3.1. You create space for honesty by telling people that you welcome the truth, that you will do your best to handle it, and that your intention is to create no unnecessary drama in response. This doesn’t mean that certain revelations may not be difficult and may not change something.
Often, situations and relationships do change with honesty. But whatever does happen in honesty, it will be the truth of the situation. Because it is truth , it must be accepted and valued as such. There is nothing real that can be gained through dishonesty; for the price is always too high.
If you want the liberation of being able to speak and live your truth, then it is right and necessary to offer others the same. It is far better to do this at the start of a relationship or immediately upon entering a new life situation. If you establish the dynamic of total honesty and unconditional acceptance from the very start, there will be nothing very difficult for you to deal with or process later. There will be no crisis to sort through because no crisis can exist if perfect honesty is the dynamic from the start. This is a fundamental concept: only dishonesty creates space for crisis and collapse.
3.2. Your path is more difficult if you currently find yourself in a situation where you have lacked faith in truth and, therefore, have failed to offer total honesty and unconditional acceptance to someone. This is a situation that must be fixed sooner, rather than later. If you go more deeply into the lies, the impending crisis will be more severe, and the relationship will become even more difficult to salvage. If something is broken now, it must be fixed now, or it will worsen. But to fix something properly, you need to take the right approach.
Ease into honesty by offering to do the most difficult part: allow the other person to go first in honesty. You can only do this by offering the other person unconditional acceptance and forgiveness.
By creating space for truth, you set an example of what you would like in return. If you are not ready and cannot handle perfect honesty that goes both ways, then you are not ready to turn the switch and to awaken. You can allow a bit more suffering in your life, or perhaps wait until everything inevitably does fall apart until you do the right thing.
You may be afraid to offer unconditional acceptance because you are afraid of the hurt you may have to endure. You aren’t sure whether you can forgive everything. But we’ve already defined forgiveness as acceptance of the truth as a replacement for lies. Would you cling to the false certainty of a life built on lies, or do you want the unending bliss, joy and peace of a life rooted in truth?
When you create the space for another person to be honest and to live freely, then some of what they reveal may be difficult to deal with. At the same time, remember that this person is also being honest about all the things that make you feel good. By creating space for honesty, you are creating an opportunity for all kinds of honesty to flourish. You can fully enjoy the fact that everything about the relationship is real.
Honesty isn’t only about the difficult stuff. A refreshing purity enters the honest relationship, and you know that nothing done or said is ever coerced or untrue. Everything is done and said and experienced for the right reasons: because it is all true.
3.3. Asking for total honesty by offering unconditional acceptance will make it so that you will be offered the same in return. Even if you are not offered the same, you will have to take it and be honest anyway. Relationships cannot be one-sided. Honesty and unconditional acceptance, even if it is at first offered by only one party, will expose the truth of your relationship—not only the truth about who did what, but also about how the relationship works and what it is.
Is your relationship really based on love? If so, what does it mean to love someone other than offering unconditional acceptance? Love is perfect, and perfect love is unconditional. Anything less than unconditional love is not love at all; rather, an arrangement where you use each other for some purpose. But is there really a need to deceive each other at all? If there is a practical fit, would you not choose to remain together in truth just as you have been together in dishonest union? Honesty cannot threaten anything that is real—and even your practical reasons for being together with someone may be very real.
3.4. To live in honesty not only concerns what you do in your intimate, romantic relationships. However, starting here is necessary for most people because this is where the most urgent need for honesty is. This is also, by far, the most challenging area to be honest.
By turning on the switch here and overcoming dishonesty in your romantic partnerships or marriage relationship, you will make it possible to fully awaken and to live in truth throughout every area of your life.
Most of the prophets, sages, religions and spiritual leaders that have existed in this world have missed this simplest message of all—that honesty is salvation. Perhaps they did not see the truth about honesty because they were afraid of total honesty.
Even many of those who have preached about honesty, truth and forgiveness have attempted to draw lines in the sand about what kind of honesty is acceptable and what kind is sinful. They are like the jealous spouse who demands your honesty and then tells you that what you said is not okay.
Religion has become largely irrelevant for most people these days, but the problem is that everybody is still doing the work of the priests—enforcing taboos, judging, and trying to make you believe you are an irredeemable sinner.
