Radical Honesty : How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth

For my own good, I want to hang out with people who want to find out what it would be like to live in such a way as to leave no unspoken words, no unfinished business; I want to be with people who are hungry for the truth, who want to spend time learning and sharing what they have learned rather than defending their images or reputations.

Most of us would rather kill ourselves than be, particularly if who we think we are keeps dying. Many of us do.

Politeness and diplomacy are responsible for more suffering and death than all the crimes of passion in history. Fuck politeness. Fuck diplomacy. Tell the truth.

We all lie like hell. It wears us out. It is the major source of all human stress. Lying kills people.

When you are lying, when you are keeping a secret, when you are withholding information or feelings in any moment, you are always doing that to protect something meaningless.

Love is when you let someone be the way she is. When you let up on your judgments of someone, there is a free space in which forgiveness and love occur.

The kind of lying that is most deadly is withholding, or keeping back information from someone we think would be affected by it.

Therapy is over when a person stops incessantly demanding that other people be different from what they are, forgives his or her parents and other begrudged former intimates, reclaims the power to make life work, and takes responsibility for doing so.

A mind is a terrible thing; waste it.

We learn to "act nice" and deny that we are angry, and we make ourselves sick in the process of denial. This is one of the main areas in which something we can't tell the truth about ruins our lives.

Instead of amalgamations of parts having contradictory and uncontrollable purposes, suppose we consider ourselves to be already what we long to be: functional, integrated wholes who produce the results we choose, effortlessly, with our entire beings. Suppose we all, already, are that. All the apparent contradictions and dichotomies the fat person struggling to be thin, the sinner trying to be good, the workaholic longing for time with his family are actually smokescreens, false struggles enacted by our own minds to hide from others or ourselves our true intent. Our true intent is to do just what we do.

Your anger is unreasonable and unfair. Let it stay that way. Trying to make it seem reasonable - which usually consists of trying to make the resented person wrong - is the source of all the judgments and explanations that remove you further from the person and further from your experience of the sensations that arose in your body.

It's not normal to be honest. What is normal is to be concerned foremost with having a good cover story. Normal people are concerned with figuring out the right thing to say that puts them in the best light. They want to live up to their own best guess about what the people they are talking to want to hear.

Wishing is a way to remove oneself from what is going on now. Hope springs eternal. Fuck hope. Hope is how most of us avoid growing up.

Manipulation never works to get the result desired, but it always seems like it's just about to work. When you get what you said you wanted by manipulation, it is never enough.

The stress that kills or cripples most of the population comes from people being too hard on themselves when they don't live up to their own imaginings about how other people think they should behave.

According to Hugh Thomas, author of 'A History of the World', the greatest medical advance in history has been garbage collection. The greatest psychological advance in history is just around the corner and will also have to do with cleaning up. Cleaning up lies and "coming out of the closet" is getting more attention these days. Some day we will look back on these years of suffocation in bullsh*t in the same way we look back on all the years people lived in, and died from, their garbage.

Meaninglessness is of great value. When you finally get that who you actually are is empty and meaningless, it doesn't matter to you whether you are a jerk or not. There is where your power lives.

It may feel less secure than if everyone agrees on what is true, but the feeling of security is just that - a feeling, not the real thing. Less secure is often more reliable.

Whatever your main struggle is, it is insignificant in the face of your death; it is petty and unimportant and has no meaning at all. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Many of us won't express anger with a loved one. We believe that if we expressed our resentment, it would destroy our relationship and our beloved would leave us.

What is true changes, so we can't tell the truth once and be done with it. It's an ongoing game.

Bullshit is a sales pitch for an interpretation of reality that comes with any interpretation of reality. All interpretations of reality are bullshit. Freedom is not being dominated by your own bullshit.

Most people, however, won't express their resentment in person to the person at whom they are angry. Instead, they gossip, complain, criticize, fantasize about telling the person off, and let it out in other indirect ways. Suppression and displacement to ideals, indignation, and judgments (against others and ourselves) usually work well enough that by the time we males reach 18 years of age and some elder asshole tells us to kill some people to defend some bullshit principle, we run right out and do it.

Integrity, wholeness, at-one-ness, is the opposite of moralism. Having integrity is the opposite of being moral. If one has integrity, one doesn't need morals. People with integrity operate with rules of thumb, not morals.

We would rather be sure of a correctly predicted negative outcome than face the realistic uncertainty of an unpredictable future even if it includes the possibility of great joy and success.

When you speak descriptively about a present-tense experience, and it changes, you have spoken the truth. It's okay that it is no longer true. Don't worry about it. It is the way things are, and it is fine that they are that way. It's more fun and less boring than trying to keep track of everything. It's called freedom.

One of these games is called, "Okay, okay, I'm guilty." This game is to make it look like you have taken responsibility for yourself when you haven't. Admitting you are guilty is a great way to avoid being responsible.

When the truth changes from your speaking, you know you've spoken the truth.