Saturday 18 July 2015

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 >






6 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are right on spot, nobody wants the truth be thrown at their faces, no matter how valuable this truth is. They should be ready for it first, and that depends on a million of factors. Some of them will feel something's wrong eventually and come to you for wisdom themselves. And the others... well, why bother so much for them anyway?

Gh0$T V1Ru$ said...

Hi mate, thanks for dropping by with your thoughts. I think you are missing the context in which this piece was written as it is simply part of an up to date rehash of my famous/ infamous 'how to look' guide.

This is aimed at beginners who are new to this and wish to do some investigating. It is primarily aimed at giving people some initial traction and trying to give a bit of guidance, of the kind I wish I had, when starting their own investigation.

I have no possible hope of convincing anyone with no genuine curiosity that they should look. I've been there, got the T shirt, and quite frankly, I have no interest in going down that road again.

I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I am bothered about convincing people to look as I don't use social media anymore or advertise this site anywhere. People find this place from their own curiosity more than anything and if they are open to looking great, if not then thats cool with me - I won't be losing any sleep :)

Anonymous said...

Not to let any misunderstanding, I didn't imply you are trying to convince or "convert" anyone. On the contrary. I just said you are doing well to only address people who already want to look.

Thanks for your efforts on this blog.

Gh0$T V1Ru$ said...

Hi again, thats the trouble with 'e-messaging' it can be interpreted in many ways!
Your quote here:

' And the others... well, why bother so much for them anyway?'

This made me think I had somehow conveyed I was interested about appealing to people with a case for no self. I did question what I had written and I was a little bemused, but I can see you only meant it rhetorically - hence it was not so easy for me to pick up on your subtle compliment! Thanks for your kind words, is there anything you think I should cover in this series that might help people?

Anonymous said...

My mistake for not being clear enough. I should say that English is not my native language. I am a person who have already tried looking enough times, I'm following this blog to listen a fellow looker more than learning something new (not saying I'm not learning anything).

I have no recommendations for the series for now, since you probably already have an outline in mind. Yet I'm eager about that "phenomowhat" article that you mention in the sidebar.

Gh0$T V1Ru$ said...

Hey, I had started writing the phenomowhat article but it quickly became dry and technical. In the interests in clarity I have sidelined it for now and am focussing on some of the key areas around looking. Whilst looking is essentially phenomenology, I don't think you need to go in to the technical details to utilise it as a tool for investigation. It is easier to just look at real life :) If you are interested in phenomenology though there are plenty of free articles on Wikipedia and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that give a gentle easing in to the subject .

In order to discuss its epistemological implications then a deeper grounding is necessary. In this instance I would read a synopsis of Hurssel's work to get a background but then for me Heidegger's 'Sein und Zeit' (Being and Time) blows it wide open. Hurssel is incoherent to my mind because of his supposition of transcendental consciousness. Heidegger supposes 'Dasein' or 'the there of being' but he doesn't explicitly formulate what he means, rather focussing on what it isn't. This has left his critics a lot of room to make out that he is too obscure.

I will also warn you that Heidegger is very difficult to follow and English translations are littered with errata. For this reason I reccommend Hubert Dreyfus's lectures on 'Being and Time'. He understands Heidegger very well and the fact he speaks German and English means he corrects many of the the translation errors.

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