3.5. There is no path toward spiritual awakening that does not involve a total commitment to honesty. What is always required is a total conviction, a decision to be honest at any cost.
Total honesty is a true expression of a faith that supersedes any religious doctrine, tradition, or ritual. Continue to make some truth off limits, maintain some taboos, and you continue to create space for lies. No philosophy or thought system that leaves any room for lies can be superior to honesty.
Of course, there is one topic that is always off limits and never considered appropriate by the world. It is sex. The reason you may not have yet awakened is that you are not entirely honest about sex. The whole world is against sex and you have been forced to lie about sex all the time.
The world is against sex because almost everyone is sexually jealous. Perfect honesty is impossible in your life unless you are willing to work through your sexual jealousy. The main reason you do not offer your romantic partner unconditional acceptance of whatever they do or say is that you are afraid he or she will have sex, or already has had sex, with someone else.
Sexual bliss is fleeting and clearly not the path to salvation, but the world’s attitude about sex blocks your awakening by making sexual jealousy real and, therefore, honesty about it impossible. Making anything taboo—especially such a fundamental and important topic as sex—causes a lot of people to lie a lot, which always causes suffering and ultimately crisis.
This is never said, but the root of all dysfunction in most relationships and families is sexual jealousy. It is probably controlling and limiting not just your life, but it is the cause of suffering in the lives of your children, your family, and everyone around you. Sex isn’t the problem. Sex is the most natural expression of life doing what it does: enjoying aliveness and creating more life. The problem isn’t sex, it is sexual jealousy.
It is mainly because of sexual jealousy that you set rules and expectations intended to control and limit the person you love. In so doing , you are instantly preventing the possibility of honesty in your relationship. You are attempting to control a most fundamental human drive in another person. Sex is the most basic source of bliss and excitement available to us, the very impulse that originally brought you into this world, and a force that brings anyone together into a romantic relationship.
By failing to accept your partner’s sexuality unconditionally, you are failing to honor the core of his or her being and the foundation upon which your relationship is built. In so doing , you are tragically and severely hurting not just your partner, but yourself and everyone around you.
You have a right to your sexuality—whatever that may be—and everyone else has that same right; including the person who you love. Your partner may never need anyone else. Most people who are loved unconditionally are not inspired to form multiple romantic relationships. People tend to do this when they are not loved unconditionally. The lesson here is clear: life gives you what you resist, in order to teach you not to resist. Drop the resistance and end the problem.
3.6. Because of sexual jealousy, the default relationship style is monogamy. Monogamy is cruel not just because it limits love and defines it through rules. It is cruel because of the way people are forced to treat one another.
Monogamy makes sexual jealousy very real, indeed, because you establish a set of rules whereby your partner must leave you if they feel sexually or emotionally attracted to someone else. A monogamous relationship is, therefore, the most brittle and unstable of all.
Founded upon a rule that cannot be adhered to because it is against nature, the relationship instantly falls apart even in a meaningless act of surrender. What’s more, by making certain kinds of sex taboo, you make it seem even more desirable and even more thrilling. Everyone is doing it all wrong, which is why everybody is cheating and why most marriages fall apart.
If your relationship were, instead, based on perfect honesty, openness and unconditional acceptance rather than monogamy; then no sexual act could threaten it. There would be love for each other and respect. Neither of you would throw away what you have—a love that is real, joyful, blissful, freeing—because of an act of passion.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that either of you would have much of an appetite for doing something that would cause great pain and suffering for the other. You would, instead, find a way to meet your needs while remaining honest and sensitive.
This honesty and sensitivity would bring you closer together than you could possibly be with a new person, so you wouldn’t abandon each other. This ever-so-common need to run away and start over with someone else would be so rare in a world in which people were being honest about sex.
Sexual jealousy can be dealt with and overcome. Millions of people have done it. Honesty, openness and acceptance is powerful enough to overcome any negative emotion. But you would never know this if you have never tried—if, like most people, you have allowed your life to be controlled by sexual jealousy.
Would you rather have sexually jealousy or unconditional love? You can only choose one.
3.7. Authority does not want you to awaken because, when you are awake, you are free. You are then beyond their control. Awake, you will no longer be exploited for their gain. You will not be dependent upon them because you will already be healed.
