Practicing

Radical Honesty
How to Complete the Past,
Live in the Present,
and Build a Future
with a Little Help from Your Friends

by
BRAD BLANTON, PH.D.
Author of
Radical Honesty
How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth

www.radicalhonesty.com

Published by
Sparrowhawk Publishing
646 Schuler Lane
Stanley VA 22851
800 EL TRUTH
www.radicalhonesty.com
Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Blanton, Brad.
Practicing radical honesty: how to complete the
past, stay in the present, and build a future with a
little help from your friends / by Brad Blanton.
1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Self-actualization (Psychology). 2. Life. 3.
Social ecology. I. Title.
BF637.S4B57 2000

158.1

Copyright 2000, Brad Blanton

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Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by
permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Healing the Soul of America by Marianne Williamson,

1999 Marianne
Williamson. Reprinted by permission of Simon &
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and Christopher Largent. Reprinted by permission of
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Praise for Radical Honesty

Brad Blanton has developed the simple concept of
honesty into a pragmatic system that we can easily
apply to our day-to-day lives. It's a wonderful way to
live your life, love your life, and to succeed in
whatever you want to do. I participated in the eightday Radical Honesty course and found it to be the
fastest and most effective way that I know of to
transform my life into what I want it to be. It was one
of the most moving and valuable experiences of my
life.
Jacques Werth
Author of High Probability Selling
Diogenes can finally put his lamp down and give his
dog a rest. If you are looking for an honest man, look
no farther than Brad Blanton. If you are looking for a
whole bunch of honest people look no farther than one
of his workshops. If you are looking for honesty in
your life, buy this book. I have participated in one of
Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty workshops and found
it to be a powerful experience. I laughed a lot, cried a
little, but most of all it made so damned much sense!
Even years later, I am consistently referring back to
things I, learned in the seminar. I recommend Brad's
work to anyone; the more, the merrier this world will
be.
Garry Francell, Ph.D.
Author of The Lowdown on Love

My thanks to Brad Blanton for writing Practicing

Radical Honesty. Reading it and applying the concepts
in my life has given me real freedom and peace of
mind. It helps you cut through all the junk and get on
with living and enjoying life to the fullest. Thanks
Brad!
Wally (Famous) Amos
Author of Watermelon Magic: Seeds of Wisdom,
Slices of Life
A few years ago I was really miserable. I drank too
much, smoked too much and fooled around too much.
I was lying to myself and a lot of other people without
even knowing it. I was having crippling anxiety
attacks and tremendous feelings of general misery,
when a friend of mine gave me a copy of Radical
Honesty. I read it. I went to a weekend and then an
eight day Radical Honesty workshop. And now,
because of the amazing experience I had and continue
to have with Radical Honesty, my life has changed
completely and forever for the better. I am happier and
more fulfilled than I have ever been, love has come
into my life, my kids and I are closer than ever and
Truth is spoken every day. We laugh a lot, we cry a
little, we have no secrets anymore and love has arrived
full blown. Pretty damn good if you ask me. If you
want to know how it feels to be free and have no
secrets, if you want to know what love and
forgiveness really feel like, I can tell you first hand

that Radical Honesty will save your life, and the lives
of those you love.
Leo Burmester
Actor, Les Miserables, The Abyss, The Last
Temptation of Christ, The Devil's Advocate
In his book, Dr. Blanton shows us that telling the
truth is far healthier, easier and more socially
acceptable than we may have imagined.
Phil Laut
Author of Money Is My Friend
Brad Blanton's practice and community building
around Radical Honesty is truly remarkable in this
world where anything, but anything, is acceptable
except for the truth. And that's why I love Brad's
work: Simply telling the truth has the power to break
the molds we hold so dear. If you've seen him work,
you know that he's gifted with the skill of a master
therapist and visionary blended from a deeply
compassionate place. Radical indeed. He challenges
us all to take a leap of faith into a world where the
truth is not whispered. Meet you there.
Brett Hill
Editor for Loving More magazine
Brad Blanton's books on radical honesty offer the
possibility of a new world: A world where truth-telling
reigns supreme. I believe Blanton has the vison,
brilliance and courage to lead us to the threshold of
this new world.

Arielle Ford
Author of Hot Chocolate for the Mystical Soul
I don't know anyone who's not Radically Honest
that has a quality of life that comes close to the quality
of those who are. Brad Blanton is 100% on target.
Honesty is the foundation for what really matters: the
truth. Anything else is empty and meaningless. Living
honestly is infinitely easier and more rewarding than
living a lie. The only requirement is courage.
Will Richardson
Author and Real Estate Developer
Practicing radical honesty has been the hardest but
most rewarding discipline of my life! It totally turned
my life up side down. After 21 years of intense
spiritual searching I found this to be the most
impactful, intense way to get to my own authenticity
and truth. I can live full-out on a day to day basisand
my life is unfolding in a way I never believed
possible.
Marlene Martin
Orange County Newspaper Publisher
Brad Blanton's books and seminars are a call to
courage. The courage to tell the truth. The courage to
face down our rationalizations, look at the real reasons
we don't tell the truth and haul those monsters out of
their caves of denial. Brad's book places the scalpel in
our hands and teaches us to be skillful surgeons,
cutting away the lies that have encrusted our

existence. Don't read this book, unless you want to

face your demons and change your life.
Dirk Metzger
Attorney, San Diego, California

CONTENTS
FOREWORD by Neale Donald Walsch
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
PART ONE: True Individuality
Introduction: The Decline of Individual
Psychotherapy and the Rise of Therapeutic
Community
1. Living under the Old Paradigm
2. What Is a Mind and How Does It Work?
3. Dysfunctional Family University, The WorldFamous School within Which We Grew Our
Minds
4. The Truth About All Cultures
5. Conscious Community & Conscious Child
Rearing
6. The Road from the Mind Jail Back to Beings The
Sufi Levels of Consciousness
7. Adults Are Nothing but Large Children Who Have
Forgotten How to Play
PART TWO: Community and Compassion
Introduction: Getting Over It
8. Community and Compassion
9. Radical Honesty About Anger
10. In Praise of the Old Paradigm

11. Creating Your Life

PART THREE: Creating Your Own Destiny
Introduction: The Workbook for Life Design
12. A Programmatic Approach to Personal Growth
13. Confronting the Past to Get Complete and Have
Energy to Create
14. Planning the Future So You Remain Called Forth
from Your Mind
15. On Continuously Being Centered in the Present
and Using the Mind to Transcend the Mind
16. The Life Purpose Statement
17. Domains and Projects
18. Reformulation of Current Work Using the Project
Write-Up
19. The Umbrella Project
20. Project Development Stages
PART FOUR: How to Speak and Listen Your Projects
into Being
Introduction: A Conversation with a Life of Its
Own
21. Creating a Context
22. It's a Lot of Work to Make a New Story, Isn't It?
Now What?
PART FIVE: Paradigms and Contexts: The Revolution
of Consciousness as Polictical. Change
Introduction: The New Heroic Story
23. Normal

24. Creating a New Paradigm by Creating a New

Context in an Old Paradigm
25. A Sufficient Fundamental IdentityThe Living
Being in the Body from Moment to Moment
26. The Big Picture: The Larger Context for All
Human Activities
27. Intimacy and Community
28. The United States of Being, A New Nation
Declaration of Independence for a New
Millennium
29. The Real Bottom Line
About the Author
Bibliography and Recommended Resources
Annotated Resources for Chapter 26
Websites/Workshops
Footnotes

Acknowledgements
I am much obliged and grateful to many, many
people for their kindness and openness in sharing with
me what their lives are like for them. Almost all of
you who have helped me by sharing in this way will
not be mentioned by name here, but you know who
you are. Please give yourself credit for contributing to
my life and to the lives of many others through what
we have done together.
I am particularly grateful to the following people for
having helped me immensely over the course of the
last five years in writing, publishing and promoting
this book: Stephanie Gunning, Amy Silverman, Tina
Oesher, Chris Ketcham (through many edits, many
times, many iterations, many tasks), Neale Donald
Walsch, Dawson Church, Arielle Ford, Laura Clark,
Pila Hall, Lara Johnstone, Eleanor Stork, Shanti
Blanton, Ed Greville, Eve d'Angremond and Susan
Campbell.
We have all been, in our brief time together,
significant participants in humanity's strange and
evolving story, an influence in the stream of invented
time, helping determine whether it is to be a short
story or a multi-volume series, a one act tragedy, a bad
melodrama, or a comedy no one watches to the end.

However it turns out, thanks for playing in the stream

with me.
Love,
Brad

Foreword
by Neale Donald Walsch
Don't look now, but the human race is terribly
unhappy. Oh, not you, of course. You're fine. It's the
rest of us that have bungled it. We have imprisoned
ourselves in jails of our own devise. We have
sentenced ourselves to lives of quiet desperation in
punishment for the violence we have done to our own
souls.
We have done this violence by the simple
expedience of lying. We meant nothing by it, of
course. We were only trying to get through the
moment. Yet by making lying a lifestyle, we have
missed the moment. And the next moment. And the
next. In this way, we humans have missed most of our
lives. Worse yet, our cumulative lies have cost others.
Namely, those who have followed us. For they have
lived the cultural story created by our untruths. Thus,
humans have not only sentenced themselves, they've
sentenced entire generations to unhappiness.
It all started innocently enough. The Little White
Lies of Childhood. White Lies we learned from our
parents, and from the world around us. Untruths
masquerading as social etiquette. I'm fine, thank
you, when we knew Mommy was feeling terrible.

Gosh, we'd love to come over, but we're just really

busy this weekend, when we could see that Daddy
had nothing at all to do on the weekend, and simply
disliked the Johnsons. We saw others do itothers
whom we respectedand so we thought, maybe I'll try
that. This must be the way to get through the moment.
Only when we ourselves have finally grown up
and then only if we are very luckyis it clear to us that
not only have we missed the moment, we've killed it.
We've robbed it of any life it had any chance of
holding for us by lying and evading and avoiding our
truth at all cost.
Those last three words were well chosen, because it
has cost us plenty. Our lives. Our fortunes. Our sacred
honor.
It has cost us our very selves. We don't even know
who we are anymore, with all the hiding and
deceiving we've done. We've lost ourselves in the
labyrinth of our own lies. Astonishingly, we can't even
admit this. Thus, we commit the highest insult: we lie
to ourselves.
And so we carry onday after day, week after week,
month after month, year after yearliving our lies as if
they were our truth, unable to stop ourselves from
lying even when we know we are doing it.
Oh, Neale, stop it. You're making too much of this.
You're going on and on.
Really? Look around you.

Our governments lie. Our politicians lie. Our

economists lie. Our police Mesometimes on the
witness stand. Our educators lie. Our religions lie. Our
parents lie. And nobody admits it.
Not only won't the liars admit it, the people being
lied to won't admit it. They know they're being lied to,
but they won't acknowledge it. Do you want to be the
one to tell the Emperor that he's wearing no clothes?
So not only do we all lie, we lie about our lying.
And oh, what tangled webs we weave
There's a way out of all this. A way to a life of peace
and joy and incredibly exuberant freedom.
Tell The Truth.
About Everything.
All The Time.
Big order? It shouldn't be. But let's acknowledge
that it isotherwise we'll wind up lying about that. It is
a big order. Because we've been lying for so long, it's
become part of our way of living. We have to learn a
new way to liveand a new way to love. That's what
we're talking about here. We're talking about love.
We're not loving anybody to whom we are lying. That
includes ourselves.
No wonder the world is in the shape it's in.
I think we should change. In the With God series of
books, I spoke about living a life of total visibility.
This means utter transparency. The irony of
transparency, I wrote in Friendship with God, is that it
produces complete visibility. And complete visibility

is all that is going to save us. We've got to come clean

with each other. At long last. Or we'll never make it.
Not as a species, not as groups within the species, and
not as individuals. We aren't making it now look
around you.
How do we change things? How do we spring free
from this trap we have set for ourselves? We adopt
radical honesty as our new lifestyle.
I don't agree with every word that Brad Blanton has
written here. Indeed, I take exception to some of what
he has said, and the way in which he has said it. Yet
Brad and I would have it no other way, for we concur
on this: the day that we agree with every word of
another, without exception, is the day that we have
stopped thinking for ourselves. Neither of us are
prepared to do that. I am prepared, however, to tell
you that I agree profoundly with the thrust of Brad's
argument here. This book will give you an incredible
ride through the corridors of consciousness, taking
you to places not many have had the courage to visit
before. That visit could change your life.
Neale Donald Walsch

Author's Preface
Here's what I want. I want you to be happy about
your life most of the time. I want the trail you follow
in your life from reading this book forward to be
mostly happy. When you finish this book I want you
to jump up and holler and fall down and laugh. To get
to that Hoohah!! kind of joy may require a trip
through some sadness and some anger and some
thinking the likes of which most of us don't often do.
That sadness, and that anger and that joy and that
brand-new thinking, comes from growing, which
keeps us alive.
To grow, and to continue growing throughout life,
and to contribute to the personal and collective growth
of humankind in the great conversation about what it
is to be human, we need two things:
the ability to have a transcendent perspective,
and
the ability to transcend.
A transcendent perspective comes from thinking and
from processing a lot of information (which has to be
accurate information, not lies). Transcending is done
by noticing and experiencing particularly, our
resistance within (the individual self) and without
(other people and other social structures).

For example, many people believe both that it is

possible for them to love more than one person, and
that they shouldn't. People often do love more than
one person, however, even though married and in a
monogamous relationship. If both married people tell
the truth to each other, they may encounter difficulty
loving their partner who is also loving a third party. In
most cases, this type of love requires more personal
growth than either of them can stand, particularly if
sexual involvement with another person arises as a
possibility. According to reliable surveys, more than a
third of all married people do have sex with people
other than their mates. They don't tell each other about
it though. They choose instead to lie to each other,
have affairs in secret, and avoid the suffering of
personal growth in favor of the suffering of lying. If
they commit to work their way through jealousy
honestly, and stay with each other and share all the
resentments, appreciations, pleasures, and pains and
break through to a transcendent perspective,
eventually they are able to love and value each other
for the shared struggle of personal growth and they
can deepen their lives together. They may or may not
screw around with someone else, but their lives
together are deeper and more intimate and each feels
included in the life of the other and a participant in the
decisions the other makes.
This is not usually the case. In most conventional
marriages the ideals are clear but the practices fall
short. Because of withholding, the bliss imagined

becomes the perspective that mocks the real

experience. Visions of heaven become the source of
hell.
In another example, most people will tell you that
they are not in favor of war, while war persists.
Defense budgets deplete a gigantic proportion of the
world's resources, and warfare is still frequently used
as an attempt to settle disputes. War and preparation
for war remain a completely acceptable exception to
collective personal preferences against violence.
Other examples are abundant. All point to the same
dilemma. We can go places with our minds that our
psyches can't yet reach. We don't have the heart to
grow into what we know is possible. Many of us are
now learning that growing is, in fact, worth the
struggle.
Those of us who have decided that growing is worth
the trouble need an ongoing supply of two things. We
need information about new perspectives and we need
to process the information personally with friends to
really be able to apply it. This is why I don't just write
books, but also lead workshops and trainings, train
trainers, and do consultations: We human beings do
not revise perspectives without a fight. Experiments in
personal growth, and working through our resistance
to giving up old perspectives, provide us with more
information, but they are hard work. This then helps
us to revise the old perspectives or come up with
entirely new onesand so the process continues. Ideas

are useful only when modified in the guts of the

living.
This book is about a few new perspectives:
the need for honest and accurate information
how to give it and how to get it,
the work needed to bring about the getting of
new perspectives into our bones and into the
world,
how to support each other in the process of
shedding old perspectives and building new
ones, and
creating a larger context politically and
economically for the growth of human
knowledge, thus expanding our ability to survive
and thrive.
Beyond these perspectives, this book is about a
perspective on perspectives. The perspective I am
advocating in this book is to view perspectives
themselves from a transcendent standpoint. That
standpoint is that all perspectives are relative. No
perspective is absolute except this one.
One first gets the relativity of perspectives
intellectually. After a long time and a lot of work, one
gets the perspective on the relativity of perspectives
practically, feelingly, usefully, psychologically,
structurally, interpersonally, and whatever other lys
pertain to the actual bringing into being of the
perspective of detachment from perspectives itself.

How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a

light bulb? Three. One to change the bulb. One to not
change the bulb. One to neither change the bulb nor
not change the bulb. The ultimate detachment includes
detachment even from the ideal of detachment. This is
the kind of thing that can make you lose your mind
and come to your senses.
The training programs developed by my colleagues
and me at Radical Honesty Enterprises, Inc. are
designed to help participants process and integrate
information about new perspectives. We help people
come up with new perspectives and use them and
adapt to them and dispense with them. We introduce
people to others who are interested in ongoing
personal growth. Our own courses are not the only
ones we recommend. There are a lot of good teachers
and good courses in personal growth these days. Our
programs are just part of what is available, but a
certain amount of discrimination is required to sort the
airy fairy from the authentic learning.
We sort through what is available using certain
standards. We use honesty, sharing, and practicality as
our guidelines for judging the value of training
programs and books. When you read this book, or if
you take any of our programs, please be selfish. Make
sure you get the benefit of a more useful perspective
as well as practice in applying it. Good luck.
Brad Blanton, Sparrowhawk, March 2000

Part One:
True Individuality

Introduction to
Part One

The Decline or Individual

Psychotherapy and the Rise of
Therapeutic Community
Let's talk straight here for awhile. I think being
honest helps, even though it can be depressing to start
with. Let's start with the depressing truth about low
level depression. Aren't almost all the adults you
know, and most of your friends and acquaintances,
less than happy, not living up to their full potential,
sometimes lying and sneaking around, getting by with
what they can, and generally, furtively, looking here
and there for a little relief or pleasure or freedom?
Don't they waste a lot of energy more or less
desperately pretending that everything is all right?
Don't you? Aren't most of us just completely resigned,

or trying too hard, or feeling depressed at a low level a

lot of the time? If you happen to hear somebody
singing the blues about how life islike, for example,
the song that goes: I got the steadily depressin' low
down mind messin' workin' at the carwash blues,
don't you want to say Amen! Ain't it the truth!
Doesn't it make you feel better to hear someone
singing about it?
If you walk down the street and just look at people's
faces, or if you drive in traffic and watch people in
their cars, and make a quick judgment, one face at a
time, do any of them look happy? If you encounter
two out of ten that actually look happy, you've had a
good day, haven't you? Most of us, at a glance, just
from our faces, look mildly distracted or frozen or
furious or sad or completely masked or desperately
tense or in a big hurry or just plain worried, most of
the time.
Many of us live in the United States of America, one
of the richest, most powerful, greatest countries in the
world, but by the time most of us grow up, we are not
really happy. Most of the people I know and I think
probably most of the people you know, including
yourself, are not dealing with a full deck, not firing on
all cylinders. I mean, really, isn't this the way most of
us are actually living most of the time?
I think our whole culture is, in many ways, insane,
and this insanity is taking over the world. We have all
gone crazy together. We are crazy over money. The
whole world is involved. The best and most nurturing

cultures are succumbing to the influence of

multinational corporations for the sake of toys
advertised on TV. More and more of us directly or
indirectly are working for the Man. The average
work week in the United States in 1954 was seventeen
(!) hours shorter than in 1994. On average, we are all
working seventeen hours per week longer than people
did in 1954! (Korten, When Corporations Rule the
World1) Not only that, if you take into account the real
value of the money made in terms of purchasing
power, the current captains of industry have two
workers for the same price they paid for one in 1954!
It's a great thing that women can work and compete in
the marketplace, but it is incredibly stupid for men and
women to have children together and both keep
working fifty-five to sixty hours a week. This is
particularly true when children are young. It is also
absolutely ridiculous for single parents to be working
all the time to care for children they are not actually,
in reality, caring for.
In the Western world (the model now being copied
by the rest of the world), we have recently come to
value money and the material it provides more than
being with our children. We're abandoning our
children when they are very young and leaving them
to caretakers other than ourselves, using the
rationalization that we have to do that in order to take
care of our children. That is a terrible mistake. These
caretakers do the best they can, but for the most part,
do not love the child like parents who bond with their

own child upon its arrival. We give birth in hospitals,

where often everything that can be done is done to
block initial bonding. So many parents miss even this
the best and first real opportunity to bond with their
children.
In spite of missed opportunities to bond at the very
beginning, parents generally still love their children.
They do the best they can, but within an extremely illfitting and inappropriate parenting and educational
system and culture that has become increasingly
dysfunctional since its inception. The more a lot of us
think about this, the more our depression seems to turn
into anger. I think that is a good thing. I think it's time
we get mad about cultural ignorance instead of
depressed because we can't make ends meet.
It is time for a revolution. I don't mean a phony
Republican revolution with welfare reform that
impoverishes another one and a half million children
to protect the poor helpless rich people. I don't mean a
phony Democratic revolution where the drop in the
bucket of having paid leave for parents when
children are sick is hailed as a great leap forward. I
mean a revolution, a turning of the wheel, that comes
from waking up and seeing the stupidity of what we
have all been doing.
Many of us are working at home now, and many
more will be doing so in the next ten years. We hope
that by doing this we will get to spend more time with
our children and our mates and our friends, but often
we won't. Even if we do, and we are in our minds,

rather than in touch, we might as well not be there. We

have hope that a kind of symbolic being there will
substitute for real contact with children, friends, and
mates. It doesn't. We are, all of us, most of the time,
simply operating from a commonly shared belief
system that is quite dysfunctional.
I think this all has to do with lying.

