Radical Honesty

Radical Honesty

            Are you feeling some kind of weird feeling in your stomach when your talk about yourself. Are you feeling stressed all the time? You feel bad when you are talking to anyone?  Are you feeling bad because people will not be interested in what you are talking? Then you are lying.

Lying kills people. Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton is a book to read to be happy in your life by just being honest, it tells How to transform your life by telling the truth. Check out the book @ Radical Honesty - Brad Blanton

Before picking up this book I thought I was an honest person, but once you read through the book, I cannot tell myself being honest anymore, because I was bull shiting to this world living with an outer persona for each and every individual.

This book tells how we are telling lies to ourselves and others about everything and lying to everyone and every moment. Lying is the one which creates stress and psycho semantic illness.

Author builds the book with four parts which helps you to get an understanding of yourself, your mind, separating yourself from your mind and finally the war between Mind and Yourself. The parts are

                                           i.            The Being

                                        ii.            The Mind

                                     iii.            Liberation of the Being from its Mind

                                      iv.            Things learned from the war between Being & Mind

Before reading this book we need to understand certain things.

·        Where the stress comes from - It comes from the individual minds.

·        How we need to live a life learning from our experience and also we must unlearn things that we have already learned (Mostly childhood programming).

·        Leave the habit of self righteousness

            Next you need to know the TRUTH ALWAYS CHANGES, this one is a big piece for me, and one time which was right was now wrong, which was wrong before became right.

When we were teenagers most of the thing we do were  considered wrong  now has become part of social life, so reality always changes with time, so never stuck with the idea of being right.  

Next big piece is moralism, which is a disease of living in the mind with our belief and it kills everyone. Moralism is expecting others to do what we think is right.

Self righteous moralism is huge evil in today’s society, it let people thing that they are superior and let them stuck to useless things that makes them more stressed and it eventually makes the people lying to themselves and to others about the moral behavior they have chosen to live.

Being free from being moralistic behavior can help to get freedom from lying

            BullShit is common term used in this book; it talks about how our mind is bullshit creating machine, where it justifies whatever we do in our life. We lie to our selves for all things we do.

 We might do a worst thing on universe that is universally not acceptable; still we create a justified reason that has the conclusion, that what we did was right.

This chapter also gives example how we interpret reality, most of things we interpret in this world are always imaginary. Like imaginary fear, imaginary loss, imaginary rejection.

           

1st Chapter: The Being

            In this Chapter, author talks about moralism and first truth, how we learn to abstract, generalize and evaluate experience in this world.

We start this in early part of our childhood; we treat our experience and try to evaluate pleasure and pain. From then on we try to seek for pleasure and avoid pain which stop us to try new things to come out of little bubble.

 Author also talks moralism is a disease and how we have to outlive our moralism which was programmed to us in our early child hood. There is no right or wrong and Truth always changes.

 He also talks about Field Independence and Field dependence.

Field Dependence means self reliance and Field Independence means moral hysteria.

He explains the first Truth where he talks about how we made up all our lesson on what we learned and start seeing the world from the lesson learned from previous experience

He commands us to stop listening to the all moral Bullshit spoken by the religious leaders to control the masses and start understanding ourselves, and become aware of our childhood programming.

 We have to first leave the sentimental idealistic romanticism of deeply felt religious belief which are responsible for the sufferings of millions which is harmful than the world threatening technologies.

      Blindly following the moralism is like rats behind the pied piper, we will follow our moral leaders off the cliff and back into the sea for ever.

2nd Chapter: The Mind

            In this chapter he talks about how we loose our innocence during childhood. How we are programmed and conditioned by our parents to be pretentious, manipulating beings.

We use our Mind to pretend a smile, try not to express how we feel, try to control our words rather than speak out. It has been programmed by our parents unconsciously because it was programmed to them the same way.

He reveals three level of telling truth where it cures most of insomnia (sleeping disorder), breathing problems and stress related diseases.

After reading lots about personality types about people I understand most of the insomnia to the people is mostly due to the fact that people need to reflect upon their actions.

 Most of the people don’t take time alone to think about their whole day, your brain needs to justify all your day’s action every day.

Only time the brain gets is when you go to bed where you will not disturbed in the dark, so it starts doing the day’s action’s justification process where u loose your sleep. So do spend time alone every day and do nothing.

 First is telling the truth that we are hiding from our parents, the things our teenage mischiefs or things we are pretending to be though we are not and the entire guilt trip we carry with us as a baggage.

When you start telling the truth about your life, you become naked, good thing is you can see other people nakedness too, so you will be able to confront your fear which you have been hiding and killing yourself for long time.

This is true with most of women who will live their life pretending every moment that kills every second. Most of their health problem is due to their emotional baggage they carry from their past and don’t want to share it with actual person, that needs to know, because they think it will hurt that person a lot.

 Second level of telling the truth is telling the truth about our current thoughts and feelings.

 Always express what u feel and express it to concerned people, rather than suppressing them thinking your words might hurt them.

In this chapter, author talks about how telling the truth about what we feel will release us from lots of pain because if you tell people they are wrong they only justify their actions, but if you tell people how you felt because of their action then they will surely try to improve the situation next time.

             Hindu religion quotes “If you speak the truth long enough, your word become universal law”.

Personally I don’t recommend the third stage because if you jump to third without living through first stage and second stage of telling truth, you will look like an idiot to everyone.

