3.7 Getting to the truth
The hardest thing for us as a species to do is to…
See ourselves as we really are.
Going down to the bottom of our operating system and standing there face to face with the source of human evil and the death of hope is…
Utterly painful.
And…
We humans are designed to do almost anything to avoid pain.
Given this, I’ve come to believe that…
As a species, we would rather die than see ourselves as we really are.
And that…
We’d rather go extinct than to do the kind of deep and painful inner work it would take for us to actually save ourselves.
What about us as individuals? In a similar way, I think…
The hardest thing for us to do is see ourselves as we really are.
This is why we have “blind spots.” If something about us is just too painful to see, we block it out.
In my twenties, I was such a mess there was no way I could have tolerated seeing myself as I really was. It would have been paralyzing. And I didn’t just have blind spots, I had blind swaths…
My life was more blind spot than not.
I remember vividly how painful it was when someone told me a truth about myself. And the worst was when I understood it was going to take me months, maybe years, to work my way out of this suddenly spotlighted behavior, like with my compulsive co–dependency. In the meantime, I was going to have to live with my shame consciously until I could effect a fix. So painful.
I’ve heard self–help experts say we stick with what we know because it’s our “comfort zone.” But for me, being stuck in the behaviors I brought out of childhood with me was…
My suffering zone.
Why did I stay in that zone for so long?
First, because the pain of the work it would take to cross over into a better future was so much bigger than the pain of my daily suffering which I had grown habituated to.
Second, because to do that crossing over, I’d have to look at the dark truth about how my family and my church had failed me, and I really did not want to see that. It was easier to think there was something wrong with me, than to see that there was something very wrong with the bigger picture, the whole system, even with humanness itself.
I’m thinking now about addicts I’ve known. They were in terrible pain and they’d do whatever it took to escape it. They’d drink or take drugs or both. This is often described as self–medicating, and those substances are called painkillers.
But an addict’s life is not a happy one. It just that the pain that comes with that life feels less than the pain of facing the trauma of childhood. So addiction is not the killing of pain as much as substituting one kind of pain for another.
From the time our ancestors first became human, self–development wasn’t about your personal self but about…
Your tribal self.
You developed your talents and strengths so you could contribute to the welfare of the tribe. People did not do deep dives into their individual psyches, because there was no survival value in that. So it would not have been tolerated.
In fact, deep dives would have been dangerous. Because if everyone in the tribe was busy being their own person, that would have fractured the social cohesion which was critical for survival in the wild.
The tribe created an identity that made it feel good about itself. And made it feel like it was much, much better than any other tribe. Like it was the best tribe ever…
And in this there was serious survival value.
So…
Tribal self-criticism was not part of our tribal way of life.
And I think this is a key reason why it’s so hard, both for us as a species and for us as individuals, to see ourselves as we really are, by which I mean…
To see ourselves critically.
This was never part of our history.
As I’ve said, if you want to ask more of love, you’re going to have to ask more of yourself which means you’re going to have to do some serious self–development. But not the conventional kind.
To upgrade our love, we need to upgrade our self–development, and here’s how that goes.
First, you identify with your humanness.
For most of our time on earth…
We humans have been a mystery unto ourselves.
We tamed fire, invented tools, developed language, created agriculture, and domesticated animals, all while knowing next to nothing about our inner workings. We made our most important breakthroughs with big brains that were black boxes. We felt so familiar to ourselves in everyday ways, yet…
We each had a stranger living inside us.
And that stranger was our operating system. Which we didn’t understand, not in any depth or detail so…
We suffered from OS blindness.
But that didn’t matter. We were happy to give our embedded OS free rein and let it run us because it was basically working for us.
In just the last two hundred years, though, we’ve learned magnitudes more about our inner workings than in the preceding 2–300,000 years, the entire life span of our species.
What Darwin and his successors have discovered about human evolution and what therapists and researchers have discovered about human psychology is breakthrough stuff. It’s not that every bit of it has been accurate or helpful, but enough of it has been that we’ve got an unprecedented opportunity to know ourselves in the deepest way—down to the level of our operating system…
But do we really want to know?
Because, as I’ve said, if we go down to the bottom, what we will find there is the scariest place in the world.
So why would we want to do that?
The ancient Greek philosophers urged their fellow citizens to “Know Thyself!” They inscribed that exhortation over the doorway of the temple of Apollo, where seekers went to find the famous Oracle of Delphi.
