The Shadow in Not Telling the Truth

I have wondered what it was that made telling a lie to be regarded as tantamount to murder in some people’s lives. In my discovery of the power of standing for my shadows when they turn up in front of me in other people and things, I have come to realize that lying is tantamont to murder because it robs people of their aliveness. I believe that I have often justified a “white lie” because I believed that I was protecting that person from possible harm as long as that person would never discover the truth by other means. What I now believe I was doing instead was robbing them of the opportunity to experience “what's so”, and that “what's so” is the essential aspect of aliveness. That leads to only one conclusion, that lying to someone is, for all intents and purposes, robbing someone of their aliveness, their experience of being alive. Further I believe that there is nothing as indefensible as to achieve my desires at the cost of another person's aliveness.  That is, in the most simplest of terms, my purpose in being here and writing these posts.

In many ways, this discovery has become, for me, a form of liberation rather than more burden, for it has shifted the question of lying from a moral question to a question of workability, integrity and responsibility which are the fundamental qualities of wholeness and aliveness. I can still question the issue of lying as a moral question if I choose, and it will not alter the fact that lying takes away from me having to be responsible, and that as long as I am able to remember to step out of any judgment, feeling or shadow around not telling the truth, I can simply let myself see that lying does not contribute to creating a world of workability, integrity and responsibility, that it creates a world of unworkability and chaos.

The Shadow of Making Resolutions

This is that time of the year when many of us take time to reflect on what we did or did not do for ourselves this past year, trying to forgive ourselves for our shortcomings, and then to resolve to make a new start for ourselves in the new year. While I really can’t speak for the rest of you, I can say for myself that this process of making New Year’s resolutions simply has not worked for me, at least with any profound change in who I am.
To examine this shadow, I went to Wikipedia™ to look up the definition of resolve and found that as a verb, to resolve means “to find a solution to a problem” or “to make a firm decision to do something”. As a noun, resolve means “determination or will power”. Both definitions seem to convey to me that a resolution is centered on the problem and requires will  power and a whole lot of struggle and effort to affect the change. So, I am thinking that if I were to focus not on a problem to be solved or resolved but rather including the problem as the seed of the intention toward workability in my life, perhaps the desired result will show up by simply looking to see what works as well as what does not, moment by moment, and then simply doing that which works, at least more often than doing what doesn’t work.
So, getting back to my shadow, does finding solutions and using my force of will to affect change really make my life more workable? Its easy to make a firm decision when I am in the throes of excitement, such as found at the changing of one calendar year to the next. Celebrations like these can foster some change in my emotions because I believe that for the moment, I am invincible and infallible, but in the light of day, I will wake up, go to the bathroom, look myself in the mirror and think to myself, “what the hell.”
One common resolution people often make is to live a more healthier life; to lose weight, eat better, exercise more, and all that other stuff. The aim is to “get healthy” when the experience of health, which is neither good or bad, is simply a state of having a mind and body which supports the other intentions in life. For me, seven months ago, I was in a state of health where I could not walk or stand for long periods of time without a support, such as a cane, and to get up or sit down brought wincing pain to my body. Somewhere I said to a friend, a healer, that I wanted a change in my life. This friend told me to imagine carrying ten pound sacks of potatoes in each hand as I walked and then to imagine doing that without those bags. That image became the seed of my intention and now I have lost 55 lbs and in my job as a deliverer of flowers, I use the stairs instead of the elevator and park farther away from buildings instead of the closest space possible. Instead of resolving to get healthy, I have simply done those things that support my body in doing its job to support me in my other intentions in life. I haven’t resolved to do anything, I have simply taken a look at what works and what doesn’t and doing what works, at least most of the time, anyway.

The Shadow of Unworkability in Relationships

I answered a question on Answerology.com about what I would do if I was a third party to a relationship which involved infidelity, okay, cheating by one of the partners. Would I choose silence or would I intervene in some way, and if I did intervene, how would I do so without trying to hold another accountable, which, as I have spoken before, I really cannot do? That got me thinking about how I have chosen silence over workability in my relationships and then wondered what went wrong when those relationships all too often broke down.

To me, the question becomes “What causes unworkability in relationships?” Unworkability, I believe, is caused by a lack of trust and safety and that both trust and safety break down when I am not accountable for my actions, in the example of unfaithfulness I mentioned earlier, if I chose to remain silent or chose to blame or shame another into being accountable by making them wrong for it.

So how then do I keep my own integrity in check in this situation? One viable way is by a process we call in the Mankind Project™ as support accountability. In this process, while I cannot make another accountable, I can support another by inviting the other to look at the possibility of an accountability for their actions and with it, the opportunity to clean up the consequences for not keeping their word and for the person to see their own shadow in their lack of integrity, if and when that person chooses to entertain my invitation to do so. In this example of the unfaithful partner, I would speak to the perpetrator, bearing in mind that the perpetrator may or may not have the same grasp of what accountability is and what the impact of having integrity in one’s relationships has on the workability of a relationship when trust and safety are jeopardized by a lie, in this case, by cheating. As third party to this scenario, while I don’t have a same stake in act of cheating as the partner may have, I do have a stake in whether the trust and safety I have with the perpetrator can survive when I choose silence over speaking my truth or if I choose to make any denial of accountability the basis of whether the relationship can remain workable.

The Shadow of Obedience/Compliance

One law for the lion and the ox is oppression - William Blake

At a site I often visit and contribute answers to questions called Answerology.com, I read a question from a man who asked “As your child grows up at what age do you expect to be able to hold them accountable for their disobedience or wrongs.” Looking at the question as I believe most would do, I would have probably answered the question with something akin to “It depends on the child” until I realized that according to many schools of thought surrounding accountability, including my own, I cannot hold another person accountable, that I can only hold myself accountable. I further believe that accountability is, for the most part, an unteachable quality, like discipline or integrity, yet it is a quality that can be instilled in a person at an early age by providing a safe, non-judgmental space for the person to properly access the consequences of their own behavior. Unfortunately for most of us, the demands of living leave us with little time to make that kind of environment available for our progeny and we surely cannot expect that state-funded public education or even most private or charter schools to have the where-with-all to providing such a safe non-judgmental environment for instilling qualities like accountability to thrive, so that both our child-rearing and educational system are left with relying on obedience and compliance in order to have the time to teach knowledge and skills needed to survive along with providing a meager amount of life-enrichment through activities like music, art and, dare I say, sports. Can all we ever hope for in our children is that they become obedient and compliant to the expectations of the society into which we have chosen to birth them? Here in, I believe, lies my own shadow of obedience/compliance, for I have chosen, for the most part, obedience and compliance over standing for my own accountability and integrity.

I recently spoke about a shadow I called virtue. I raised the question of whether or not virtue is a quality to which it is necessary to aspire if we are present to the idea that we are not separate from each other or from our source that some may call God, for if we really are all one, would we not always be acting in alignment for the highest good even without being able to consciously know what that good is?  Are obedience and compliance virtuous and the only way to prevent lawlessness, unworkability and chaos?  I say no, for I not only believe that I can, but also I believe that I actually do live in a world where integrity is simply the state or condition of being whole and complete and where I am accountable by honoring my word.  What I mean by honoring my word is that if I am unable to keep my word I will communicate as soon as I know I am unable to keep my word to those who are counting on me and I will clean up any messes with those who counted on me that resulted from not keeping my word. From this state of wholeness, I believe that by honoring my word, I create  workability.