Brutal Self-Honesty: The Key to Success

 "If you tell the truth, you won't have to remember anything." - Mark Twain

As 2013 comes to a close, I look back at the year and can clearly pick out the most important realization  I experienced in the 22/23rd year of my life: unflinching and relentless honesty with yourself and those around you brings clarity into your life and everyone you encounter.

Growing up in suburbia America, on a small middle-class WASPy island in the Puget Sound, I found it easy to get away with telling half-truths, exaggerations of reality, and relating to others who also "turned a burp into a fart" to make for funnier conversation, awe, ego-stroking, or any number of reasons one would want to spice up a story.

This exaggeration became so natural, I began to confuse myself with what actually happened and what I imagined happened, leaving much of my childhood hazy and difficult to remember with any sense of certainty.

No more.

Having now understood this seemingly harmless state of being to be, in my personal experience, completely destructive, I'd decided to be a truth-teller so-as to more clearly live my life and provide honest insight from my experiences as one who seeks what is Real.

I like to think about telling the truth like this: as you live your life, you are constantly "building the foundations" for your home (your life). When you lie, exaggerate, steal, cheat, or are dishonest in anyway, you are essentially laying a damaged/lower-quality foundation from which everything else will be built upon.

If you build a house with a shaky foundation, that house will fall, and it seems that telling the truth and being honest with yourself allows one to build the foundation of their character much stronger than someone who is constantly fluffing their and others' lives up with distorted perceptions with ulterior motives.

Total honesty is a hard place to get to, especially if one has, like myself, lived completely immersed in their own self-delusion.

STAY FOCUSED! You may find, as I did, that most of what you take to be "real" about yourself is actually made up and that looking deep brings up pain, long-forgotten past experiences, and/or negative belief patterns embedded in your psych. These findings, whether positive or negative, are apart of YOU and are important factors in who you are today.

When was the last time you asked yourself, "why do I believe xyz?" If you take a thought, any thought, ("I like this," "I shouldn't have done that," "that is cool,") and follow it back through your mind, you will find, as one of my teachers Adyashanti did, that each thought that surfaces in your mind has a whole belief system tied behind it, driving the thought forward.

As one begins to unravel the inner-workings of their mind, and makes the vow to be honest with what they find, these unraveling reveal a deeper-sense of self from discovering why one thinks the way they do.

From Tiny Buddha,

"Only you know if you’ve been lying to yourself. Other people may think they know what’s going on in your head and what’s right for you. But only you know what you need to do and whether or not you’re doing it.Only you know what you believe and whether or not you’re honoring it.Only you know what your values are and whether or not you’re upholding  them.Only you know if you’re projecting onto other people to avoid taking responsibility for your own life.And only you can decide to get brave, stop lying, and start being the person you know you want to be–in thoughts, words, and actions.Have you been lying to yourself–and is it time to start creating happiness in the way that only you can?"

"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending." - Carl Bard

Rambles from the Deep

This is what comes out of me in an hour. I can feel the blockage, and now the leak... soon to be flood of ideas, information, misinformation even, feelings, thoughts, remembrances and wishes... puked onto a blog in hopes that something hits for someone, somewhere at sometime.

Gotta figure, my experiences and insights may lead others to other insight upon conscious crystallization to blog.

All day, I have been feeling that some wave of crystallization (a word I picked up from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Racing by Robert M. Pirsig) is going to hit me and leave me temporarily dazed from the clarity. I remember from some spiritual text I've browsed that a longing for this sort of state is injecting desirous energy into the mix which is never a good thing and this loses my train of thought for a while.

In the Seattle Public Library downtown today, sitting on the 10th floor in a red lawn-chair/beach-seat/throne-type chair, I meditated on the idea that everything I see, hear, think, process, is going to be a past interpretation of what is actually happening now, and that what is REAL, that is, in the same way, not an interpretation, has a strange aspect of being unknowable due to this time it takes to process through your senses.

Now that... is a sentence.

To put it more simply: actuality, reality, here and "the NOW", God, Om, is DIRECTLY known.

It just occurred to me to look at my doubt, and ask "why do I doubt myself?" Upon inspection, there was no reason, and so it only made sense to SEE without the doubt. What remained was how I saw before, only a weight lifted off the back side, an opening of the minds eye which extended into my own vision. The world didn't change. The kid standing across the street staring off into the distance is still standing across the street staring into the distance as I type this.

Why doubt yourself? Why even doubt other people without repeated acts of distrust? Doubt just clogs up the mental space, the available RAM, if you will, of the brain, with dysfunction and leaves one with a dim perception of it all.

Random ramblings... going nowhere... lets pick a topic now that I've dumped for a bit and see what happens.


What the Buddha Saw-
It seems to me that, in this day-and-age of TV and YouTube and corporate-owned everything, I have been swept into a mindless abyss of mental chatter, almost all of which do not belong to me. Who are these ghosts? These remembrances of fragments of verses of songs which clutter my brain during my waking hours? Why do they torment me? Like an addict, I give myself to these impulses of thought, these expressions of another's life, which take away from my own. No doubt due to my love for music, new and catchy hip-hop beats, hooks, rhymes dominate my mind. Over and over, day in and day out. The trick is, when I catch myself. What happens then? The moment I say to myself, "Hey, you've been quoting Drakes new verse for the last 72 hours, what's up?" There's a silence, an openness which can last for precious seconds. No thoughts come to mind during this period of Grace, only complete beauty and stillness. Then my ego-dominated thoughts come back and thoughts of how I can turn my spiritual endeavors into monetary conquests and then complete chaos and confusion kicks in. Impulsive thoughts and behaviors spring up that cause me to express myself in ways I don't mean around others. This paranoia is exacerbated by smoking marijuana, yet I have learned to see this paranoia as nothing other than the amplification of something that is already there, making it disproportionally big... scary for some yet perfect for those inquisitive enough to face their fear. Due to years of conditioning myself that what I say isn't worthy, I have shut myself in a tight space unable to feel and constricted by fear. This is obviously completely made up, and could be corrected by realizing again, that this fear has nothing behind it, which it now is, yet I know that this conditioning will continue from its sewing into the fabric of my being and need constant conscious undoing.

Eventually, so I've heard and read in many different places from different people at different times on different accounts, this undoing, or unraveling of this consciousness-structure, this mind this way of seeing this way of thinking this way of being this way of living... eventually completely falls out...

 and THAT is what the Buddha saw.