45 On Seeing Simple Truths

EXPERIENCE has taught us that there are gifts in life that most of us do not recognize as gifts. Sometimes we may have to stretch it a bit to understand them as gifts.


The gift of fear is the restoration of our capacity for wisdom and freedom.


By embracing our fears we gain the opportunity to notice what is life-destructive and what is life-enhancing. Both avenues of investigation require risk.


Peck says, in The Road Less Traveled,

“When We Extend Ourselves, Our Self Enters New And Unfamiliar Territory . . . The Experience Of Change, Or Unaccustomed Activity, Of Being On Unfamiliar Ground, Of Doing Things Differently Is Frightening . . . Courage Is Not The Absence Of Fear, It Is The Making Of An Action In Spite Of The Fear, The Moving Out Against The Resistance Engendered By Fear Into The Unknown And Into The Future.”

Lessons on Life: Beginning Middle and an End

There was a man who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly.

So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away.

The first son went in the winter, the second in the spring, the third in summer, and the youngest son in the fall.

When they had all gone and come back, he called them together to describe what they had seen.

The first son said that the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted. The second son said, no it was covered with green buds and full of promise. The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with blossoms that smelled so sweet and looked so beautiful, it was the most graceful thing he had ever seen. The last son disagreed with all of them; he said it was ripe and drooping with fruit, full of life and fulfillment.

The man then explained to his sons that they were all right, because they had each seen but only one season in the tree's life. He told them that you cannot judge a tree, or a person, by only one season, and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy, and love that come from that life can only be measured at the end, when all the seasons are up.

If you give up when it's winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, and the fulfillment of your fall.

Author Unknown ...

In the Nature of the Lie --- Adapted from Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting

Lies are only possible because they are—by necessity—a co operative act1.

Statement of Fact: A lie has no power of its own.

A lie only has power when someone else agrees to believe the lie. So if you have been lied too lately, then in there somewhere you set it up to be lied too. That is sometimes a difficult pill to swallow.

Not all lies are hostile acts ... Don’t I sing well? ... Does this make my butt look too big ??? ... etc ... What would you say? ... Maintaining social niceties are excuses we use to lie. Once agreed to as a social norm then, consciously or unconsciously we are in agreement and we can both agree to pretend. The problem is, now we are both liars ... in a nice, kinda of way.

Two Basic types of lies: Willing participants in the lie: That is, I’ll believe you are who it is that you say and think you are... if you believe I am who it is that I say and think I am. There are several thousand other extrapolations on this theme but this is the basic premise. I’ll look after you ... if... you look after me. Some call this sharing ... some form relationships based on this but essentially, it’s lying, and that’s the truth.

On the other hand there are times when we are unwilling participants. You get to see this particularly in business; Bernie Madoff is one of the better known worst examples. Statistics noted that in the business year 2008/2009 nearly ¾ of a trillion + dollars or nearly 7% of the GNP of the USA was scammed by deceivers like Madoff. Another infamous example is President Bill Clinton and there are literally thousands of examples where these few people get their greed needs met at the cost of the many.

The underlying premise is that the conman is working from a place that was stated very clearly by Henry Overlander, a Brit, who was said to be able to bring down any (if not all) of the world’s banks single handedly. In the one and only interview he ever gave in his life he stated: “I’ve got one rule. Everyone is willing to give you something. They’re ready to give you something for whatever it is they’re hungry for.”

What you are hungry for does not have to be real; it just needs to appear to be real for you and your portion of the deal. The dupe is positioned by the con to give first and then forced to wait for the fantasy return (shortly). If it is too good to be true ... etc. The nature of what we are hungry for is buried deeply in our unmet needs ... and by the time we hit adolescents or early adulthood the need has been masked over by so many false fronts and wishes it is hard to tell what the real need is.

But it is still the deeper needs fulfilment drives that causes “the hungry” Overlander is talking about.

If you don’t want to be deceived then you have to know what you are hungry for ... that much is simple.

Basic Primary Needs are:

1. Food Shelter Clothing,

2. A Sense of Power,

3. A Sense of Fun,

4. A Sense of Belonging ... Love and Acceptance, A

5. Sense of Freedom...

We all have our fantasy wish list ... and the lie is the bridge between the Reality of My Reality (my painful world) and the Fantasy of My Reality (my painless world).

No one wants to be hurt ... But the truth of the matter is life is painful and the lie is a vain attempt to bypass that pain. By accepting that life is painful, by accepting that as a fact, it makes the pain of life a little less difficult to handle and life a little more tolerable.

Statistics say that strangers will lie 3 times in the first 10 minutes of meeting. It is also stated that we are normally lied to 10 to 200 times during the course of a normal day. It seems to be the way of things.

