Approaching Honesty

Approaching Honesty

In his beautiful (no other word describes it) book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, the poet David Whyte examines a number of common words. He interprets and invigorates those words with a freshness, insight, and value that stirs the soul. His thoughts offer a new and unique sense of understanding the universe, our place in it, and how we can develop into higher quality individuals. He does not tell us what to do or not do. He instructs us indirectly, his wisdom all the more powerful for that. One of those words is Honesty, addressing it in part by looking at dishonesty .

From Whyte:  

Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, or with our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in our understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door, as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.

Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live without knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay, honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell, the living, breathing frontier where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss.

Whyte says that the root of all our dishonesties is fear of loss, of which we are seldom conscious. Were we to experience that fear for what it really is, we might be able to address our unconscious dishonesties. But they and the fear that spawned them remain conveniently  unknown to us, suppressed as Pandora’s box casts its frightening image. Denial of the fear and of the unconscious dishonesties takes enormous psychic energy, for which we and others pay a great price.

Once we understand that we are powerless, paradoxically we gain all the power for living as Whyte’s truly honest “spiritual warrior.” Once we give up the story that we are always honest, once we face the unconscious fear, complete honesty is in our lap.

“…honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all….”