OK, so what about honesty?
What would it be for you, just among your friends
to change the degree of honesty?
What if you're just honest all the time, with everyone that you know?
People that you already know, and you weren't too worried
about being tactful, or diplomatic you just said whatever you thought,
like a kid, like a child.
What do you think it would do to your relationships?
What would be different
if you were radically honest?
There's a story of a woman who interviewed for a job,
and her potential boss asked her a question in the interview
What do you consider to be your worst fault?
She said, "Honesty".
He said, "I don't think honesty's a fault."
And she said, "I don't give a fuck what you think."
(Laughter)
I really like that joke.
I think, would you hire her if you were the boss?
I would.
I would want someone that I could depend on not to cater to me.
That I could rely on to handle things and be honest.
There is this problem about being honest about what's going through your mind,
and the problem is that we have three minds.
We have at least three minds,
and we've been taught all of our lives that our mind is a very valuable thing,
and that thinking is the most important thing.
I don't think that's right.
Our first mind is called the reactive mind
and that's basically we are a recording device,
we've been recording multisensory recordings
of what happens to us since we were in the womb.
We didn't have vision in there but we have these multisensory recordings
of successive moments of now.
We have them filed in a somewhat orderly fashion,
some of them weren't recorded too well, some of them were a little off
but they still are built into us, we have these records of things
we've experienced.
They're not just sight and sound, they're tasty, touchy, feely, smelly
proprioceptive recordings.
So that's one mind, that's called the reactive mind,
And that's because whenever something was recorded
it had a little bit of trauma in it or some shock or something like that,
that got recorded with it.
Then every now and then those things just kind of pop up
later on in your life.
So that's the reactive mind.
The next mind is called the personal construct mind.
That's based on replicated experiences.
We have this experience of something over and over again.
Say the baby has the experience of nursing, and then not nursing,
and then nursing and not nursing,
and after a while, after many, many repetitions of this,
a little construct begins in the mind of the baby:
nursing time and not nursing time.
Then the baby cries when it wants nursing and gets nursed,
and after a while that gets in there, and she starts operating on the construct:
nursing, wanting nursing, crying, and then getting nursed.
It works just fine except when she wants nursing, and she cries,
and she doesn't get it, she gets really really pissed off.
We have all these little things in there,
of expectations associated with constructs that we built in our minds.
That's what we call the personal construct mind.
Then we have the categorical mind,
or the planning mind, the linear mind,
the one we usually think of as our mind.
It's mostly verbal skills and has to do with
having definitions of things and points to objects and ideas;
the mind the way we think of it.
The problem is that these three minds turn on and off more or less at random,
and they're not very accurate.
In fact, there is a section of one of my books, titled--
- it's a take-off on the advertisement from the American Negro College Fund,
they say, "a mind is a terrible thing to waste" -
and my book says a mind is a terrible thing wasted.
These minds are very unreliable instruments,
and one of the things that makes them unreliable
is that they tend to get mixed up, they confuse each other.
Like our categorical mind likes to take responsibility for things
that just popped into our head.
We think it's basically just used to rationalize the impulse
that came from the reactive mind.
So then what are we to do?
Well, a New Yorker was stopped by a tourist and said,
"How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"
She said, "Practice, practice, practice."
Practice is what we need, and what you need to do is practice
knowing the difference between noticing and thinking.
Knowing the difference between noticing and thinking
and in a new context that is you've been taught
that thinking was the most important thing your whole life
- that's wrong -
noticing is much more important than thinking.
Thinking is an unreliable mess.
We have three minds and all of them are screwed up,
and they're interfering with each other
and the reactive mind is always trying to come up with things,
and the construct mind came up with an idea
that wasn't accurate in the first place, and now it's forgotten about half way,
and it interferes with the linear mind,
and we all try to take credit for the ideas that come to us,
but basically, we didn't come up with them,
they just jumped out of our mind.
So basically, the mind is not a very reliable thing.
In order to get some clarity, we need each other,
because my faulty mind needs to have a report delivered to your faulty mind
and we have to be able to talk about it,
which means, if we're not honest,
we'll just be even more fucked up than we already are.
So what we're after is some kind of clarity,
what we're after is something called co-hearted co-intelligence,
and I'll get to that in the end.
So what are we to practice?
We practice distinguishing between noticing and thinking.
Now, stick with me here, with a whole awareness continuum,
everything we can possibly be aware of can be divided easily into three parts.
You can be aware of what's going on outside of you right now,
I could be aware of you, you could be aware of me, right now.
That's one aspect of the awareness continuum.
The second aspect is you can be aware
of what's going on within the confines of your own skin right now in your body
- sensations: heat, cold, tingling, tension, warmth -
where they are in your body, you can be aware of that.