Individual Psychotherapy in a
Dysfunctional Family Doesn't Work
Unless the Family Changes
For twenty-five years, I have been a practicing
clinical psychologist in Washington, D.C., specializing
in individual, group, and couples psychotherapy. I
have helped thousands of average, normal, miserable
people become less miserable, normal, and average. I
helped them to quit lying the way they had been
taught by nearly every person and institution they had
been in contact with all their lives. When they quit
withholding, hiding, manipulating, performing, or
lying outright to everyone in their lives, their
depression went away. Anxiety disorders disappeared.
Psychosomatic ailments were cured.
Most of my work with people has been about
repairing the damage done by their education and
parenting. Their parents and teachers communicated
that the highest value a person could hold was to
perform well, or at least to appear to perform well.
They had learned never to be satisfied with anything

less than perfection and always to pretend that

everything is okay and improving. Who you are, they
were told, is your performance. With such a stress on
performance, their whole lives became an act. Then,
maintaining and enhancing the act captured all their
attention and they began slowly starving to death for
lack of the nurturance that comes from commonplace
experience.
Almost all of us have been poisoned by such
pretense, and few of us grow beyond that. We lie like
hell all the time to maintain our systematically
indoctrinated image of who we are. We Americans
live privileged lives in a wonderful country with
fantastic opportunities and we have been brainwashed
since the day we were born. In fact, we are so used to
the brainwashing we hardly even notice it any more.
We are used to being poisoned on a regular basis, from
within ourselves and outside ourselves, that we don't
even notice we are feeling sick anymore. As a result,
we live in a kind of well-decorated hell together.
Telling the truth can help you start to notice how you
poison yourself, how you feel as a result, and how you
maintain the social structures around you to keep from
noticing the nausea that comes from maintaining the
act. Once that occurs, all hell breaks loose.
Based on my experience as a psychotherapist,
workshop leader, and consultant, I have come to the
conclusion that what most dramatically transforms
lives from normal misery to unreasonable happiness is
telling the truth. When I talk about telling the truth, I

mean giving a blow-by-blow description of what

happened, what you thought about what happened,
and how you felt at the time it happened, as well as
what you are doing, thinking, and feeling about it right
now. It is important that you tell these things to the
people from whom you are most inclined to hide this
information. Tell the truth about what you have done,
what you think, and what you feel.
Telling the truth is hard to do, because it is so,
contrary to our conditioning. People might get their
feelings hurt, or get offended or shocked or
unbearably relieved. But if neither you nor they run
away, and you stay with your experience, on the other
side of that short-term breaking of the taboo is great
freedom and love for each other. Telling the truth is
hard, but covering up is harder on you and harder to
live with than the truth. Being isolated within our own
internally-judging minds is what most of us suffer and
die from. The rescue from our mind's oppression
comes through authentic contact and honest sharing
with other human beings. Not only does the quality of
our lives depend on this contact and sharing, but as Dr.
Dean Ornish has demonstrated in his recent book,
Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the
Healing Power of Intimacy2, life itself depends on this
authentic contact with others.
Two recent movies, Secrets and Lies and Courage
Under Fire, illustrate the transformation that follows
from telling the truth. In both movies, when the main
characters finally muster the courage to tell the truth,

the difficulties they face as a result are less damaging

to everyone than the lies they had been hiding behind.
That same kind of transformation has been
experienced by hundreds of real-life graduates of my
workshops and psychotherapy clients. In each case
where this extraordinary level of honesty occurs in
real life, there is an authentic sharing of emotion, a
rebirth of intimacy, and a renewal of relationship and
psychological healingin many cases not only for the
truthteller, but also for those hearing the truth. Here
are a few examples of the transformations
accomplished by participants in Radical Honesty
workshops.

A husband who was having an affair, and not for

the first time, told his wife the truth when he
described in detail the number of times he had seen
his lovers, what he had done with them and how he
felt during the liaisons. The initial conversations
were really hard, and both he and his wife lived
through a lot of fury and hurt and fear. They were
coached by other friends and me who simply held
constant for them the goal of being explicit and
clear about what they felt, what they thought, and
what they had done. Eventually, she forgave him
and they chose to continue living together. The
result was not only forgiveness for hurts and
transgressions from the past, but great joy and
renewal of the whole family. The perspective and
the conversation and the closeness that developed
out of that renewal continues to this day, as they

work to consciously design and create together the

future life of their family.
After
withholding information from her
fundamentalist parents for years, a daughter told
them the truth about an abortion she'd had while in
college. She went back and told them everything,
including how she got pregnant, what she'd done
when she found out, where she went for the
abortion, and how she felt about not being able to
tell them. She was sure her parents would disown
her. Her parents expressed their sorrow at her
having gone through that experience alone, and
their desire to be there for her even if she violated
their expectations and values. She and her parents
now have a more authentic and open relationship.
Dozens of times, I have coached women to make
similar revelations, with like results. Out of this
experience they can, for the first time, make plans
for the future of their own love relationships and
the families that proceed from them without being
blocked by undone knots from the past.
A young man wanted a better relationship with his
parents but felt that certain things were
unspeakable as a part of the family code of
silence. He had a five-hour session with his parents
in which he shared specific resentments and
specific appreciations for things they had spoken
and done in the past. He spoke in detail about
things that were implicitly not talked about in his
family. Afterward, he began to realize that the

family code was partly in his imagination. He

also became more open to who his parents really
were, just as they became more open to who he
was. Now they all acknowledge that a new family
of adult friends has been born, made up of people
who work together on joint projects and support
each other in separate projects. (There are many
millions of people in the world who never really
get to know their parents as adults. For others, this
simple process of declaring I am grown and
This is what I resent about you and appreciate
about you from the past and This is who I am
and what I value now often leads to complete
renewal of the whole family and stands in stark
contrast to the norm.)
A woman diagnosed by physicians with arthritis
told the truth to her husband about an affair she
had been hiding for a long time. They eventually
split up, but her arthritis went away. Her next
relationship was one of more honesty, less pain and
illness, and more creativity in a shared life
together.
A man with chronic sleep-onset insomnia started
falling asleep peacefully every night after cleaning
up his act by telling the truth at work and at home.
He risked his job by telling his boss his specific
resentments and as a result, instead of getting fired,
he was given a raise in pay. He risked his
relationship with his wife by telling her the truth
about what he felt, thought and did, and instead of

her leaving, they fell in love again. As a side effect,

he can sleep now. He now has work and love in a
community of friends rather than a life of isolation.
There are scores of such examples throughout our
own radical honesty community of friends. The
common thread across all these stories of successful
deliverance from the mind is the revision of an
incorrect belief, on the part of each individual, about
who they are. When we discover that we are not our
reputations in the eyes of our parents or bosses or
spouses, we also discover the same thing about other
people. We find out who we are behind the mask of
false identity, and simultaneously begin to glimpse the
same in those close to us. Once this gets straightened
out, authentic conversation can begin. Sometimes it
begins with a person admitting that they are a liar and
accusing their friends of being liars as well and then
sticking with the discussion until they all can laugh at
their own and each other's pretentiousness.

Deliverance from Mistaken Identity

When I wrote Radical Honesty3, a number of
concepts had become apparent to me, through working
with hundreds of people suffering from depression,
anxiety disorders, and stressrelated ailments. These
concepts follow.
1. Lying is the primary source of most human stress.
2. Stress is caused by the mind of the individual
suffering from stress, not by circumstances.

3. Most suffering is generated by the tendency of the

mind to moralize and judge, and to mistake belief
for reality.
4. Most of us suffer from the fundamental problem of
mistaken identitywe tend to identify with our
judgments and criticisms of ourselves and believe
our judging minds to be who we are.
Freedom from the foolish notion that our
fundamental identity is a judge and critic gives us the
possibility of living our lives according to our
preferences rather than the shoulds our minds
generate. Once people complete the undoing of their
past lies and get current by telling the truth, they
must continually reground themselves in the present
moment with the use of daily practices that help them
stay current.
The daily practices, as the world's great wisdom
traditions have always taught, all have to do with
noticing. Meditating, telling the truth, practicing yoga,
being aware with the senses, and many other practices
lead to a new way of identifying oneself. This new
identity as the Noticer rather than the Performer grows
on you. The Noticer takes charge of the mind rather
than the reverse. Belief is distinguished from reality.
An individual is born.
In addition to daily practices to maintain and
sharpen noticing, something else is equally important:
the mind has to be given new work to do, to keep it
from backsliding into its habitual patterns. The
judging mind is like a teething puppy; it needs to be

given a bone or toy or an old rag to chew on. That new

work for the mind-dog, that something bigger to
chew on, is the work of creating one's life as an artist.
Getting free and staying free from the jail of the mind,
identifying oneself as a noticing being, and using the
mind rather than being used by it are practices at the
heart of how honest people create the good life in a
community of friends.

Approaching Life Problems

Once belief is distinguished from reality, a whole
new approach to life problems emerges. We stop
wasting energy protesting and simply accept that life
comes with problems, whether we are honest or
engage in spiritual practices or not. Problems are best
handled by confronting them openly rather than
keeping them secret; by telling other people what
problems we have and working them out in the public
arena. As it turns out, not all problems are miserable.
A lot of problems are fun. Even those that were once
miserable can become fun through a change of
perspective and a change of heart. People who stop
resisting life problems become a community of
support for each other's practice of honesty,
awareness, and creating life by intentional design. The
most wonderful thing about this whole process is that
people's contributions to the lives of others become
the primary means of getting the results they want in
their own lives.

After Liberation from the Jail of the

MindConscious Creation
My clients have all been average, functional, taxpaying, voting citizensnormal peoplewith problems
that were getting them down. Out of the work they did
with me and my colleagues, however, they became
abnormal peopleabnormally successful. They didn't
settle for just getting over something or resolving their
problems. They began to create. When that happened,
my job changed. I became a coach for creating. As the
Radical Honesty Workshops evolved, my job shifted
from encouraging liberation from limiting beliefs to
supporting designer beliefsbeliefs consciously
invented to bring about certain results. The function of
the mind shifts from maintaining an image to
imagining a future and then to creating a future.
Beliefs that are just functional and not a substitute for
reality can be useful.
The future that emerges from conscious planning
and conscious use of the mind is absolutely not
predictable by inference from the liberated person's
past. Energy that was once expended on self-criticism,
conflict, and suffering has instead nurtured projects
resulting in multimillion-dollar businesses, startups of
new enterprises, marriages after years of inability to
partner up, children born and adopted, homes built,
careers changed, indebtedness resolved, and reunion
with alienated friends and families accomplished.
Take, for example, Melody Harris.

Depression and Liberation

The first moment I met Melody Harris she started
crying. She came into my office for a psychotherapy
appointment, introduced herself, sat down, said, My
sister-in-law told me to come see you because I'm
depressed and started crying. I just watched her
and waited and didn't say anything. She dug a bunch
of tissues out of her purse, blew her nose, looked at
me, and started talking again. Over the course of that
first hour we spent together, I found out that she was
in her forties, lived alone with a five-year-old child
she'd adopted just before her husband left her, and
worked as a secretary in a law firm. She hated her job,
even though she liked the lawyers for whom she
worked.
There was a history of depression in her family, and
she had been on anti-depressant medications of
various sorts for several years. At the time, although
Melody was taking Prozac, she still cried frequently
and felt hopeless a lot. I also learned that she loved to
read, had read lots of good literature and self-help
books, and that she had a sense of humor.
Toward the end of the hour, I asked, Did you hear
the joke about the computer programmer who died in
the shower?
Melody said, No.
I said, She read the label on the shampoo. It said,
Wet hair. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.'

Melody looked blank for about five seconds and

then laugheda great big guffaw of a laugh. She got it.
She got that the computer programmer, caught in the
do-loop of the instructions and shampooing herself
to death, was just like herself in some way. She got the
joke and she got that the joke was on her at the same
time. I liked her and thought she was smart and funny
and she felt the same about me. That was about three
years ago.
Melody and her eight-year-old daughter came to our
house to visit for the weekend not too long ago. We
spent most of the time laughing, singing songs, and
talking about her plans to quit her job, sell her house,
and move out to the country. My wife, Amy, and our
kids and I love her.
Melody is no longer victimized by depression, and
over the last six months has been able to slowly
reduce the amount of medication she's been taking so
that now she is off it altogether. She may or may not
stay off medication, but the choice will be made by
her according to what she notices about her life and
her moods, not according to some physician's best
guess about the state of her neurotransmitters. She
recently told me she hadn't started the day by crying in
the morning for over six months. She is way happier
most of the time than she used to be.
Melody learned how to be happier and no longer
victimized by so-called endogenous (genetic,
biochemical) depression. She was worse off than you
probably are. Yet she stopped being a victim and

became a creator. She stopped being a victim of

circumstance and became the creator of her own life.
It didn't happen overnight. She still has relapses. But
she herself and anyone who knows her will tell you,
she is more in control of her life than she used to be.
She did it systematically, over about a three-year
period, through individual and group psychotherapy,
participating in workshops and groups designed and
conducted by me and other people I have trained, and
by spending time living among and playing with other
honest people.
She came to Mexico with us in early February for
the last couple of years with about fifty-five of our
closest friends, to attend the Annual Unconvention of
the Futilitarian Union Network, which is the name of
our cult. She quit her job and moved to the country
with her daughter and until recently has been living
with us while preparing to build a little house nearby.
She is consciously designing a way to make a living in
some less miserable fashion by working with us and
carving out a new career.

Dual Relationships
There is a term among psychotherapists for the kind
of healing that involves creating together and being
friends: it's called dual relationship and you lose
your license to practice psychotherapy for it. A dozen
or so therapists a year lose their licenses and their
listing in the National Registry of Health Service
Providers in Psychology for conducting dual

relationships with their clients. These rules were

made when the model we were operating under was
the doctor/patient or teacher/student model. This
model was set up to protect the patient or student from
being taken advantage of sexually or financially by the
caretaker and to prevent the caretaker from having
undue influence over a patient or student's life because
of the position of authority held by the caretaker.
Seeking to avoid any possible Bill Clinton and Monica
Lewinsky events or cult leader advantages, licensed
therapists made rules that say we are supposed to play
doctor and our clients are supposed to play patient and
so we shouldn't hang out with each other at all. As is
the case with the evolution of most rules and
regulations in the minds of most people, what starts
out as an impulse toward fairness and consumer
protection eventually becomes moralism and
ignorance. In the context of honesty we are equals
from the start. Whatever expertise gets shared comes
from another flawed human being.
Currently, all my relationships to all my clients are
dual relationships. The evolution of psychotherapy
and teaching to the stage where the therapist and
teacher are demoted and the power of the client is
promoted has occurred in the context of honesty to the
point where we are presumed equal because, in fact,
we are. As beings we are equal to start. As minds, we
are both screwed up whether we are playing trainer or
trainee, and either one of us may be more screwed up
than the other at any given time. Most of the

psychotherapists I train nowadays admit this equality

of being and most form friendships with their clients.
That kind of sharing is actually critical to creating the
kind of therapeutic community that gives rise to the
psychological growth of all its members, including its
so-called leaders.
This book explores the same path Melody and
others have followed and includes most of the content
of the training groups that teach a new egalitarian
model for living called radical honesty. Melody is
now busily engaged in the process of consciously
designing her life. She has accomplished her main
goal of no longer having her mood determine the
results she gets in the world. Ironically, this
detachment from mood has had a subtle but
unmistakably positive effect on her mood. She is now
in training to be a trainer to run groups that teach
radical honesty. My family and friends and fellow
therapists and trainers and other dual relationship
clients are working away at modeling and teaching
this way of living out loud and living with no
apology that we have learned from each other.

How Does One Live Honestly?

First of all, Melody took permanent responsibility
for the moment-to-moment quality of her own life.
Then she learned a number of practices that keep her
grounded in the present; noticing her experience and
distinguishing between noticing and thinking. She
meditates and exercises regularly, communicates her

feelings all the time whether she is scared to do so or

not, practices yoga occasionally, speaks honestly with
other people about her life and theirs, and seeks
coaching from friends about work and child-rearingrelated problems and perplexities.
As a result of our coaching and conversations and
encouragement, she also contacted and completed
unfinished business with people from her past, most
notably her ex-husband from whom she had been
alienated for seven years. She found him and met with
him in person. Face-to-face and out loud, she told him
what she resented him for and what she appreciated
him for. After she had traced him down and met with
him to clearly experience and live through all the
anger, hurt, and appreciation she had avoided for all
those years, she found that her life changed. In all the
rest of her life, she now has the power to make things
happen differently from how they had happened
before. She completed what had been avoided and left
incomplete, in the real world, with real people in her
real life. And she has had more power in relation to
every person she has come in contact with since then.
In addition to what Melody learned by facing those
major things she had avoided, there were dozens of
other small things that she learned to do as a result of
her openness and availability. As both advisee and
advisor to her friends in our local radical honesty
community, which is made up of people who are also
taking charge of their lives, she has continued to
become more skillful at listening and communicating.

Everyone in this community has tried both avoidance

and taking charge and they have found that making
things happen is more gratifying than whining and
complaining and blaming and making excuses for all
the bad things that have happened to them that were
beyond their control. We all remind each other of that
now and then. Those of us who have discovered our
own authority in our lives have compassion for those
who haven't, but we don't buy into their tales of woeis-me. We often make fun of each other as much or
more than we feel sorry for each other. When we get
over the stories about the past that we have been living
in, what used to be tragic often turns out to be more
funny than tragic.
As a result of communicating with honest friends
over a period of time and completing what she had
avoided in the past, Melody no longer believes a
number of things she used to believe. She used to
think she was a victim of depression and many other
accidents of fate, and that there was nothing she could
do about it except to stay on medications at high
dosage levels that had negative side effects (no sexual
interest, dulled sensations, weight gain, and more).
She used to think that she had to keep working at a job
she hated no matter what.
Through coaching and practice in noticing
sensations in her body, from one moment to the next,
Melody came to recognize that a global category like
depression didn't precisely describe each individual
moment of real feeling. She became skilled in

distinguishing the difference between limiting beliefs,

such as I am a depressed person, and actual
experience, such as I feel pressure in my chest right
now and I am crying. She developed skills for
designing step-by-step blueprints to build the future
she envisions for herself and her daughter.
Furthermore, she has the continuous support of a
community of people who love her and consider
themselves to be in the same boat with regard to
making their lives work.
By telling the truth about what we have previously
avoided, we progress from living within the
restraining context of limiting beliefs, to noticing real
experience, to conscious design of the future with the
help of a community of friends. This is accomplished
through a series of learnings. This book is a detailed
description of that series of learnings.
Of course, it's not just folks who have worked with
me who are making these great transformations. There
are other therapists and trainers and consultants and
teachers and philosophers who, out of discovering
their own individuality, make immense contributions
to others by assisting them to find their own
individuality. It's more like a movement. This book is
dedicated to that movement. Those of us fed up with
pretense and lying are gaining ground.
A revolution is happening. It is called the revolution
of consciousness. It involves:
1. Liberation from the traditional jail of the mind;

2. Constant engagement in the practices of

meditation, awareness, and radical honesty to
maintain contact with being alive and with others;
and
3. Consciously designing the future with the help of
friendsbeing a creator in a community of creators.

The Revolution of Consciousness

As I have traveled across the country speaking and
doing book signings and leading workshops on radical
honesty, I have met hundreds of people who are
members of a great revolution in consciousness
presently taking place in America, and in much of the
rest of the world, fomented by individuals who want
to improve not only their own lives, but also to change
the way society educates us about what is important
and valuable. The leftovers from Judeo-Christian
fundamentalism and stoicismthe belief instilled in
most of us that we must suffer all kinds of
unhappiness just to survivestill determine for most of
us our automatic approach to life. We who have grown
beyond that have learned two very important things:
we don't know much about how to leave ourselves
alone, and life can be so much easier than how most of
us are willing to let ourselves live. Life can be so
much richer when we shift the focus from increasing
the quantity of our accumulations and concentrate
instead on the quality of our attention.
There is a way out of the desperate, driven way of
living we have all been taught, and we can only create

it, simultaneously for ourselves and each other,

through an honest dialogue about how our lives are
and how we want our collective future to be. I am
writing this book to make it possible for readers to
benefit from the same processes and practices that
have helped my clients, workshop participants, and me
not only to get over our suffering, but to begin
creating a less dysfunctional world family.
Through all these years of working closely as a
psychotherapist with people who were screwed up by
how they were parented, instructed, and acculturated, I
have been asking myself:
What makes people happy and free?
What is functional and what's dysfunctional?
What is an average functional person, and how
does a highly functioning human being operate?
The answer to all these questions has something to
do with continuing to grow. And continuing to grow
seems more and more to require shedding one's mind
and one's outdated culture like a snake shedding his
skin each time he outgrows it.
A fulfilled life is going to be something different for
every person, but there are some qualities, skills, and
abilities that are essential. In addition to being willing
to take responsibility for one's own life, and
maintaining an ongoing engagement in practices that
keep one grounded in the experience of being and
noticing, one needs to find work that seems like play.
What used to be work becomes play because it is

based on the future you envision and want to bring

into being simply because you love the idea of it. To
make all this possible, you need skill in maintaining
strong, nurturant, loving participation in a community
of friends who support you in an honest and creative
life. Rather than using your mind simply to react to the
events in the present that vaguely remind you of your
past, as most of the miserable people in the world do,
you use your mind instead to create a future for
yourself and your friends.
Practicing Radical Honesty is about the reattainment and rediscovery of what Nietzsche called
that seriousness of a child at play. This book shares
insights, practices, and exercises that work. Done in
sequence, they allow you to move all the way from
feeling overwhelmed and depressed to feeling, most of
the time, as if your whole life is playing and having
fun and contributing to other people. To move along
the path from being a victim of overwhelming
circumstances to becoming a masterful creator at play,
you must constantly practice noticing with the senses
to escape domination by the mind.

