An Intoduction To Dishonesty - How To Look 2015

Where to begin - Part I here

Dishonesty - An Introduction

This word has a negative connotation straight off the bat. It does suggest that there is a degree of conniving and plotting, much like in the sense of perpetrating a scam on some poor unsuspecting victim. 
As a matter of fact dishonesty is just as toxic as this metaphor makes out, however, the conniving and scheming aspect is done entirely by your brain. 

It is in fact you who are both the unsuspecting victim and blissfully unaware of the deceit your mind is perpetrating all the time to prop up the facade the constitutes 'your world' – but fear not. 

The whole purpose of this investigation is to root out and shine the light on this dishonesty. 

You will find I make unkind references to religion frequently in my work but I do not blame the adherents, it is actually this core mechanism of human dysfunction that riles me. The depths of dishonesty to which we all sink will literally shock you, once you start to explore what is happening. 
Back in the Ruthless Truth days we use to refer to it as 'the lie'. When we used to spot patterns of delusion within our own ranks, we used to cry “There is lie in you”. In the context of this view of the self as a 'lie' it seemed pertinent to label it as 'wretched dishonesty'. 

I will concede here that nobody likes to be told they are dishonest. To come across this site for the first time and be told that all your life you have been engaged in wretched dishonesty is hardly going to endear you to me. 

That being said though, if you have the nous to investigate no self be prepared to discover the uncomfortable truth. 

I am not here to make this more palatable or persuade you that you need this no self insight, I am primarily interested in studying this as a curiosity and I happen to think that others would benefit from my previous work. For this reason I am laying out some of the tools one can use, and I will be presenting some of my findings whilst working out in the field. 
You are not required to undertake this investigation so if the notion that you are dishonest upsets you then please walk away now. I take it as a given that our starting point is being wrapped up in an intricate fantasy story that is held together at the seams by dishonesty. 

Whilst there are a number of narratives available in which to view this process, the only things that are important for us to note here are that dishonesty is a very destructive force against humanity and we are all unconsciously engaged it in some way. Some more than others. It is probably worth mentioning that I was drowning in wretched dishonesty when I started this journey, so you are probably not as much of an extreme case as I was!

Crucially though, we have to recognise that it is not our fault that we are dishonest. 

It is pointless looking back at what life threw at us and how we built psychological defences to cope with the world. It is also pointless blaming others and making accusations of dishonesty. We are already engaged in dishonesty and we have to accept that we will find it when the story begins to unravel. 
We certainly didn't intend to deceive ourselves from the outset but, unfortunately, that is what happens ultimately. It is up to us to start and dispel our ignorance and test our taken for granted assumptions. The first step is actually gathering the honesty and courage to be willing to face up to what we find. 

Dishonesty can only be perpetuated continuously in the absence of truth. 

The Ruthless Truth and Truth Strike Days

One of the reasons I do not masquerade as a  so called 'liberator' anymore is because I realised that no-self as an end, in itself, is a trapping. There is further to go and there is no sense in which it is a final liberation. 

However, it must be remarked that it opens up great vistas and insights in to the human condition, and for that I am grateful. 

That being said I still fall foul of dishonesty from time to time, and it is not so much that one  vanquishes it after seeing through the illusion. 
It is such an ingrained response to coping with the world, that it still happens. One must be vigilant and continue to look at the mechanisms.

The second reason I stopped 'liberating' was because I realised that I was swimming against the current. Trying to take on dishonesty and fight it with fire was a fruitless endeavour. To give an analogy it was like fighting a hydra. Once you chopped one head off, another would grow back immediately and the creature would be far more riled this time. 

Credit to Moonscream: http://moonscream.deviantart.com/gallery/26906822/Pencils-And-Ink

Once I turned my back on doing this I was glad to walk away from it. The depths of deceit that some people were engaged in absolutely sickened me. This dishonesty is the core mechanism of human delusion , and it was not pleasant trying to battle it. 
All the fire and brimstone that came out of ruthless truth and truth strike was never directed at the person, but it was directed at this mechanism. Persistence would usually win the day but it was at a great cost to my time and it was disheartening to think that humanity was held in its clutches. 

Instead of doing this, I feel it is better to let people find the truth themselves and now I am no longer burdened with trying to wage a futile and demoralising war against psychological defence mechanisms and peoples inherent dishonesty.

It is now your prerogative to try and bring in to awareness the mechanisms of delusion.

Having being acquainted with fighting human delusion, I am now a weary veteran and have an intimate understanding of the mechanisms we use to delude ourselves, and can tell you some of the downright bizarre phenomena that I discovered when dealing with peoples psychological defences. 
It is not so much that you need to rote learn these or anything, but once you get an idea of what to look for, it will become apparent that this is actually happening in real life. Once you start investigating, you will witness the mechanisms of dishonesty playing out and they become easier to spot. 

Honesty is not some simple resolve to be honest, it is actually being attuned to the way in which we live in a fantasy world. This world is held together by assumptions which are contradicted by what we discover when we begin looking. 

Seeing the truth is what loosens the stranglehold of dishonesty.

