By Brad Blanton
My responses:
Wow, I think there is so much truth to be gleaned from this book. The author is quite correct when he calls his own book “elephant shit” because to some degree he is presenting me with a new or another form of “moralism.”
To a deep and even liberating extent, I agree that we have been brainwashed with moralism: each and every one of us. Our parents choose what is acceptable and teach us to follow their rules, which are further based on societies rules, religious influences and cultural norms, sexual norms etc. etc.
I have been thinking about this a lot in my own personal life, so I know I am not reading this book by chance or accident – it is God’s wonderful timing.
My thoughts have been along the lines that God’s law was only created because the people asked for it and refused to relate to him in a more intimate and personal way. People wanted to earn his love and acceptance and to be rewarded. This was never his intention.
Nevertheless, we all interpret God’s law differently. For example, very few people I know actually respect the Sabbath. A person might talk about murder being wrong, but think that war is different, and self-defensive murder is acceptable. Another person stands against abortion whilst taking the pill, unaware that the pill can result in the abortion of fertilised eggs!
One person’s “conscience” tells them that sex before marriage can’t be wrong if you really love the person because it feels so right. Another person’s “conscience” tells them that not only is sex before marriage wrong, but also masturbation and touching certain parts of the body etc.
Whose conscience is right? Whose morality is the truth? Whose interpretation of God’s law is perfect?
Everyone has different opinions and experiences. Everyone has a different conscience. The murderer probably feels that murder is right or justified to an extent!
What I am sick of as a Christian, is this idea that God will ever pass any judgement on our behaviour, our morality, our attitude, our heart response, our head response, our conscience; sub-conscious or unconscious responses to anything. Those Christians who think that they are going to score points because of good behaviour or a good heart attitude, in my opinion (according to my morality) have lost their marbles. There is no real, solid “good” in our conscience or morality. We all choose for ourselves what we think is right or wrong and do what we want or what we should or whatever. At the end of the day, we all need a saviour because we are all fucked in the head!
Am I then to throw out morality? To throw out the law? To ignore my so-called conscience or my head or my heart?
This is where, I think, Brad is missing something. I am not arguing to keep morality or law and I am not disagreeing with Brad’s conviction that we should tell the truth and start living out of the truth as we perceive it.
However, I believe, his mistake is in promoting independence and the idea that the solution to the problem of morality is to tell the truth, according to my perception, my gut, my initial reaction, my self, my core, my heart – me, me, me, I, I, I.
But the truth is relative. What’s true for me isn’t true for everyone. That is why some people do in fact commit murder and may not feel any remorse whatsoever. Hitler brainwashed a whole army of people into committing extreme acts of racism, hatred, murder, abuse etc. and he was acting on some kind of truth concept within his own heart – or so I would presume.
At the risk of soundly like your average Christian, I have to advocate that in seeking to live out of a place of truth, honesty, heart, conviction etc. – there has to be a higher truth. I’m not saying that we can find it – that we can understand God’s truth or that we should try to line ourselves up with biblical concepts of right and wrong – not exactly. But I am saying that I cannot base truth purely on me. We people are too damaged and broken to base truth purely on our gut.
Truth needs to be understood within the context of relationships with other people, with God and admittedly with self too, but not just independently.
I need to hold my horses. What is the truth about why I am saying this? I am saying this because I am afraid to trust myself. I do not trust that I am morally good or right and I do not even trust my own concept of what truth is.
I am okay with being wrong – in a general sort of way. I would never expect to be always right about God or about life or about the truth etc. I want to believe in something higher – that there is truth out there that is absolute and even if I never find or fathom it, I want to believe that it exists.
It’s interesting, that in being brutally honest, I cannot prove that higher truth exists; I am simply saying that I need to it exist for my own peace of mind.
In the same way: I believe there is an absolute morality or righteousness or grace/love that conquers sin and evil … but I don’t expect to find and fathom this in my lifetime here on earth. I choose to believe that it exists and to put my faith into it, rather than putting faith in myself and my independent concept of truth.
For me: God has to exist because I will never be enough, or complete without God. At the end of the day, maybe all I am saying against Brad is that he doesn’t believe in God or make God his authority and the basis of his teaching. Apart from that, I love his encouragement to be more ourselves, to be truthful and honest and try to act out of that.
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I am up to chapter five and most of what Brad is saying about the first two phases of being honest resonate with me. I have already experienced trying to talk deeply with my mother before she passed away. She refused to talk about certain things and that was her choice. I have gradually, increasingly come out of the closet about my sexual abuse as a little girl – telling first my immediate family, then close friends, then ordinary friends/acquaintances etc. It is no longer a secret for me. It no longer holds any power or shame and it feels amazing to treat it simply as a fact rather than giving it so much weight.
