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Bonds
That Make Us Free, Part 27: Self-Honesty's Role in Doing What's
Right
by C. Terry
Warner
We are ready
to look at the second factor that enabled Benson and Doug to do
the right thing in a genuine rather than a counterfeit way. When
they asked themselves what the right thing to do might be, they
had to do so sincerely. How were they able to give up their self-absorption
enough to attain this sincerity? Why wasn't the self-questioning
just one more episode in their ongoing series of self- deceptions?
In asking himself
what the decent thing to do might be, Benson simultaneously wondered
whether he might be in the wrong. This kind of self-honesty must
be present if, starting in a self-absorbed condition, we are to
discern what is right to do. If we do not suspect ourselves of
having been wrong, our search for what is right won't be completely
sincere. Sincerely asked, the question, "What is right
to do?" includes the question, "Might I be in the
wrong?" With either of these questions we ask the other; we
pull ourselves up short and start over.
This is the
key: Even in asking this question, if we ask it sincerely,
we begin to change in our way of being; we begin to become the kind
of person capable of doing the right thing without counterfeiting
it. For putting this question to ourselves sincerely means we are
already troubled and wondering about ourselves. The initial
act of self-honesty has already taken place.
How Can We
Tell What's Right?
What has just been said might make it all sound too easy. If
we're caught up in self-betrayal, our sense of what's true or right
is hopelessly mixed with other, often competing, feelings. Doug
no doubt felt insecure about approaching that man again. He might
have remained annoyed with him for making a reconciliation so hard
to achieve, and discouraged that the tension between them had gone
so long unresolved. How, in such a confusion of feelings, does a
person discern which feelings to trust and to be guided by?
Keep in mind
as you think about this issue how very easy it is to be misled.
When our hearts are hardened we also have false feelings about what's
right and wrong. You will recall Jennifer, staying home from visiting
her aunt in the hospital and finding so much fault with the woman
that she actually felt it would be wrong to make the visit.
Self-betrayers have feelings, often very strong feelings, and they
get into trouble by trusting them.
Discerning
the Feelings We Can Trust
A woman named Brenda came to see me about the hard feelings
that had long been developing between herself and her husband. She
told several stories of his slovenliness, his rudeness, and his
anger. I listened. She bombarded me with a list of reasons why she
ought to leave him. I listened. She told me what would happen if
she failed to take this action. Then she asked if it was okay for
her to do it.
I said, "You
know the answer."
The room fell
silent. I would not have disrupted that silence for anything. Brenda
was going over in her mind all her arguments for leaving her husband.
She hadn't found these arguments totally convincing; had she done
so she wouldn't have doubted herself enough to come to see me in
the first place. Her eyes reminded me of a person waiting at the
edge of a momentous and frightening decision, but not yet ready
to make it.
The silence
persisted for a very long time, perhaps fifteen minutes. I waited.
Finally she spoke and said: "I'm a pathetic person, aren't
I?"
What had been
the pattern of Brenda's inner conversation during all that time?
Of course, I have no way of knowing the answer for sure, but from
what she said later I suspect the inner argument went something
like this:
"But he
never shows me respect."
Silence. "Maybe
that's not completely fair. I've criticized him pretty harshly right
from the beginning."
"No, nothing
excuses the hurt. Bad habits I can stand. But when he knows how
he hurts me, then it's on purpose!"
More silence,
and then: "On the other hand, I've known how hurt he
has been, and I still go ahead and cut him down."
"Yes, but
. . . "
"Why do
I want to nail him to the wall, anyway? My mother said I keep forgetting
all the good times and remember only the hard times, and that's
true. Why do I just emphasize the bad? Am I just looking for an
excuse not to try harder?"
In the silence
of that room and without needing to defend herself against any other
person, Brenda allowed herself to look at herself, and she
saw a woman filled with accusations. She could feel them inhibiting
the spirit of life in her. There was a difference between (1)
her accusing, self-excusing feelings and (2) the discomfort she
felt when she observed herself having and defending those feelings.
And she could discern this difference.
That's the key.
To have feelings that are essentially dishonest (and by that is
meant any of the accusing, self-excusing emotions or attitudes we
have been talking about) is one thing. It's quite another to observe
ourselves having these feelings and to see how we are afflicting
others with them. Whereas in the first case we are being dishonest,
in the second we are honest about our dishonesty; as we learned
in Part 24, the honesty drives
the dishonesty out. Between the dishonest and the honest state of
mind there is a world of difference, and, like Brenda, we can all
discern that difference.
How it went
with Brenda is how it goes with many. I was teaching a group of
managers in a traditional industry. They lived to drink and gamble
on big athletic events, they treated one another callously, and
they never showed sympathetic feelings, which meant that they pretended
to be unaffected by anyone else's need. At the end of the teaching
day, one of them, Jimmy, a craggy stub of a man of sixty who looked
seventy-five, dropped his head in his hands, said something about
his wife that, though muffled, was very appreciative, and wept.