The Workbook Section

The revolution of consciousness is the organizing
principle for the workbook section of this book. The
path goes like this: first we recognize and then
transcend the limiting beliefs of our own minds. Then
we stop being victims of our own and our cultures'
ignorant and outdated prejudices. Finally, we accept

full responsibility for the quality of our present and

future lives.
Once we get beyond the paradigm of beliefs that has
been limiting us, and are restored to our true identity
as beings in our bodies right here and now, we have to
put our minds to work doing something other than
worrying and criticizing. We do this because we have
learned that if we don't give our minds work to do
designing the future, they will convert remembered
experience into limiting beliefs all over again. To keep
our concepts about reality from recapturing the hereand-now space of the experience of reality, we assign
our minds the task of bringing about a future we
envision. Unless the work we give our minds keeps
them busy, we will go back to judging ourselves
according to the old-fashioned and inappropriate
values of the past and believing that who we are is the
judge-and-victim game. We have to give our minds
something to chew on or they chew on us.
Designed to be used by individuals or groups, the
workbook section of this book contains exercises and
experiments and practical techniques for becoming
attuned to the sensations of our bodies and grounded
in our experience in the here and now. These practices
allow us to become identified, through practice, with
our ability to notice. The workbook exercises are
introduced, one set at a time, according to what seems
to be the natural developmental sequence people go
through when they begin to grow up. The highlights of
the steps are as follows.

First: Get Over It

Nobody is going to be able to make up for how you
got treated as a child. No one owes you compensation
for your suffering. The scars are not going to go away,
and the odds are you can't be fixed anyway. It turns
out that no matter how good a listener your therapist
is, your whining about how your parents didn't do it
right, and how nobody has done a good enough job
since then, isn't going to help you lead a better life.
You need to accept what skills and scars you have and
live in the present and look to the future. Once you
accept that being a victim is an impotent protest and a
waste of your life and energy, you have a chance to do
something about it. One of the first things you do is go
back and confront your parents and ex-spouses and
begrudged people from the past and complete with
them, forgive them, acknowledge them, and turn
yourself loose from your story about you and them.
Express your resentment and get over it. Express your
appreciation and get over it. Then, articulate and
confirm value differences that are real, and be separate
individuals and still be related in the context of
forgiveness. Get over it.
Primarily, we are each victimized by one thing only:
the limiting perspective of our own minds. Formerly
limiting perspectives, once transcended, can be used to
construct a better life. You can create the life you want
using the equipment you have. Your neuroses, your
limiting beliefs, your defenses, your paranoia, and
your hypersensitivity can all become useful tools once

your perspective on them changes. Examples of this

transformation are plentiful.
John Bradshaw, the famous author, personality
theorist, and therapist, says he became a therapist
because of his codependent relationship with his
mother. There is a fellow I know who teaches the rich
and famous how to stay safe, a skill he developed
from being an abused child and later a thief. He began
his training in life by learning to watch for subtle cues
in the behavior of potentially violent people and to rip
them off first, in order to avoid being ripped off. He
now teaches people how to avoid being victimized by
people skilled in his kind of survival system. My wife,
Amy Silver, a, writer, songwriter, and performer, spent
her childhood climbing trees and reading books to
escape the fury of her hysterical mother and the
insanity of her space cadet father and the way they ran
the family in her earlier years. After she voluntarily
came back to this world, she turned out to be a poet,
having learned to synthesize her facility with language
and her skills in noticing. She now uses her art to
share her vulnerability with others as a
singer/songwriter instead of trying to escape or get
better.
In all these cases, the very equipment developed to
survive as children traps us in a jail of the mind the
primary set of limiting beliefs constraining further
maturationas adults. When transformed, these selfsame patterns become the instrument of creation.
These stories are fascinating, and we have so many of

them now in our community of friends that we are

currently writing another book together, The
Truthtellers: Stories of Success by Honest People.

Second: Continue to Develop Your

Awareness
The awareness continuum can be divided into three
parts:
1. What we notice within the confines of our own
skin right now;
2. What we notice outside of ourselves in the
moment; and,
3. What we notice going through our minds right
now.
I call this Inside, Outside, Upside Down, after my
favorite children's book (Berenstain, 1982)4. There is
a progression in the way we train our noticing that
parallels these divisions of the awareness continuum.
Exercises developed in the course of training Gestalt
therapists are used to practice and develop skills that
involve noticing and describing what is noticed. In the
Course in Honesty, we teach and practice these
exercises intensively and develop skills in noticing.
When we become skilled in noticing and describing
what is going on inside our bodies right now, we can
then practice noticing what is going on in the world
outside of ourselves right now. Finally, we develop our
ability to pay attention until we become capable of
noticing what is going on in our own minds right now.

In other words, our skill in noticing what is going on

within the confines of our own skin, and our skill in
noticing what is going on outside of our bodies,
moment by moment, can eventually be applied to our
ability to notice our own thoughts as they arise.
After becoming skilled in noticing, we begin to
become identified with our ability to notice. Who we
consider ourselves to be is the Noticer, the perceiver
who is consistently there, which includes but is not
limited to the perception, thought, or sensation that
may arise. We have perceptions, sensations, and
thoughts but they are not our primary identity.
Likewise, we are not our biography. We still have a
biography but it is not our primary identity. Though
we still perform, we no longer identify with our
performance as who we are. Identification with our
literal experience of being in our body in the here and
now, present to the external world here and now, and
observing our thoughts here and now, gives us the
opportunity to use our minds rather than being used by
our minds.
The power of this quality of attention, free from the
distractions of the mind, is demonstrated in the classic
Kurasawa film Seven Samurai. A samurai takes on the
task of defending a village of farmers from raids by
bands of thieves at harvest time. He needs more
samurai to help him. To interview those willing to help
defend the village, he invents a system of screening
applicants. He places a samurai with a drawn sword
just inside the doorway of the interview room with

instructions to behead all who enter. The interviewer

faces the doorway to greet arriving applicants. If the
applicant, upon entering, notices the person attempting
to behead him and blocks the blow, he is hired.
Our trainers who lead Radical Honesty workshops
(the Courses in Honesty, Forgiveness, and Creating)
and community meetings are skilled in defending
against invasions by the marauders of the mind who
come to steal the benefits of the work of being. The
trainers have been selected based on their capacity to
save their own lives from being devoured by their
minds.

Third: Spiritual Practices + Planning

= Creation
A person who takes full responsibility for how her
life is, and what her life is for, can create the life she
wants by using a number of spiritual practices within
the context of a consciously-designed plan. The life of
the spirit is maintained through specific practices like
meditation, telling the truth, and yoga. To live the
spiritual life, you don't have to be a spiritual type or
some kind of goody-two-shoes. You don't have to be a
religious moralist to be a spiritual person.
As far as I can tell, spiritual and experiential are
synonymous. When I am fully engaged in any
experience with my full attention, it is a spiritual
experience. Spiritual/experiential events come from
the heightening, deepening, and widening of the

quality of life through the quality of mindful attention.

Meditating, telling the truth, yoga, and many other
practices enhance the quality of my life and that of my
friends because these practices heighten our
experience of being. Spiritual practices enhance the
quality of our lives by heightening, deepening, and
widening our experience of being through mindful
attention.
As it turns out, spiritual practices not only enhance
the quality of life, they also empower you to create. In
fact, to bring about the results you imagine you want
in your life, spiritual practices are essential. Being
holy or righteous about spiritual practices or spiritual
beliefs is entirely unnecessary and antithetical to their
functional use. In fact, if you are a moralist, sickening
daily with the disease of attachment to righteousness,
you are as far from spiritual as a person can get.
My friends and I have found something more
valuable than the fun of righteousness. It's those
amazing moments when we are suddenly productive
after being inspired by an honest conversation with a
friend, or just after returning from a vacation, or right
after meditation. We have learned that we become
productive and creative out of spiritual experience.
Spiritual practices, both private and public, are regular
mini-vacations that refresh your quality of life every
day. These practices help keep you mentally focused,
healthy, and relaxed, functioning optimally while you
implement your plans. Regular spiritual practices help
you cope with the tendency of the mind to transform

inspiration to obligation and enable you to recapture

the space of freedom.

Fourth: Don't Be the Lone Ranger

Do This in Community
Ongoing support groups, which connect you with
friends who are doing the same thing you are, end up
being project planning and vision sharing meetings
that are at least as much fun, if not more, than whining
and moaning sessions about who is to blame. We call
them therapeutic communities. We could call them
creative communities. They are going on in cities and
townships all over America right now, and are starting
up in other places in the world. We have dozens of
these groups of friends associated with our work to
which we refer people who say they are interested in
radical honesty.
The final section of Practicing Radical Honesty
describes the model for how to develop and live in
communities which support honesty and creation.
When we belong to a community based on sharing
honestly, there are people around who know us and
whom we know deeply. These people are the means of
support for bringing about powerful results for
ourselves in the world, even if other people in the
world are against us. Good friends can get us past our
own mind-centeredness and hysteria and back into the
here and now. Good friends can also help us feel okay

when we don't tread the beaten path, and when people

with old-paradigm values say we're crazy.
Networking among the communities of support that
have developed from the Radical Honesty workshops
and affiliating with other communities of support that
share our new values are ongoing sources of
inspiration for all of us.

Summary: From Victim to Creator

Most human suffering comes from being trapped in
the jail of the mind. We are confused by the map and
can't find the territory. Like Alzheimer's sufferers, our
brains misidentify our surroundings and we become
lost and confused. We have concepts that don't fit
reality and reality that doesn't fit our concepts. We get
further into the soup by trying to explain why the
pieces don't fit. Then we make matters worse by trying
to get ourselves and others to straighten up and fit in.
We end by telling some kind of story that builds a case
for ourselves, and trying to put on our best face so we
can convince others we are the model for what fits,
good and not bad, right and not wrong, capable,
adequate to the task, and so on.
Deliverance from the suffering caused by being
trapped in the mind comes through sharing with other
people how life actually is for ushonestlyrather than
lying in the conventional ways we have all learned.
We have been taught in school and at home and in the
marketplace to anticipate what other people expect
and to perform accordingly, regardless of whether it

makes sense to us or has anything to do with what we

want. There is a strong taboo against telling the truth
about how we actually feel and what we actually
think, and strong reinforcement for doing what we
imagine our peers and elders expect of us. We are
convinced that this performance is very important; we
are quite attached to our assessments about our own
and other peoples' performance and our stories about
who is to blame when performances are not up to par.
Basically we are performing and judging all the time.
Constantly performing and judging wears us out. We
get tired from it. Getting tired of it is the next step.
Practicing Radical Honesty draws on the major
philosophical systems and religious and psychological
practices of the world to develop a program that has
four fundamental elements:
1. A series of processes for getting current and
detaching from the past;
2. Ongoing practices to reground ourselves in
present-tense experience to help us through
obstacles and rough moments and our mind's builtin resistance (attempting forever to make
categories seem like reality);
3. A design-and-management system for life-projects;
and
4. Information about how to develop honest, sharing
relationships with friends in a community of
support so that, through making contributions to
each other, we bring our individual projects into
being.

The road from victim to creator is an ever-opening

path into the future. The combination of radical
honesty, spiritual practices, and co-creating in
community keeps the way clear. The life-altering,
community-building, world-changing program we
have refined over the last ten years is presented in Part
Three. It includes practices we have developed to
sharpen skills in noticing, until identity with the
Noticer occurs, and from which a community of
people in love with each other comes into existence.
The results you can bring into being with this
technology and these practices are almost limitless.
Once you lose your mind and come to your senses,
you get your mind back. But, because you don't have
to use it to defend your image anymore, you can use it
for other purposes. You envision what you want and
make a plan. Planning is the work of making things
happen according to your vision. Your personality,
which developed from what happened to you in your
past the very mind system that formerly constrained
you and caused endless neurotic suffering is now the
equipment you use for the act of creation. What was
once the source of your suffering becomes a tool to
create and operate your plan for the future. Rather
than the usual psychotherapeutic approach of figuring
out what is wrong with you and trying to fix it, this
approach advocates the use of your personality quirks
and problems as instruments for creation. You take
damaged equipment and make something useful.
Stumbling blocks become stepping stones.

Honesty about what you have done, what you feel,

and what you think, shared on an ongoing basis,
creates an intimate connection with and concern for
the ongoing well-being of other people. Out of this
grows a community of mutual support and cocreation. If you want the good life, a community of
co-creators is the place to be.

Chapter One

Living Under the Old Paradigm

Many of us begin to feel victimized by our
circumstances because we try to fit into a model of
living that doesn't work for us. We feel trapped by a
sense of obligation to perform our lives in obedience
to a way of living that somebody else invented. No
matter where we live in the world or what we believe,
when we are driven by our obligationsall the things
we think we should dowe get further and further
behind, and that way of living ends up draining us
rather than inspiring us. The pressures of modern-day
lifeto move faster, work harder, earn more, get
aheadweigh heavily on us, and as a result we're
working harder than ever at jobs we don't enjoy, and
find we don't have enough time to spend with our
families or other pursuits of happiness.
We work too much. Strangers are raising our
children and we are missing out on one of the most
precious gifts life has to offerbeing with our own
families. We are living in a paradigm we learned from
people who had no idea what our modern lives would
be like.
The parents, teachers, neighbors, politicians,
religious leaders, television personalities, writers,

musicians, friends, and talk show hosts who were

primarily responsible for our education as we grew up
had no idea what our lives would be like now.
Likewise, we cannot know what our children's lives
will be like. It is one of the givens of living in the
Information Age that we cannot be specifically
prepared for the future that will show up for us.
Therefore, it is critical to our happiness and well
being that we get over attachment to beliefs quickly
and repeatedly.
People all over the world suffer like hell from the
tenuous relationship of their beliefs to reality. They
cannot live happily within the constraints of traditional
ignorance. People who have become conscious
creators of their liveslike the people described in the
first part of this booknot only cannot live, they will
not live, within the torturous constraints of these
antiquated paradigms.
The largest single economic enterprise worldwide is
the sale of illegal drugs most of them painkillers.
That doesn't even count the billions spent on legal
painkillers of one kind or another from the
pharmaceutical industry. According to Breton and
Largent, authors of The Paradigm Conspiracy5, more
than half of the people in the world are addicted to
some substance or some process! Why are we so sick
and in pain?
Because we think that when we can't make life turn
out the way it is supposed to, we, ourselves, are just
not good enough. It's our fault that we suffer, because

we are bad and inadequate and less capable than

successful people. So we suffer and we assume we
deserve the suffering we get. It could be, instead, that
we are fine, but just a little too attached to those
models of how life is supposed to bemodels that
don't have much to do with reality anymore.
People come to participate in workshops and
psychotherapy with me because they are frustrated,
overwhelmed, feeling deeply ill-prepared and
inadequate to the tasks they feel obligated to perform
at home and at work, and anxious and mildly
depressed about the future. Their personal
relationships don't satisfy them emotionally, they are
isolated from their friends and family, and they feel
disconnected from being alive and awake like they
were as children. We all share a kind of cultural shift
pain, from a world constantly in transition from one
model of living to another. Something just doesn't feel
right, and we cast about for someone or something
external to blame. No matter what we do, we don't
seem to be in control of our lives.
We're all trapped in a do-loop we don't seem able to
escape. We wonder why we're not experiencing a
richer quality of existence. We can remember how, as
children, we were eager and curious and had a spirit
for living. How did we lose it? Is it possible to regain
our passion? Isn't there an alternative to obsessive use
of painkillers and alcohol and overeating and
overwork and other addictive substances and
processes?

The Rediscovery of Our True

Identity
The ill-fitting cultural paradigms that live in
people's minds create intense suffering. These limiting
cultural and family paradigms exist only in the minds
of individuals. The courage to live out loud is
required of each individual before outmoded systems
can be revised or dispensed with. This is why telling
the truth is so critical.
As it turns out, when you tell the truth and hear the
truth enough, you become a revolutionary. As George
Orwell said, In a time of universal deceit, telling the
truth is a revolutionary act. I wrote this book to teach
people who have suffered from middle class child
abusethat is, normal parenting and schoolinghow to
create a way out of the mind jail they have built. There
is a way out of the desperate, driven way of living we
have been taught, and we can only create it
simultaneously for ourselves and each other through
an honest conversation about how our lives are and
how we want our future to be. Through honest
conversations, we come to identify ourselves as the
being who notices in the moment rather than our case
histories.
There are thousands of us now, most of whom have
never met each other, who are a rapidly growing cult,
fomenters of a new revolution, and we plan to change
the world. We are going to change the world by
modeling a better way to live than all the other cults,

particularly the money cult that is currently in charge.

We are going to win the competition with
multinational corporations and the money cult by
outdoing them in the quality of our lives together. The
quality of of life that we create is better than the
quality of life they create; it will just take a while to
let the world know. When people modify what they
are greedy for, it radically alters what money is, and
what money means. That alteration is what the very
last chapter of this book is about. We follow a trail
from individual suffering to the examination of
dysfunctional families and cultures to the
establishment of communities of liberation and
ongoing renewal.
Practicing Radical Honesty naturally follows from
the concepts in Radical Honesty, just like creating
with friends naturally follows from the practice of
individual radical honesty. The workbook section,
with exercises and detailed instructions for designing
and creating a vibrant, fulfilled life, gives you actions
to take to employ the mind for something other than
useless worrying and self-criticism. Plans for the
future are the natural next step to transformation.
Creating the future intentionally is done in the same
way any artist intentionally creates a work of art, only
it is done in community and with contributions to
others as a part of the work of art itself.

The Old Activist, Old Hippie, Young

Dissident Revolution
Many of the people I have met on book tours and
talk shows are people like me, who were in the civil
rights movement, and the anti-war movement, and in
humanistic psychology, and in Haight-Ashbury, and in
school buses traveling all over the country for years,
and experimenting with drugs and roaming around the
rest of the world to find out more about it. We who are
awakening, according to a recent survey by the Center
for Noetic Sciences, represent twenty-four percent of
the population of the country. We are everyone who
listens to public radio. We are the people who make
hits out of really good movies like Secrets and Lies,
and make popular more honest TV shows like NYPD
Blue and Roseanne and Seinfeld (Seinfeld was honest
by frankly portraying modern life as contrived) and
Ellen andPolitically Incorrect and ER and a few
others.
Ministers of various faiths have written or called me
after reading Radical Honesty to let me know that my
time as a preacher in the Methodist Church and as a
student of existentialists and Buddhists and Sufis did
teach me something valued and needed by people in
modern times. People in recovery from every drug and
process addiction known have thanked me for my
work. Unitarian Universalists and Unity Church
people and even Methodists have been inviting me to
come and preach and sing my songs about this work.

We're all hungry for clear articulations of what we are

presently in the middle of doing.
As many people have learned through Radical
Honesty workshops, deliverance from the suffering
caused by being trapped in the mind comes through
sharing how life is for you with other people. This
sharing can occur in psychotherapy and / or some
other kind of formal or informal training in life. Any
instruction is revolutionary that allows one to be
grounded in experience, fundamentally identifying
oneself as the experiencer, in order to transcend the
mind, and then to use the mind to stay free from the
mind. The first, most important transcendence is
getting over a particular state of mind: namely,
moaning and whining about how your parents didn't
do it right and nobody has done a good enough job
since then, either.
Once we see ourselves whining in impotent protest,
and really get that we are wasting our lives that way,
we have a chance to do something about it. We come
to understand that we are all primarily victimized by
one thing only: the limitation of perspective of our
own minds. Once we gain a perspective on our own
minds we have the possibility of using them rather
than being used by them. In addition to this learning
about transcendence, an ongoing practice or set of
practices (such as meditation) is necessary on a
continual basis to keep the mind from recapturing the
space of freedom and starting to whine all over again
about some other victimization. This work is about

how to use your mind to keep yourself from falling

back to the neurotic survival skills of the mind and its
familiar complaints.
You use your mind to transcend your mind. You use
your mind to direct your attention to constantly
practicing noticing, and to your vision of the future. In
the present, you create work that seems like play
because it is based on the future you envision and
want to bring into being because you love the idea of
it. Rather than using your mind to simply react to the
things in the present that vaguely remind you of your
past, you create.
The progression of growth for human beings who
reach their full maturity looks like this: innocent child
in touch with beingraised by well-intentioned but
inept and stupid parents to be neuroticattains
adolescence, which is almost psychoticgets therapy
or gets wise some way, and rediscovers being
becomes functional and maintains it by practicing
meditation and consciously creating a life as an
intentional work of art in the context of a community
of friends. Getting this whole picture is critical to
being able to apply the benefits of enlightenment to
your everyday life. Figure 1 below summarizes the
path to maturity.