I have also been talking about sex with my dad, my sister, one of my brothers, some of my friends. I’ve admitted to far more temptation than I ever used to admit to. I am more honest now and not just putting on a façade of being an asexual virgin.
So I have experienced the truth of what Brad’s saying: the emancipation of telling the truth about the past and telling the truth about the present in the present: being more honest more immediately in current situations.
However, what he said about the third phase, firstly made no logical sense to me, secondly felt dangerous in the sense that it sounds like he is saying: nothing is real and there is no truth and there is no absolute and there is no good and there is no bad, there is just “being.” My head used the words: “mumbo jumbo.”
I do think he has taken things too far. I think his encouragement to be more real and truthful is fantastic so I fundamentally agree with steps one and two. However, I think he should have stopped there. Step three is not a conclusion, it is an airy fairy – nothing makes sense and nothing is truth or reality anymore – joke!
Once again, I believe he is missing out because he does not make God his absolute, his higher truth or his plumbline. Now whether I am responding out of fear or out of truth I cannot be sure. But I refuse to throw out God and God’s truth as my plumbline and make Brad’s phase three: nothing is absolute; my resolution.
I am not angry at him for coming to this phase three conclusion which is logical to him. I understand it is perfectly reasonable to him and his experiences, and I doubt that he has any belief in a God of any description so his conclusion was basically to make himself God. I just, simply, disagree with it.
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That is another thing that causes me confusion about Brad’s book. If there are any “laws” in Christianity that I try to adhere to, it is not the 10 commandments, but has always been (for me) Jesus’ commands to love and to forgive. When I read the New Testament I get this overwhelming sense of how great God’s love and forgiveness is, that it is so logical and right and beautiful to me, that God would want me to extend this love and forgiveness: this grace to others.
So there has to be some kind of balance between telling the truth about our feelings, expressing anger and other very deep so-called negative-emotions; and being loving and forgiving towards others. I do believe there is a time to walk away from a conversation and think before you speak. I believe there is a time to forgive, without the other person being sorry.
Forgiveness and love are choices. Venting may certainly aid those choices, and being honest and responding in the moment, may help as well, but I believe there is just as much value in learning new ways of responding, new ways of giving truth that are healthier and wiser, that accommodate to the person being spoken to and that take into consideration where that person is at in their own life journey. It’s not just about me and my truth. It’s about a whole world full of people and trying to have healthier relationships with each and every acquaintance, friend and family member.
So I take Brad “with a grain of salt” as they say. I think he has part of the truth: part of the story. I have also read personality books that seem to have part of the truth. I have read the Bible, which is another part of the truth. I believe in God and he is my ultimate source of truth. Nothing is absolute except God: not even Brad’s book.
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I loved chapter 6 about how it is taboo in my culture to experience and talk about ones sexuality, anger and excitement. This makes perfect sense to me. I’ve realised this year that the church has made sexual “sin” out to be so much worse than so many other sins, which is not only illogical and contradictory to God’s word, but is also detrimental to Christians because the result is to suppress, avoid, hide and feel ashamed.
It’s even more interesting to me that the first things I learned to suppress after being sexually abused were exactly the first two things on his list: sexuality and anger. Maybe it was because my parents were already suppressing these things or maybe because of cultural influence, but it seems that sexual abuse victims are inclined to go to one extreme or the other. I know SA victims who became very promiscuous in response to their abuse and I can perfectly understand their logic and reasons for doing this. Most of the victims I know have repressed anger, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are victims who display the opposite extreme of violent rages.
As for suppression of excitement, I can relate to that as well, although I thought that was more of a personality thing. I have a melancholy disposition and I do find it hard to feel excited. I’m not convinced that I suppress it, but I rarely feel it.
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Interesting:
“People really get mad when they’re resented for withholding anger — something for which they feel they should be appreciated. But, contrary to popular belief, people resent being withheld from and lied to. Withheld anger destroys relationships by sucking the aliveness out of them. For aliveness to be restored, both to the relationships and the individual, anger must be expressed.”
I am determining to allow myself to express more anger but will try to do it in a healthy way. Hopefully I can say when I feel angry without having to explode and hopefully I can define my anger quickly, rather than saying that I feel angry but I’m not sure why.
