These are my very favourite extracts from ‘Radical Honesty,’ this is an excellent book if you want to be awoken from your own ‘bullshit (as I was from mine) and brought back to your sensory experience.
Please note these are my chosen extracts, and some are adult in nature. I strongly recommend you read the book if interested, the book is filled with much more great content.
Yesterday’s truth is today’s bullshit. Even yesterday’s liberating insight is today’s jail of stale explanation.
All interpretations of reality are bullshit. Freedom is not being dominated by your own bullshit. We believe in our interpretations of reality intensely, and we want other people to join us in our interpretations to make us feel secure. We believe our interpretations are a reality, and if we can get enough votes, we will prove it.
We abstract from our senses and build our minds. After a while, we get so involved in mind development that we lose touch with our senses and get lost in our minds.
Telling the truth, after hiding out for a long time, reopens old wounds that didn’t heal properly. It often hurts a lot. It takes guts. It isn’t easy. It is better than the alternative.
The three levels are: revealing the facts; honestly expressing current feelings and thoughts; and, finally, exposing the fiction you have devised to represent yourself and your history.
The secret of the good life is not suffocating in the mind’s bullshit. Bullshit is like heroin (or a warm blanket or money in the bank or life insurance) — it feels so good and protected and safe and warm that even if you do choke on your own puke, you don’t mind so much. The alternative, freedom, is often too terrifying for a mind to tolerate. Hence, the mind hides from freedom behind piles of bullshit, under blankets of evaluation, in a bed of memories.
We would rather be sure of a correctly predicted negative outcome than face the realistic uncertainty of an unpredictable future, even if it includes the possibility of great joy and success.
This is why the context for each person’s commitment to change has to include a perspective that allows for periods of more significant discomfort than that caused by the problem they are trying to fix.
People really get mad when they’re resented for withholding anger — something for which they feel they should be appreciated. But, contrary to popular belief, people resent being withheld from and lied to. Withheld anger destroys relationships by sucking the aliveness out of them. For aliveness to be restored, both to the relationships and the individual, anger must be expressed.
You cannot forgive someone else without expressing your resentment directly to her or him.
The biggest fools are the ones wasting their lives pretending not to be fools.
The ways that work make things worse for a while and better later.
The process of forgiveness involves the following six minimal requirements, none of which may be skipped. 1. You must tell the truth about what specific behaviour you resent to the person, face-to-face; 2. You have to be verbally and vocally unrestrained with regard to volume and propriety; 3. You have to pay attention to the feelings and sensations in your body and to the other person as you speak; 4. You have to express any appreciation for the person that comes up in the process, with the same attention to your feelings and to the other person as when you are expressing resentments; 5. You have to stay with any feelings that emerge in the process, like tears or laughter, regardless of any evaluations you may have about how it makes you look; 6. You have to stay with the discussion until you no longer feel resentful of the other person. Then, and only then, are you ready to talk about the future, make arrangements for the future, or make any agreements Any lawyer, priest, psychotherapist, or other patrolman who tells you differently about this is full of shit.
A Checklist for Intimacy If you are reading this chapter with an eye to having it help you have a better relationship with your mate or mates, God bless you; I hope this works. If you are willing to risk and want to grow together, use the following checklist for intimacy, and if you haven’t done a particular item on the list with your mate or mates, do it. 1. Tell each other your entire life story, taking about 3 hours each. 2. Tell each other your complete sexual history, including how many people you have had sex with, what gender they were and the details of what you did with them. 3. Masturbate to orgasm in front of each other with no assistance. 4. Tell each other of affairs, near-affairs, necking, arousal, daydream or flirtation you have engaged in since you have known each other. 5. Take turns with a half-hour monologue in which you agree to be silent for 30 minutes while the other speaks.
Tell your partner everything you resent them for and everything you appreciate them for. After you have both taken a turn, talk about the two monologues for at least half an hour. Whichever of the above you have yet to do that you least want to do, do first, with one exception: the last recommendation.
Put your ass on the line. Tell everybody what you are about and when you will get results, and ask them to help.
“I’m here on this planet for experience and want to be a creator, not a victim. I’m willing to learn and keep learning. I am willing to experiment with life. I am more interested in discovery than carefulness. I can depend on my alertness more than my certainty that I’m right. I am more interested in learning than in protection.”
Also, if you’re honest, you can have more fun with alcohol and pot.
Only our willingness to live at risk and in the knowledge of death can keep the mind from squeezing the life out of us before we die.
