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writing for godot

The Radical Honesty Revolution

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Written by Brad Blanton   
Wednesday, 26 December 2012 01:48
THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS, PART TWO: THE RADICAL HONESTY REVOLUTION—OCCUPYING OURSELVES
by
Brad Blanton, Ph.D.

The unification of personal growth and social activism is a movement called Radical Honesty. It is based on the insight that honest sharing of what is real is the way empathy gets stronger in you and in the world at the same time. I started the Radical Honesty movement but I am no longer in charge of it. I try to keep up and say what I think we are doing together these days. Here’s what I think.

Relief and deliverance from the jail of your own mind comes from open sharing of information and the undoing of secrets and lies. This is the source of both personal and political power. With honesty you become personally more self-possessed, less self obsessed, and give yourself to others for the sake of all our mutual benefit. The power of living out loud applies simultaneously to psychological personal growth and social change. The social change part includes simply not putting up with secrets and lies on the part of groups of people, including the government, corporations or other secret societies.
We think there is a trail from personal growth to the creation of a new social order. Here are a few distinctions that mark the trail:
STEP ONE: A change in personal identity
Your mind is not your being.
Your performance is not your identity.
Your being notices.
Your mind thinks.
One of the things your mind thinks is that it notices.
Your mind is wrong about that.
STEP TWO: Reminding each other we are human beings
Your mind is a limited function of your being. Your mind’s job is to be second in command. Your presence to and noticing of your sensate present tense being comes first. Noticing first. Thinking second.
Your mind can do a lot of things but one thing it cannot do is notice. Your mind is not capable of noticing. The best it can do is report what you notice as a sensate being, and distinguish those reports from what you think. Unless you are grounded in attending to your experience your mind is a worse than useless instrument.
Usually, your mind makes clang associations between current and past events, confuses them, and then makes what appear to be logical comparisons of experiences in your life. (The associations between past and present are images from the past and interpretations you made of those experiences. They are psychological associations, not logical calculations.) Your mind believes and pretends the interpretations are real and does a sales pitch for them to others. That is a multiplying mistake. Your mind is not your most reliable instrument of orientation. This leads to one of our mottoes: “A mind is a terrible thing. Waste it!”
Interpretations can be useful. But interpretations presented as reality are phony information that fucks all of us up completely. Your mind lies all the time. “This is what I think. Therefore this is real” is the fundamental root of the miserable insanity of civilized human history. Your mind constantly “forgets” that judgments are not the same as noticing.
Fundamentalists of all religions sell judgments, insights, comparisons, evaluations, rules, thoughts, etc. as more important than experience. That’s how enlightening spiritual revelation devolves into mere religion. Faith devolves to belief—with terrible murderous consequences over the last 5400 years of civilization. This appears (to my mind) to get worse as civilization gets older.
Our survival as a species depends upon a speedy modification of both ourselves and almost all aspects of religious civilization. Or else, our extinguishment as a species will be the final proof that belief, sold as reality, is not viable.
STEP THREE: Correcting our insane historical identity
Because of this mistake (about belief being real), and stored ignorance about the history of this mistake, who we think we are, individually, is wrong. So our minds are incorrect about our actual personal identity.
Your mind thinks that who you are is the sum total of your performances and how well you have performed. This determines your value. If you buy that, and identify yourself as the sum and judged quality of your performances, your chance for personal happiness is ruined—and will be for as long as you hold on to that belief.
Your mind was formed in a culture. And no matter where in the world you live these days, you culture has been influenced by the metaculture I call “the Judaic/Christian Western Corporatocracy End-the-World Complex.”
Your culture is insane.
And your culture is not just outside of you. Your culture lives in your mind. So as Mark Twain said, “We are all mad.” Healing our mutual insanity depends on more honest sharing than a “performance identity” allows for. This is why the reveal—you—shun is the revolution.
STEP FOUR: Simultaneous self and social psychiatry
The opportunity exits to heal your own and our culture’s insanity at the same time. If you primarily identify yourself as a present tense noticing being, you can change your delusional reactive life based on unfinished business from the past, to a more accurate creative and happier life. You can begin using your mind instead of being used by it. This helps you and other people instead of having all of us wasting our lives for a false illusion of success.
Grounded in your new identity as a noticing being, you can use your formerly lying-in-wait and lying mind for honest dialogue with other beings who have, rather than are, minds. You can reveal what you have kept hidden and engage in the process of forgiveness. You can have a co-hearted co-minding experience of co-operation. You and co-hearted co-horts can create a future for yourself and those you care for as artists of transformation—a life of contribution to others, with the help of others, for the sake of all of us.
Life artists in affiliation with each other can tear down what is poison and build up what is nurturing at the same time, both within and in the world outside. We can undo the dysfunctional systems that support the ways of identifying ourselves as mere believers. And we can co-create new systems that nourish our more grounded identity as sharing animals with minds. We can build and maintain (through deep democracy by grounded beings) a world that works.