“To express anger fully, we must give up most of our constraints on it. We can inhibit killing and physical violence. But we must be willing to be angry rather than decent and fair, because angry, rather than decent and fair, is what we presently are. After we are angry, we may be decent and fair, but we will never be authentically angry or authentically fair while we are struggling to be both at once.”
“Agreeing to tell the truth about anger in a committed relationship is a way to get over some of the damage and suffering that comes from how you were raised.” Does this mean that when you’re angry at someone who is in your face but you do not have a strong relationship with that person, you should deal with your anger in another way?
What if your anger is purely racist or some other bullshit that you have been taught, that is actually indirect anger in the first place. You may feel angry, but are you really angry at the person in front of you? If anger is already misdirected, wouldn’t it be more beneficial to dig up past anger and deal with that more directly than to misdirect my anger all over again by expressing it in the present, immediate tense?
I am confused, but my conviction is that anger can still do a lot of damage. I personally prefer to think about why I am angry, before I respond in anger, because I am never convinced that I am angry at the person immediately in front of me. I am angry because that person may have triggered the same response of anger I never expressed to my parents or some other person. Ideally, I want to think before I react.
However, I wonder if reacting more quickly with the people you are the closest to is important. I don’t get angry enough at my dad when I feel the anger inside me, and probably the same goes for siblings. If I were in a relationship with a man, I would like to think I would be far more immediately honest about my anger now than I have been with men in the past, because I’m learning from that past-mistake.
I can’t help remembering that Jesus said to “turn the other cheek”. And verses about not letting the “sun go down on anger”; and “in your anger do not sin,” (Ephesians 4 and Psalm 4). Maybe this means: express your anger, discuss it and move on from it. But why do I need to raise my voice or express anger in an angry way? Is that really necessary?
“Our decision not to express our resentment is based on a deeply held belief that our anger has to be justified, righteous, and legitimate. It doesn’t. To be free of anger, we have to give up this belief and allow our resentments and other people’s resentments to be expressed even if they are completely irrational.”
This is very interesting. Anger doesn’t have to be right but has to be expressed. Wow. This chapter about anger is my favourite. I have to admit I have suppressed far more anger than I ever realised. I don’t want to keep secrets bottled up inside about how I am angry at my parents or other relatives etc. and pretend everything is hunky dory.
Brad said that people who become perfectionists are angry. That’s me. People who feel self-condemnation or angry. That’s me.
Fuck! What the fuck do I do?
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“We all know that commitment is essential to creation. What has been unclear in our culture is what to do when you’re not committed to anything but struggle. When we feel powerless to keep our word, eventually we stop giving it. Your wholeness — the experience of yourself the way you are — must precede commitment, because to be anything less than your whole self is to be trapped in the morass of beliefs you have about who you are based on your case history. Commitment must be based on the awareness of what is, and on the willingness to be responsible for ourselves the way we are. That means if we are imperfect beings who make mistakes, break our word, get angry, and are selfish, greedy, petty, and unfair, we must make our commitment as those imperfect beings. We spend our lives waiting to get better so that we can accept ourselves. We refuse to enjoy life, refuse to accept that we are loved and forgiven, and refuse to tell the truth about who we are because we never quite meet our own standards. Perfectionists are people who would rather be the worst than be the second-best. Everyone who ever successfully made a change that worked and served as a platform for the next, did this first: they finally accepted themselves the way they were. They gave up the struggle to get better. Then, finally, they were free to change.”
There is something powerful in this, when you realise that the reason you are having so much trouble changing is because the majority of you actually does not want to change.
I know, for me personally, the only way I could lose weight when I was 22 was to first realise that a part of me wanted to be fat. It was a shocking revelation because it took a long time to uncover, but it was a self-protective mechanism to ward against sexual abuse including sexual attraction and attention from men. If I had never recognised my own fear of men’s attentions, I could never have lost weight. I had to accept that I was opening myself up for these attentions and that I would have to cope differently.
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“The encounter of two beings is what love is. At this level of being where love is, one-night stands are just as good as lifetime relationships. The place where energy is simply playing with our bodies, or where the beings that we are play with each other, is a nice place, and you can go there with anybody, any time.”
Can this be true? I don’t like to disregard another person’s opinion just for the sake of Christianity or previous assumption. I can consent that if you did believe this statement, then perhaps it would be true for the person who believes it. But for me, I don’t see how fleeting sexual experiences can compare to a long term relationship. How can long term relationships really be overrated? How can family be overrated? I mean, my understanding is that that’s what Brad is indicating.
