is now the poorest. Despite vast reserves of oil (the world’s largest), worth billions, people are dying from lack of food and medicine, crime, and extrajudicial killings in anti-government protests. Corruption is worse than ever, and Venezuelans lost their freedom of expression under Maduro’s tyranny. This is clearly a government not for the people but for the greed of its self-interested rulers.

Venezuelans are defending their authenticity—they’ve been fighting for freedom for years without tangible results—and people are dying and suffering. Maduro, reelected through sham elections, ordered the burning of trucks with much-needed US food, medicine, and supplies. According to the Venezuelan constitution and the national assembly elected by the people of Venezuela, Juan Guaido is the rightful president. But the cravings for riches of those in power deny it.

Considering the tragic story I’d shared, I expected words of hope and compassion. As I left, the driver stared at me and said, “I am a [name of a political party],” repeating this twice more.

I was surprised. What did the tragedy of human beings in Venezuela have to do with an American political party? What triggered that unpredicted reaction?

Most shocking, his coldness—how beliefs can cloud reality so people lose their compassion for other sentient beings. He reminded me of a robot, following a program.

Worse, most people are living this same robotic reality—guided by an inner mind program, without full awareness, causing them to give up their humanity. Are you one of them?

I am not a political party. I am not my religion or my culture. I am not the country where I was born or my profession. In short, I am not what I believe. I try to remain neutral and open to experiencing a broader perspective that comes from my real essence beyond my learned beliefs—my crystal blueprint. If there’s something I consciously and openly profess, it’s transparency.

I dream of living in a society where we can be authentic and still live collectively in freedom and peace; we all aim for this. This is part of our authentic, transparent nature; subatomically, we’re all interconnected fields of energy—what really separates us are our beliefs.

Throughout history, many political, social, and economic structures were created theoretically with the best intentions. The problem is when you want to implement these from the biases of people’s minds—limited personal experiences and learned beliefs—not from transparency. All depends on the “crystal” through which we see our reality.

We come to the world through different families, circumstances, and backgrounds. Each comes with unconscious conditioning from culture, religion, nationality, friends, social media, institutions—from people who were also influenced through different lenses. The result is all kinds of unconscious biases. Remember, we are inclined to accept information that resonates with our inner information and reject what differs.

In 1949, Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb used the phrase “neurons that fire together wire together” to describe the formation and reinforcement of pathways in the brain through repetition and to understand the function of neurons in psychological processes like learning. When information is repeated by parents, teachers, friends, religion, political parties, and social media, it’s recorded in our unconscious mind and becomes a program that runs our life. This doesn’t differ much from the programming of a robot.

Also through repetition, crystals can help us recognize and transcend these programs when we commit to working with them consistently.

Back to the driver. Maybe he was raised by parents and surrounded by people who listen to news with a very specific political inclination. Have you ever tried to talk to someone about “opposing” political or religious parties or beliefs? Some will listen, while thinking: “You’re not right. I’m the only one who’s right.” Others will try to convince you otherwise. The more extreme will judge you, avoid you, and exclude you from their circles. Repetitive information received consistently over time becomes a strong program in your mind. Convincing someone with this kind of program to open up to new information or think differently is extremely difficult. He or she automatically rejects everything that differs—until consciously choosing to work on these programs, in which case, crystals can be great tools, as they can catalyze processes.

I hope that, in the near future, we all seek consciously to become transparent and experience sympathy and compassion for others. I hope that, rather than rejecting “the other” because of inner programming, we’ll accept the other for his or her transparent, crystalline blueprint. 

Have a transparent month!

Beatriz