Truth is Medicine to Heal Diseases of Bullshit 💊
Overcoming self-deception with nuclear Truth-bombs.
📍 Coordinates: My new home—the Nest 🪺—Colegiales, Argentina.
🎧 Music Pairing: Sentimental – Cloudchord.
📖 Reading Time: ~6 minutes.
“Hard times arouse a distinct desire for authenticity.” – Coco Chanel
“Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.” – Emily Dickinson
I moved homes the past week…
I awoke today living in a 5-bedroom, 2-bathroom, enclosed patio w/ terrace wonderland where my partner and I are building a Cultural House & School of Life.
Living in a communal space that I build and steward has been a dream of mine for years. Now I’m here.
It’s surreal and wonderful and dripping with potential. Just my kind of vibe.
But this nearly never happened.
It came only after getting painfully honest enough to admit—and courageous enough to voice—my unhappiness with our previous space.
That comment, surfaced in our weekly Sunday check-in, set off a chain reaction of events that led us here, to our home, to our cultural center, to our school of life.
It happened because of brutal honesty, and the courage to act on it.
The raw honesty blossomed from a series of Circles we’ve been creating. Find out more at the end of this piece.
Today, we’re going to look at the outrageously transformative powers of aligning yourself with Truth and letting it animate you.
“The object of the superior man is Truth.” – Confucius
“Peace if possible, Truth at all costs.” – Martin Luther
You Can’t Lie to Yourself
“Stop lying to yourself.”
Whether in poorly scripted movies or from someone in your life, you’ve heard this before.
There’s one fatal flaw: you cannot lie to yourself.
A lie is the opposite of the Truth. In order to lie to yourself, you must at the same time know what the truth is.
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” ― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
There is a more pernicious force that requires no performative contradictions – bullshitting.
I came across this through John Vervaeke’s brilliant Awakening From the Meaning Crisis series, who cited it in the small but mighty tome aptly titled “On Bullshit” by Harry Frankfurt.
You can bullshit yourself.
Bullshitting is a blatant disregard for the Truth. It makes no difference what the facts are, the bullshitter will act as they please.
“When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” ― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
This is why so many people love/hate Trump.
Trump is a master bullshitter, with a total disregard for Truth. He expressed a shadow element rooted deeply in all humans, and seeing their shadow laid bare in front of them offended nearly everybody.
He struck a raw nerve, confronting people with the fact that they are bullshitting themselves and those around them.
“Step into the fire of self-discovery. This fire will not burn you, it will only burn what you are not.” ― Mooji
Truth Incinerates Bullshit
I’ve had a tenuous relationship with the Truth, Integrity (your ability to align your actions with your Truth), and Bullshit throughout my life.
I’ve had periods of life where my entire persona was bullshit.
My Truth didn’t matter whatsoever.
I did what I was told, what I thought people would like, what everyone else was doing, and whatever was popular in my echo chamber.
To take a literal metaphor, I was living in a mountain of bullshit.
And I got sick. My psyche began to ossify and corrode. Mental illness, major depression, OCD tendencies to ‘keep up the act’ developed. My psyche was splitting, rotting under the mountain of bullshit my life had become.
It took a series of cataclysmic feedback loops—mostly in the form of high-dose psyche-shattering psychedelic experiences, stream-of-consciousness journalling, and hundreds of hours of insight meditation—for me to discover (& more importantly care about) the Truth again and align myself with it.
The fires of Truth incinerate bullshit.
Truth burns off layers of karmic residue, traumatic patterns, cognitive fallacies, and egoic tendencies. This is a difficult and painful process when that which is being burned away is your persona.
The very armour you have created to protect yourself from the world. But in order to be touched, to be moved by existence, you must obliterate your armour.
As Mooji says: the fires of self-discovery will not burn you, they will only burn what you are not.
You are not your job, your people-pleasing tendencies, your funny act at parties, your life story, your material possessions, your brand associations, your “world-traveller-with-cool-stories” shtick, your crypto balance, your nationality, your knowledge of exotic wines.
You are the timeless essence beneath and beyond all of these.
Nothing that you can give up is truly you.
In committing to two things: discovering the Truth, and having the Courage to act on it – you begin a process of identity-level transformation that will take you on the weirdest, wildest, and most wonderful journey imaginable.
Be warned: you may not like what the Truth burns away. It is not easy to find, articulate, or act on the Truth. It’s like a muscle, you strengthen your abilities by practicing them.
You need a Dojo to train your Truth Muscles (Integrity, Courage, Truth-at-All-Costs).
“Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.” – Thomas Jefferson
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the Truth is a revolutionary act.” – Unknown
Truth Sessions
At some point, you must look at yourself in the mirror and ask, “Am I willing to die having only lived in my own cocoon of bullshit and world of illusion?”
This is a practice of letting go and surrendering rather than searching and acting.
If you cultivate a deep sense of Safety, Truth emerges through you, speaking for you. You might surprise yourself with what you say.
We all need practice. We need to be held and supported while the Truth works its Medicine. Mending broken integrity, healing the neglected soul, and weaving core confidence back together.
“Wisdom is keeping your truth machinery and your relevance machinery tightly coupled together so you don’t bullshit yourself.” — John Vervaeke
For several weeks, a group of us have been prototyping a space to develop this muscle.
It is a direct confrontation with the Truth of what it’s like to be you. Beyond contrived trivialities, past the cop-out answers of work and media, a group of us gather around the virtual campfire and practice allowing the Truth of ourselves to speak through us, and for us.
If you would like to join us or learn more about this, I invite you to take a look below. We’re calling them Soul Circles, and these Circles are potent.
We are opening these to the public, on a gift-based donation model. If you are interested, I welcome you.
As Coco Chanel said – hard times arouse a distinct desire for authenticity. It’s abundantly clear that hard times are here – let’s work on the authenticity part, together.
With love, EB. 💛