@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

A fish cannot swim out of water. You cannot get out of the water that your soul is drowning in. I refer to a world composed entirely of lie. That is the world we live in.

The lie takes many forms: secrecy is lying; breaking your word is a form of lie; cheating and stealing and profiteering are all offences against truth. Keeping quiet when you know something is wrong is also in the spectrum of lie, so is claiming wisdom and knowledge that you do not in fact have. Saying anything for personal gain is to lie. White lies to “protect other people” and “avoid embarrassment” are nevertheless part of the fabric of lie in which we drown.

Gossip is a currency of lie and so, very often is the cruel humour of the Jonathan Ross generation who cannot say anything straight and sincere.

When you pretend you are lying. When you act. When you mislead. When you manipulate using NLP or otherwise. When you withhold vital information is also to lie. When you write that ridiculous puffed-up profile you are exaggerating, which is to lie, as all personal branding is, and all marketing come to that. Marketing conceals some information and promotes sly charm, leaving the consumer confused, deliberately. That’s a cardinal form of lying.

I don’t get me started on religion and political lies…

In a climate of lie such as this, which has always existed in some form in every human culture – in such a climate it is almost impossible to sustain sincerity, honesty and the hugely powerful skill of allowing the truth to flower in any situation.

We are hoist by our own petard, full of sound and fury that signifies nothing (that’s a quote or two for the non-educated, “creative writing” generation).

Once you perceive, admit, experience and begin to recognise the universality of lie all around you there comes the occasional chance to jump out of it for a bit of liberating truthfulness. It’s not going to survive for very long when nobody you are talking to gets it and everyone is so steeped in lie they cannot understand you, but you have to try, or go to your grave with your eyes never opened.

OK, here you are:

I believe things because it pleases me to do so. I don’t require for my belief to be anchored in verifiable truth, but it pleases me when I find an ally in my belief.

Already in two sentences I have placed “what pleases” me above the concept of Truth, seen as some unseen dictator criticizing my feeble failure to accord to its strictures.

When I stop believing my beliefs, shaken by some emotion, I feel disconsolate, drifting like a boat that has broken its moorings. Perhaps this is why my favourite beliefs are those which cannot easily be proved wrong. Those such as militant atheists, the BBC and the scientists and doctors it clasps to its bosom, who worship the “evidence-based”, rather miss the entire point of beliefs.

I ought to give some examples of the kinds of things I believe, or would like to believe—I’m not sure there’s a difference between the two. I believe that all creatures are intelligent; that evolution itself is intelligent, not blind and mechanical. I believe a giraffe’s neck is long because its ancestors desired to reach the high branches. I believe that the conscious mind, the I that is in the given moment dedicated to interaction in the world, is less important than commonly acknowledged. True self-awareness has its centre of gravity more in the unconscious, the autonomous processes of the body which keep us safe and strive to prevent us from continuing in self-destructive actions and attitudes; even if they have to make us ill in order to send us messages. I think poor Nietzsche believed that too, and he had more than his share of illness. Perhaps in him it was merely syphilis, which from a scientific point of view disproves the belief. But never mind. He said what he said, and it has value that cannot be refuted by medical science.

It is perfectly rational to do what pleases us. And our beliefs prop us up. We need that!

We are all restlessly seeking change, evolution, healing of past sores and creativity in our lives. No matter how much we talk about the power of acceptance, we just do not live like that. We yearn.

Is there any way around this awful paradox? Well, yes, there might be, if we were evolved enough to hold more than one reality in our hearts at the same time, for example: to hate and yet to also forgive, both in relation to the same object, person, group, system, whatever.

You can’t change anything at all by using control, by planning, scheming, manipulation, NLP or any other bullshit visualisation or management technique. They don’t work, like diets don’;t work, except when they do, which is very rarely.

First step is to acknowledge our fury and when I saw hundreds of people at EST do this the next emotion underneath was generally fear, but very close behind that was profound loss, grief and sadness that was as big as an ocean.

That’s the place everyone needs to get to before they can even speak of maturity, before they can channel anything about themselves usefully. Anger is not to be manipulated intellectually. It’s actually the way that the powerful control the rest of us: by tapping their potentially explosive just-below-the surface threat of anger into our own fears.

We are so crushed by our fears that we start pretending. We deploy self-aggrandising strategies. We turn to smugness (if we feel like winners or want top project that impression). We turn to anger and the threat of anger, like our bosses, governments, parents, bullies – if we think we may lose the game and wish to intimidate opponents first. Just like animals, especially apes, especially our closest relative, the chimpanzee.

If that all fails we sulk, become helpless, force other people to waste their own lives in taking care of us.

Once you know about your fear and anger, which are two sides of the same coin, then and only then can you feel your way into the loss, shock and grief that lies below them. And only by reaching that, deep in your heart, your memories, your tissues, your thoughts, your over-compensating ideas and behaviours… only when you clearly know and feel all that can you access sublime joy, true creativity, real love.

But don’t expect them to last. This is an ongoing process, for ever, that nobody ever wins at. The best you can achieve is to be real and to feel real empathy with others.

That is the goal you were born for. Anything else is a betrayal of your gift of life. Anything glib that offers a solution is a lie. You need to live all this. No one is immune. No one has beaten it. No one will for centuries hence.

Most people would agree that the closer you come to reality the more effective you will be: the more alignment there is between what you perceive and what is, the more precise, subtle, timely and accurate will be any interventions you make in the world.

If this is true it flatly contradicts one widespread notion that people hold about their lives, viz that each of us has “my own reality“, “my truth“, “a right to my opinion”. You think you believe this when your own views are challenged but clearly you do not when you compare yourself with someone who is mentally impaired, with a small child, with a horse – all of which are implicitly assumed to be less in contact with the real reality than I am.

Do you see how important this contradiction is? Are you able to entertain the possibility that you could be more real, in better correspondence with the actuality of what is happening in the world?

The commonest way for anyone to avoid the implications of this inflexible truth is to split the real world up into zones. Hence we have financial reality (economics), psychological reality (a vast and treacherous zone with innumerable sub zones), spiritual reality (a lovely catch-all to avoid making accurate judgments about almost anything in life), political and social realities (in defence of who we are and what we do and what is done) and, most damaging of all, the divisions of a zone called ethics into so many subsystems of tolerance, judgement, prejudice and self-aggrandisement that we can almost no longer use the word “good” without a cynically half-held breath of contempt.

Once you start using these sorts of categories (and believe me you do) you have strayed from the reality into my reality and everything you say is totally invalid. It is nothing more than a complex defence of your own position, your behaviours, your omissions, your mistakes, misjudgements and cruelties.

If you do not know this you know absolutely nothing at all.

If you do not attempt on an on-going basis, all day and every day, to wrestle yourself free from the insane insularity of my reality towards an imperfect understanding and harmony with the reality then you are certainly a primitive life form. We will never get there, any of us, but we owe it to each other to try.

And the most important aspect of the one reality in which we all live? Oddly enough, though we strive for objectivity as a general goal we conversely must deploy subjectivity to find the truest and most important aspect of all reality: our empathy, our understanding, our imaginative reaching towards, our love of… other beings.

Sorry, but you cannot have your own reality. You share it with everyone else.