Some of those ancient guys were not really into self–knowledge. To them, “know thyself” meant you should know your place in society and stay there. For others, though, it meant more like what we mean by it today—figure out why you do what you do and what might make human community work better.
But those intellectually ambitious Greeks could be happy in their pursuit of self-knowledge…
Only because they weren’t delving down into the deepest wellspring of human behavior.
These days we’ve got New–Age teachers who urge us to know ourselves, but they say it like this…
“Know your true self.”
What they’re actually telling us to do is cherry-pick…
Take all the things you like—caring, kindness, creativity, compassion—gather them together in a bouquet, add a bow, and call that your true self.
Anything you don’t like—envy, greed, gossip, hatred—call that your false self, cram it into a garbage bag and dump it.
The one thing I like about this reframing is its aspirational flair. You imagine the person you wish to be, then do your best to live up to that wish.
If, however, you start believing this invented “true self” is the same thing as the whole of the real self that evolution has given you, you’re going to get into trouble because those rejected parts don’t go away. You can suppress them, but only for so long. Eventually they will leak out or sneak out or break out and sabotage you.
But maybe that doesn’t sound so bad when you realize that if, by contrast, you venture down to your source, what you will find there is…
Your too-true self.
And it will shake you to your core.
So why would we want to go deep? Two reasons. The more we understand how hard it is being us…
The more compassion we will have for ourselves.
And the more we understand this damnable game we’re in…
The better we’ll know how to fight for ourselves.
There’s the old saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Our operating system is our first and greatest enemy. Knowing it intimately gives us the power, not to play the game better, but…
To play against the game.
And I think upgrading love is the best way to play this kind of offense. And it starts with seeing yourself as you really are, because if you can’t do that, you won’t know what to work on.
So, you look all the way down into the human operating system. You see humanness as it actually is, not as we wish it could be, and you…
Identify with it.
You say…
“Yes, I am human. I have the human OS inside me running me, with all its pluses and minuses. I have the human genome in common with every other human. So yes, this human me is really me.”
And that’s plenty painful right there. They say the truth will set you free, but here’s what they don’t say…
First, it will hurt like hell.
It’s no wonder that so many people prefer to believe they’re exceptional. That they’re better than ordinary humans. That they’ve transcended humanness.
I remember feeling that. If only everyone were like me and my fellow activists, the world’s problems would be solved and everything would be okay.
Where does this arrogance come from? The answer is simple…
Exceptionalism is part of the tribal way of life.
As I’ve said, each tribe believes it’s the best. That’s part of tribal identity—my tribe is better than your tribe. Magnitudes better.
This exceptionalism has survived into the present. I’m thinking about the speeches I hear politicians make about how America is the best country in the history of the world. How we’re the best democracy ever. How we are called to show the rest of the world how to live. How we have every right to lead the world.
And, by the way, because we’re so good and deserving…
We get to take whatever we want from whomever we want whenever we want.
But we don’t like to talk about that.
From time immemorial it’s been true that the more deeply we believe in ourselves…
The more fiercely we will fight if another tribe attacks.
And the more deeply we believe in ourselves…
The more fiercely we will fight when we attack another tribe.
So exceptionalism, despite how dangerous it’s become in our modern world, throughout our history has had survival value.
To identify with humanness, the whole deal, the bad with the good, is a radical act. It can be depressing. And it can trap you in despair.
So please, please, if you decide to look at the truth of humanness and identify with it…
Do not stop there.
Don’t ever stop there.
Make sure you make it part of your plan from the beginning to take the next step as soon as you are ready.
Second, you dis-identify from your humanness.
You take a stand for yourself and you say…
“I have this OS inside me, but I did not choose it.”
In fact, you get to oppose it openly. You get to say, “Biologically and genetically I’m absolutely human. I just am. That’s a fact. But…
“Morally, I choose to fight for a better kind of humanness.”
Third, you get to make a new identity of your own.
When you strip out your pretenses…
You get to get real.
And when you do that you get to start…
Meeting your real needs.
This is the blessing that makes all the pain and all the work worth it.
Because now you get to live by what’s deepest in your heart. You get to live by the decisions of your own personal moral soul, rather than submitting to the ways of a troubled and dying tribal world.
You get good at asking the question…
What do I need?
You get good at actually getting what you need. Like what you need so you can upgrade your love.
