While I was lying in wait, I read the latest installment of James Redfield's Celestine books, The Twelfth Insight. The part of this story that jumped out and grabbed me was the idea about how we are living in a time when Absolute Honesty is an imperitive, if we are to navigate through the sea of globalized manipulation and corruption.
For the past year and nearly a half, I have been immersed in an environment that was very toxic for me, but I felt (for many reasons) unable to "speak my truth," so to say. I wasn't dishonest, technically, but I also never verbalized directly to the significant player how her actions were affecting me. Hence, I remained feeling all knotted up inside each day, absorbing all of that caustic toxicity, which resulted in very painful intestines physically all knotted up. So I can't help but wonder if the practice of Absolute Honesty could have made a difference. Would the environment have changed had I told it how my anxious body cringed in its presence?
The hard truth for me to own is how much of my personal truth I actually hold inside, and not just with this experience, but in many ways. I withhold the complete truth so as to not hurt a friend's feelings. I give partial pieces of information in such a way as to present a reality the way I would like it to be for any number of reasons. I love the line from Something's Gotta Give when Jack Nicholson's character declares that he never lied, that he always gave some "version" of the truth. (You gotta love Jack :) But the bottom line is that there are a lot of ways that I withhold all or part of my personal truth.
The problem is that I have never really seen Absolute Honesty in motion. The socio-political world is nothing but half truths and outright lies, and I grew up in a trio of family systems that practiced varying degrees of feeling avoidance, secret keeping, image making, and self-interested deceptions. There were always at least three sets of "truth" on the table: the version we invisibly agreed to support, the version we shared publicly, and the version I experienced inside. . . .and they were very rarely (if ever) the same. So I'm having a hard time comprehending how to put this idea of Absolute Honesty into motion in a meaningful way, but I absolutely feel the need to do so.
Truth is a funny thing. Everyone can look upon the exact same "reality," yet every person sees it differently through their personal perceptions, lenses, and interpretations. . . .much like the white light of reality being split through a prism of multiple perspectives. But I wonder. . . .is there a difference between truth and honesty?