Figure 1. The Growth of Human Beings

Freedom
This is a how-to book on freedom. Radical
Honesty was the cake with the file in it, so you could
escape the jail of the mind. Practicing Radical
Honesty is instruction on how to use the file and
where to start filing. This is the information on the
practical work of transcendence so we can use our
minds rather than be used by them. That is the heart of
the new revolution, the revolution of consciousness.
The cultures of the world, living in the minds of the
people of the world, are under the influence of the
various transcendent, but not transcendent enough,
meta-cults of the world, based on money. The
corporate/money culture, directed by a very small
number of very rich people, transcends cultural
boundaries of the world, but fails to transcend its own

limited culture which is based on the accumulation

and control of resources.
Once the people of the world learn to use the culture
that has been using them, by transcending their own
culture, whatever it is, the current multi-national
corporate rule of the world, based on the bottom line,
will almost simultaneously be transcended as well.
This may or may not be traumatic, hut the way the
world is governed will significantly change, and the
process will probably not be gradual.
This work, which results in communities of support
for transcendence through being radically honest, is
designed to help individuals to change, not by trying
to change, but by transcending their own minds. This
will change the cultures of the world, because cultures
are only habitual mind-sets with a lot of emotional
attachment.
This community already exists and is growing and I
intend to do everything in my power to support it until
I die. I expect to help this already existing community
become conscious of itself by consistently training
trainers to run Radical Honesty workshops and by
conducting workshops myself and writing books as
our community of conscious co-creators grows larger.
We will live long and prosper as the world gradually
turns our wayand then suddenly blossoms into a
whole new garden, for which the next generation will
thank us, and then, hopefully, plow under to make
room for something new we never even dreamed
about. We are becoming a movement. We intend to be

a movement that keeps on moving. We invite you to

join us. Our revolution starts with the understanding of
our own minds, how they were built, and how they
operate.

Chapter Two

What Is a Mind
and How Does It Work?
This is the story of Sally Jean Henry and her life up
to age nineteen. She was born in 1980 and she grew
up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States of
America. Before we tell the story about how her mind
was built and how it used her, let's talk generally about
what a mind is.
I am stealing from some of the best thinkers here. I
acknowledge primary recent contributions by L. Ron
Hubbard, Werner Erhard, and Tor Norretranders. I
acknowledge the source of this conversation in
Buddhism, Taoism, Yoga, Vedantic philosophy, and in
Western philosophy in the work of Leibnitz, the
existentialists, phenomenologists, and perceptual and
cognitive theorists in psychology. I am discussing the
following questions: What is a mind? What is a mind
for? How does a mind get built? How does it work?
How can you tame one and keep it from running away
with you?

What is a Mind?

The model of the mind provided by L. Ron

Hubbard, with a bow to Leibnitz, (who spoke of
monads, which were little Lego-like units of
stored information) includes this definition:
The mind is a linear arrangement of total multisensory recordings of successive moments of now. This
is a good definition of the fundamental reactive mind:
stored records of events that occurred as we got born
and grew up. The records that make up the mind are
multi-sensory recordings, not just videotapes but
recordings that include taste, touch, smell, balance,
feeling states, and thoughts.
These recordings are not all the same with regard to
how long they last. A beginning of a recorded moment
is demarcated by noting some significant-to-you event
that stands out at the beginning of a moment, and lasts
until you consider it played out. These moments are
recorded and stored as records in our brains. They are
collected and stored in a linear fashion from early in
our life to recently in our life, and they vary in length
from a few seconds to several hours. Moments of
now vary in length according to clock time, they are
all in a linear arrangement, and they are total multisensory recordings in succession. The sum total of
these stored recordings is the fundamental reactive
mind.

What is a Mind For?

A mind is for survival. We have minds in order to
survive. Human beings, biologically, are a-tube-

within-a-tube construction. We have a tube of skin

covering up many more tubes inside us, including our
veins and arteries and capillaries, and our digestive
system. Millennia ago in our evolution, we became
independent of the ocean by creating our own ocean
inside called the bloodstream. We survive now by
putting water and food in one end of the tube and
running it through our other tubes. Eventually,
everything we put in comes out again through tubes at
the other end, when we defecate and urinate, and
through little tubes that come to the surface of the skin
where we sweat.
A mind is useful for our survival if it helps us be
successful at assimilating food and water and running
it through the tubes so that we are sustained in being.
If we continue to do it long enough and survive to
pubescence, we then put a male tube inside a female
tube and make another tube. When we do this we have
fulfilled our mission to survive and the mission of our
species to survive. The mind serves the survival of the
being if it is of some use in assimilating things to put
in the front end of the tube, and finding other tubes to
play with long enough to create more tubes. It's a tube
maintenance program.
All in all, this sounds easy. But there is one small
problem. We haven't quite answered the question
What is a mind for? A more complete answer is: A
mind is for the survival of the being, or of anything
the being considers itself to be. This addition to the
definition of the purpose of the mind engenders a

problem. Suddenly we are talking about more than

tubes here. The problem is that the tool called the
mind is what the being does its considering with! The
mind, in considering the survival of the being, comes
up with the idea that it also has to survive so the being
can survive.
The mind knows it has to be maintained and it is in
charge of its own maintenance. The mind is its own
mechanic. The mind gets to thinking that its own
survival is what it is for! Because my survival as a
being depends on me, the mind thinks, I must
preserve myself at all costs. And the mind can come
to think that its own survival is more important than
the survival of the being.
For example, Jack Benny, a comedian noted for his
tightness with money, created on his radio show a skit
that took place in Central Park in New York City. A
mugger stuck a gun in Jack's ribs and said, Your
money or your life! With his thumb under his chin
and forefinger on his cheek, Jack paused and
drawled, /?/Wel-1-1-1 The mugger repeated
himself and Jack responded peevishly, I'm thinking!
I'm thinking!! He was having a difficult time
choosing which was more important, his money or his
life. What is worth more, his mind wondered, My
money or my life?
For another example, let's say you are sixteen years
old and you were born in Baghdad and you want to be
a good Moslem and a good citizen and a good
follower of Saddam Hussein. You put on a uniform to

preserve that identity and go with 80,000 of your

brothers to Kuwait, and the Americans kill you and
60,000 others sharing the same identity. Your
identification with your ideal has cost you your life.
When I was eighteen years old, many of my
contemporaries went to Vietnam, trying to be good
Americans, and many died trying to maintain that
identity. Just like all the pitiful, well-meaning young
soldiers throughout history who have died for illconceived ideals by the dozens, we can let whom we
consider ourselves to be, what our minds say we are,
cost us our life. What is more important: our image or
our life?
Two phenomenological psychologists named
Schneideman and Farberow6 wrote a book about
suicide after seventeen years of research in which they
studied 350 cases of suicide. After studying suicide
notes left behind and examining all the stories and
interviews with friends and families, they found a
theme that seemed to apply in all cases. They
concluded that every suicide can be explained as an
attempt to maintain or enhance the self. The mind is
maintained at the expense of the life of the being. The
mind survives by being right. The mind would rather
be right and die than be wrong and live.
Teenagers identify with their self-image rather than
their being. The internal judge who makes the
assessments about life It's too hard, I can't take it
anymore, It's not worth it, Now, this will show

them!survives at the cost of life itself. Suicide rates

are highest among teens.
The mind is for the survival of the being or of
anything the being considers itself to be. Sometimes it
doesn't preserve the survival of the being while it
thinks it is serving its own survival. The mind is not a
perfect instrument of survival. The mind misfires.
The mind makes mistakes and cannot always be
trusted to maintain survival. The mind's survival
depends on being right, whereas the body's survival
depends on being fed and kept well and free from
harm. There sometimes appears to be a conflict
between these two goals, and the mind decides its
survival is the most important. In Eastern philosophy
this is called the problem of ego.
Once the mind has decided that itself is what must
survive, it believes its survival depends on being right
whatever the cost. A mind survives by being right and
not wrong and by getting agreement, not
disagreement, from other minds. This narcissistic
preoccupation with itself and its own survival
necessitates the defense of all its assessments,
judgments, decisions, stories, products, creations, and
so forth. The mind's primary job switches from
survival to defending itself.

How Does a Mind Get Built?

The records of the mind are formed and stored
continually as each individual grows older. All the
records of total multisensory recordings of successive

moments of now can be divided into three types. That

is, we can sort all the records of the mind into three
groups. They can be thought of as records stored on
three spindles. Imagine three spindles for three
different kinds of records of the mind: Spindles A, B,
and C. The criteria of selection for storage on one
spindle as opposed to another are as follows.

Class A Events
Spindle A stores records of events involving a
threat to the person's survival, pain, and a partial loss
of consciousness. These stored records are called
Class A events. For an example of a Class A event, let
me reintroduce you to Sally Jean Henry and pursue
her story starting when she was a young child.
Sally Jean. Henry: Scene One. Sally is four years
old and is playing with her brother, Tom, who is five
and a half. They are sailing a toy sailboat in a small
pond at the playground in a park near her house. Her
mother is there, talking to a neighbor lady. It's a sunny
day and the wind is blowing through the trees and
Sally is busily engaged pushing her toy sailboat back
and forth across the little pond with her brother. Her
dog, Rags, is there playing with some other dogs and
children.
Suddenly, her brother snatches up the boat, says
My boat! and starts running away with it. Sally
knows that the boat is hers and she starts running after
Tom yelling, My boat! My boat! Rags chases both
of them. As they approach the other side of the park,

her brother runs down three concrete steps, but just as

Sally gets there, Rags gets tangled up in her feet and
she falls headfirst from the top of the first step. She
misses the steps but lands hard on her shoulder, arm,
and head on the concrete sidewalk at the bottom of the
steps. She scrapes her left arm and shoulder and
bumps her head as she falls and the wind is knocked
completely out of her.
The next thing she knows, she is coming out of a
fog, rolling over, trying to catch her breath. Her
mother comes running up and kneels in front of her.
The sunlight reflects off her mother's glasses into her
eyes, making her squint. Her dog Rags is licking her
face. Tom is saying, a little anxiously, She's not hurt;
she's not hurt! in the background. Her arm and
shoulder hurt and she feels nauseated. Her mother
picks Sally up and carries her home, cleans her cuts,
puts on battle ribbon Band-Aids and gives her some
M&Ms. That's the end of the event.
The moment of record started when her brother
grabbed Sally's boat and ended when her mother gave
her the M&Ms. It is a Class A event, in which she
experienced pain, a partial loss of consciousness, and
a threat to her survival. Sally makes a total multisensory record of it at four years of age. The record
may or may not remain conscious, it may become
buried, it may be partially forgotten, it may be
modified in conscious memory, but in some complete
form it remains as a total multi-sensory recording of a
Class A event. We all have many of these events in our

lives and therefore we have many records of them.

One of the first of these recorded Class A events is our
own birth. The trauma of childbirth for the baby meets
all the criteria of a Class A event. Getting born, for
most of us, involves pain, shock, a partial loss of
consciousness, and a threat to our survival.

Class B Events
Class B events stored on Spindle B involve a
sudden shocking loss, with strong emotion, usually
negative, and something in the event related to a
previous Class A event.
Sally Jean Henry: Scene 2. Sally is seven years old
now. She's running on a sidewalk behind her brother
Tom, next to the stadium. Rags is running behind her.
Suddenly, her brother cuts to the right and runs across
the street. She follows him. Rags follows her. There is
a screech of brakes and a thud. She looks back. Rags
has been hit by a dump truck. She runs back. She
bends down to look at Rags and touches him. Her
hand feels sticky and she smells blood. She realizes he
is dead and begins to cry.
This is a Class B eventa sudden shocking loss,
with strong emotion, usually negative, associated with
a previous Class A event. Rags was running in the
park, got tangled up in her feet, and licked her face in
the previously stored Class A event. His sudden,
shocking loss becomes a permanent Class B record in
her mind. We can't grow up without experiencing

these kinds of events and storing them. We all have a

bunch of Class B records of loss.

Class C Events
Class C records are anything at all that occurs in the
experience of a person which can be associated with
Class A or Class B events. Anything in the world that
is associated with spindle A and B events can be
separately recorded and is called a Class C event. For
Sally, any earlier or later records of trees, sunshine,
breezes, ponds, toy boats, parks, grass, sidewalks,
steps, eyeglasses, falling, being near the ground,
brothers, dump trucks, dogs, fur, wet sticky things,
M&Ms, and so on are all events that can be stored
separately but with their association with A and B
remaining intact. So by the time we are seven or eight
years old, and have stored a number of Class A and B
events, EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD is associated
with a threat to our survival!
The mind is essentially a paranoid instrument. We
have records in our memory of threats to our survival,
and of loss, which we are to avoid in the future in
order to survive, and they are associated with every
other recording of everything we have experienced.
Every new stimulus from outside ourselves after about
seven or eight years of age just triggers a whole chain
of associations. We are on guard, looking out for
trauma and trouble at all timesand that's what a mind
does. It's like an accountant or a lawyer or some other
kind of deal killer who is hell-bent on anticipating the

possible recurrence of some tragedy that has happened

before, or one very much like it, and trying to avoid
that happening.

How Does the Reactive Mind Work?

Here's how the associative/reactive mind works
when we are adults. Let's say it's twelve years later
and that same little girl, Sally, has grown to be
nineteen years old. She is a pretty young woman and
she is a freshman at George Washington University in
Washington, D.C.
Sally Jean Henry: Scene 3, Option 1. Sally goes to a
park on a picnic with her boyfriend of several weeks,
Gary. It's a sunny day and the wind is gently blowing
through the trees. They've had some wine and cheese
and a few bites of food; Sally leans back against a tree
and Gary comes over to sit beside her. As he leans
over to sit down beside her, he squeezes her knee.
Ouch, she says. He replies, You're not hurt; you're
not hurt, and some vague discomfort comes over her.
Then, just as he bends over to kiss her, the sunlight
glints off his glasses right in her eyes and she squints.
He kisses her and she kisses him back, but she feels
nauseated and mildly anxious and slightly
uncomfortable. After the picnic they go home
separately. When he phones, she doesn't return the
call. She never goes out with him again.
If you ask her why she quit dating Gary, Sally has
all kinds of rational explanations: he's not her type, he
doesn't have a good sense of humor, she is just a

freshman and wants to play the field and doesn't

want to be tied down right now, and so on. These
rational explanations, however, have nothing to do
with why she dropped Gary. She dropped him because
her associative mind identified him with her partially
forgotten Class A event from when she was four years
old. His saying You're not hurt; you're not hurt, and
the tone of voice in which he said it, combined with
the glare of the sun off his glasses making her squint
just when he kissed her brought back the pain and
nausea and the threat to her survival she experienced
when she fell and hurt herself. Her Class A record was
reactivated in association with Gary, and she avoided
him thereafter.
Sally Jean Henry: Scene 3, Option 2. Let's say the
same events occur on the picnic with a slightly
different outcome from the same associative chain.
Sally leans back against the tree; Gary comes to sit
next to her and squeezes her knee. She says, Ouch!
He says, You're not hurt; you're not hurt, and as he
leans down to kiss her the sunlight glints off his
glasses, but this time when he kisses her, instead of
nausea, she feels an insane urge for him to lick her
face! As he pulls back at the end of a French kiss, he
accidentally, just barely, licks the very edge of her lip.
She marries him!
If you ask Sally why she married Gary, she will
have all kinds of valid reasons for marrying him: his
family is wealthy, he's going to go to medical school,
they are the same religion, and so on. But her

associative mind chose him prior to all those

reasonable rationalizations. She married Gary to bring
her dog Rags back to life. (A lot of us married our
dogs, at least the first time around.)

The Illusion of Control

The rational, thinking, reflective mind thinks it is in
control, but it isn't. As writer Annie Dillard says, We
are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy
we control any switches at all. Our rational decisions
really aren't decisions at all, but rationalizations to
justify the choices already made by associations of the
reactive mind. The reactive mind works according to
associationslinks between records formed in
previously experienced events. Control is an illusion
provided by the quick thinking (but not quite quick
enough to actually be in control) reflective mind. The
reflective mind just tags along closely behind the
reaction and generates explanations to maintain the
illusion of control.

The Reflective Mind

On top of the reactive mind, the reflective mind is
formed. That is, we have records of yet another kind
stored in our minds. These records are made based on
comparisons of replicated experiences. In George A.
Kelly's The Psychology of Personal Constructs7,
volumes I and II, is a more thorough explanation of
the development of what we are here calling the
reflective mind. Basically, from very early on in life,

we begin to form thoughts by comparisons based on

replicated events. The minimal requirements for a
thought to exist are three: a similarity between two
things, something that is different, and an overriding
construct of relatedness. If A and B are males and C is
a female, they are related by an all-encompassing
construct we call gender. In linear time, events that
are repeated and remembered as similar get compared
to a contrasting event along a common dimension of
relatedness. Concepts are formed from these
minimalist requirements starting from very early in
life. The reflective mind is an interlocking hierarchy
of subsets of these three elements.
An example of formation of an initial idea may be
as follows. The baby has repeated experiences of
being nursed. The baby has repeated experiences of
being hungry and crying. The baby builds a little
memory of feeding events and compares them to a
non-feeding event. The overall relatedness may be just
events. Then a little concept emerges based on
distinguishing feeding and non-feeding events from
the ocean of experience. In a short while, the baby
feels hungry, cries, gets fed, and confirms her little
hypothesis. As she matures, she distinguishes in the
same way the breast, then mother, then her crib, then
daddy, then her room, and so on. With a second order
of association, using replicated events, the mind we
call the reflective mind is born.
Sit with this for a minute. I'm not asking you to
believe this idea instead of whatever you now believe.

Just try it on for size; use it as a temporary model;

imagine it to be true just for the time being. If this is
considered to be true, even temporarily, it is kind of
disorienting. We fool ourselves into believing that we
are in charge of our lives through having concepts
about life. But the concepts about life are not what our
decisions are based on. Our choices are reactions.
Our thought processes are merely rationalizations of
reactions of a paranoid reactive mind. If you think you
know why you got married or why you didn't, or why
you got divorced or why you didn't, or picked a
certain path in life or didn't, or got remarried or didn't,
or had children or didn't, or moved to another location
or didn't, and so on, you are seriously deluded. Your
belief that you are in control is a complete illusion.
If we make this model of the mind temporarily true
just for an experiment in this moment, several things
that follow from it are quite obvious.
1. All the beliefs you have defended were merely for
the sake of providing you an illusion of control.
Every thought about what was right or why you
were doing or had done anything were just after-thefact rationalizations for choices you had already
made by reaction. All the reasons you have come up
with for anything are suspect. All of what you might
call values are fundamentally rationalizations for
behavior you were not in control of.
2. All the theories you have expounded explaining
your motivation for doing thus and such are a waste
of time.

3. The truth is you're not in control at all, and all your

attempts to explain in order to fool other people
only show who was really fooled all along. You!
The only thing one can do to be in control in any
way, shape, or form is to stick with merely describing
what happened. For any event in the world that any
human being participates in, there are always at least
three levels from which to report the event, one level
of description alone and two levels of abstraction from
experience. There is what occurred, the story made
about what occurred, and the meaning made out of the
story about what occurred. The most abstract level, the
meaning made out of the story that occurred, is the
sales pitch that most of us are calling reality. What
most of us call reality is just a story about reality or a
story we have about the story.

Rationalizing the Choices of the

Reactive Mind
We keep reacting to events from our past that are
triggered by what happens to us in current
relationships to people. Our spouse hits a certain note
in their tone of voice or says something a scolding
parent said in a Class A or B event and an argument
ensues about something in current time. Most
arguments between partners in a couple are
reiterations of records of feelings and events from the
past triggered by each other.

We start to make explanations to pretend we were in

control at an early age. When my son, Amos, was
about four years old he explained to me in great detail
how his Big Wheels were faster than the other kids'
Big Wheels because his wheels were more sharp.
Explanations become important as proof of being
oriented and in charge at about that age. Any
explanation will do. Sometimes these explanations
themselves become part of what is stored as a record.
In our particular culture, because of the surrounding
Judeo-Christian shame and blame context, we become
more sophisticated in learning how to blame ourselves
for anything bad that happened to us (from about three
or four years of age forward).
Whenever we make mistakes, particularly, we make
little resolves in our developing linear reflective
minds, intense resolves to avoid replication of certain
experiences. We make these intense resolves many
times between ages two and sixteen years and we hold
on to them tightly as guidelines for life for the ensuing
years. We said to ourselves, quietly within our own
minds, I will never, ever, ever, let this mistake
happen again.
In my own life, when I was about ten years old, I
experienced the following intense event: My younger
brother (nine years old), my little brother (one year
old), and I were in the back of the car. In the front seat
my mother and stepfather, who both had been
drinking, were in a loud shouting argument. We kids
were all scared. I kept saying to myself and my

brothers, particularly to the baby who was crying at

the top of his lungs, We'll be home in a few minutes.
We'll be home in a few minutes.
When we got within a mile of home I said to
myself, quietly within my own mind, Okay, we're
here. It's just over this hill. We're home. But just then,
my stepfather hit my mother in the face, slammed on
the brakes, and began beating her more. It was a twodoor sedan and we were trapped in the back and the
car was sliding sideways on the gravel road. She was
screaming and hitting back. Blood splattered on us.
We were trapped in the back seat. When the car finally
came to a sliding halt, I held the baby tightly in one
arm in a total panic while I hit the back of my mother's
seat with my body as hard as I could, pushing her
forward into the windshield. Then all-in-one-motion I
grabbed the door handle, pushed the door open, and
jumped out of the car with the baby in my arms and
my other brother right behind me. We began running
up the road. As I ran, carrying the baby and crying, I
said to myself: Always remember! You're never there
until you are there! You are never home until you are
home! Nothing is over until it is over! Don't ever make
the mistake of thinking you are there until you are
there!
This resolve, to be continually on guard and not take
anything for granted, to be wary on behalf of my
brothers and protect them by not making false
assumptions, became a theme in my life. It was a
resolvebased not only on that experience but on

previous experiences triggered by that one and it had

the emotional force of a lesson based on previous
trauma. I preserved an illusion of control by blaming
myself for being caught off guard and not doing a
good enough job of caretaking, and by swearing I
would never do such a careless thing again. Out of
this, caretaking became my method of preserving an
illusion of control.
Such resolves only further delude us into thinking
we are in control. The next time, we say to
ourselves, I will be in control like I should have been
this time.