Truth is a very relative term and is an empty concept in of itself. If by truth we mean it is derived from direct experience then this is what I am talking about. However, when we investigate this area we actually discover that most of our ideas about the self are given to us within the constraints of a social construct. 
If you adopt the view that all of this knowledge has been framed through a socially shared cultural context which has never been challenged, then it should now make sense to you now that challenging the constraints of this context piece by piece, is exactly what we will be doing.    

So, the best way to do this is to give a very basic example of looking at real life and investigate the way we draw our conclusions. From here, we can have a glimpse of the process and look at the way we use the information derived from experience. 



The Ease of Dishonesty >

Courage - How To Look 2015

Where to begin - Part I here

Courage

Courage is required to see through the illusion of self. Putting it simply the mind will twist and turn, and throw up every excuse not to look and convince you that you are looking, when you are actually thinking. It will also throw up the idea that seeing no self will make you insane and this will also obstruct you from looking. 
It will also cause other strange artefacts but generally the fear of insanity theme seems to be common in 90% of cases. The way to dissolve this one is simply to acknowledge that all you are doing is looking for the truth. Can the truth really affect your sanity, or is this just a story related to a self that you have not discovered yet?

If there is no self, then you are entitled to ask “How come this happens?”

As discussed, experience is real and hence the appearance of thoughts is also a real appearance and we obviously cannot reject the appearance of thoughts in our experience. The illusion of self arises from the myriad of thoughts and projections about an entity being in control of thinking and having agency over the body. 
As far as the mind is concerned, there is no problem and everything is working fine. The idea of no self is a disturbance to the equilibrium and I'm sure when you first heard about the idea there was, and certainly still is, a degree of resistance. Basically, the brain filters the incoming sense data through its model of reality. If you believe there is a self, everything that comes in to the brain is in terms of this model of the world. 

On an evolutionary level this makes perfect sense, as the brain needs to form a working model of reality in order for it to be able to judge the appropriate action to be taken in a wide variety of situations. As an example, take a look at this picture:

Do you see a six of spades?








Look again




It is actually a red six of spades. As we know the six of spades is black, therefore, this card does not exist. As you have never seen a red six of spades before, the brain filtered the incoming sense data in terms of its model of reality. Therefore, we can conclude that our brains model of the world actually influences our perception of it. It also follows then, that our beliefs and preconceptions can potentially obscure what is really going on in reality. 

This is literally what is happening through the illusion of self. It warps reality in terms of an illusory entity being responsible for thoughts and actions. If we think about this in terms of confirmation bias, we are prone to interpreting data in terms of our entrenched beliefs. What is happening, to put it simply, is that we are fighting against our own confirmation bias to try and discover the truth. 

This is why some seekers in the Ruthless Truth and Truth Strike days could not even muster a shred of courage or honesty. 

Hence the reason why we thought people actually needed harpooning and lancing, and why we aggressively tried to tear a persons ego to shreds. 
The whole point of those endeavours was to smash apart their reality bubble in the hope they could see that they needed to look honestly instead of arguing from a set of preconceptions they had never tested. But that's another story, I digress.

At every step of the way in an investigation we are disrupting our equilibrium to try and search for information that might contradict our model of reality. Naturally, the brain does not want to do this and hence we might experience mild emotional turmoil, all the way to more intense physical ailments. For me, I had a migraine. For others, they experienced a little fear when looking. 

The scariest thing about liberating people during the Truth Strike and Ruthless Truth saga was discovering the degree to which people deceived themselves. Watching people slither out of uncomfortable questions was one of the ways in which we highlighted to people the circular logic they were utilising. Quite often this helped folks hone in. 
Other people used to fight to protect the integrity of the illusion and delude themselves that they were not arguing against the idea of no self, when they clearly were. In this sense the inability to face up to difficulties for their story or the contradictions they were faced with was indicative of a degree of cowardice. 

In this sense, it was those who were brave and cared about the truth who managed to push their way through to the other side of the gate. 

Remember being brave also entails being afraid.  

It is not so much a special quality that only tougher people have but it is the courage to keep going, no matter what uncomfortable truths you might find, that will serve you well on this journey. One of my good friends who was a fellow administrator at Truth Strike came out with a great quote. 

'The opposite of truth is not a lie, it is cowardice', (Stepvhen 2011)

To this day I realise the profundity of  this statement and you need to realise that we lie to ourselves and weave intricate stories for the sake of avoiding suffering. Now, if we weaved ourselves a story about god and heaven, what we have is a paradigm example of the most putrid form of cowardice.  Religion is merely taking on an ontology that avoids the fear of death and tells us that our suffering is a virtue. 

All of us have  weaved complex mental fictions in some way or another, however, it is on us to untangle the mess and find out what is true - Or else we are simply wrapped up in a vacuous story and our humanity is suppressed. 
If you believe religion actually encourages our humanity you need to realise that that it is actually self serving. It is done within the context of trying to curry favour on the day of judgement as such, and any supposedly 'selfless act' in this context has, at its core, the vile stench of ego. 

Of course, one weaves a story of how they are a 'good' and 'just' person, but this is just one of the ways that the deceit, in which they are suckered in to, is rationalised in to a narrative that can be rote learned and parroted ad nauseam. You have to grow a pair, metaphorically speaking, and challenge everything - even things you never even dreamed of questioning. 



An Introduction To Dishonesty >