If you want to move to third stage then you need to fully submerge and come out of the above two stages.

 The third level of speaking the truth occurs when you admit that you are not who you have pretending to be.

This one will be life long quest, because we do lots of things to please or impress others, once you reach second level you become self righteous and you start bragging about your self righteous concept, but you have to surpass this level where you stop trying to impress people by being an hero.

 No body on earth want to be considered an average, we always want to be better than everyone, that’s why most of the big corporate fashion, electronics are becoming multi billionaire by exploiting this psychology, that they make you believe, what they provide is the extra elegant things on earth which makes you superior.

            Finally in the chapter, author accepts the fact why he wrote the book, which is because he wants to be considered as smart than everyone and perceived as smarter individual.

He wants his name should live even after he is dead. Because he want to live in the fantasy world where we gain lots of energy when we just fantasize about things.

           

           

Liberation of the Being from its Mind    

            This topic is worth a double you paid for the book. He is absolutely honest in most of the human problems. He talks taboo about excitement.

In this chapter he quotes Sigmund Freud’s quotation about primary psychological problem

            “The primary psychological problems of persons in his day were the result of sexual repression; that is, People are taught to deny that they had feelings in their genitals”

            Consequently, his theory concerned about sexuality, its repression and expression. Freud sought to cure in individual cases, the cultural sickness of guilt about being sexual.

Two things are considered in this topic

·        Sexual desire

·        Getting Angry and  how we express the emotions

             

For instance, a person who has put a lot of energy into denying his own sexuality and making sexual behavior an evil thing may become self appointed defender; he will protest all pornographic books and movies to protect youth from this filth. That is his way of dealing with his own lack of knowledge of sexuality.

Author says we all fall into the habit of giving all of our attention to thoughts, belief and fantasy. He asks us to stop feeling guilty about having attracted to opposite sex. It is absolutely normal.

 Repressing our sexual feeling, anger, guilt, jealous is cause for all our psychological problems.

Next is dealing with emotion ANGER: People tend to get angry but they cannot show it because they have a persona that they have been living up their whole life that they are sweet, so they try to repress it by eating more.

More of the eating problem is due to the fact of suppressing our anxiety to soothe our nerves with feel good dishes (all snacks).

Refocusing our awareness is the key to handle our emotions

·        Be aware of things happening in our immediate environment

·        Aware of feeling and sensation inside our body

·        Aware of strengths of our thoughts and fantasy

            Another common way, people handling emotions is try to look sad because society accept sad people rather than the angry person.

So people suppress their anger by looking sad. Because being sad is acceptable but being horny or angry is taboo for our society.

            He also talks about the passive aggressive ass-kissers who wish and hope that they will receive nice things in their life just because they are nice to people, actually they are boring burdensome and stressed out bunch of people.

Those people who talk to their managers how pissed they are or how angry they are on certain way gets mileage are ass kickers. The ass-Kickers always will be promoted because they express their emotions in right way because they cannot gossip about who was to blame for their unhappiness

Steps to show anger to another person

·        Be direct in communication don’t hold yourself giving shit to people when you are pissed on them.

·        Expressing your anger will make you forgive them

·        Express your resentment face to face, not in phone

·        Don’t blame people bluntly saying they are asshole, tell them precise situation where you felt them as asshole. Because people will tend to justify/prevent themselves from being blamed

·        Express how you felt when he/she was an asshole

To handle your guilt about getting attracted to opposite sex make sure you are open to your partner about your fantasy and share with your partner your sexual history.

            Finally he ends the topic with few key points. Take care of your physical health; taking care of yourself is part of growing up. People take care of others but forget to take care of themselves. He also talks about polarity therapy which is very good to read. Meditate is also his advise

Things learned from the war between Being & Mind

            In the last part he talk about how change starts to start when you accepts who you are and take responsibility of your own life and stop being perfect in all times

Perfectionists are people who would rather be the worst than be the second-best.

Everyone who ever successfully made a change that worked and served as platform for the next, did this first: they finally accepted themselves the way they are. They gave up the struggle to get better. Then finally, they were free to change.

Next important quote I like is

     “Truth always changes”

Consider our childhood days where there were many thing that was considered wrong but those thing have changed, may be we do it everyday and no body cares, so truth on that day is irrelevant now.

It is all our perception about things. Mind categories all the time, try to see the world through senses and not through your mind.

Don’t just categories and leave the details. Have a mind set that, love is just a journey; there is no scale or meter.

Try not to be right always it is more fun to be alive than to be right. Observe your ego.  If you accept that death is always possible, the complacency of egoism disappears.

One of the works and most resistant strains of anxiety neurosis are by the Catholic Churches because they teach young children that the most important things in life is being right.

           

            This is the very good book to read it has lots of insights about every day’s life. Following this pattern of life is always the best strategy to feel happy all the time. 

So start telling truth about your past to the one which concern the most.

Start telling truth about how you feel rather than trying to avoid confrontation about other person action. Stop pretending who you are.

Stop feeling guilt or bad about sexual feelings. Try to handle emotions and be aware of your body when you go through every emotion.

Learn the process to express anger in effective way which will lead to your success, because anger has lots of energy to it which can be changed to useful form

Resist being perfectionist, accept yourself that you and others have all rights to be wrong.

 Start telling the truth everywhere, which will reduce your stress and make your life happy.

 To know more about and have more insight about your own life, Check out the book @  Radical Honesty - Brad Blanton

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