Is Actual Control Over Our Life

Really Possible?
Even when we are not simply reacting
unconsciously and rationalizing the reaction, our
partially conscious memory of our linear mind's early
resolves to preserve an illusion of control seems to be
what we usually call thinking. As it turns out,
making up our mind may be more like making up
any other story. It appears to be just an exercise of
imagination. What we are doing, then, is reviewing the
lessons of old that were themselves an illusory attempt
at an earlier time to preserve an illusion of control.
Isn't that just pathetic? Aren't we just unbelievable
pitiful fools?
Is it possible to keep our own reactive mind from
determining our life based on very old data? Is it

possible to actually have any real control over our

lives when we have such a vested interest in
preserving an illusion of control based on what we
imagine other people think we should think and on
childhood resolves? Before we attempt to answer
those questions, let's add one more idea.

The Being Beneath the Mind

You are now looking at ink on a page or pixels on a
screen. The light reflects off the page and goes to your
eye, through the lens to the back of the eyeball, and
there, a certain chemical reaction is triggered. This
reaction throws off an electron that causes another
chemical reaction that throws off an electron that
causes another chemical reaction and there is an
electrochemical transmission up the optic nerve to the
visual cortex. There, in the visual cortex, a chemical
reaction occurs, and you see the words, immediately
interpreting both what you see and what it means.
The place where you are creating seeing the words
is in your brain. You experience the words on the
page, outside of your brain. You are creating the
perception of the words on this page in your brain and
experiencing them as outside of you. You create the
whole world in your brain by a chemical reaction, but
where you consider the world to be is outside of you.
You do this electrochemical act of creating many,
many, many times per second. Just like a movie
projector provides an illusion of real action by rapidly
displaying slightly changing images, you keep

everything out there looking constant. You are creating

the room you're in or whatever surrounding you have
around you, all the other people in your life, and
everything in view of you at all times.
You do the same thing with sound. If someone
makes noises with their voice box near you, the
vibrations reach the hammer, anvil, and drum in your
ear, a chemical reaction occurs causing an electrical
transmission to your brain, and you hear the sound.
You integrate the sight and sound and other sense data
in your corpus collosum, and you also make meaning
out of the words being heard or read probably using
your frontal lobes. This is all completely effortless. It
requires no strain or effort or trying on your part. It
happens automatically simply because you exist as the
perceptual organizing machine you are.
This creation by perception is the most magnificent
thing you will ever do, yet you give yourself no
special credit for it because it doesn't count, because
everyone else does that too, so it doesn't make you
special in any comparative way. It is not important to
who you usually think you are, yet it is ongoingly,
millisecond by millisecond, the most magnificent
thing you will ever do in your life.
Nothing you ever achieve with your mind or your
life will come close to matching the miracle of
creation of the world by your involuntary nervous
system, effortlessly, just by being here, right now. We
all know that doesn't really count. What countswe all
know, don't we?is all that hype we have been taught,

that has to do with our performance and our products

and our appearance of being in control. Who you
really are, however, is the creator of the world.
I think whenever one of us creators dies, the world
comes to an end. I think that who you are is the creator
of the world and who I am is the creator of the world.
I think when I die the world will come to an end. I
think when you die the world will come to an end.
And for all practical purposes that appears to be true.
You die. The world ends.
So I want you to consider these two ideas at once
now. You are the creator of the world and you have no
control. You are out of control. Control is purely an
illusion of your reflective mind, to protect you from
discerning that you are helplessly at the beck and call
of your reactive mind and of circumstances beyond
your control. Yet, at the same time, as a being, you are
the creator of the world. And when you die, for all
practical purposes, the world comes to an end. Just
consider both of those things true at the same time.
You are the creator of the world and you are not in
control. You are out of control. All control is an
illusion, yet you are the creator of the world.

What is the View of the Illusion of

Control from the West?
There is a story told about all the Greek gods sitting
around on Mount Olympus. They were all-knowing
and all-seeing. They knew all the past and all the

future. So, very soon, they became bored. To entertain

themselves and pass the time, they started inventing
and playing games. One of their favorite games soon
became one called, Let's pretend that what is not here
is more important than what is here. This game,
pretending that what is not here is more important that
what is here, became the common obsession, and after
they played and played, after quite a while of playing
the game, they forgot it was a game. They forgot it
was a game for a long time, in fact until right now. It's
my job now to remind you. So, I am reminding you,
God, it's just a game. You are the creator of the world.
You play a game that something that is not here is
more important than what is here. It's just a game.
I am speaking to you directly now. The idea that
something that is not here is more important than what
is here is just a game. It is just pretending. It is just a
pretense. It was just something you got in your mind
from your upbringing that made you forget that you
were God, and it made a modification of how you
lived. We human beings, because we have minds,
forget that playing toward the future is just a game and
that our fundamental identity as creators in the
moment, in the flow of creation, is reality. We are
creators without any real control.

What is the View of the Illusion of

Control from the East?

We are not talking about something new in history,

just something relatively new in western history. Yoga,
which means yoke or unionthat which connects
together intellect and spirit, or being and mindis
primarily concerned with exactly the topic we are now
considering. In the millennia-old philosophy and
practice of yoga, as summarized in the Yoga Sutras of
Patanjali, countering the mind's distortions is given the
highest priority.
In Sanskrit, there is a form of embodying all there is
to be known about any area of study in one hundred
sutras, or verses. These are short phrases, limited to
about a two-line statement, organized in a specific
form. The structure of one hundred two-line
statements precedes the content. The first sutra says
what the set of one hundred sutras is about. For
example, if we were to put the whole body of
knowledge we call physics into one hundred
statements, the first statement would be, These are
the sutras of physics. Then we would have ninetynine statements left to cover all of physics. The second
sutra is designated, traditionally, as the most
comprehensive overview of the whole body of work
and all the practices of the area under consideration. In
our example, we would be expected, in the second
sutra, to say in one statement what all of physics is
about.
After Yoga had been around for 2,500 years,
Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras. By the time he wrote
them, many different methods for the practice of yoga

had been developed while the teachings of yoga

spread over most of the continents in the world. These
methods include Karma Yoga, Bakti Yoga, Tannic
Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, Hatha Yoga, and so on. These
yogas of service, love, sex, work, physical health, and
the philosophy of yoga had all undergone literally
thousands of years of development through many
languages in various geographical locations in the
world. There had been thousands of teachers of Yoga,
hundreds of sects, and hundreds of practices. Thus, the
second sutra had to encompass the unitary theme that
made sense of all these developments. The second
sutra of the Yoga Sutras, the one that most
comprehensively covers its subject, is: The objective
of all yoga is to bring about an inhibition of the
modifications of the mind.
Notice that Patanjali says that the objective of all
yoga is just to inhibit the modifications of the mind.
He doesn't say it is to destroy them, or do battle with
them, or obliterate them, or overcome themjust
inhibit them. Just hold them back a second or two. Just
decrease or delay the effects of the little suckers a
millisecond or two.
How do you do that? With yoga. What kind of
yoga? Any kind. Whatever works! Creating art or
music, loving, performing physical exercise and
stretching, being present with a child, meditating,
lovemaking, workinganything you can attend to for a
sustained number of seconds or minutes without the
modifications of the mind!

The modifications of the mind are all those records,

memories, principles, conclusions, morals, and beliefs
we have stored from the past. When we inhibit the
modifications, as the yogis instruct us to, we discover
what is here in the world of present tense reality, other
than the mind.

What is the Current Cultural and

Scientific Synthesis with Regard to
Being and Mind?
Telling the truth is the particular yogic practice
necessary in our time to inhibit the modifications of
the mind. We are all engaged in a gigantic experiment
to discover and invent what a human being is. We
need each others' data. Our only hope to keep from
being interrupted to death by our own minds is by
using one mind to inhibit the modifications of the
other. The objective of all yoga is to bring about the
inhibition of the modifications of the mind. The mind
includes the reactive mind that is based on stored
memories of Class A, B, and C events and the
reflective (logical or linear) mind that comes up with
the explanations. The reactive mind is just an
accidental random chain of associations of stored
memories. The reflective mind is the rationalizer who
makes up good reasons to justify the associations of
the reactive mind and makes up these reasons to be
consistent with resolves made by a child. These minds
are the smoke and mirrors that keep us from attending

to the reality of being. Authentic spiritual practices are

done for the sake of experiencing reality directly.
So, if we assume that the reactive mind truly
determines how we live and what we do and what
attitude we have about it, and the reflective mind
preserves the illusion of control through explanation
and interpretation, and that the fundamental identity of
ourselves as human beings is the being part that
creates the world, is it possible for a person to be
consciously in control of his or her life?

Wait. It Gets Worse

Tor Norretranders, author of the recent book, The
User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size8,
says, among other things, that, In recent years,
scientific investigations into the phenomenon of
consciousness have demonstrated that people
experience far more than their consciousness
perceives; that they interact far more with the world
and with each other than their consciousness thinks
they do; that the control of actions that consciousness
feels it exercises is an illusion. Consciousness plays
a far smaller role in human life than Western culture
has tended to believe.
George Johnson, in reviewing Norretranders' book
in The Washington Post, summarized some of his
main points about consciousness in this way: Most
revealing of all are famous and controversial
experiments by Benjamin Libet and other
psychologists. Subjects wired with measuring

electrodes are asked to move a finger. A half a second

before the decision is made to flex the muscle, an
electrical signal is detected in the brain. Astonishingly,
the decision seems to be made by unconscious
neurons before the self becomes aware of its desire to
act.
Consciousness portrays itself as the initiator, but it
is not, Norretranders writes. Consciousness is a
fraud. Norretranders compares consciousness to a
concept invented by the computer scientist Alan Kay:
the user illusion.
Sitting at the computer, (controlling a mouse),
dragging documents into folders or into the trash can,
the operator is under a machine-induced hallucination.
Inside the computer chips there are no documents,
folders, trash cans, words or lettersjust voltages and
charges representing the ones and zeros of binary
code. Instead of overwhelming the user with a flood of
useless information, the computer projects a simple
array of metaphors: icons that can be manipulated to
get things done, m a similar way, the brain, throwing
away unneeded data, generates its own user illusion:
the interpretation called consciousness. In the
consciousness section, in a chapter entitled The Half
Second Delay, Norretranders concludes that,
Consciousness cannot initiate any action, but it can
decide that it should not be carried out.
Consciousness is not a superior unit that directs
messages down to its subordinates in the brain.
Consciousness is the instance of selection that picks

and
chooses
among
the
many
options
nonconsciousness offers up. Consciousness works by
throwing suggestions out, by discarding decisions
proposed by nonconsciousness. The notion of
consciousness as a veto is a very beautiful, very rich
one. Its kinship with Darwinism and natural selection
is not its only parallel in the history of thought.
This view of consciousness as veto power over the
options of all that is nonconscious becomes even more
interesting when compared to the second sutra of
Patanjali's Yoga Sutras9: The objective of all yoga is
to bring about an inhibition of the modifications of the
mind. The objective of yoga is to inhibit the primary
function of consciousnessits veto power! What is left
when thinking is inhibited? What is there to notice? Is
there noticing without consciousness? Clearly there is,
at least, noticing without thought. We sometimes call
this being conscious of, but even that, even
noticing, is a half-second behind!
When, in the movie Little Big Man, the main
character, played by Dustin Hoffman, is being taught
by his sister to be a gunslinger, she says, Draw and
shoot before your hand touches the pistol. It is
possible that we can act before we register acting.
Who is it then, who acts? There are plenty of people
who testify to this. Joe Montana, former quarterback
for the San Francisco Forty-Niners football team, says,
When I go out on that football field, I am not
conscious. He means he is not self-conscious, not
thinking, not aware of himself. He is not thinking and

deciding what to do with the ball. He is acting without

thinking. Tim Gallwey, the great tennis coach and
author of The Inner Game of Tennis10 (and Golf, and
Music, and Business), says that we all have two selves,
self one and self two. Self one is the one who knows
everything there is to know about playing tennis. Self
two is the one that can play tennis if it can get self one
out of the way.
In my book, Radical Honesty, I repeatedly contrast
being and mind. I suggest that, over time, when
we become more identified with being than mind, we
regress to being in touch with the source of our
experience, our bodies, in the moment, rather than the
adolescent/adult identity of the mind that tells stories
about experience and explains how it was in charge.
Our minds do not initiate anything. They associate
and rationalize and maintain the user illusion that
the mind is in charge and initiating action in the world.
Quite the contrary, the mind is always behind. As
Marilyn Ferguson said, The mind is like a reporter at
a funeral. It runs around asking questions like Who
died? Are you mourning? Where is the grave? How
long did you know this person? How long have they
been dead? How long did they live? When will this
funeral be over? The mind is obtuse, behind, frenetic,
insensitive to feeling, blocking presence to life. It asks
questions desperately to find out what is going on,
while blocking the noticing of what is going on. As I
have said before, a mind is a terrible thing. Waste it!
Or at least just inhibit it for a few seconds!

You create the world by perceiving it and your

perceptions are more reliable than your conceptions.
But even that is not simpleit's an interpreted
perception, based on past experiences of distinctions
in perception that you use automatically but are not
conscious of having learned. Those perceptions
themselves are at least a half-second behind in
registering what occurred from the impingement of the
bandwidths of impact on the senses from the world,
most of which we are never consciously aware of.
This is when you are functioning at your best, before
you begin thinking. If you think, you are interpreting
interpretationsrepresenting representationsthat will
put you further away in time from your experience and
further away from the data of the least representational
form of your experience. Put simply, we are always
dealing with second-hand information and, usually, it
is used second-hand information.

If All This is True, How Can We

Live?
What are the implications of this? What are the
minimal inferences one can make from this model of
the brain/mind? If this is true, what should one do?
Well, first of all, a few immediate things are clear.
1. Give up the illusion of control. Your consciousness,
or what you usually call your self, is not in control.
Your sense of agency in the matter of being sure that

you are reasonably in charge is all nonsense. Forget

it.
2. Know that you are already sufficiently taken care of
by your involuntary nervous system, which keeps
you alive without having to think about it.
Perceiving is superior to interpreting, though no
perceiving occurs without some degree of
interpretation. The least degree of interpretation is
the most reliable. Noticing is a better mode of
orientation than thinking, even though you can't
keep from thinking.
3. Tell the truth about what you think and how you are
interpreting things, but do not value it as reality.
Also, don't see your interpreter as your whole
identity, and don't imagine that what you think is
very important. It's all stuff you are making up. A
lifetime spent protecting your story is not a good
lifetime. Besides, the rest of us need your data. An
intentionally well-wasted life is somehow less tragic
than an unconsciously wasted life.
4. Identify with your being. Be aware of being a
moment-by-moment creator of the world. Surrender
your life to your involuntary nervous system.
Develop skill in noticing everything you can about
what is going on within you and outside you.
5. Focus on becoming organismically selfregulating. That is, live by paying a lot of attention
to immediate physical needs as a way of orienting
yourself in the world. If you are thirsty, drink. If you
are hungry, eat. If you are tired, rest.

6. Practice noticing. Notice even your mind. Notice

thinking. Notice sensations in your body. Notice the
outside world. Notice noticing.
7. If you are a being with a mind (I am, therefore I
think) rather than a mind with a being (I think,
therefore I am) as your culture has taught you all
your life, a whole new world of possibility opens
up.
8. You could possibly become a conscious creator of
your life by using your reactive and reflective minds
instead of being used by them. You could dream up
a future based on what you remember really liking
in your life, make a plan about how to get there,
follow the plan to create what you envision, and use
up your mind and body consciously on the trip from
here to the tomb.
I highly recommend all eight of these options. But
how on earth can you live like this?
The best way to start is to constantly do things that
help you to identify with the being you are, who
notices, rather than the mind you are, who thinks.
Then put your mind to work in service to your being.
It helps greatly to begin the practices that help you to
notice being here. These practices include but are not
limited to: meditation, yoga, honesty with others, and
sharing your experiences and your plans with others.
Instead of keeping your mind in the foreground in
charge of your being, switch figure and ground, and
put your being in charge of your mind. The details

about how you do that are the focus of the rest of this
book.

Existential Anxiety
This place is scary to actually live fromthis not
being in control. Tibetan Buddhists have been talking
about it and working with the fear that is triggered
from the knowledge of not being in control for a long
time. In an interview in the Shambala Sun in March of
1997 reprinted in the Utne Reader in June the same
year, a Buddhist teacher named Pema Chodron said,
We have so much fear of not being in control, of
not being able to hold on to things. Yet the true nature
of things is that you are never in control. You're never
in control. You can never hold on to anything. That's
the nature of how things are. But it's almost like it's in
the genes, part of being born human, that you can't
accept that. You can buy it intellectually, but moment
to moment it brings up a lot of panic and fear. So my
own path has been training to relax with
groundlessness and the panic that accompanies it.
Training to allow all of that to be there, training to die
continually. To stay in the space of uncertainty without
trying to reconstruct a reference point.
I believe Pema Chodron unflinchingly faces the
truth of her experience and reports honestly how it is
for her. This makes her a great teacher, because we are
moved to emulate her courage. We can take what
comfort there is from sharing in the despair of
attempting to control our life with our mind.

From that space of uncertainty, when it is not

something to be avoided, but in fact quite rich, you
can begin to play. Go ahead and read the summary of
this chapter and then start playing with the exercises at
the end of thie chapter.

Summary
Because of the way the mind is made up of
recordings of unconsciously selected previous
experiences, and a rationalizing internalized judge
who thinks she is in charge, we all have illusions
about having control of the world and our lives. We
use methods of survival based on association with
early childhood events and we rationalize actions
based on these associations with theories that we made
up as children. We are only occasionally conscious of
these childhood-formed sets of associations,
assumptions, and beliefs. We vaguely feel that because
childhood beliefs worked when we were younger, they
should work now and we keep trying them over and
over and ignoring any new evidence about their
usefulness in current time. These associations,
assumptions, and beliefs, which are championed to
maintain an illusion of control, limit our adult lives.
By overcoming our culture's blind faith in the mind,
and adopting a transcendent and non-defensive
perspective, we can see how these old beliefs affect
what we think, feel, and do. Once we have perspective
from which to view these limiting beliefs, we can stop
wasting effort on hiding our true selves, struggling to

survive, and can start living freer lives based on

noticing before thinking. Luckily, the same illusionmaking capacity of the human mind can be harnessed
intentionally to create a vision of a future life and
bring it into being.

Exercise
How do you get in your own way? The first step to
discovering and inventing an answer to this question is
to acknowledge how you DO get in your way. How do
you block yourself or interfere with yourself? How do
you shoot yourself in the foot before the race is over?
How do you talk to yourself, coach yourself, warn
yourself, worry yourself from within your own mind?
Think about your favorite way or ways of limiting
yourself or stopping yourself. Write them down. Do
this now.
What are your favorite limiting beliefs? From
what automatic reactions of carefulness did you
formulate those beliefs to justify placing those limits
on yourself? (For example, you might believe that if
you are good, life will treat you right, and if life is not
working out, it's because you were bad, concluding
that you should redouble your efforts to be good. How
old were you when you started doing that careful to
be good racket?) What are your main methods of
maintaining your illusion of control? Do any of them
involve self-blame and intense resolve as though you
should be held accountable for being in control of
your life? Write those down.

Save what you write because you will need it for

exercises in the workbook section of this book. Think
about' this. Work at this. After you read the next
chapter, you will be asked to go back to revise and edit
your initial draft.

Chapter Three

Dysfunctional Family University,

The World-Famous School Within
Which We Grew Our Minds
all experience hath shown, that mankind
are more disposed to suffer, while evils are
sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing
the forms to which they are accustomed.
The Declaration of Independence of the United
States of America
We have lost touch with our simple, instinctual,
common sense function of noticing what is needed to
take care of ourselves and our own, and then simply
doing what we've noticed is needed. In our culture, we
lead with our minds rather than with our noticinga
distortion of the happiness we were born with.

The Dangers of Belief

All the major scientific discoveries of the twentieth
century have been based on shifts in perspective.
Einstein invented the theory of relativity, tried it out in
space and with subatomic particles, and it worked. He
looked at the world differently than had Newton,

whose model also works. If you want to build a dog

house, use Newton's theory. If you want to design a
bomb, use Einstein's (but use Newton's again to
actually build it).
We have discovered that perspective is a matter of
invention and that different perspectives yield
different information, and that all the information is to
be judged with regard to its usefulness rather that
whether it is right or wrong. In physics,
psychology, linguistics, economics, sociology,
theology, philosophythe list goes onall the advances
are in the direction of the relativity of models. Models
of all kinds are subsumed under what I call the
Kleenex tissue model; you use one and throw it
away. When the full implications of this are finally
integrated into religion, education, family life,
government, organizational development, group
psychotherapy, and individual psychotherapy, the
world will be quite a different kind of place; and very
suddenly. All beliefs are relative. All models are just
functional or dysfunctional toward certain ends.
All models are dysfunctional when we attempt to
use them where they don't serve. Nothing is sacred
except that nothing is sacred. All shoulds are relative.
All obligations, mindsets, ideas, and gods are mere
structures of belief for certain ends. All personal life
stories are just stories. All concepts are fictional. All
constructs are imaginary. Nothing is absolute.
Possibility is not determined by belief. The greatest
intellectual advance of the twentieth century is that,

through the integration of Eastern and Western

thought, the growth of science, and the ability to make
comparisons of religions and cultures, it is now
possible to question all belief.
The transcendence of moralism, the main sickness
of our time, allows us to gain detachment enough to
see cultural moral values as mere beliefs. The use and
abuse of belief is the fundamental issue for the twentyfirst century.

