Humanity is beginning to heal itself, and the odds of our survival just went up 1%. Grasping at that straw, we have created The New School for Personal and Social Change. We have a new website at www.radicalhonesty.com. We heal psychological misery through honesty, and provide training in how to become a social activist instead of a psychological reactivist. We think the quickest way to make military empire obsolete is by recognizing how truly dysfunctional it is and how truly dysfunctional we are within it. Civilization is a mental illness. For humanity to survive civilization must not-particularly the Dilitary Combustible Complex of the American military empire.

If we want to do something about our wholeness, our ability to have intimate relationships and be happy, and about the downfall of civilization and humanity because of civilized lying, we need to understand the framework that determines what is actually going on from the personal to the political. We can demythologize our past together, and create a new future by revealing the truth, personal and political.

We have all been framed. All of us together can transcend how we have been framed. It is possible that a whole bunch of brainwashed and psychologically screwed up dumb asses can develop brilliant co-hearted, co-intelligent solutions to world wide social, psychological and economic problems together, and bring about the overthrow of the government of the mind and the world at the same time. You may laugh. But we ask you; Whooo Haaaah!!?? (Answering that is the first step.) This is our training program in operational compassion and contribution to humanity and the world. Copy or steal whatever you like.

The Curse in Honesty Workshops

I was a clinical psychologist in private practice in Washington, D.C. for about thirty years and I wrote a number of books about lying. (Washington is the best place in the world to study lying.) I wrote a nationwide bestseller, Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truthdeveloped a series of workshops based on that and my other books and have been conducting those workshops and training trainers to conduct them for over twenty years. The original Radical Honesty curriculum used to be devoted almost exclusively to psychological healing. Now we have expanded the focus to include social healing, using the work of Michael Brown, David Korten, Derrick Jensen, (a brief review of their three books follows below),Tom Atlee, (The Tao of Democracy!) Juanita Brown, David Isaacson (World Cafe!), Paul Hawken (Blessed Unrest!) and a number of other people.

By extending the trainings to include other authors, teachers and thinkers and by having an annual festival, and a trainer's training program each year, we expand the number of people receiving the benefits of this work and making a living from it every year. The new Curse in Honesty workshop series is spread out over a year, with reading and homework in between the three sets of three day meetings.

After level one is completed, various reading and meditation assignments are agreed upon and completed by participants prior to attending the next group meetings for levels two and three. There are months between each of the three-day-week-end meetings. There is ongoing coaching and mutual communication between and among participants and trainers during the months in between groups.

THE BOOKS:

Read these books and give copies away to friends and enemies whether you come to our course or not!

(1) Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth. Read or give the book or the CD set of me reading it (with additional commentary) to every lying person you know (everyone you know). You and the people you give them to can hear the books read aloud to you in your cars while you are polluting the atmosphere and making lying fascists who kill for profit richer by the minute. Hell, this is a first step. You can sell the car next year.

(2) The Presence Process, by Michael Brown. This is an excellent book that condenses and puts into practice the essentials of training necessary to transform your way of being in the world, such that you grounding is in your awareness and attention rather than your mind. Using this book, you can do the presence process, a daily meditation and study practice over the a 10 week period while you read the book, and it will help you get grounded, be joyful and learn to contribute to others for your own and their mutual benefit as an ongoing source of joy. The ten weeks of twice daily meditations and contemplations are critical to our year long training, and doing the whole process in a repetitive cycling of that content is encouraged. This work allows us to go from personal work and inner silence to social action and back to silence again and back to the world again.

(As Krishnamurti said, "The observer is the observed. You are the world. Silence is difficult and arduous; it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence." (In As the River Joins the Ocean (1998): spoken in London, 1962).

This silence is precisely what Michael Brown's book and the personal work in the workshop is about. Out of growing up psychologically, and out of that beautiful silence, comes all renewal and all lasting social change. So the ongoing development of this workshop is a collective creation, developing into an ebb and flow life of compassionate action and renewal for billions of us.

Read and give (3) The End Game, by Derrick Jensen, a brilliant writer who sees civilization itself as a fundamental mental illness and perversion of humankind. This furthers the conversation and moves us to action together to depose those who impose upon us and give both oppressor and victim a new chance at life. The premises around which this whole book is organized are listed on the first pages.

Read and give (4) The Great Turning, by David Korten, a brilliant analysis of progress being made to recreate the stories we live by and a devastating analysis of the failure of previous stories. This is the source conversation for changing how the world works and converting hell to heaven, doom to prosperity and hatred to forgiveness, compassion and love.

You can read and do the practices of these four books on your own. You can also join up with some of the rest of us who are practicing how to remove our heads from our asses, and we can use our new understanding and alignment with each other to change the world-maybe even in time to keep our fellow miserable dumb asses from killing off humanity and most of the rest of the beings on earth.

I should also mention that between Levels two and three we also read The Tao of Democracy by Tom Atlee and The World Cafe by Juanita Brown and David Isaacson, Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken and The Truth Machine by James Halperin. We also watch the movies About Schmidt and The Ultimate Giftand American Beauty and other recent movies about the Zeitgeist within whose context we now operate. We also read Practicing Radical Honesty and do the exercises based on Part III of that book entitled Creating Your Own Destiny.

At that last meeting we actually plan our futures together, committed to a common vision we formulate together, and then help each other along the way. Level Three is modified each year by the participants when we conduct a Radical Honesty World Cafe during the workshop to re-design the next year, and then we'll all go back home and enroll people in the next mutually conducted Curse in Honesty workshop series for the following year. The end objective is personal growth and social change of a kind than can only be accomplished and maintained through conscious people constantly recreating their lives together honestly. We can teach it by modeling it.

This is a leadership training for change from the psyche up, to make people happier and save humankind from destroying itself. We discover how to learn and grow and act and enjoy as best we can the turning away from the damnable deceits of the group mind disease called civilization. We plan to do this before the ship of humankind hits the iceberg of its own extinction head on, or at least so we will be leaning on the rudder to hit the iceberg a glancing blow. It's better than just rearranging the deck chairs.

If you want to buy six of those books as a package, call 800 EL TRUTH or go to www.radicalhonesty.com, and buy the Unwash Your Brain Sixpak. You'll buy 4 books and get 2 for free. Read these books on your own or join us. If you want to read and practice along with us, come on and let's see what we can make happen with a little help from our friends.

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