"This is the first time," he said, "I have ever been
out of the box."
Can you imagine
a life of abrasive and irresponsible attitudes suddenly challenged
when their author, in a solitary moment, acknowledges his sense
that it has always been false? It calls to mind that lone, unprotected
Chinese revolutionary standing in the path of a tank in Tiananmen
Square. To me, Jimmy showed that kind of courage. He sided with
the truth. Such a profoundly private and personal decision is the
beginning of an awakened life.
Brenda's and
Jimmy's examples answer the question, "Can we trust our feelings?"
The answer is: It depends on what kind of feelings they are. If
they are feelings that come when we are yielding to the truth, we
can trust them; if not, they will lead us astray.
The Buck
Absolutely Stops with Us
How, then, can we tell whether we are caught up in dishonest
feelings or proceeding honestly? What yardstick do we use to make
certain we are not making a mistake?
The answer is,
there is no yardstick. No handy tape measure or scale or barometer
exists by which to assess the difference. No jury of public opinion
can help us decide. No panel of experts knows any more than we do.
Yet the difference between counterfeit and genuine is plain, as
plain as bright daylight or the darkness of a moonless night. We
not only can't rely on anything external to tell the difference,
but we don't need to. This is something that human beings are simply
able to do.
You might think,
"Sensing what's right must certainly be a defective and unreliable
procedure then. No wonder people so often disagree about right and
wrong!" This thought would be mistaken. What's defective is
not our capacity to discern whether we're doing right or wrong,
but our ability to formulate rules for doing it. Keep in mind that
we can't formulate rules for doing many of the utterly simple things
we do daily, like raising our arm, making our vocal cords work,
and remembering a name. The reason is their simplicity. Rules are
for the complex things we do by means of doing simple things for
which there can be no rules. It would be foolish to question a capacity
we exercise consistently just because we can't put how we do it
into words.
Therefore I
am prepared to say: When it comes to discerning when we are being
taken in by falsified feelings of what's right and what's wrong,
we are completely, utterly on our own. No yardstick or procedure
can help us. The only thing that can save us from being hoodwinked
by our own dishonesty is our own honesty. The buck stops right
there.
Growing in
Confidence
Most interestingly, the more vigilant we are in seeking the
right thing to do and the more faithfully we do it, the more unerring
becomes our sensitivity to the self-insistence of false feelings,
and the more acute our distaste for them becomes. We grow in our
courage to renounce them and follow our heart instead. Thus we become
more able to discern our own spiritual distress and to protect ourselves
from self-deception.
After twenty
years of marriage, a woman whom I'm going to call Rachael was jolted
to learn that her husband had been having an affair for quite some
time. He had had a history of that sort of thing before their marriage,
but had tried hard to put it behind him. "I can see so clearly
that he tried to change everything except his heart," she wrote.
She had long since recognized his fear of emotional intimacy and
had sorrowed for him over that. Her story exemplifies complete honesty
of soul. She said:
One day in a
heap of tears I decided that I still had a life and that I would
not spend it being bitter and poisoning the lives of our children
with venom about their father. I felt really rather wonderful after
I made that decision. People now tell me they are amazed at my attitude,
but I feel that it is not amazing. I just want to live a clean life,
and poison does not allow growth.
In the last
week I have had two bitter divorced women call me up and offer a
shoulder to cry on. Interestingly enough, neither of them heard
me when I declined (graciously) their offers. They both are certain
that I am seething with anger—because they are. In their eyes
I belong to a club of women who need to "let it all out."
Both of them offered to cry with me, talk with me when I need to
talk, and ultimately have me participate in fanning the fire of
"I-have-been-wounded-and-I-will-never-let-anyone-forget-it."
When I told them how I feel—that my husband is ill, weak, and
suffering and that I hurt for him—they tell me that I am really
denying my anger and that this anger is justified. They don't hear
me when I say that I want life, not death that I would carry around
in my heart forever.
This woman had
developed her discernment of the light and her confidence in it
through a number of hard experiences. When very difficult trials
befell her, she was ready; she knew which feelings to trust. Thus
she was able to see through invitations to collusion that otherwise
would have been very seductive and to spare herself a great deal
of sorrow.
We use the word
character to name a person's constancy over time in straightforwardly
doing what honestly seems to be right. We can grow in this constancy,
and it is our choice alone to decide whether or not we will. And
we do so by quietly accepting and doing the right thing in the present
moment—and then in the next moment, and after that in the next,
and so on without end.
Next up we will
answer the question: "Since we cannot bring about a change
of heart in ourselves directly, what can we do directly that will
indirectly bring about a change of heart?"
This article
is part of a serialization of Bonds That Make Us
Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves by
C. Terry Warner.
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