Be Real

The moment you decide to be real you run into all sorts of problems. Being real is a selfish act. It rejects society and it rejects relationships and it may even reject love. It's like packing up and heading into the desert and forgetting about the world and keeping on going and going and going letting the purity of the surroundings sanctify what you feel inside.

In a way it's suicide. Not literal. You're killing all the careful constructs you have created and you are killing all the pretenses a lifetime's conditioning has made you accept so readily. The truth is we lie. We lie all the time.

We lie to ourselves, first and foremost. We plan things in detail which we never do, all our energy instead going in the mental planning. We lie to women we want to sleep with and men who we admire. We lie to kids and tell them 'truths' which we know aren't but we really wish they were. We lie to our parents and tell them we are doing great because we don't like to think we are not doing a million light years better than they did in every possible way. We lie to our friends and make out we are Ok, even when we are not.

The lies are so multi-layered and so habitual that we forget we are lying. Lying is a response you learn from very young and if you do not embrace it you will never get to be old enough to read something like this.

Because we lie so much we look for truth in unexpected places. Sometimes we find it in our work, creating through an imperfect means a perfect solution, a perfect job something we can really be proud of no matter how small. Sometimes we find it, incredibly enough, in a pet. We know deep down that here is truth. The food provider/food consumer, master/pet relationship works along such clearly delineated lines that then everything else which comes with it, adoration, friendship, mutual respect, is real.

We know that. We cannot articulate it and we anthropomorphosize our pets and wish they were real friends or children or parents, but we feel it all the same. We feel the power of this truth and it makes us humble.

Then there is the truth we feel in the world sometimes. In a selfless act of altruism, an unexpected act of friendship or generosity. In an act which requires the crossing of an invisible divide, something which we know swings the balance and keeps the world from sliding into the oblivion of total lies.

These are all things we sense. We know they are out there and we respond, every time, intuitively, to them. We do this even as we continue to live a lie.

Getting real hurts real bad. It means that suddenly all the 'white lies' (and can lies ever be white? - Get real and shed the conditioning, this is like a 'little' stealing is ok, or injuring someone but not killing them, yeah baby! That's ok!) we have been telling are shown to be false and this turns you into a liar and a manipulator whereas before you were someone who could be trusted and always knew what to do and always did the right thing.

The pain is real, even if you peel off a false relationship. You've hurt people who are not bad. People whose only mistake was to trust what you said because they did what you did: they believed the lies.

Truth No 1: Not everyone wants to be free.

Truth No 2: The moment you break free you experience such a deep sense of sadness and loss you which you never really shed the illusions.

Truth No 3: Break free and you are alone.

This, baby, is your desert walk. You go out with friends and the meaningless posturings and empty waffle leave you untouched and detached. You go to work and you realise that this is a soulless contract you entered into making out that it is really important that a deadline is met and the glossy fashion ad gets to print on time so that a thousand dresses to anorexic, body-image obsessed women can be sold just so you can pay your rent, your credit card bill and your food bill.

Being real is not easy which is why so few of us actually do it. Why should we? If we all did maybe the whole thing would grind to a halt, or worse, come crashing down and, whatever we may want to believe about the power of real truth, the civilisation we have built and the multiple complexity of so many lives, is a thing of beauty in itself. That we can see in every state we are in.

That's why we buy into the lie so readily. The damned thing works.

So you want to get real? In most cases I would say don't... or do, but keep the cloth of the lie close to hand. Wear it as camouflage. Adorn yourself with it when in public. Be real inside yourself. Stop lying to yourself, saying you are a hero or a nice guy or a person who really matters to the world (because you meet work deadlines). Feel the desert and the searing heat beating relentlessly down upon you. See the featureless landscape in your mind's inner eye. Know your steps take you deeper and deeper and deeper. And realise that this is a one way journey baby. Truth that takes you inside yourself does not allow you to come back out again.

Then, in that inner loneliness and the bleakness which allows you to understand what's real, you can make decisions which are true. You may still decide to lie. We all do. But, for once, you will know that you are lying to yourself for a reason. A real reason, rather than simply the desire to not think about the world.