The Integration of Knowing and

Believing
Western philosophy reflects a faith in thinking,
while Eastern philosophy reflects a faith in noticing.
The human groups of the world have slowly begun to
learn from each other that thinking and noticing are
both important. We have also learned, however, that
thinking often blocks noticing. Nowhere is this more
obvious than with regard to the limitations of cultural
beliefs.
A Unitarian minister named Randle E. Vining, in a
published sermon, said, The opposite of belief is
experience. If you experience something then you
know it is the truth, but the same thing believed is a
lie.If you experience something then you know it is the
truth, but the same thing believed is a lie! But, you
say, we can't function without beliefs! Well, I agree
that we can't function without theories and ideas. We
do need a mental framework to help us interpret our

experience of the world. But ideas are not like

religious beliefs, because we wouldn't claim any
certainty for them. They are working hypothesesI
call them notions. A belief is a hardened notion, and a
believer is someone who's suffering from hardening of
the notions.
Mr. Vining is talking about the tendency we all have
to categorize our experience and then, when we recall
the category, we think we have recalled the
experience! We have recalled a picture of the
experience only. This picture can trigger a new
experience but it often doesn't, particularly if we
concentrate too hard on getting the picture right. For
example, many of us have had the peak experience of
suddenly being delivered from the burden of intense
worry and avoidance and the delivery into a new
experience of freedom like that described by people
who have been saved.
We get free from our mind and notice the joy of
being really connected with and aware of another
person we love. We then think, That was a wonderful
experience and I should never forget it and everyone
should have it. This originally generous impulse
quickly becomes a belief and a should and a
moralistic value to be imposed on others whether they
are interested or not, including the person we were in
love with. Then we join up together with other
believers and we are off to the races.
The world is still suffering mightily from believers.
True believers usually value their beliefs more than

they value other people. Other people axe expendable

as long as the beliefs can be maintained. Their own
children are expendable. Pakistanis and Indians, Arabs
and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Serbs and Croats,
Moslems and Christians, Serbs and Albanians and so
on can all vouch for the ultimate importance of being
right and how it justifies the perennial murder of each
other. As long as people are less important than belief,
the world will continue to go to hell in a handbasket.
How's that for a belief? That's what I believe and I am
quite attached to it. Anyone who disagrees ought to be
shot!

Hiding From Experience by

Believing
Seriously, if you really want to hide something, put
it behind a beliefpreferably a belief about what it is
you want to hide. If you want to avoid the experience
of love, hide behind a belief in love. Then romanticize
love and watch a lot of soap operas about love and
make a lot of soap operas in your real life about love.
Go to war in the name of love if you can. If you want
protection from any uncontrollable feelings, make up
some belief about them and hold on for dear death.

Heretics Who are Beyond Belief

There is a significant and rapidly growing minority
of people in the world who realize personally the
relativity of belief. We have discovered and invented

ways to learn detachment from belief. We have let up

on our demand that belief be given the status of
reality. We don't want our children raised that way
anymore. If you read beyond this point, you are one of
us.
I am also writing another book, Radical Parenting:
How to Raise Creators, which is a training manual
about how to raise heretics. You can learn something
by reading my books, but I recommend that you not
believe a thing I say. Just hold the insights lightly,
without attachment. Be inspired. If you are, be grateful
and expressive or angry and expressive, even be an
advocate or an enemy, but don't believe.Become a
friend to me and my friends, or become our opponent,
but let's not be believers.
There is some really good news in the current
Zeitgeist as well. The overbalanced stress on thinking
by Westerners has been modified in the minds and
hearts and actions of people all over the world. The
most unlikely people are now practicing meditation,
exercise, contemplation of and with the senses, and
contact, communication, and openness to people with
different beliefs. Slowly the wisdom of the heretics is
integrated into the culture, but then the danger is
always that new perspectives become merely another
set of beliefs, with wisdom defeated again.
It appears that the maximum beneficial use of the
human machine requires a constant reintegration of
noticing and thinking. Thinking involves categories
developed from previous noticing. The constant

update of thought only occurs when the continuous

recurrence of noticing is possible, not limited by the
previous set or belief.
For this reason, lucky for us, every belief system
that cannot rapidly modify itself is falling apart. For
this reason, communism is falling apart. So is
fundamentalism of all kinds. So is capitalism, and a
growing number of experts can see that now. In our
lifetimes, most of us will witness many downfalls as a
result of the coming to an end of the long-honored
human habit of reification and blasphemous worship
of organized belief systems.
We have worshipped belief for untold millennia
since our genetic pathway diverged slightly from our
brother chimpanzee. We are going to miss holy
reification of belief terribly, but it is time we grew
beyond that.

The Mind, the Culture and the

Possibility of Recreating Both
Now, what we have said so far is this: We all have
minds and we all are beings. If we assume that we are
beings within which the mind resides, rather than
minds within which the being resides, we experience a
big difference. We humans in the West made a slightly
aberrant turn back there when Descartes said, I think,
therefore I am. Unfortunately, that was a mistake.
After a few hundred million useless deaths and a
couple thousand years of damaged suffering lives, we

now know that was wrong. I am, therefore I think is

a better premise. It makes all the difference in the
world. To learn from being is more fruitful than to be
from learning. A grounding in being, as children have,
is also the best trait for adults to have, at all times and
no matter how old they get. What we learn from
studying how we be and how we have been is of
value. What we learn from studying what we have
already learned is not worth much unless it is done
from a transcendent perspective, centered in being.

Exercise
Now revise and edit what you wrote about getting in
your own way, at the end of Chapter 2. Take into
consideration what you have just read. Save what you
write for later use in the workbook section coming up.

Chapter Four

The Truth About All Cultures

Cultures operate consistently with a mythology that
allows them to focus the energy of their members
toward certain ends. The benefits of this include
creating things, conditions, and institutions to benefit
the people of the culture. However, this focus limits
what we can notice outside the mindset of the myths
we live by. Our culture, as cultures do, has taught us to
be ignorant.
I imagine you are engaged in the middle of life with
other people, including children, doing your best to
responsibly care for your children and raise them
right. I'm sure you're well-intentioned. But wellintentioned people mislead and mistreat their children
every day because of highly valued and unquestioned
cultural ignorance, moralism, righteousness, paranoia,
obsessiveness,
and
other
charming
human
characteristics. I'm sure you have plenty of them; I
certainly do.
Cultures live in the minds of individuals. You have a
mind within which the culture we live in, lives. It is a
mind full of hopelessly obsolete subsets of ignorant
prejudice that compete with each other for dominance.
I know this from personal experience with lots of

parents and with lots of neurotic adults like yourself. I

also have made plenty of mistakes of my own and
produce my fair share of misleading data every day.
We live in illusions that direct our attention to certain
things and also block our view of what is out there in
reality, other than what we are looking for.
The reason I know you are living in an illusion is
because we all are, all the time. It's just that most of us
don't know it, and for that reason we are living out a
script written years ago that determines almost
everything we do, including how we raise our children
and how we treat each other. Illusions can be our
friends if we can just get one point: illusions are for
creating, not for self-assurance.
Living in a story is what we all must do because we
are human. Human beings live in the real world, but
always in a way consistent with some story. Most of
us live in stories that were created for us by the
conditions we started out in, and survived with, as
children, and the cultural prejudices we were born
into. Some of us grow beyond that and, as adults,
actually design the story we live out of. There are not
really a lot of us, but those of us who have
transcended our raising have found that living in a
story of our own conscious creation is a lot less
miserable than living in the survival story we came out
of childhood with.
Most of us live our entire lives trapped in a story we
desperately contrived so we could endure
circumstances of middle, or lower, or upper-class child

abuse in the culture in which we were raised. When

we shed the delusional system that tells us life has a
particular meaning, or that we must be careful to avoid
symbolic dangers, or we should compete to overcome
our adversaries, or be polite above all else, or maintain
our belief in God or God will die, or any of the
thousands of outdated, misleading, and actually
damaging beliefs of any kind that people have been
selling as reality in our culture for centurieswhen we
get over attachment to the image or the illusion of who
we are, then we get to create some new illusions for
the future. We don't have any choice not to live by
illusions, but we can choose which illusions we live. It
is our given destiny to be delusional. It's out of these
illusions of a possible future that we live the creative
and intentional life, and that we heal the damage done
by our previous attachments to beliefs that don't work
anymore and haven't for a long time.
Creation of the future with conscious illusions
(called visions) works best if the illusions meet two
criteria: they have to involve making a contribution to
other people in some way, and they have to closely
match the survival skills from our past. Because we've
already developed upkeep and maintenance skills for
these, this habit structure can be used.
A person who understands the use of illusion from a
position of transcendence or detachment (that is, a
person who uses illusions, but doesn't believe in them)
has a much happier and fulfilled life. If I am
disappointed about an image I just dreamed up and am

not attached to, it's quite different than feeling like

dying because somebody was disappointed with, or
rejected, the image of whom I truly believe myself to
be. All those folks who jumped out of the window
when the stock market crashed were doing so to
escape the negative meaning of the crash in a very
limited view of life.
When people can use illusions to design their future
in a playful and creative way, they can also design a
life and education for their children in cooperation
with the children themselves, and at the same time
model for the children what creating with illusions
consists of.

Radical Being
In Radical Honesty, I said, We come into existence
as beings and grow minds, which eventually come to
so dominate the experience of being that there is little
time or space left to attend to any aspects of life other
than thought.
The books I'm writing are all dedicated to
attempting to undo damage already done by overly
moralistic parenting. For the child raised by the
standard attached-to-cultural-belief parent, the mind
becomes a jail. Being in jail is worrisome and
depressing. One major thesis of these books is that the
primary cause of most anxiety and most depression is
being trapped in the mind, unable to noticebecause
we're constantly thinking. We stay trapped in our
minds because of various kinds of lyingoutright

lying, hiding, lies of omission, pretense, little white

lies, withholding, yadda yadda yadda. Lying keeps
you trapped in the jail of the mind, and most of us lie
habitually most of the time.
My clients over the years have reflected the culture
they grew up in. They had all been taught
systematically to lie by the way they were parented
and educated. The only thing that could rescue them
from the jail of the mind was to start telling the truth
about everything they had done, everything they felt,
and everything they thought. Telling the truth gets you
back out into the real world, where you can deal with
other people and feelings to some degree of
completion before you recreate the next mess in your
life out of the unfinished business from the last
completion you avoided.
Human stress is caused by the mind of the
individual suffering from stress. Suffering comes from
being trapped in the mind, unable to escape the
categories you have made up for yourself and others
from previous avoided experience, the emotional
attachment to ideas you invented to protect yourself
from feelings in the past, and the ranting and raving of
the mind. I call this fundamental dis-ease of being
trapped in the mind moralism. Moralism is
characterized as extreme attachment to moral
principlesbeing trapped in a valuational continuum
where judgments about right and wrong and good and
bad are given excessive significance and emotional
charge. These principles become more important than

life itself. We all have the disease of moralism, and the

secret of the good life is learning how to manage the
disease like one manages herpes or diabetes and other
incurable, but somewhat controllable, diseases.
Most of us keep repeating the same kind of behavior
in relation to other people and ourselves; begging,
berating, and scolding ourselves and each other and
our children, trying to convince everyone that if we
would all just live up to our expectations we'd be
happy. In our neurotic way, we do this over and over
again and expect a different result each time. We get
the same results: anger, discomfort, depression,
anxiety, and somatic ailments due to stress. Most
parents believe that the primary responsibility of
parenting is moralizing intensely! This is the worst
piece of delusional data extant today. This is the core
source of middle class child abuse.

Old-Timey Parenting as Cultural

Instruction
How do most of us become repetitively self-limiting
and self-torturing in our standard, garden variety
neurotic ways? It clearly starts with how we were
parented. Your parents did the best they could, given
that they lived in the dark ages, where male intellect
was thought to reign supreme, with no respect for the
continuum of genetic learning from which we came.
You've probably survived well enough to go on to
have children of your own, but your method of

survival still probably limits you much more than

necessary. You are very likely to be more worrying
and worrisome than necessary, trying to fill up
emptiness with good behavior to get brownie points
along the way as a pathway to happiness. You might
already know that being trapped in performance mode
is pretty screwed up, but you're raising your kids the
same way anyhow.
Keep reading; there are some ideas that can be a big
help. The main thing seems to be to grow beyond the
limitations imposed by your culture.

About Growing and Not Stopping

with Up
Human development is a continuum of growth of
the mind out of the being (when we are babies),
through a period in which the mind captures all our
attention (adolescence), and then to a time in which
the liberation of the being from domination by the
mind occurs (maturity). The full path of growth from
birth to maturity consists of the birth of being, the
growth of the mind, a period of domination of the
being by the mind, and finally, a mind used by the
being who has escaped domination by the mind.
How capable we are in keeping body and soul
together as adults is directly contingent upon staying
in touch with the experience of being in the body
noticing, moving, playing, and manifesting energy
doing things other than thinking. Happiness and

freedom depend upon not losing touch with being in

the body and in the world, as one grows a mind.
As a psychotherapist, my main therapeutic method
(for people who have been torn loose from contact
with being and are trapped in their minds and kept out
of contact with being) is coaching people to tell the
truth. When people begin telling the truth about what
they have done, what they feel, and what they think,
they free themselves from the jail of their own mind.
It's lying that keeps one from gaining freedom from
domination by one's own mind.
When a person who was once divided against
herself, and out of touch with the joy of living,
becomes whole again through psychotherapy, it is the
result of beginning to notice things in the world all
over again, including her own body, and running her
life more in obedience to what she notices, rather than
in obedience to interpretations she has worked hard to
brainwash herself with. She reports her mind's
machinations to others, simply to share with others
(including others she's thinking about), but she doesn't
have much faith in her mind as a source of directions.
When one who has been damaged by how they were
raised begins to heal and become whole again, the
healing is a result of establishing balance out of
imbalance, a reunification of being and mind. A
person who has become whole again makes the best
parent.
When a person loses their mind and comes to their
senses in psychotherapy, there is a period of

troublesome disorientation. Reorientation occurs

through getting back in touch with gravity, sensation,
and what Wilhelm Reich and Fritz Perls called
organismic self-regulation. To become grounded in
experience again is not just changing some opinions.
Opinions do change, but that is after the reorientation
to experience has occurred. You start living from what
you notice you want rather than what your mind says
you should want.
Thinking itself becomes merely something else to
notice and use, once one has become reoriented to
experience. Thinking loses its prior status as a primary
ruler and jailkeeper of being and becomes more like
the chauffeur. The mind becomes background and the
being in the body is in the foreground. So when you're
thirsty you get a drink, when you're hungry you eat,
when you're tired you rest, when you have to go to the
bathroom you go, and so on. You notice other people's
expressions and tone of voice and changes in coloring
and pace of speech, and whatever else helps you
comprehend their communication to you. You are
centered in the world of noticing as the foreground
and your opinions are in the backgroundand
changing constantly! This includes cultural values of
all kinds, and is threatening to those whose world
depends upon belief. Practicing radical honesty with
every human around you is the first step in this
transformation.
In this view of human development as a continuum
of growth of the mind out of the being, and then the

liberation of the being from domination by the mind,

the most obvious question that arises concerning child
rearing is: How can we allow minds to grow without
losing touch with being? The most important
question before all the nations of the world at the turn
of the century is, What is the best way to raise
children so that they don't have to be torn loose from
their grounding in being? Even though young
humans must go through a long period of growth of a
mind, and parenting and teaching must assist them in
this task, can they do it without losing the nourishment
of commonplace experience? Can they learn about the
values for sale by the culture they are dumped into
without having their spirit crushed?

In All Cultures: Let's Quit

Brainwashing Our Children to Be
Moralists
Luckily, through sharing honestly, some of us have
learned from each other a few things that we know
don't work. We know that moralizing constantly with
children at an early age makes chronic liars out of
them in their adulthood. We know that enforcing rules
with a vengeance damages people and makes for a
miserable life. Stringent moral instruction at an early
age doesn't create a happy, whole adult; it creates
miserable, self-righteous, phony, and manipulative
people.

Intense early religious and ethical instruction

makes chronic liars out of people in their adulthood.
Unhappy parents and teachers, enforcing rules with a
vengeance, damage children. This instruction results
in a miserable childhood with children mistreated in
the dysfunctional ways of the tradition. Many among
us know that stringent moral instruction at an early
age doesn't work, but too many of the teachers in
charge of our children don't have a clue about the
damage they do. There are plenty of fine teachers
whose hearts are in the right place and who love
children, but they are operating within a system that is
impossible to survive in without being agents of
misery. There are teachers in the educational system
who know that stringent moral instruction at an early
age doesn't work. There are also teachers who don't
yet recognize this, and most of them are completely
unaware of the damage they do with their shoulds and
their conditional love and their misplaced moralism.
Because the grading, comparing, coaching, pushing,
and moralizing that is already in place, provided by
the structure of the system itself, is so poisonous, the
people of compassion too often quit. Even when they
do stay, their primary function is to be outlaws within
a corrupt culture, and slightly block the damage done.
Even parents who know better often continue to
damage their children in spite of what they know. We
find ourselves, in trying to help our children, acting
on automatic based on how we were raised. Out of
love for them, mixed with anger, expressed through

stringently enforced cautionary rules, taught at too

early an age for the child to comprehend, we teach
them the same anxieties that were trained into us. In
addition to that we send them to schools, make them
do whatever homework is assigned, and encourage
them to be successful in a system that is killing their
spirits.

Calling all Cultures!

How might we design a better way for children to
be raised so they don't have to suffer so much? What if
children were allowed to discover how to take care of
themselves? What if parents had faith enough in
themselves and their children to simply protect
children while they unfold as they were genetically
programmed to do? What if, instead of forcing them,
with punishment and shame, to be worried and afraid,
and to memorize rules for their own good, parents
allowed their children to learn from experimenting and
learned with them? What if love and encouragement
and an even-handed permission to experiment were
given to children based on assuming they are okay to
start with, rather than assuming they are evil little
pleasure-seekers who need to be taught how to
behave?
If love and encouragement with freedom works, and
I say it does, it could become the norm, and we could
reorganize the whole human community and create the
possibility of a lifetime of play and service for every
human being on the planet.

What if parents were in a therapeutic community in

which their tendency to take out their misery on their
children in the name of love was compassionately
interrupted? What if the world became such a
therapeutic community? Changes in the way we all
live together can happen through a radical change in
how we raise our young. Without radically changing
how we raise and educate our children, homo saps will
increasingly be unable to enjoy the greatest benefit of
life, that of living freely and fully in the moment,
cherishing every sensation and connection with life
and with other human beings. If that change in how
we raise our young doesn't happen, we are finished.

Cultural Blindness: Trying to Teach

Too Much Too Soon
One of the primary causes of the disease of
moralism is the forced training of children with
abstract concepts they are developmentally too
immature to comprehend. Children are forced to act as
if they understand abstract cognitive principles (like
right and wrong, good and evil, the existence of God,
the concept of fairness, and so on) before they are
capable of abstract cognitive thinking.
Children do not learn the ability to generalize and
abstract until about ten or eleven years of age. They
learn quickly, however, to focus on avoiding
punishment for not understanding and by acting as if
they are trying hard to understand. Children don't

know how to generalize quite like adults, but they

learn to be afraid of what is required of them, and to
feel stupid and inept. They learn this quickly, and
carry it with them for a long time. They learn how to
cower and falsify sincere effort. Once a child learns
this phony pretense of understanding to avoid
punishment, along with being afraid all the time, any
further learning is blocked. After the child has attained
the age of eleven or twelve and develops the ability to
do abstract thinking, they use it to make only a few
permanent defensive generalizations, one of which is:
If I put on a show for the sake of the teachers and my
parents to keep them off my back, maybe I can have
another life in secret, protected by pretending to be
good. The problem with too much force in training in
abstraction in any culture whatsoever is that human
children can't do the abstracting required prior to ten
or eleven years of age, and if forced to act like they
have, they continue to play like they understand when
they don't, for the rest of their lives.

The Fundamental Assumptions That

Come with Feeling Whole
People who are happy in life, regardless of the
culture they grew up in, learn how to feel connected
with the continuum of life they encounter as they roll
out of bed each day. Because of that feeling of being
present in their bodies and present to the life around
them, they wake up into an assumption that something

interesting, something challenging, something good,

something fun is likely to happen today. Wouldn't it be
great if the next generation of people, raised by us,
could wake up in the mornings with an expectation
that is vague but always there, that this day is to be
looked forward to? Feeling whole is a fundamental
necessity for being a creator.
Children learn first, as a natural consequence of
their development, to locate themselves in the real
world of sensate reality in the moment. Then, because
we are usually in a hurry, we train them out of it. For
example, a child might notice and comment, That
toothpaste smells good, when she's brushing her
teeth. A parent who is attentive to the child as a
constant guru of living in the moment would
themselves notice the smell of toothpaste, something
they hadn't noticed for a long, long time, and say,
Yep. It sure does, in a grateful tone of voice. A
parent who is in a hurry to get the kid off to school so
she can get off to work to get to the next place she has
to go to, to get through the day and get the day over
with, would say, Hurry up, honey. We're going to be
late. This little difference in parenting can make all
the difference in the world.
The systematic teaching of hysteria about time is a
part of the curriculum for the day, on most days, for
most of the children in our culture. The parents of
millions of children wake up into a frenetic
assumption: I have to make everybody get there on
time. They resentfully force themselves to push the

kids to get ready in time, resenting children for

dawdling while being afraid of what the boss will
think if they're late again. Somehow, we have to
interrupt that interruption. Every time a child
interrupts your mental agenda to point out something
they have noticed in the moment, follow their lead
instead of overriding their discovery because your
agenda is more important. Your agenda isn't more
important. Your culture has given you a bad agenda.
You've been torn loose from the continuum of being
and captured by intellect. Most of us are psychotic
with regard to time and money.
Children who are spoiled in the old paradigm way
of thinking are actually the ones who have been raised
the best. They have been taught to expect that the
world is a place of nurturance and love, and as they
gradually, over about twelve to sixteen years, take full
responsibility for their lives, they develop their skills
in taking care of themselves in the context of an
assumption of each day bringing a new and interesting
adventure. Children do a lot of fantasy play to develop
their imaginations. Our job is to play along with them
by helping them develop their ability to envision the
future and live into their visions.
Marilyn Ferguson says in her great book, Radical
Common Sense (which hasn't been published yet
because of complications with international
corporations who own almost all the publishing
companies), that in her extensive study of visionary
people she found that, consciously or

unconsciously, they have learned to be good parents

and teachers to themselves. I think this is more than
likely related to them not having had their natural born
optimism stomped out of them at an early age by
parents and teachers hysterical about time and money.