On the other hand, I want to believe him. I want to throw caution to the wind and just enjoy my sexuality without giving a shit if I’m not in long term relationships with men. But I can’t. It’s like what he said about how someone pretends they want to change, but really they don’t want to because if they really did want to, they just would, right? Well I say I “want to throw caution to the wind” but my “want to” is not as big as my refusal and resistance to actually doing so. So I wish what he was saying could be true, but my logic and my understanding of God and my own self-protection and desire for lasting relationship, refuse to agree with him.
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“Your conscience is the devil. The revolution of our times is the revolution of consciousness. The government to be overthrown is the government of conscience, with its bureaucracy of moralism. Conscience inhibits being. We are developing our awareness to beat the devil.”
This paragraph about the conscience: I LOVE!!! Brad has just brought me to the conclusion I have suspected for years, but never worded so conclusively. I figured out as a teenager that if not all consciences are the same; we cannot trust our own conscience or claim that it is God’s voice or Godly. I learned about something called “seared consciences”—religious psychobabble—and came to the conclusion that every person on planet earth has a seared conscience because our concepts of right and wrong do not agree. I have never really stated these things.
God created a tree of the knowledge of good and evil and when people partook, they developed a conscience of moralism and guilt. God gave people the law only to bring us to the end of ourselves, the end of our moralism and trying to get things right which is impossible for us living in a polluted world. Satan is the one who wants to control the world with rules and guilt: not God. God’s stance is the law was added so that the trespass might increase, but where sin increased, grace increased all the more (Romans 5:20). I fucking love God! And the more I believe in this radical grace, the more I see that it is Satan who is the legalist.
I now have a theory that the whole reason Satan “fell from grace” is because he saw that God had given creatures free will, and he decided that this was morally wrong and that God should be in control, not give control away. And Satan himself tried to take control of the world and tried to tempt God to take control, and instead: grace increased and infuriated the devil all the more! It’s hilarious! I am writing a book with a “fall of Lucifer” story right now, and that is exactly how I have described the devil: a control freak who wants laws and limits!
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“The power of positive thinking is the biggest load of bullshit of our day. Positive thinking is for negative people. With positive thinking and affirmations, we start from an image of ourselves as flawed, and try to use thinking as a strategy to make ourselves whole. Thinking is not the source of power. Being is the source of power. And in being, we are already whole.”
This is one of those statements that I want to agree with but would have to ponder it for a long time before I could agree. I guess I’m sitting on the fence. On the one hand I have to disagree (from a Christian perspective) with his implication that we are not flawed – I’m sorry, but we are flawed. There is a sin problem. Using positive thinking, or Scriptural affirmation to see ourselves as whole and believe we are whole, actually does, factually and scientifically help. Just ask a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist. There are neuro-pathways in our brains from thinking the same things repetitively. If we are thinking negative things, we will most likely live/reflect those beliefs. If we can correct them with positive thinking, we can create new pathways in our minds that bring us healthier, happier emotions.
However the question remains: is this reality? I have been taught: what you think is what you are. He is saying, what we think is all bullshit and lies. The truth changes. The truth is relative. The truth is not absolute.
I just don’t know. I don’t think it’s wrong to be in denial and use positive thinking to live a more emotionally stable life. However, I personally have struggled with saying these positive sentences and creating these new neuro-pathways. I have seen improvements over years of gradually contemplating new concepts and ideas, but the result is still in my mind and emotions, not out in the world. Positive thinking most certainly didn’t heal my mother from cancer. Positive thinking hasn’t brought me a husband, however, it has made me more content as a single person and it may or may not (not really sure) have increased my opportunities and ability to attract men.
Maybe Brad is an extremist. Maybe, by saying that thinking is not power: being is power; he is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What if both are supposed to be equal??? What if my thinking is as important as being? What if there is such a thing as creating a personality and, yes, my personality changes over time, but perhaps there are some things that always were and always will be true about me.
I would have to argue that I was born with musical talent. My musical ability is part of my personality or personhood. It is measurable only in comparison to other people’s talent, however, I still believe that it is real and that it is something that I did not create myself or learn. It was a gift first, and then I expanded it through education.
Surely it is true that some people are born with abilities or skills that other people don’t have to the same degree. Surely this means something about who a person is that is a constant and not a fleeting thing. I can choose not to use my skill, but it doesn’t negate the fact that I was born with it – right?
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Overall this book has made me think (which is ironic since the book is about being rather than thinking) and challenged my beliefs and coping mechanisms. I’m grateful for it. I will place some things on the shelf and I will open up and try to be more myself in accordance with the things I have learnt that touched me.
I will probably re-read it in a couple of years and see how I’m going and if there is more than needs to change!