Q: Are there people who are capable of only speaking openly and freely to everyone?
There are very few. We are so culturally conditioned to lie that it’s an automatic response. Often, we’re not even aware of it. There are so few people who know what they’re feeling when they’re feeling it, never mind having developed the ability to speak it.
If you want an interesting exercise, take a day where you speak everything you feel uncensored, regardless of how petty, silly, small, unflattering, grand, loving, humorous, appreciative. Say it as it bubbles up into the mind without auditing the thought. As soon as the thought is on the tongue, set it free. This is how you will begin to clear the mind to be open to greater realities. To master this requires practice over a great length of time because the lies are so insidious. It will take quite awhile before they all become uncovered.
Q: Would all the pain we would have to go through be worth it?
The mere suggestion of this exercise is enough to cause your stomachs to lurch. There is always an assumption of pain when one thinks about speaking the mind. But there would be an even greater expression of love and gratitude. Would it be worth the pain to clear up unspoken assumptions, misunderstandings, and judgments? You’d have to decide that it was in order to do this. Otherwise it would remain a fanciful idea.
Q: In acting that way, wouldn’t we have to go through a period of pain and humility?
The pain would be in the release of attachment to ego. While speaking thoughts may cause others pain, it is more likely that it could cause self-embarrassment at revealing that you have such petty thoughts, particularly if you’re attached to intellect or seeing yourself as always loving and spiritual. What you’ll find is that almost the entirety of your thoughts are culturally generated: “She’s too fat,” “He’s a geek,” “She looks terrible in that,” “He has no table manners,” “That’s a cool car,” “I need to get more accomplished.”
While these may truly be the thoughts you are having, are these thoughts true? By what standard? Do any of these thoughts tell you anything real about yourself or the other person? Or do they simply tell you that you’ve unconsciously parrotted a cultural perspective in which you’ve been heavily indoctrinated.
By even allowing yourself to consider doing this exercise, you’d quickly experience this truth on a visceral level. You would see how your culture sets you up to continually judge each other to perpetuate dissatisfaction and identification with separateness. Any remaining mental space not occupied by judgment is usually swallowed up by repetitive thoughts of worry and fear.
If you could get others to participate in this exercise, you’d quickly see that almost everyone has the same trained cultural thoughts—good and bad. Then perhaps by realizing that you’ve all been brainwashed into automatically having these kinds of thoughts, you will begin choosing to hold different thoughts.
We all build a shell to live in, in order to survive. For some, the shell is the athlete, the brain, the attractive one, the funny one, the kind one, the in-control-get-things-done one. There are many shells. But that’s all it is, a shell game. You won’t know this until you lift the shell to see that there’s nothing underneath it. You don’t live in the shell, the shell is not you. When you are freed from that illusion, then you will see that you live in the soul of yourself and God.
Many of you have progressed to where you’re practiced in knowing what you want to say and to whom you wish to say it. It’s a matter of developing courage by realizing that there is nothing to lose except pain and frustration, and everything to gain in spiritual cleanliness, love and appreciation for yourself and others.