Believe it or not, Radical Honesty simply means telling the truth. It's radical because hardly anyone does. Even the most honest among us usually have some things that they hide. Telling the truth hides nothing. Because hiding anything at all is not telling the truth. And so Radical Honesty means all of the worst things you might imagine it means. It means telling the truth about everything you have hidden that you have done in the past to the very people who you think would be most hurt or angry or surprised or embarrassed by the revelations.
Telling the truth means telling all your secrets and your secret feelings to whomever you don't want to tell. Worse yet, it means being expressive of feeling -- being mad when you express resentment and, warm and moved when you express appreciation, and silent when you don't yet know what you feel.
Telling the truth has to do with being expressive of feeling and using descriptive language regardless of ideas about tact or propriety. The first thing you have to get over to tell the truth is politeness modification of your report of your experience out of "consideration" of the other person's feelings. Honest people speak simply, using language more to describe than to evaluate.
When a person chooses to make the transition from habitually bending the telling the truth, the passage is scary and difficult. We have learned to assign value dishonestly and pitch our point of view with everything we say. We have been trained by scores of moralistic authorities, like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to keep our mouths shut and behave as we should instead of speaking the truth. We have been blackmailed into a common interpretation of reality by hundreds of male and female Nurse Ratchets.
When a person chooses to make the transition from habitually bending the telling the truth, the passage is scary and difficult. We have learned to assign value dishonestly and pitch our point of view with everything we say. We have been trained by scores of moralistic authorities, like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to keep our mouths shut and behave as we should instead of speaking the truth. We have been blackmailed into a common interpretation of reality by hundreds of male and female Nurse Ratchets.
Learning to describe, to speak what is simply true, requires an unlearning of hard-earned preconceptions and a relearning of how to perceive with as little preconception as possible.
Knowing the difference between perception and conception and getting good, through practice, at distinguishing between the two can save your life. Both the quality and length of your life can be increased through learning to focus on making the distinction over and over again between value laden words and descriptive words.
Descriptive words make pictures happen in the minds of the speaker and the hearer, pictures of anger, righteous indignation, embarrassment, sympathy, sadness, joyfulness, or laughter. An honest person is one who is creating vivid pictures, feelings, sounds, and smells in the singular attempt to portray what has occurred or is occurring within her or around her. An honest person is concerned foremost with accuracy.
Being honest is not just for the sake of feeling good about being a virtuous person; it is a vital necessity. Learning how to be honest and being willing to do so is the cure for all non-environmental stress disorders. It is the key to managing the disease of normalism.
It is the most worthwhile focus of our attention as humans of this time and the only thing with half a chance to save us from ourselves. This is vital to our life and to the survival of life for all of us. Our problems do not arise from not thinking enough before we speak. Just the opposite is true. The way we learn to think and modify what we have to say before we speak kills millions of us unnecessarily and lays waste most of the cripples left injured but still alive.
In a Centers for Disease Control study, the list of causes of deaths in individuals under age 65 goes like this: environment is responsible for 21 percent of deaths; the health care system for nine percent; and human biology for 17 percent. Think about that. Twenty-one percent of the people who die before age 65 are killed by war, traffic, accidents, acts of God, and crime. Nine percent get killed by doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medicine. In 17 percent of the cases, the human biological machine breaks in some way that is not blamable on the way the people took care of themselves. That means the remaining 53 percent of the deaths prior to age 65 come about as a result of the way people choose to live their lives.
I believe the ways we take care of ourselves so poorly arise out of the starvation we experience from being cut off from the nourishment of commonplace experience, including the experience of intimacy.
We are responsible for cutting ourselves off from experience by substituting our interpretations of reality for reality. We invent some fundamental lies about how life should be and shouldn't be, how life is or isn't according to what we have taught ourselves to ignore or deny and what can or cannot be talked about. We compensate for our sense of something missing and our boredom with a kind of frenetic, compulsive use of food, alcohol, and drugs to try to get temporary relief from imprisonment in our own minds.
We are all terrible liars. People with notable stress disorders like ulcers, insomnia, spastic colitis, etc., are worse liars than normal people, although normal people are generally unhappy from lying, withholding, hiding, and avoiding and evading as well.
Unfortunately in this society it is normal to be unhappy; most people are. It is normal to discover that life doesn't live up to its billing. It is normal to be disappointed but getting along and doing the best you can. It's not normal to be honest. What is normal is to be concerned foremost with having a good cover story. Normal people are concerned with figuring out the right thing to say that puts them in the best light. They want to live up to their own best guess about what the people they are talking to want to hear.
An honest person, in contrast, focuses on saying what is so. Getting back to honesty rescues people from being normal. Sanity is getting back to basic, funky, hometown reality, down from the clouds of good cover stories.
What passes for sanity is an agreed-on form of insanity, which is an attempt to make life work out by legislating ideals and imposing values in our own minds and selling them to other minds. It is normal to be insane. Being sane is abnormal. Abnormal, sane, honest people are less worried and more free than normal people.
