When the Path Becomes Truth, the Lie Is Born

There are moments when life seems to fit together in an almost perfect way. A relaxed body, a beautiful setting, an important conversation, a good taste in the mouth, a sense of accomplishment, the feeling that we have finally touched something essential. In those moments, well-being does not remain just well-being. It begins to thicken into revelation. The path that led to that state starts to feel like more than a path. It starts to feel like truth itself. Recent psychology shows exactly this: affective states do not stay outside thought. They enter the way we evaluate the world, interpret signals, and make decisions.

That is where the deeper problem begins. The things that led us to a good feeling, or even to a strong emotion, were pathways toward an inner state. But brain formation tends to crystallize those paths as if they were existential truths. What made us feel very good starts to look like “the right thing.” What hurt us starts to look like “the wrong thing.” What gave us ground begins to feel like salvation. What shook us begins to feel like threat. And without noticing it, we start treating emotions and feelings as if they were final judges of reality, when perhaps they are, before anything else, modes of regulation, orientation, and marking of lived experience.

This dynamic becomes even more delicate when well-being wants to become shared. A powerful moment almost always calls for a “we.” An impulse appears to divide, confirm, and bind that inner center to the body and gaze of the person beside us. But the other person may be in a different mood, a different time, a different problem, a different sensitivity. And when that happens, what is lost is not only agreement. Ground itself is lost. Recent work on shared reality shows that the feeling of sharing reality with a close other helps reduce uncertainty and increase meaning in life; when that fails, the experience can become destabilizing precisely because the world no longer feels co-inhabited.

At that point, the body can turn quickly. What felt like epiphany can slip into rigidity. A person may still feel “normal,” centered, perhaps even lucid, while the other already perceives harshness, imposition, defensiveness, or aggression. This is where we can recognize something very close to what, in our language, can be called stone connectome: thinking fast, defending, attacking, freezing, or repeating, with an almost compulsive sensorimotor component. Recent science on responsiveness in intimate relationships helps us read this movement: when signals of relational safety fail, self-protection can increase. And recent studies also indicate that alcohol can narrow processing, reduce inhibitory control, and increase the likelihood of aggressive responses in interpersonal contexts, especially when emotional or relational triggers are already present.

The decisive point, then, is not to condemn feeling, but to put it back in its proper place. Feeling intensely is not a lie. Strong emotion is not an error. The problem begins when we give the path that evoked that state the status of absolute truth. At that point, the body stops using affect as information and starts using it as dogma. What moved us must be loved. What contradicted us must be rejected. What organized us must also hold for the other. And when the other does not follow, difference stops being difference and begins to feel like threat.

This logic does not apply only to love. It applies to politics, religion, consumption, and social media. A repeated, shared, expectation-loaded stimulus can create a sense of collective without producing real commitment. Rumors, countdowns, promises that “something is going to happen,” moral shocks, slogans, and symbols can synchronize attention and emotion across many people at once. But that does not mean a mature “we” is there. Recent research on rumors in social media shows that false rumors can spread through herd dynamics more than through collective intelligence. In other words, shared feeling is not always real sharing; sometimes it is only synchronized capture.

This is where the BrainLatam2026 reading gains force. We can say that part of human suffering is born when the body turns affective paths into ontological truths. Dinner, drink, company, pleasure, status, spirituality, ritual, victory, wound: all of these can be paths. All of them can mark the organism deeply. But none of them, by themselves, is enough to decree the truth of existence. Maturity may begin when we manage to make a more difficult passage: from “I felt it, therefore it is true” to “we felt something important, and now we need to examine together what it actually means.” That passage does not kill feeling. It only prevents feeling from becoming tyrannical.

Perhaps that is why the most provocative phrase here is not “the path is the lie,” but something deeper: when the path becomes truth, the lie is born. The lie is not in pleasure, nor in love, nor in ecstasy, nor in well-being. The lie is born when we kneel before the path because it touched the body too deeply. And perhaps the clearest life is precisely the one in which feeling continues to have value, but no longer reigns alone. Because what matures existence is not feeling less. It is turning sensation into dialogue, epiphany into examination, and an individual center into shared agency.

References

Asutay, E., & Västfjäll, D. (2024). Affective integration in experience, judgment, and decision-making. Communications Psychology, 2, 126. doi:10.1038/s44271-024-00178-2.

Enestrom, M. C., Rossignac-Milon, M., Forest, A. L., & Lydon, J. E. (2025). Meaning-making with romantic partners: Shared reality promotes meaning in life by reducing uncertainty. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Murray, S. L. (2023). Regulating relationship risk: Partner responsiveness as a safety signal. Current Opinion in Psychology, 50, 101582.

Pröllochs, N., & Feuerriegel, S. (2023). Mechanisms of True and False Rumor Sharing in Social Media: Collective Intelligence or Herd Behavior?. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW2. doi:10.1145/3610078.