6.1. So, you want to practice perfect honesty? Merely saying what you think in every situation, while it is a great start, isn’t quite the same thing as taking the power of honesty to its full potential. You can begin your journey toward honesty by simply saying what’s on your mind; but be prepared to make some errors and to be corrected.
The ego likes a certain kind of honesty: negative honesty. A negative truth is always about what you do not want.
The ego’s purpose is the opposite of openness because it believes your path to happiness and safety is in separation. When your ego tells the truth, it is mostly about putting walls up, defining boundaries, and telling others what you don’t like and won’t tolerate.
This has the effect of pushing people away, which is exactly what the ego demands of you so that it can maintain control over your life. In the joy of perfect union with another person, the ego becomes unnecessary and unwanted. Obsolescence is what the ego fears most; so it demands your loyalty and will use very clever tricks to convince you that you still want what it offers. But what does the ego offer other than suffering?
Here, no further attempt will be made to distinguish orders to honesty or to define good honesty vs. bad honesty. That would be a judgment and would not provide the necessary space of acceptance where you can be free to tell the truth. However, clearly positive honesty carries with it much more power than negative.
Make your honesty mostly about what you do want. Then, remain open to others so that they may collude with you to make your happy dreams a reality. In contrast, honesty about what you don’t want prevents two minds from connecting and blocks the flow of life.
Correction by others is part of the process of growth. Being honest and open allows this natural process of correction to transform your life. As of now, your knowledge of this thought system of truth isn’t complete. But, if you start where you are and don’t look back, you will ultimately reach the destination of perfect knowing, uninterrupted peace, bliss—in other words, you will awaken. It is a process.
The first few steps along the path are sometimes rocky, but there is nothing to be afraid of because you are safe in truth. Just start telling the truth and allow the process of personal growth and correction to unfold.
Remember, turning the switch causes a light to shine that exposes all the illusions that were previously concealed in darkness. These include your illusions and those of others. The more illusions you have destroyed, the calmer the waters. But first there are a lot of waves. You can understand why it requires patience to allow waves to settle.
You are beginning a journey toward truth that will take you in a very different direction from what you might anticipate. Being honest changes you fundamentally—as fundamentally as the difference between waking and sleeping.
6.2. You may have gotten the wrong idea that to apply honesty in your life means that you will not be able to properly play the game of life or to engage as effectively in the world. You may think that you will become an outsider, and that you may have to sacrifice material success and status. Nothing is further from the truth.
To be honest is to engage with the world. Remember, those who are dishonest are confusing sleeping dreams with the waking dream of life. But you, by remaining open and honest, are fully engaging with other minds and, therefore, you are taking part in this life exactly as you were meant to. Honesty optimizes the way you live and removes the bad habits and false perceptions which have been holding you back.
The most wonderful and important thing about openness and honesty is that it allows your mind to connect harmoniously with other minds. Dishonesty is clinging to isolation; and nothing in this world can be accomplished in isolation. When you are open, honest, and accepting, then you create perfect unions with others who share the same purpose. This union is the source of abundance and external success.
Union with others brings the opportunity to create value for them and with them. How can you bring your talents, skills and value to anyone if there is not a mutual understanding and connection? Furthermore, you’ll expand your abilities by harmoniously joining with people whose strengths make up for your weaknesses. Joined with others, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
Do you think it is more effective to compete with people and prove that you, as an individual, are more right and better? Or do you think you might be able to benefit on a much larger scale through harmonious collaboration and cooperation?
Competition leaves you weak and no greater than your own abilities. Leaders, on the other hand, know how to work with others to achieve something far superior. Leaders know how to eliminate resistance to success.
While the ego’s drive is toward external success, it’s behaviors and habits often prevent it. If you can cultivate more productive, harmonious, win-win relationships with more people from beyond the ego; you will obviously be more successful in this life.
6.3. Greater worldly success comes after you awaken—and it comes more easily. But remember, you aren’t striving toward worldly success to become happy. It’s the other way around. You first become happy and feel good by awakening, then success flows from that.
More accurately stated: the total success of awakening and feeling good is your starting point. This is the starting point that others will never reach as an ending point through the methods and means they have been taught to use.
From this perfect starting point, life continuously gets better because you are also able to enjoy whatever level of success you want to achieve. You enjoy everything from this place of being happy and feeling good all the time.
So how do you get to this starting point? How do you become happy by awakening? On the most basic level, you need only tell the truth and seek only the truth. Take this leap of faith and, by design, the flow of life will take you the rest of the way. Perhaps you aren’t quite ready because your faith in honesty is not complete.
You may fear that, if you begin to tell the whole truth, you will end up alone in this world. Maybe you don’t know anyone who would accept all your truths. Yet, on another level, you know that if you met that person who embodies all these principles of perfect honesty and unconditional acceptance, you would want that person in your life. So be that person. Other people very much want you as that person, and you will not be alone.
If you go all the way into truth, you will not be alone. But withhold your truth anywhere, doubt the lesson that honesty is truth, question whether truth is heaven, and you will be lost. Remember, you cannot serve two masters and there are no gray areas between truth and lies. You must go all the way or don’t go at all.
If you think you will hold onto someone by withholding honesty, you already do not have that person. You are clinging to an illusion and it is only a matter of time until the relationship changes entirely.
You cannot know, ahead of time, exactly what the steps are and what you might experience along the way. This is your personal journey. But you can know that, if something is happening in your life—and you are always being honest as it does happen—then it is supposed to be happening and life is guiding you in the right direction.
The right direction is always truth, and the wrong direction is always dishonesty. Seeking truth doesn’t depend upon learning something; rather, it is a process of unlearning untruth. It is a letting go of illusion and seeing through lies.
You don’t need to know everything about everything. You can’t know everything anyway. But you can know everything you need to know about your present moment. In any given moment, everything you need to know and understand is right there for you.
To awaken is to have removed all the clutter from your mind so that you can easily know what is really there; in any moment, whatever may or may not be happening. Fully awake and living in truth, the correct response to any situation you encounter will always emerge.
6.4. To access this power of perfect knowing, you need only set the intention of perfect honesty and do so with 100% conviction and faith. If there is a prayer, it is a very simple prayer that you are always aligned with honesty and truth. That’s it.
Decide again, each day, that you do not want illusion and do not want lies anywhere in your life. This sounds easy, but to succeed you will have to undo the world’s conditioning. A daily practice is required. Simply reading this book and then setting it aside will not be enough because you will go off-course. If telling the truth doesn’t work, the only reason can be that you aren’t doing it. If you ever fall short of the truth, then you must correct this immediately through apology.
You’ve spent most of your life, until now, learning the false lessons of the world. This is helpful because you now understand how normal people think. You know the dysfunction, you know the expectations, the habits, the frustrations and the whole range of what almost everyone is going through.
You’ve been there, and you will never forget any of it even after you awaken. Don’t worry about forgetting or losing anything. You will not be diminished in any way. You are only letting go of illusions; which are only weaknesses and completely unreal constructs.
Awake, you will be far more effective because you will remain calm. You can get a lot more done in a state of calm than you can in a state of stress and panic. Awake, you will move through your day with intention. Your mind will become clear and unclouded by fear. Solutions to problems will come easily. There will be far fewer mistakes to redo. This means less work and more time to enjoy yourself. Even as you are working, you will enjoy yourself.
Do you know your highest purpose in life? Your reason for being? Your calling? If so, this process of undoing error and illusion will allow you to fulfill it. If not, this practice of telling the truth will reveal it. To be honest is to awaken fully. You can’t know what it means to awaken until you are awake.