How Would We Treat Children If

We Weren't Working so Hard to
Teach Them Something?
Let them lead every now and then. Just do whatever
they do or ask you to do. You'll learn how to play with
them the way they like to play at whatever age they
are. Play with them. They will teach you again to be a
visionary, thereby allowing you to envision how to
raise them. We could just start learning with them.
Radical parenting means staying connected as an
older being with your child as a younger being. To be
present to a child's presence to you, to notice that you
are being noticed and to give your full attention with
no particular agenda, is one of the great joys of
parenting. You and your child can play with your
developing minds together, bonded as one noticing
being noticing the other. As Kierkegaard said, A
person who relates to another person and relates also
to that relationship relates thereby to God. My
understanding of this is that you discover yourself as
God and the other as God at the same time. Children
are rich with the fullness of being, and the nurturance
you get from nurturing them is the best there is. This

is more valuable than money. Play with your kids for

hours instead of making more money.

Seeing Problems as Opportunities to

Play
I believe that people can work out their problems in
life by sharing with other people. I have a lot of
friends who share that belief, and we act on that belief
by telling each other what problems we have and
working them out. Life doesn't come without
problems. Problems are life. We don't expect life to be
problem-free and we don't expect problems to
disappear through hope or positive thinking or the
magical recitation of affirmations or any other form
of magical thinking. Those ways of thinking are the
leftovers from having been brainwashed into playing
like we understand something we don't, and playing
that pretend games are the same as reality. Those of us
who have grown beyond that handle our problems by
confronting them openly and sharing them rather than
keeping secrets. Not all problems are miserable. A lot
of problems are fun. Miserable problems can become
fun through the transformation of perspective on the
problem. Reality cannot be changed by thinking or
daydreaming. Perspectives on reality can be changed
easily. When the willingness and inspiration that come
from a change in perspective show up, transformation
can
occur.
Repeated,
ongoing,
recurrent
transformation is the alternative to moralism.

My friends and I all did our time in the prison of

the mind during quite an extended adolescence. We
eventually escaped the pretense of our reputations to
ourselves. We finally got clear that our imagining of
who we were in the eyes of other people, and our
performing whatever lies were necessary to maintain
that image, were a waste of time and the source of
more problems than got handled. We decided that,
somehow, we didn't want our lives used up by such a
story. As a way out of the story, we started really
talking to each other about our own pretenses. We told
the truth about our phony performances to each other,
and that took away the need to keep it up.
We now get to invent, for ourselves, what our lives
get used up by, rather than having them used up by the
method of survival advocated by our trainers; that is,
playing to the audience to control their view of who
we are so we can get what we want. That got boring
and felt futile and we thought, there must be more
interesting things to do in the world. We ended up
turning to the task of creating a new world together
and it is more fun than the old life was. We decided
that because life always involves problems, why not
be in charge of inventing some of them, and why not
invent one big enough to be worth working on? What
we have invented to use up our lives is building a
heaven on earth by honestly sharing who we are.
Saving the world and improving the lives of all human
beings on the planet through sharing is the problem we
have invented and taken on for our own sakes. A

lifetime of play and service for every person on the

planet is the possibility we invented to live for. We
would like to spend our lives working on ending
human suffering, using ourselves up to end it.
Working on the solutions to this problem is much
more challenging and fun than a life of just keeping up
with the current style.
To bring about a solution to the problems of human
suffering and planetary extinction and make a world
that works for everybody, rather than just the rich
folks, we need to work on a lot of minor subproblems; namely, the end of hunger, the end of
economic injustice, the end of armament, the end of
authoritarian
governance
of
countries
and
corporations, the end of war, the end of enslaving
educational paradigms, and the end of genocide. This
almost gives us enough problems. This is almost
enough to substitute for whining about how you don't
love me as much as you love somebody else or
whether to get the Ford or the Chevy.
We are taking on the central problemand we ask
you to helpof raising a generation of human beings
the world over who are prepared to love and share
with other human beings. What you can do to help the
world become a much better place is to take delight in
your children, and, viewing them through the eyes of
delight, work consciously to have them love life, and
learning, and other people. Do this more by example
than instruction.

So let's get to work. The good life is shared

problems. Solving big problems together is the best
game on earth. If parents and teachers stop teaching
whining and complaining and start teaching the fun of
playing with problems, help is on the way.
All in all, our immediate forebears have not done
that great a job of loving their children. We can tell by
looking around at the world we live in. We can tell by
all the damaged children who are our friends. We can
tell by looking at our current, mostly sick institutions
(the legal system, for example). Most of us are
depressed or anxious or angry or distracted or sick or
just not happy. We were raised in a way that didn't
work, and we are raising our children, for the most
part, in the same way. So we have to do some work on
ourselves to change how we treat our children.

Cross Cultural Transformation:

Learning to Tolerate Joy
Some of us have worked through anger and shame
and sexual inhibitions in the course of growing
beyond just growing up and were surprised at what
came next. We were surprised to discover that we are
more afraid of joy than we are of any of the other
emotions. The joy and celebration of freedom together
that emerged when we got free from most of the
mind's taboos was so unfamiliar it was too much to
bear.

Many of us have this built-in mechanism to guard

against being overwhelmed by lovebeing unmanned
and unwomanned and undone from our identity as
survivors. Here is how the mechanism works: we fall
in love and feel love for another person and for a little
while it is just wonderful; more wonderful than we can
allow ourselves to experience.
So our minds, whose duty it is to make sure we are
not overwhelmed by any experience, save us from that
experience of love by associating the current
experience of love with earlier records of having lost
this same kind of love. We close down the love with
anxiety, to prevent the intensity. We experience love
and immediately turn it into nostalgia for lost love
because we cannot bear letting love come and go. I
have lost it before, our minds say, and it was
terrible, so don't do that again. Our mothers and
fathers and teachers and other big people loved us
conditionally and we never quite got the conditions
met. We lost their love and thought it was our fault for
not being careful enough. We didn't stay in control.
This time we will be carefulso careful we block the
feeling with the memory of the loss of the feeling.
Love becomes blocked by mourned lost love and
romanticized nostalgia to satisfy the mind's need to
preserve the illusion of control. It is our mind's job to
protect us. We think that who we are is our mind. Our
parents and teachers taught us that who we are is our
minds. They were dead wrong. Who we actually are,
is a being, in love. We already knew this when we

were little, but we didn't know we knew it. In the

course of growing up, we got trained out of it by
people who thought that developing our minds and
identifying with them was more important. Once we
get this again, and get that we have always known this
in our bones, our life changes from making-do-thebest-we-can (survival) to making out quite happily in
the world.
This love of being alive comes with the territory of
being human. The future of humankind depends upon
how well we learn aliveness and love of life over
again from our children, and how well we let love for
them be the heart of how we organize ourselves in the
world to take care of them. This book is to help us
learn to teach each other to be beings in love.

We All Have a Common Desire

Wherever I have been with peoplejails, mental
hospitals, universities, corporationsI have never
found a human being who didn't want to contribute to
the well-being of other people. Regardless of how
distorted their mind or how twisted their thinking, all
human beings fundamentally want to help each other,
be with each other, contribute to each other. Human
beings want to celebrate being alive with other human
beings who are celebrating being alive. This is
fundamental to our nature as human beings. I believe
that the world of human beings can eventually become
conscious of, and operate according to, this
fundamental love of human beings for each other and

their desire to celebrate being itself, if the mind's

resistance to this doesn't destroy us first.
Our minds resist the risk of surrender to celebration
of the joy of being alive with other human beings
because we have learned that human beings are
dangerous. We learn this in the course of growing up.
Most of us overlearn this paranoid fear of other human
beings because of the poisonous moralism and
parental abuse of power in the culture in which we are
raised. I believe that the will of human beings to
contribute to each other is stronger than the resistive
forces of their minds. I also believe that one day the
force of being will be more in control of how humans
live than the forces of the mind's resistance. The key
to this is how well we love each other and how well
we love our children.
I hope you are inspired by now, but you may be
offended instead. If you are offended by anything I've
said so far, check to see what moral you are attached
to and see if you can forgive me. If you are not
offended so far, or are offended but still interested,
continue reading this book. We hope it will help you a
lot in raising your kids and loving your neighbors and
having fun doing it, attentively, playfully, and in no
hurry, casually saving the world.

Chapter Five

Conscious Community and

Conscious Child Rearing
Members of a culture that is asleep are characterized
by unconscious attachment to a cultural subgroup of
values based on how they were raised, or in rebellion
against how they were raised. The most important gift
we can give to our children and to humanity is to teach
them to grow beyond limiting beliefs continuously.
Loving our children unconsciously is not enough.
The gift is to love our children consciously with a
clear intention to help them stay in touch with the
glory of being alive in their bodies as they grow, so
they can transcend the jail of their own mind when
they grow up. Nurturing their spirits is important for
their freedom. The being of the parent loves the being
of the child, consciously, and two free persons grow
and grow and grow. The first generation, ever, of
independent people not enslaved by their own minds
is born. Beings are in charge of their own minds,
rather than minds in charge of their own beings. This
is the dawning of the age of enlightenment. It has to
do with giving up the provincialism of culture itself.
Let's do it. Let's enjoy it.

This book is a basis for honest conversation

between generations about taking responsibility for
the next new generation. I am talking to all of us:
Everyone in the home schooling movement,
experienced parents and grandparents, single parents,
friends of single parents, newlyweds, young couples,
first-time parents, first-time grandparents, over
100,000 people who will have bought Radical
Honesty by the time this book is released, and all the
graduates of the Radical Honesty Two Day
Workshops, The Course in Honesty (8 Day), The
Course in Forgiveness and Creating (4 days). I'm
talking to all the graduates of trainings involving
existentialist and Buddhist approaches such as the
Landmark Forum, Life Spring, Insight Training, and
those conducted by Tony Robbins, Kathlyn and Gay
Hendricks, Neale Donald Walsch, Pema Chodron and
literally hundreds of other compassionate people and
good teachers. I am talking to everyone who has ever
been in a 12-step program in AA or in /?/A1-Anon or
many co-dependency groups. I am here to speak with
the 40 million Americans who embrace New
Paradigm Values as reported in a survey conducted
by Paul Ray reported in Noetic Sciences Review in
1996. I am also appealing to people who are not
parents and don't plan to be, but who are interested in
new paradigm values and in making a contribution to
the people of the world.
I am speaking to everyone who has read The
Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, which has been

in publication for almost twenty years now and is a

masterpiece. It compares our lives with the lives of
primitive tribes with regard to happiness of the adults,
and examines the child-rearing practices that make us
who we are in each culture. This conversation is with
and for everyone who has read the following books
and others like them:
Summerhill by A. S. Neill
The interest-led learning books by John Holt
The books of John Taylor Gatto
The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace
Llewelyn
The War Against Children by Breggin and Breggin
Spiritual Parenting: A Guide to Understanding and
Nurturing Your Child (Harmony, 1997) by Hugh
and Gayle Prather
Deepak Chopra's new book about parenting, Seven
Laws of Spiritual Parenting,
Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn's book and workshop
Mindful Parenting: Nourishing our Children,
Growing Ourselves, and
Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the
Healing Power of Intimacy by Dean Ornish, M.D.
I plan to review all of these books and a few more in
my upcoming book Radical Parenting. But, read Dean
Ornish's book as soon as you can, because of his
brilliant analysis and evidence of the relationship
between wholeness and health and healing and his
clear understanding of the uselessness of moralism

without love. The people in this world are waking up

from a long sleep. We are all helping. This is a great
time to be alive because compassionate people are
coming into their own power.
All these people, and many more you and I don't
know about, are growing beyond the cultural
limitations of whatever culture they were born into. I
have mentioned just a few leads to contribute to the
network that is hooking up all over the world. We will
come to recognize each other as time goes on, and
when we do, we will change the world.

Chapter Six

The Road from the Mind Jail

Bade to Being
The Sufi Levels or Consciousness
We have just started the conversation about the
developmental path from centeredness in being to the
growth of the mind in a culture, to the eventual
recentering in being for using the mind and the
traditions of the culture. Now we want to review what
happens when we assume that a person in a culture
wants to outgrow the limitations of that culture. What
can we do if our starting place is now, and we are
trapped in a mind? I'm using the Sufi system called
the levels of human consciousness as a model for our
mutual instruction. This model was first taught to
people in the West around the turn of the century by
Gurdjieff.
Let's assume we are liars in the acculturated way we
learned in whatever culture we were raised. If we were
stringently instructed to learn abstractions at too early
an age, we live in our minds so much we hardly have
any experience of anything and we can barely contact
reality enough to walk through a doorway without
bumping into the doorjamb. We need to get back into

the world of experience and stop obsessively thinking.

We would like to get to where we feel happy and in
charge of our lives rather than feeling like we're
running around in circles putting out fires all the time.
We want to inhibit the modifications of the mind
and become present to experience. How do we do
that?

The Level of Belief

We must start by recognizing where we are in the
first place. We are at a level of consciousness that the
Sufis called the level of belief. This means we think
that to escape our mind we must figure something out.
We think we need to figure out what to believe and
then act accordingly. The problem is that we are trying
to think our way out of thinking. Our entire focus is on
figuring out what we should believe and acting
accordingly. This is the lowest level of human
consciousness, called the level of belief. The Sufis
say that ninety-eight percent of us spend ninety-eight
percent of our time at this level. (At least we know we
are not alone.) Lots of other people in the world share
this level of consciousness with us most of the time.
This level has an alternative name. It's called hell. It's
the inescapable do-loop prison of the interminable
warning buttons of the reactive mind and the useless
rationalizations of the rationalizing mind. It's hell. It's
being strongly attached to the cultural quagmire we
got dumped into that I discussed in the beginning
chapters you have just read.

Let's say we live in hell for a long time. We grow

older, get a job, get married, and so on. When we
reflect on our life, we realize life isn't quite living up
to its billing. We don't want much. We would just like
to work when we feel like it and not work when we
don't. That's all. We believe we can't do that but we
wish we could. Our job, our kids, our family, our bills,
and our other obligations dictate what we do and there
just isn't any time left. We just never can, really, relax.
It is not all intensely painful, some of it is even
enjoyable, but we are basically on duty all the time,
dreaming of a day when we won't have to be on duty
all the time. We want out of hell.

The Level of Social Contracts

In this level, we have done some work on ourselves,
some therapy, some schooling, some honest
conversations, some degree of telling the truth, but we
are stuck with obligations we just have to respond to.
The level of social contracts is one notch above hell,
but only one notch. It is a slightly higher hell than the
level of belief because it at least recognizes that other
people out there exist independently from our own
mind's pictures of them.
That isn't true at the level of belief, where other
people are just categories like converts or
heathens. The lowest level, the level of belief, is
where insulated, isolated fundamentalists live. The
next level up is where many first generation
immigrants live. It is where we live when we are

concerned about acceptance and living up to other

people's expectations.
So let's say that now we have advanced from the
level of belief to the level of social contracts but we
are still severely constrained. Plus, many times each
day we drop back into the level of belief, where we
are trying to figure out what to believe and then do
what that belief dictates. Although our contracted
obligations to other people constantly rescue us
from the hell of belief, the rescue is hardly worth the
work. Whereas, at the level of belief, we aren't even
related to other people except as triggers for other
beliefs on our part, we now recognize the independent
existence of other people that places constant demands
on us. Our marriage, kids, paying taxes, paying bills,
and honoring other commitments to other people
deliver us from the frying pan of self-torture into the
fire of the torture of obligation.

The Saint Ego Level

Eventually, through hard living and experience, we
get to know that there must be more to life than
showing up to work on time and having a split level
house with a two-car garage and two-point-eight
children and keeping the mortgage paid and doing our
duty to others who are doing their duty to us. There
has to be more to life than maintaining our
obligations. At least we have learned that. Most of us
are in our forties before we learn that. When we do
realize that there is more to life than fulfilling

obligations, we realize at the same time that knowing

that makes us superior to others who haven't learned
that yet. We also know that there is more to life than
being an obedient, well-behaved citizen for whom
living within the guidelines of convention is the
highest goal of life.
The Sufis, according to Gurdjieff, who first
introduced these levels of consciousness to the West,
called this level of consciousness the Saint Ego
level. We begin to understand that we are better than
most of the other fools in the world. Some of us
modern day Sufis call this the Muhammad Ali level,
because Muhammad Ali in his prime was such a great
example of proclaimed superiority. I am the
greatest! he said, I float like a butterfly and sting
like a bee! I am beautiful! He refused to go to
Vietnam and kill his dark-skinned brothers and sisters
because the human bunch who claimed he belonged to
them told him it was his duty. He was not obedient to
the beliefs and the social contracts they claimed he
should be obedient to because he was superior to that.
When we attain the level of consciousness known as
the Muhammad Ali level, we still make frequent visits
back to the two lower levels of consciousness known
as belief and social contracts. We still have beliefs and
we still have to deal with social contracts, but we tend
to not be as attached to beliefs and we handle social
contracts so we can spend more time at a higher and
less worrisome place. We want to spend more and
more time at this higher level because we have a larger

perspective that subsumes more information, a

perspective of superiority from which to view beliefs
and social contracts.
Since I have been hanging out at that level for some
years now, let me give you an example of the level by
excerpting from a letter I wrote a few months ago to
my literary agents in response to their suggestion that I
needed a co-author, ghost writer, or editor before I
could have a best-seller because my language is too
offensive:
So here is the way it is. I'll write whatever way I
want. I know what I am talking about and what I have
to say. I will not change what I have to say to suit the
market or what so-called experts about the publishing
field claim to know about the market, including you
two. I will not change how I say what I say if, in my
view, it changes in any way, shape, or form the point
of what I have to say. I will not surrender any
authority over what goes out under my name. At the
heart of what I have to say is the general attitude of
disrespect for minds. The fundamental integration of
Eastern and Western philosophy that I have
synthesized, which I both represent and live by,
transcends local knowledge, and I am not going to
change that for any mere agent or publishing
company.
I don't want a co-author or even a heavy-handed
coach about what the mind of the expert thinks the
minds of the people think. I have been doing
psychotherapy with miserable intellectuals for more

than half my life. I don't intend to cater to the sickness

I have learned to heal in myself and others. I will
work, on a give and take basis, one paragraph at a
time, with an editor whom I respect, with me having
the final authority over what gets published
The very essence of what I have to say is radical. I
am talking about the overthrow of the government of
the mind. That includes all minds. Your own mind is
not your friend; it is Big Brother inside of you. It
considers itself to be who you are. I don't consider
your mind or mine to be who we are. I consider the
being who grew the mind, the one who notices first
and learns second, the observer-in-the-moment-aliveright-now-only being to be who I am and who you are.
I do not cater to the minds of what your mind calls 'the
market.' I serve their beings instead.
A fully alive, healthy person raises hell all the time,
is not polite, offends people, hurts people's feelings,
and also stays with people while they work through
the feelingscommitted to their being and at war with
their minds. He or she doesn't submit to the minds of
others or even to his or her own mind. He or she rules
his or her own life and creates a life from being, which
is to say, out of love, using his or her mind; not being
used by it. I do not cater to expert opinion even if it is
my own. This is what I am expert in. For the love of
being I am a destroyer of minds; incessantly,
endlessly, and perhaps fruitlessly, but it is my own
sweet damned choice.

