Honesty

Honesty is nudity and, as such, a precious and rather rare phenomenon of the natural world, human interaction, and self-knowing. Looking out upon the panorama of the world, one can be easily fooled into believing that what you see is what you get, with the bare landscape, unclothed creatures, and the like. But this stark appearance could not be further from the truth. “Though mathematically intelligible, physical reality is literally unimaginable,” Michael Williams notes, the ultra vast majority of the cosmos far beyond our fathoming, and with our minds intentionally distorting, hiding, eliminating, and shrinking nature’s grandeur into something much smaller and more manageable for us to perceive. Human interaction, too, is fraught with immense calculation, coyness, and nuance, even with those most dear to us, and almost as reflexively as breathing, so that we are never quite naked with another, as it were, which might be too much for us to share, or bear, given the parameters of social etiquette ensuring smooth engagements as we stave off the gauche. But perhaps the most clandestine and convoluted domain of all with an aversion to honesty is the psyche. Best estimates are that our conscious mind comprises a mere five to ten percent of our knowing, while the subconscious, and deeper still the unconscious, constitute the majority of the mind. We are on the whole hidden from ourselves. If the very best effort a human being can make is to be completely honest with oneself, as Freud believed, then it seems we are at a great disadvantage from the get-go, and through no fault of our own. The naturalness of the world, our interactions with one another, and indeed our own inner cosmos contain an inherent recalcitrance toward being truthful. And yet, despite this recalcitrance, or perhaps because of it, honesty is all the more important. Catching a glimpse of nature’s splendor as revealed to us through new knowledge of the quantum, spooky action at a distance, or simply allowing Aeolus the kindness of combing us on a midsummer day, can at least bring us into proximity with the truth and beauty of being. So, too, in a conversation, by risking the revelation of something utterly personal, in the hope that this disrobing might lead to increased interpersonal intimacy and reciprocity. And likewise within the deep of one’s own mind, when we dare to open ourselves beyond the familiar, to make known and integrate what lies in the dark. “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious,” Carl Jung wrote. “The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore unpopular.”