The religions of this world, throughout the centuries, are clearly a form of centralized authority designed to exploit you. Like the therapists who want to keep the patients coming back, the church does not want you to awaken because, if you do, you will not need them.
To ensure their continued relevance, they make it impossible for you to heal by making it impossible for you to be honest. Rather than accepting you, they would rather call you a sinner when you fail to make real their illusions about human nature.
Speaking an unpopular truth in church is almost unthinkable. If you were to go to church and tell your truth openly, you may find that you are judged quite harshly and not welcome there. Religion is against honesty and so it is a very real part of the problem.
Most people these days pay little attention to religion, yet you are still indoctrinated against sex through movies, teachers, parents, and basically everyone you meet. Everyone wants you to lie about something because everyone wants to control you.
By making you ashamed of your enjoyment of sex and your need for it, they quickly and easily take away your power by forcing you to compromise on perfect honesty right from the start. If you compromise honesty just a little in any area of life, you’ll quite easily compromise more, then a bit more, until eventually there is no room for truth and honesty anywhere in your life. The need to force you into dishonesty is the reason why the world is against sex, and a core reason why most people continue to suffer in dishonesty. Turning the switch requires that you are also honest about sex.
3.8. You withheld truth from your parents for their approval. You pretended to go along with absolute nonsense at school for approval. You faked being cool and lied about your deepest feelings to please friends. You told your lovers what they wanted to hear so that would they like you. You did whatever your bosses required because you feared the loss of your job. You’ve raised your kids in ways that are considered appropriate, even while your kids have no idea about the person you really are.
At each step and in every area of your life, you meant well but you are erasing yourself by hiding your truths. You’re a good person—of course you are. But your best intentions have failed because you are probably suffering from low energy and fear, and you are made to believe you don’t matter in this world. The life force within you has been cut off by your choice for dishonesty. Honesty will heal you and you will become the force you were meant to be.
Do you want people to love you? Offer them unconditional acceptance. Make it okay for everyone in your life to tell you anything and everything. There is nothing for you to judge because anything they say or do isn’t about you. It is about them growing and being honest.
In the gift of unconditional acceptance, you offer the people you love the chance to reach their fullest potential in life. You teach that it is possible to be honest, and by doing so you make it possible for everyone in your life to be very happy. Do you think they are not going to love you like crazy if you are allowing them to be happy? Do you really think you will lose them? Try it and find out for yourself.
Or would you rather continue to carry this impossible burden of trying to control everyone—judging everything and manipulating everything according to what you think is okay and not okay when, deep down, you know that you’re missing the very same mark you set for others.
The only mark worth hitting is the standard of perfect honesty. When you teach the people around you to hit that mark, you offer them the greatest gift and the most important lesson in life. But you will never create space for perfect honesty if you think it is ever okay to judge. You cannot expect any honesty if you are not teaching it. If you continue to attack, if you ever resort to shaming or blaming, if you feel the need to sort out who’s right and wrong, and if you continue to use punishment and reward as a tool to control behavior then you are teaching dishonesty.
These behaviors demonstrate no faith in truth and place all faith in illusion. This can only lead you to suffer now and face crisis later.
3.9. You don’t need to control anything. Furthermore, you can’t control anything even if you wanted to. Reality is too complex.
You don’t know what’s good or bad. Maybe your child doesn’t want to attend college and you believe it is bad. What if college isn’t the path toward his or her calling or life purpose? What if, by forcing your child to attend college, you are only setting the person you love most on a course of dishonesty and misery?
You may think it is bad that your wife or husband has a huge sex drive that sometimes extends beyond your relationship? Have you not enjoyed his or her passion? What if you were able to accept it and embrace it more than anyone else could?
Or you may think that the worst thing in the world would be for your marriage to end? What if the end of your marriage ends up being part of the switch that ends your suffering and begins your awakening? You might ultimately find yourself in perfect bliss with your ideal partner and, since you will live in truth, all your family and even your ex will love and respect you anyway.
You cannot and do not know what is good or bad. Because you are learning to value truth above all else, you are learning to accept that there is never a need to judge anything. It is as it is. This is acceptance.
Acceptance is total, unconditional, and beyond judgement or control. What is just is. What is unreal will always dissolve, while what is real will remain. In this law of nature, there is nothing for you to control.
You need only sort out what is honest and dishonest. Then you can relax.