I am in love with hundreds of people and they are

in love with me. This is not romantic love or nostalgic
love but simply the love of one being for another. The
way we did it is through the way of being I have just
described. A lot of the people I love and who love me
were offended by me in the first place because I
threatened the illusion of control provided by their
minds. That is what I am about.
As you can see, living at this level is more fun than
the previous levels. I continued my rant at my poor
agents.
Once, when Frank Lloyd Wright was being sued by
a client, the lawyer for the client began his cross
examination of Mr. Wright, who was in the witness
stand, by saying, 'Mr. Wright, it's been said that you
are the world's greatest living architect.' Frank Lloyd
Wright responded, 'That's a bit conservative.'
I admire that arrogance. I think Wright showed an
honorable disrespectfulness of all human assessments
and comparisons and evaluations other than his own. I
am proud to be arrogant in that same way, and I think
in an important way it is prerequisite to being the
creative genius that I am. I don't have much faith in
minds at all, but if I am going to place my faith in
anyone's mind at all, it will be mine.
I would like to title my next book A Mind is a
Terrible Thing! Waste It! but after reflection and
good coaching from some people who love me I am
willing to change it to Practicing Radical Honesty:

How to Complete the Past, Live in the Present, and

Create a Future with a Little Help from Your Friends.
I intend to teach by modeling, both in how I live
and how I write, the life of an individual who is not
controllable by moralism. I wish 'mere anarchy' as T.S.
Elliot said, to be 'loosed upon the world' and I will do
everything I can to make it so. What do we need
moralism for if we have the integrity of being? When
we break loose from the stupid illusion of control we
have trapped ourselves into with the help of the entire
culture and educational system and the crippled
humans we were raised by, we don't go 'out of control,'
but we do go beyond control. We are beyond control
by political force, whether it be government or office
politics. We then discover a new use for the mind
namely, as a creative instrument in service to our true
identity, the being within which the mind resides.
I am a leader in the revolution of consciousness.
You don't do that by catering to lame-brained experts.
You don't do that by catering to minds' attachments.
That tirade is a fine example, if I do say so myself,
of a person at the third level of consciousness, the
Muhammed Ali or Saint Ego level. Luckily my agents
are used to it, and being superioristic egotists
themselves, they understood me, and didn't quit, but
figured out a way to continue to support me without
controlling me too much. Unfortunately, we didn't find
a publisher who wanted to give me a whole lot of
money for being the superioristic jerk that I was there.
I have had to grow a little more since then but I still

have ended up publishing my own damned book now

and I'm glad I have. (I like this level.)
Another example of someone who spent time in the
Saint Ego level is General George Patton. The movie
Patton has a scene where, after successfully invading
Sicily, Patton is giving a press conference as he's
walking through a field. He uses some profanity, and a
lower-ranking reporter, trailing along in a carefully
pressed uniform, comments on the general's language.
George C. Scott, as Patton, delivers this line: If I
want it to stick, I give it to 'em loud and dirty, and then
they remember it.

The Level of Philosopher/Charlatan

After a while at the Muhammad Ali level of
consciousness, a being may have a dawning revelation
that leads to the next level of consciousness. We
recognize that bragging about being superior by virtue
of the inferiority of others is not very superior, and
even if it is, so what? We are equal as a being to other
beings. When we brag about being better than, smarter
than, or superior to other people, it is not our being we
are referring to, it is our beliefs. We come to
understand that the beliefs we have generated from
our own life experience are just more beliefs. This
includes our belief in our own superiority. We start
losing faith in our own ego. We begin to see through
our own mind. So what that we are superior to
fundamentalists? What does that mean? We know that
their attachment to their beliefs doesn't work, but we

are still attached to a few we call our own, one of

which is about our so-called superiority.
At this point, partly out of desperation, we begin to
enroll other people in our hard-earned beliefs (that is,
we start selling our beliefs to others). Hopefully, a
whole bunch of others will pay to read these beliefs at
about fifteen bucks a book. (Ha!) Yep, this is my main
level these days. It's called the level of
Philosopher/Charlatan. The beliefs I have generated
from my hard-earned experience are, I know, just
more beliefs, but I'm selling them to you nevertheless.
Most of us have had a taste of all these levels, though
we still remain generally entangled at the levels of
belief and social contracts. So it is easy to go up or
down two or three levels in a very short period of
time. But the place you spend most of your time in is
your level these days.
You know what I am talking about here. You may
not spend a lot of time at this level, but you've
experienced it when you were trying to sell other
people on the virtues of your beliefs. If not, you
wouldn't be reading these so-called self-help books. At
this level, you acknowledge that you know more than
most, you know that doesn't mean much, and you try
to sell what you can to make the most of it even
though your general opinion of yourself as superior
doesn't do much for you anymore, given your
knowledge that a superior person and a regular person
aren't recognizably different.

The Level of Despair

Here we are, unfortunately, becoming superior to
being superior. We are on the cusp of a very high level
of consciousness, the next rung on the ladder, known
as the level of Despair. Despair comes from root
words in both Latin and Greek that mean down from
hope. We no longer hope. We have no hope. We have
nothing to hope for. We are hopeless. We have nothing
left to believe in, including our own hard-earned
beliefs.
We have come to understand that all beliefs, even
our beliefs based on our own experience and our
beliefs about who we are, are worthless. We get that
we are compulsive meaning-making machines who
endlessly make meaning out of everything, and it is all
a waste. We realize that life is meaningless. This is a
very high level of human consciousness. Werner
Erhard said, Until you know that your life is utterly
meaningless you don't know anything at all. At this
level, you get that the preacher Koeloth in the book of
Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament is right when he
says, All is vanity, and a striving after the wind, and
there is no profit in it. We are worth exactly nothing.
We are not of significant negative value (a popular ego
trip), or of significant positive value (all the hype
about self-esteem and positive thinking, and all the
previous levels of consciousness, and so on). We are
of no value. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Nothing.

Now, at this level, we're really getting somewhere.

Then it dawns on us that becoming more conscious is
not necessarily correlated with becoming happier.
There are no guarantees about nothing, and that's not
bad grammar and it's not just a pun. Now what?
Well, if we don't run away to lower levels of
consciousness as quick as we can (which, of course
we do, the first thirty or forty times we reach this
level) we get born into the next, very high level of
consciousness, known as the level of Suicidal Panic.

The Level of Suicidal Panic

At this level, we either kill ourselves or we don't.
We are desperate for something to believe in. If we
don't kill ourselves, we eventually run out of panic.
We are at a very high level of consciousness, known
as Suicidal Panic, and then we don't kill ourselves
and we are no longer in a panic. That, then, is the next
level. But before we name and describe that level, let's
focus a bit on what the panic at this level is about. The
panic is from not having a single thing to believe in at
all, not even despair. We get that not only is our life
utterly meaningless, but the fact that our life is utterly
meaningless is also utterly meaningless. We can't even
get off on being an existentialist philosopher any
more! We can't get meaning out of preaching
meaninglessness any more! We are left with nothing.
All we have is what the Buddhists call suchness,
the present experience of being, right now, whatever it
is, and nothing more. All that is left is just what is in

front of us and within us to experience right now. We

face the hard Buddhist saying, which is written on the
wall of my office: If you understand, things are as
they are. If you do not understand, things are as they
are.

The Level of Here and Now

When the panic is gone, we arrive at the next level,
which is called the level of Here and Now. At this
level we are present to being present. We are grounded
in noticing. We have lost our minds and come to our
senses. If someone else is there, we are present to
being present to them. The being we are notices the
being in themthe being they are. Our presence to
their being salutes their being's presence to us.' This is
what Kierkegaard was talking about when he said,
When a person relates to another, and relates also to
that relationship, they relate thereby to God. Here, at
this level, is where love becomes possible. Not a belief
in love, but love its own self.
This level is the focus, certainly, of Buddhism and
of most spiritual practice and psychotherapy and
group process work when the leaders actually know
what they are doing.
The level called Here and Now has three aspects.

Here and Now but Still Wishing for

Something to Believe In

When we first enter the here and now, it has a

negative quality. We still wish we had something to
believe in and are sorry we don't. We yearn for the
former phony security of our belief in meaning
beyond the moment. We are present to what is going
on in the moment but we wish there was more to
expect than just more moments.

Neutral Feeling Here and Now

After a while, we become completely neutral about
not having anything to believe in. We are present. We
don't feel bad that all we have is this. It's not great. We
don't feel good about it; we don't feel bad about it; we
are completely neutral.

Positive Feeling Here and Now

Then after a while, we still have no hope and
nothing to believe innothing but suchness,and that
is just fine with us. We begin to feel good about it.
There is nothing to believe in, only the present
experience of being alive in the moment, which
includes everything (all of the past and all we can
imagine of the future, including our own death), and
that is just fine.
There are actually six levels above this one, but I am
only going to describe one more, the next one. If you
want to learn about the other levels of consciousness,
do our Course in Honesty or find out from Oscar
Ichazo or the Arica training or Gurdjieff or someone

else who knows more about the traditional way of

teaching this model than I do anyway. My version has
been modified based on real-life experiences of my
friends and myself for the past twenty-five years.

The Level of Pure Reason

The next level after the level of Here and Now is
called the level of Pure Reason. Isn't that
something!? We've gone to all this trouble to escape
from the jail of alienation our minds create, and the
first thing that happens after we get grounded in our
experience is we get our minds back! What a
difference, though. We now have a mind that is not
bound to the defense of our ego. We have this
wonderful instrument we worked so hard to grow, and
now we can use it! It turns out to be a fantastic
instrument for creating! Daydreams become amenable
for action! Fantasies become visions! Escapist
hopefulness and desperate attempts at reassurance
about our self-worth and the entanglement of selfimage promotion and maintenance become just
possible scenarios to play with. We don't need that
mind for our identity anymore! Our identity is the
being we are, in the here and now! Our identity
precedes our mind! We take ownership of our mind
and take it out for a test drive! Hoohah!
This is the part where you start to consider the life
of the creator. At Pure Reason we can think like we
have never thought before. We become truly a free
thinker. We see the possibility of a lifetime of play and

service. As Kris Kristofferson says, Freedom's just

another word for nothin' left to lose.
The experience of living for a while, grounded in
your experience of the here and now, leads to thinking
about that experience. Sitting in that place, we come to
understand things we never understood before. We get
that the source of our historical being and the source
of our present being is like a generator that has been
running reliably ever since it started. Getting back to
our source is the first step to transcendence. When we
pay attention to the being we are, we withdraw
attention from the dilemmas of the mind.
This is at the heart of Buddhism, Yoga, Vedantic
philosophy, Christian salvation, and other forms and
practices of enlightenment. When a Zen Buddhist sits
and looks at a wall fourteen hours a day, seven days in
a row, he does it to be able to sit and look at a wall. To
be able to sit and look at a wall and just sit and look at
a wall is enlightenment. To sit and look at the story of
your life like you would sit and look at a wall means
you have recontacted your source in the same way as
the Buddhist in front of the wall.

Summary
Well, this is what we have to go through once we
have a mind, to get back to identifying with our
experience in the here and now as who we are. We did
this when we were little but we grew out of it. If we
can remember, it was a lot of fun. Now we get to do it

again, only with better toys and more appreciation of

what we've got!
This is our story. All of us.
The poet and artist e. e. cummings, who knew that
the source of love is in the here and now, and who was
above all else a creator, wrote this poem about our
mutual journey. As you read it, pretend that there is a
boy named Anyone and a girl named no one.
Pretend they met and loved each other and lived for a
while and died. Pretend they are both each one of us.
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring autumn summer winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.
Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones

laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then) they
said their nevers they slept their dream
stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)
one day anyone died I guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was
all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.
Women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain11

Chapter Seven

Adults Are Nothing But

Large Children Who Have
Forgotten How To Play
This chapter title is a quote from the following talk
by Tom Robbins, one of the best-loved novelists of
our time. Robbins is a tremendously creative author
(Skinny Legs and All12, Still Life with Woodpecker ,
Another Roadside Attraction , etc.).
Tom Robbins is a creator. He models what a creator
does and how he lives. He is funny, and able to laugh
at past and present tragedy and the pretentiousness of
belief systems for all the world. He is a model creator
who lightens us up before we launch into the hard
work of life design and community building. This
attitude of play and irreverence for all past tradition is
absolutely essential for people who begin to make a
life of creating.
He gave this speech to an alternative high school
graduating class several years ago. When I asked him
for permission to publish it, he responded immediately
with a confessional letter, from which the following is
excerpted:
13

14

When, back around 1975, I was invited to deliver

the commencement address at a small alternative high
school in Oak Harbor, Washington, I accepted largely
because I was enamored of a young woman connected
to the school, and wanted to charm her into my bed.
Having to write the speech in a hurry, and searching
for a punchy way to begin it, I added to my shame by
borrowingnay, stealing!the opening paragraph, and
the two with which I closed it, from another, now
fogotten, source.
At the time, I was contributing fairly regularly to
underground newspapers, and the underground press
had a free-exchange policy. Nobody was proprietary
and credits counted for very little. Therefore, I felt not
a pang of guilt in appropriating three quirky paragraps
about life after death from one of the papers,
especially since I had no intention of publishing my
speech and never expected it to survive the evening
that it was delivered.
Now that it has resurfaced to haunt me (apparently
one of the teachers surreptitiously taped the talk and
later circulated it), I must apologize to the unknown
author whose words I lifted, and say that I'm more
than happy to give them back. Please be assured that
all of the remainder of the speech was my own
original work, and that I never made a dime from it
although I did get laid.
Here is the advice he gave the graduating class:
I am often asked whether there is life after death.
Certainly there is. There is also death after life, and

life before death, and death before life. It goes on

forever. In fact, you already have.
As for Heaven and Hell, they are right here on
Earth, and it is up to each of you in which one you
choose to reside. To put it simply Heaven is living in
your hopes and Hell is living in your fears.
In the traditional image, where hell is down and
heaven is up, one escapes from hell by digging a hole
in the ceiling. Though in an age of downers and
uppers down and up no longer make sense, it is still
possible to think of in and out. Think of hell as in and
heaven as out. To get out of hell you expend your soul
until it is pushing on all the walls from the inside all
the way around. If you just maintain a steady pressure,
your soul will gradually filter out into limitless heaven
beyond.
One problem with the notion of Heaven and Hell,
however, is that, although they are exact opposites, an
astonishing number of people seem to be confused
about which is which. For example, all over the
United States on this very evening, commencement
speakers are standing before audiences not greatly
unlike yourselves, describing Hell as if they were
talking about Heaven.
Their speakers are saying things such as,
Graduating seniors, you have reached the golden
threshold of maturity; it is time now to go out into the
world and take up the challenge of life, time to face
your hallowed responsibility.

And if that isn't one Hell of a note, it's certainly

one note of Hell.
When I hear the word maturity spoken with such
solemn awe, I don't know whether to laugh or get sick.
There circulates a common myth that once one
becomes an adult, one suddenly and magically gets it
altogether and, if I may use the vernacular, discovers,
where it's at. Ha ha. The sad funny truth is, adults are
nothing but tall children who have forgotten how to
play.
When people tell you to grow up, they mean
approximately the same thing they mean when they
tell you to shut up. By shut up they mean stop
talking, by grow up they mean stop growing.
Because as long as you keep growing, you keep
changingand a person who is changing is
unpredictable, impossible to pigeon-hole and difficult
to control. The growing person is not an easy target
for those guys in the slick suits who want you to turn
over your soul to Christ, your heart to America; your
butt to Seattle First National Bank and your armpits to
new extra crispy Right Guard.
No, the growing person is not an ideal consumer,
which means, in more realistic terms, he or she is not
an easy slave. Worse yet, if he or she continues to
grow, grows far enough and long enough, he or she
may get too close to the universal mysteries, the
nature of which the Navy and the Dutch Reform
Church do not encourage us to ponder. The growing
person is an uncomfortable reminder of the greater

human potential that each of us might realize if we

had the guts.
So society wants you to grow up. To reach a safe,
predictable plateau and root there. To muzzle your
throb, to lower the volume on the singing in your
blood. Capers all cut, sky finally larked, surprises
known: SETTLE DOWN-settle, like the sand in the
bottom of an hour glass, like a coffin six months in the
ground. ACT YOUR AGEwhich means, act their
age, and that has, from the moment they stopped
growing, always been old.

Growing Up Is a Trap
As for responsibility, I am forced to ask,
Responsibility to what? To our fellow humans? Two
weeks ago, the newspapers reported that a federal
court had ruled that when a person's brain stops
functioning, that person is legally dead, even though
his or her heart may continue to beat. That means that
80% of the population of the Earth is legally dead.
Must we be responsible to corpses?
No, you have no responsibility except to be
yourself to the fullest limit of yourself, and to find out
who you are. Or, perhaps I should say, to remember
who you are. Because deep down in the secret velvet
of your heart, far beyond your name and your address,
each of you knows who you really are. And that being
who is the true you cannot help but behave graciously
to all other beingsbecause it is all other beings.

Yet,
we
are
constantly
reminded
of
ourresponsibility. Responsibility means obey
orders without question, don't rock the boat, and for
God's sake, get a job. (Get a job. Sha na na na.) That's
the scary one. Get a job. It is said as if it were a holy
and ancient and inviolable law of nature. But the fact
is, although cultural humanity has been on Earth for
some 2 million years, the very concept of jobs is only
about 500 years old. A drop in the bucket, to coin a
phrase. And with advent of an electronic cybernetic
automated technology, jobs are on the way out again.
Jobs were just a flash in the pan, a passing fancy.
There is no realistic relationship between jobs and
workwork being defined as simply one of the more
serious aspects of play any more than there is a
realistic relationship between jobs and eating. It is
curious how many people believe if it weren't for jobs
they couldn't eat. As if it weren't for Boeing their jaws
wouldn't chew, if it weren't for the Navy their bowels
wouldn't move and if it weren't for Weyerhauser, that
great destroyer of plantsplants wouldn't grow.
Technocratic assumptions about the identity of
humanity, society and nature have warped our
experience at its source and obscured the basic natural
sense of things. Rabbits don't have jobs. When was the
last time you heard of a rabbit starving to death?
Ah, but we must be responsible, and if we are, then
we are rewarded with the white man's legal equivalent
of looting: a steady job, secure income, easy credit,
free access to all the local emporiums and a home of

your own to pile the merchandise in! And so what if

there is no magic in your life, no wonder, no
amazement, no playfulness, no peace of mind, no
sense of unity with the universe, no giggling joy, no
burning passion, no deep understanding, no
overwhelming love? At least your ego has the
satisfaction of knowing you are a responsible citizen.
Responsibility is a trap.
As a matter of fact, the entire System into which
you were born and which now, upon completion of
high (high?) school you must perhaps face more
directly, is a System designed to trap youand
manipulate you as a co-operating slave, a System
designed to steep you in Hell.
Hell is living in your fears, and it is through fear,
both subtle and overt, that the System traps you: Fear
of failure, fear of social rejection, fear of poverty, fear
of punishment, fear of death.
For example, we once were taught to fear
something called Communism, and millions of
Americans have gone to sleep each night wondering if
Mao Tse Tung is under their bed. Conversely, on the
other side of the world millions of Russians and
Chinese have gone to sleep wondering if Henry
Kissinger is tinder their bed. Our Totalitarian
government used the hoax of the threat of
Communism to control and enslave us, just as the
totalitarian communist governments used the hoax and
the threat of capitalism to enslave their people. It's an
extremely old and obviously effective trick.

You see, the powers behind Communism and the

powers behind Capitalism are virtually the same
people. We might also include the powers behind the
Vatican and the powers behind Islam. Their main
function is to mystify the popular mind by creating
illusions of omnipotence and omniscience with which
to command docility from their subjects, while at the
same time creating illusions of health, happiness and
fulfillment for their subjectsalthough it does not
require much thorough investigation to discover that
few of the peoples of the world are healthy, happy or
fulfilled.
But never mind, there are ways out of the trap,
ways, as I earlier suggested, out of Hell.
The only advice I have for you tonight is not to
actively resist or fight the System, because active
protest and resistance merely entangles you in the
System.
Instead, ignore it, walk away from it, turn your
backs on it, laugh at it. Don't be outraged, be
outrageous! Never be stupid enough to respect
authority unless that authority first proves itself
respectable. And, unfortunately, there is no officially
sanctioned authority today, from the President of the
United States down to the cop on the beat, that has
earned the right to your respect.
So, be your own authority, lead yourselves. Learn
the ways and means of the Ancient yogi masters, Pied
Piper, cloud walkers, and medicine men. Get in
harmony with nature. Listen to the loony rhythms of

your blood. Look for beauty and poetry in everything

in life. Let there be no moon that does not know you,
no spring that does not lick you with its tongues.
Refuse to play it safe, for it is from the wavering edge
of risk that the sweetest honey of freedom drips. Live
dangerously, live lovingly. Believe in magic. Nourish
your imagination. Use your head, even if it means
going out of your mind. Learn, like the lemon and the
tomato learned, the laws of the sun. Become aware,
like the jungle became aware, of your own perfume.
Remember that life is much too serious to take
seriously. Remember to never forget how to play.
In times of doubt and chaos, it has been the duty of
superior personsartists, poets, scientists, clowns, and
philosophers (certainly not statesmen or military
heroes)to create order in the psychic vibrations of
their fellow beings. But in times such as ours, times
that are too carefully ordered, too strictly organized,
too expertly managed, thoroughly programmed and
carefully planned, times in which too few control too
many, it is the duty of all feeling, thinking,
humanitarian people to toss their favorite monkey
wrenches into the machinery. On second thought, you
do have some responsibility to your fellow beings. To
relieve the repression of the human spirit, it is your
sacred duty to screw things up royally.
Looking at you tonight, I know you're going to do
just fine.
Let me wrap this up with a few short questions I
am often asked.

 Will we be eaten by bugs and worms?

We ought to be. We have eaten, and we ought to be
eaten. This is the Justice, and there is no stopping
it. If you have your body burned, starving the earth
to glorify a memory, you are asking for trouble.
Does your soul fly out of your body at the moment
you die? No, this is a foolish superstition. Your
soul is constantly flying out of your body in just
the same way that energy is constantly flying out
of the sun. At the moment your body dies, the soul
stops flying out.
Is
Jesus
coming
back?
Yes, all the time. And so are you. All the souls echo
forever throughout the universe. I hope you have a
wonderful trip.

This is the end of Part 1. To read the rest, go to

https://store.radicalhonesty.com/ where you can order
Practicing Radical Honesty as a paperback, ebook or
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