When this information hits us it is hard to imagine that this is really the way of things in the day to day world of our life. Now the truth of the matter is that we lie more to strangers then we do to co workers ... extraverts lie more than introverts ... men lie 8 times more about themselves then they do about other people ... Women lie more to protect other people from the pain of the perceived truth ... if you are in an average marriage then you are going to lie to your spouse one out of every ten interactions ... now if you are unmarried, and that number drops to one in every three interactions ...

Rule one: The truth of the matter is that we are deep ambivalent about the truth and pass it out only as necessary...

Rule two: we are overtly against lying but covertly for it. We are for it in the ways that our society has sanctioned ... sometime the history of the sanctioning drifts far back into antiquity.

Rule Three: we are hard wired to lye ... the larger the neo cortex in the species the bigger and better the liar.

• There is the well-known story of Koko the gorilla who had a baby kitten name ‘All Ball’... Koko was taught to sign and could communicate readily with her keepers ... she once blamed All Ball for tearing a sink off the wall ...

• Babies will fake a cry stop and see if anyone is coming then go right back to crying

• One year olds learn concealment ...

• Two year olds bluff

• Five year olds lie out right ... they manipulate via flattery

• Nine year olds are masters of the cover up

• By the time an average person gets to be college age they will normally lie to their mom one out of every five interactions

• So by the time we enter the work world we enter a world that is full of spam and fake digital friends ... people who would rather lie then tell us the truth if in fact they even know what it is ... it is a world that is full of schemers ... referred to in the literature as the Post Truth Society.

[1] Adapted from Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting

On Dreams and Dreaming

1. What was the overall plot / story of the dream?

2. Highlight the outstanding emotions experienced in the dream.

3. Were the emotions felt predominantly positive or negative?

4. What was your vantage point in the dream (observer, participant, or both depending on the portion of the dream referred to)? (If you were in observer, how did you feel about what you were observing? Were you caught up in the events as they were unfolding, as if they were happening to you; or did you feel more objective, detach from the events you were witnessing unfold?).

5. What was the outcome / resolution of the dream? (This may reveal tips on how you should go about doing something in waking life)

6. Could you anticipate the outcome of any of the activities in your dream before they happened? If yes, which ones?

7. Did the events in your dream seem to occur in an erratic or random way, or did they seem to unfold in logical sequence?

8. Were there any recurrent dreams symbols (people, places, things or situations which frequent show up in your dreams)?

After the explore the dream using these suggestions, we then process it together.

Systemic Maturation

Systemic maturation occurs both in the healthy functional family and the dysfunctional family. These stages are called The Early Phase, The Middle Phase and The Late Phase.


The Early Phase:
This is the time when new families form boundaries, rules, regulations and rituals to govern themselves. Some but not all are carry over practices from their family of origin. The healthy family establishes boundaries to meet the needs of the family members. The dysfunctional family establishes boundaries to meet the needs of the Prime Stressor and the systems, never the individual within the system. Accommodation rather than Cooperation is the primary factor. I live my life adjusting to someone else’s problem.


The Middle Phase:
This is a time of consolidation within the system. In the dysfunctional system, this phase is marked by the necessity of deeper commitment by the various members of the system to the system and a growing consistency of regulatory behaviour, rules and roles according to the needs of the system. It really boils down to each member of the family being there for the family but the family not being there for them. It is during this stage that dependency behaviour(s) of the Prime Stressor is reinforced. The family consistently meets the needs of the system that is being controlled by the Prime Stressor ... at the expense of the needs of the individual within the system. Members of the system are abandoned with everyone at home. During this phase there is strong resistance to either growth or change. New rules and norms form naturally around how the family operates. These become the rules of the road within the system. Everyone adapts:

The family adjusts their thinking to make the unacceptable acceptable. This is not healthy, but it is the norm and acceptable because it has been sanctioned by the system to define their Way of Doing Things.

Acceptable according to the rules

developed by the family to cope.

The Late Phase:
It is during this phase that the legacies for future generations form. The Way of Things for the family system becomes the customs and rituals especially at celebratory times of the year. Co dependent families experience this phase with the most difficulty. With the progression of the Co-Dependency Cycle severe health problems begin to arise and the family resists the need for change and becomes more rigid in their ways. As the family tries to cope with the crisis of the moment they are totally unable to prepare for their future and more importantly they have never considered facing the demons of their past.

Recipe for Sanity

Only by discussing ourselves, holding back nothing, only by being willing to take advice and accept direction [can] we set foot on the road to straight thinking, solid honesty, and genuine humility.

Repeat Often