The most real truth is the immediate and ever-changing truth of direct experience. Evaluations are never the truth. We all tend to get lost in the swamp of our evaluative minds trying to make decisions and figure out how to behave and what to do next while constantly considering what we imagine others might imagine about us as a result of any action we anticipate taking. This concern about controlling the opinions of others and keeping control of ourselves kills more people than any form of environmental stress. Even worse, most of those who don't die would scarcely know the difference if they did.
The main thing that can free a person from his or her own mind is telling the truth. Telling the truth is always interpreted by the mind as a threat to its security. When people think that who they are is their mind, they feel like they are committing suicide when they start telling the truth. What dies in telling the truth is the false self, the image projection we have presented to the world. All real suicides, where people really died, were the result of a battle between being and mind. In those cases the mind won. But the person who learns to tell the truth is the most free, most alive kind of adult human being you'll ever see.
Knowing the difference between perception and conception and getting good, through practice, at distinguishing between the two can save your life. Both the quality and length of your life can be increased through learning to focus on making the distinction over and over again between value laden words and descriptive words.
Descriptive words make pictures happen in the minds of the speaker and the hearer, pictures of anger, righteous indignation, embarrassment, sympathy, sadness, joyfulness, or laughter. An honest person is one who is creating vivid pictures, feelings, sounds, and smells in the singular attempt to portray what has occurred or is occurring within her or around her. An honest person is concerned foremost with accuracy.
Being honest is not just for the sake of feeling good about being a virtuous person; it is a vital necessity. Learning how to be honest and being willing to do so is the cure for all non-environmental stress disorders. It is the key to managing the disease of normalism.
It is the most worthwhile focus of our attention as humans of this time and the only thing with half a chance to save us from ourselves. This is vital to our life and to the survival of life for all of us. Our problems do not arise from not thinking enough before we speak. Just the opposite is true. The way we learn to think and modify what we have to say before we speak kills millions of us unnecessarily and lays waste most of the cripples left injured but still alive.
In a Centers for Disease Control study, the list of causes of deaths in individuals under age 65 goes like this: environment is responsible for 21 percent of deaths; the health care system for nine percent; and human biology for 17 percent. Think about that. Twenty-one percent of the people who die before age 65 are killed by war, traffic, accidents, acts of God, and crime. Nine percent get killed by doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medicine. In 17 percent of the cases, the human biological machine breaks in some way that is not blamable on the way the people took care of themselves. That means the remaining 53 percent of the deaths prior to age 65 come about as a result of the way people choose to live their lives.
I believe the ways we take care of ourselves so poorly arise out of the starvation we experience from being cut off from the nourishment of commonplace experience, including the experience of intimacy.
We are responsible for cutting ourselves off from experience by substituting our interpretations of reality for reality. We invent some fundamental lies about how life should be and shouldn't be, how life is or isn't according to what we have taught ourselves to ignore or deny and what can or cannot be talked about. We compensate for our sense of something missing and our boredom with a kind of frenetic, compulsive use of food, alcohol, and drugs to try to get temporary relief from imprisonment in our own minds.
We are all terrible liars. People with notable stress disorders like ulcers, insomnia, spastic colitis, etc., are worse liars than normal people, although normal people are generally unhappy from lying, withholding, hiding, and avoiding and evading as well.
Unfortunately in this society it is normal to be unhappy; most people are. It is normal to discover that life doesn't live up to its billing. It is normal to be disappointed but getting along and doing the best you can. It's not normal to be honest. What is normal is to be concerned foremost with having a good cover story. Normal people are concerned with figuring out the right thing to say that puts them in the best light. They want to live up to their own best guess about what the people they are talking to want to hear.
An honest person, in contrast, focuses on saying what is so. Getting back to honesty rescues people from being normal. Sanity is getting back to basic, funky, hometown reality, down from the clouds of good cover stories.
What passes for sanity is an agreed-on form of insanity, which is an attempt to make life work out by legislating ideals and imposing values in our own minds and selling them to other minds. It is normal to be insane. Being sane is abnormal. Abnormal, sane, honest people are less worried and more free than normal people.
The most real truth is the immediate and ever-changing truth of direct experience. Evaluations are never the truth. We all tend to get lost in the swamp of our evaluative minds trying to make decisions and figure out how to behave and what to do next while constantly considering what we imagine others might imagine about us as a result of any action we anticipate taking. This concern about controlling the opinions of others and keeping control of ourselves kills more people than any form of environmental stress. Even worse, most of those who don't die would scarcely know the difference if they did.
The main thing that can free a person from his or her own mind is telling the truth. Telling the truth is always interpreted by the mind as a threat to its security. When people think that who they are is their mind, they feel like they are committing suicide when they start telling the truth. What dies in telling the truth is the false self, the image projection we have presented to the world. All real suicides, where people really died, were the result of a battle between being and mind. In those cases the mind won. But the person who learns to tell the truth is the most free, most alive kind of adult human being you'll ever see.
Copyright © 2008 by Brad Blanton.
The above is an excerpt from the book Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton.
The above is an excerpt from the book Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton.