Once you know your real identify, as a being grounded in the present, related to gravity and other people in the simplest and most immediate way, you can give yourself a break. You can pause in the chaos of today's modern world, renew and restore your creative focus on your own life and make your presence a gift and example to others. You can complete what is incomplete with others and make peace with your past so it doesn’t invade your and our present.
It helps a lot at this point to learn to meditate. We can teach you that.
The most gratifying life is one used consciously in affiliation with other life artists, in service to other beings.
STEP FIVE: Overthrowing the Government with Shared Information
"There is a war going on between those who believe that the power of information lies in its capacity to be withheld—that information is power if you can keep it to yourself. This is not how it works really. Information is power if you can share it, validate it, vet it, and contribute it to that global awareness that we are all here in the process of creating." John Perry Barlow
Our social reform efforts are not educational in the usual way. We are more like guerilla information sharers. We are radical interventionists. What we do is a kind of perennial occupy/retreat strategy of confrontation of all those in power in the maim-harm-and-kill-for-profit machine and the brainwashed who support them.
We challenge the whole world by describing the dysfunctional untruth of personal identity as performance. And we tell the truth about all of the historical and ongoing religious corporate billionaire rape that’s grown out of that dysfunctional identity. We link instances (health care rip-offs, bankster gangsters, student loan manipulation and usury legislation, Wall Street lies, mortgage rackets, lobbyist created subsidies, over 30 U.S. “security agencies” to spy and lie and protect “government secrets,” defense spending graft and corruption, many actual proven conspiracies, etc.) We share about the current world economy, run by thieves who make themselves legitimate by laws passed with bribery, where millions of people in hundreds of ways are being deprived and starved for profit for corporate sociopaths and their obedient servants. We tell how Iceland prosecuted their bankers and ran them out of the country, and now has one of the strongest economies of the European Community. We describe how 400,000 of the richest people (three tenths of one percent of the population of the U.S.) “own” and control most of the world’s economy. We point out, over and over again…that we outnumber them 99.7 to one!
This is a “tough love” psychotherapeutic approach using the revelation of many instances of violation of common human caring—a kind of psychological guerrilla warfare we might call linked revelations. They add up to a cumulative experience of joy that comes from speaking and hearing and helping each other and getting justice instead of a raw deal. Joy comes by showing real needs for real changes, and then bringing them about with a little help from our friends.
What we do breaks through to the dunderheads and scares the shit out of the establishment who already know they don’t have a wheel to stand on. Then we make a quick retreat before they can bring in their superior military force to bear and then laugh at them again. Then we go and put our arms around them. And they put their arms down—to hug us back instead of kill us.
Chris Moon reports on Hakim Bey’s idea of “Temporary Autonomous Zones” which show up in social actions like those played out in the #occupy movement – where the experience of temporary freedom from control by the state—can come and go, but accumulates for all those who participated on both sides. These “Temporary Autonomous Zones” occur intra-personally as well. When psychotherapy works the internal experience of sudden freedom from domination by the “shoulds” of the moralistic top dog/bottom dog superego battle of the mind results in a joyful experience of wholeness. And when people, through observing and questioning their own internal dialogue, let up on themselves they let up on others at the same time. Those instances accumulate to result in cumulative therapeutic change—they are actual physical experiences (physically experience-able sensations) of freedom. Psychotherapy that works is the accumulation of these experiences of realization and peace. When people who suffer from severe internal judgment of self and others let up and talk to each other about it, they feel happier and then, social change occurs!

Summary

The control of ourselves that comes from noticing, then thinking, then sharing, then noticing again, then sharing, then thinking—is sufficient for our mutual governance and the successful management of our individual lives. We don’t need more than that. That will do.

The cumulative effect of joyful sharing of information and power is what our new personal and social occupy movement is about. We will not overcome the state with force. We will undermine the state and its force by the accumulation of experiences of temporary joyful experiences of autonomy and temporary autonomous zones. This results in mutual control by people who relate to each other and to other living beings with compassion. We say, “Hey! We don’t need all these cops and soldiers!” We don’t! We don’t need them inside or outside! That revelation is the revolution.

This wholly human disease we attempt to heal together in this way is called moralism—the belief that being right and not being wrong is more important than being alive. It is hard to deal with because it is both inside and outside. Healings operate only temporarily from the inside and re-infection is always available from the outside. It is possibly a terminal disease. Immunity does not exist, but a cumulative resistance both inside and out could work. It depends on us.

At the Center for Radical Honesty we are sponsoring three online courses that follow these five steps. Course one starts in March. Join us and help us.

Love, brad blanton www.radicalhonesty.com
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