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Spiritual Honesty: Why Good Thinking and Bad Feelings Matter

Sunday, May 24, 2015 14:56

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(Before It's News)

25th May 2015

By Jack Adam Weber L.Ac., Dipl. C.H.

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

“To learn about spirituality, to become spiritual, you have to give up all you think is spiritual.”

Without honesty, we live in disaccord with reality, which bears all kinds of hidden problems. Honesty is truth, and refers to the accurate perception of ourselves, each other, and the outside world.

We can only heal to the degree that we are honest, for what goes unnoticed, especially inside us, will remain largely unchanged. Our spirituality is no exception. In this vein, I will first discuss intellectual and emotional honesty as a build-up to spiritual honesty. So, please bear with me while I set the stage for this fruit of our best-used inner resources.

Intellectual Honesty

Intellectual Honesty is our capacity to notice and accurately report to ourselves and others what is true in the world, what is true of ourselves and our own logic (if it is internally consistent), and what we honestly believe. Intellectual honesty relies on our subjective capacity to level-headedly assess what is most likely true, what is factual, which is another way of describing rationality and self-evident common sense.

Some things we all consider to be true. This is called consensual, objective reality. Drinking poison will hurt you. Lying to others for our gain at another’s expense is hurtful. Abusing children is damaging and not compassionate. Unless you are a psychopath, we all hold these to be true. Good science and self-evident common sense inform us of objective truths. We now know the Earth is not flat, that it revolves around the sun and that gravity is an invisible force that causes things to fall to Earth. This all pertains to fact, to intellectual honesty.

Intellectual honesty also relies on critical thinking, which is our capacity to reason and make sure the logic of any position or discussion is internally consistent. According to Wikipedia:

“Critical thinking is clear, reasoned thinking involving critique. Its details vary amongst those who define it. According to Beyer (1995), critical thinking means making clear, reasoned judgments. During the process of critical thinking, ideas should be reasoned and well thought out and judged.”

In sum, intellectual honesty helps us ascertain fact, whether that fact is personal, interpersonal, or objectively true about the physical world. Intellectual dishonesty shows up as excuses, alibis, and justifying just about anything we want to, usually to protect our ego, pleasures (for the moment), and false sense of self. Many influences cause us to deny the truth, with the result of suffering, not just our own, but especially for those we love.

Emotional Honesty

Emotional Honesty is our capacity to consciously feel our true feelings, our true emotions, as we experience them in our body. Intellectual honesty aids emotional honesty by helping us make sure that what we base our beliefs on, and therefore our responses, is true. Intellectual honesty therefore helps us to be more emotionally honest. If we are not intellectually honest, if we don’t discover the facts of our predicament, we can generate emotions that are not appropriate in the context of external reality. If we then act on these emotions, even by expressing them, then we run the very likely risky result of doing violence onto others and creating suffering because the external world is likely not deserving of our reaction — which, had we been more patient and intellectually honest about the facts of a situation, we could have avoided. I discuss this at more length in the article Re-Thinking Love – Why Our Hearts Must Also Be Minded.

Reciprocally, being able to feel our true feelings and work through painful ones helps us assess reality more honestly. If we are not emotionally honest then we will be less intellectually honest because we’ll have unconscious emotions governing our decisions, opinions, and thoughts. This is based on some interesting science, which I mention just below. We’ll also be more prone to acting out our pain onto others via the maxim, “hurt people hurt others.”

Modern neuroscience informs us that most of our decisions and beliefs are emotionally driven. For this reason, emotional honesty, and emotional process work to heal and reduce our painful feelings, is crucial for intellectual honesty. In other words, many people won’t be intellectually honest, not because the facts are obscure, but because they don’t want to believe the truth due to a fear of feeling pain, even if it’s the death of their illusions. So, if we can accept that “the truth hurts,” and adjust accordingly, we stand to be more intellectually honest, more in alignment with reality, and ultimately more productive, effective, joyful, and helpful. These positives usually come after we make peace with the truth, become more grounded, and adjust our lives appropriately.

In one sense, all of our feelings are true because they exist. However, just because we feel something, doesn’t mean that what we assume from our feelings is true. For example, because I feel upset at you doesn’t mean that you deserve it or that you actually did anything to justify my upset. To find out if my interpretation of my feeling is accurate, I can exercise critical thinking to find out if what I believe about what upset me is true. If I find out you didn’t eat the half a watermelon I was saving and I just missed seeing it in the back of the fridge (which, if you know me, is utterly likely!), then my feeling, while true for me, was not true in its assumption and projection onto you.

I want to mention a point about emotional healing in the context of emotional honesty. If we haven’t done some core emotional wound work, we really can’t be as loving as we’d like because when our buttons are constantly pushed we tend to shut-out what triggered us, thus limiting our outreach, our love in action. What’s more, dealing intimately with our own heartaches fosters compassion and empathy in us for others that suffer (which is everyone). When we can accept our own pain and wade through our griefs until they run clear, then we can extend our love to a world that suffers. When we don’t do this personal work, we miss a lot of suffering because when external painful events trigger our unconscious pain we haven’t dealt with, we tend to defend against it and tune it out. I think this is a big unacknowledged reason for why so many deny evil and the climate change crisis.

Just as we can’t heal without intellectual honesty, without emotional honesty we also can’t heal because we don’t know what we are feeling. Emotional dishonesty, therefore, shows up as a disconnect both from feeling our feelings and being conscious of them.

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