Radical Honesty #2

Radical Honesty – How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth Brad Blanton PP. 92-94 Telling the truth means all of the worst things you might imagine it means. It means telling 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. If, for example, you have been having sex with someone other than your spouse, you have to tell him/her all the details: who you did it with, how many times, who came first, how many times you came, where it happened, whom you told, what you said to each other, how much fun it was, and so on, and answer all the questions that arise from the telling. 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 – 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. That is, unless your spouse gets a clear feeling from your report of how much fun it was when you fucked his best friend, you haven’t told the truth yet. Honest people speak simply, using language more to describe than to evaluate. Liars evaluate almost exclusively, only using enough description to make the story believable. Good liars use a little more description that bad liars, more subtle in its cast of value so the listener things she came up with the idea about whether what happened was good or bad. Hours and hours of practice and observation have helped us all in developing our ability to manipulate in this way. We all have a sales pitch about the nature of reality. When a person chooses to make the transition from habitual lying to 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 Ken Kesey’s 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, crate experiences like sexual excitement, 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 moralism. 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 your 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.