The third aspect is you can be aware
of what's going through your mind, right now.
All of these awarenesses are right now.
That's all there is, I call it inside, outside, upside down.
After my favorite children's book.
So you can notice what's going on in your body,
you can notice what's going on outside of you
and you can notice what's going through your mind right now.
The only problem is if you actually say to the voices in your mind,
"OK, go ahead, I'm listening,"
all of a sudden, your mind doesn't know whether to shit or go blind.
It just doesn't say anything
because it's run by resistance.
If you're trying to stop your mind that's the best way to keep it going.
So the noticing, is noticing what's happening outside of you,
it's noticing what's happening in your body,
and noticing what's going through your mind.
Radical honesty is reporting what you notice, period.
You report what you notice
without any particular, common ways of lying,
like politeness and being diplomatic.
Diplomacy works just the way--
the world is completely fucked up, and it's about diplomacy.
Usually, we talk about either we go to war or you use diplomacy.
That's not true.
Diplomacy is what causes war.
So what we're after is to get the value of paying attention.
So if you're going to report to another person
what you notice in your minds,
you have to report everything in all three minds.
They'll be contradictory;
your reacting mind will come up with something,
you'll say that out loud,
and then your linear mind will come up with something else,
you say that out loud, they contradict each other.
Then, your personal construct mind says something else,
and people think, "What are you, crazy?
All these things are going through your mind?"
Yes, and so are you.
So, we, crazy people, have to figure out a way
to do a better guess at what's going on.
But if you're lying,
nobody gets the chance to intervene for you,
and you don't get the chance to intervene for anyone else.
So what is the value of honesty?
You see, life is trouble. Period.
If you have three minds, you've got trouble.
If you tell a lie, you'll get in trouble.
If you tell the truth, you'll get in trouble.
So lying gets you in trouble, and telling the truth gets you in trouble.
And the question arises, which is the best kind of trouble?
And the best kind of trouble is the trouble that's caused
whenever you speak the truth.
Even if it upsets somebody, or hurts their feelings, or offends them.
I recommend that you offend people,
and I recommend that you hurt people's feelings,
and I recommend that you stick with them until they get over it;
It only takes about 90 seconds or so.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Thank you.
The noticing that you do has to be in a certain order.
We like for you to notice what's going on outside of you first,
use your eyes and ears, and your sense of balance,
and your relationship to gravity,
and notice what's going on in the world first.
Then report that to who ever's around.
Then secondly notice what's going on within the confines of your own skin.
I notice there's a sort of tension in my stomach,
a little tension in the right hand shoulder over here,
a little movement here, you report that,
and only after you reported those two,
then, you start reporting what's going through your minds.
Now, the best way to get in touch with what's going through your mind
is to start from the right place, and the right place is not in your mind.
You never want to begin any new project by thinking.
In fact, you want to be grounded in your experience
which means the awareness continuum.
I ran this eight day long workshop for about 20 years,
3 or 4 or 5 times a year, it was 8 days long,
about 16 people each time.
We spent 12, 14 hours a day trying to get
what a year of psychotherapy would do
condensed down into one week.
About 10 years into it, we discovered this amazing discovery.
We discovered a chant that puts you on the road to enlightenment;
in fact, you're enlightened within three minutes.
Now, I usually charge a whole lot of money for this,
but I'm going to give it to you guys for free.
This is the chant
that will lead without fail to enlightenment within three minutes.
(sobbing) Duuuuhhhhhhh...
Duuuuhhhhhhh...
And if you slobber, you get there in two minutes.
So you slobber...
(Laughter)
You used to get dumber than a stick, dumber than a box of hammers.
Duuuuhhhhhhh...
That's the way you start if you want to get enlightened.
You don't get enlightened by being smart,
being smart is the biggest blocked enlightenment there is, all right.
It's not by thinking.
So if you get grounded in your dumbness, what we call dumbfounded,
if you get dumbfounded,
there is a way you begin to notice
the way you usually interrupt noticing;
which is with your mind.
And the reason for doing all this is this:
when you experience an experience, it comes and goes.
When you resist experiencing an experience, it persists.
The major form of resisting your experience is by thinking.
So if you're thinking, trying to think your way around things,
what you first need to do
is to stop thinking and feel your way through things.
When you open up to your awareness in your body,
and your awareness of the other being across from you,
and your awareness of what's going through your mind,
and you report them all,
not as an advocate trying to persuade
how you're right and they're wrong or something,
but just to report, so you can share and check each other out,
then, you tell the truth about what you're experiencing,
because it's vital information that both of us need
in order for us to be able to make it in the world.
I believe that your personal happiness is critically related to this,
is dependent on this,
and I think that the survival of human kind is too.
So I want you to get out there and start being radically honest.
Thanks.
(Applause)