STADTMILLER: Are people picking up on this movement now more than ever?
BLANTON: Yeah, there’s some big thing going on across the whole world. I don’t know what it is, but I just signed two foreign rights contracts, I sold three books to international rights in Spanish and it’s like the number of translations has just gone up to 14 languages now. I had a Sunday magazine section in the London Times about a month ago and in El Mundo, the big newspaper in Spain in Madrid, about two months ago. I just got inquiries for French language rights and book sales started increasing for me in the United States. Suddenly the whole world is reflecting back, like reflecting back from what’s going on in Europe. Everybody’s interested in the truth now all of the sudden.
STADTMILLER: What do you say to someone who has a hard time separating radical honesty from just being impolite and not following socially accepted norms? How do you try to explain to them what it is?
BLANTON: Well, I was a clinical psychologist in Washington, D.C., for about 30 years and it’s a great place to study lying. My clients taught me and in my own life I learned that the primary cause of most human stress, the primary cause of most conflict between couples and the primary cause of most both psychological and physical illness is being trapped in your mind and removed from your experience. What keeps you trapped in your mind and removed from your experience is lying and we all lie like hell all the time. We’re taught systematically to lie, to pretend, to maintain a pretense because we’re taught that who we are is our performance. Our schools teach us to lie, our parents teach us to lie. We’re all suffering from mistaken identity. We think that who we are is our reputation, what the teacher thinks of us, what kind of grades we make, what kind of job we have. We’re constantly spinning our presentation of self, which is a constant process of lying and being trapped in the anticipation of imagining about what other people might think. Our actual identity is as a present tense noticing being. I’m someone sitting here talking on the telephone right now and you’re sitting there talking on the telephone and writing or doing whatever you’re doing. That’s your current identity and this is my current identity and when you start identifying with your current present-tense identity you discover all kinds of things about life that you can’t even see or notice when you’re trapped in the spin doctoring machine of your mind. So radical honesty is about delivering yourself from that constant worrisome preoccupation of, “Oh my god. How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing?” Then you can pay attention to what’s going on in your body and in the world and even pay attention to what’s going on in your mind. I mean most of us are just frenetically running around being obedient to the moralistic dictates of our unexamined minds. We’re not really conscious of our thoughts either. It’s like we’re all in the same insane asylum together here. The movement has spread because wonderful articulate people like Derek Jensen are writing books like “The Culture of Make Believe” and his newest book called “End Game” where basically he says civilization itself is a mistake.
STADTMILLER: What does that mean?
BLANTON: It means that for the last 5,000 years we’ve been on this mistaken pathway, humankind has. I just wrote this song which I’m performing in California and a few other places. It’s a song called “Human Photosynthesis” about what we need to do to fix global warming.
STADTMILLER: How does it go?
BLANTON: It’s too long. I need to play the guitar to sing it.
STADTMILLER: What’s the critical lyric?
BLANTON: Let’s see. What would be the critical lyric? “If we access all our hearts and brains, face our weaknesses and pains, undo Earth’s costly human stains, we might turn these losses into gains.” That’s the chorus. George Orwell said that in a time of lying, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. It starts out with personal truth, people being honest with each other, couples in relationships and it goes all the way to the whole way we spend money.
STADTMILLER: You said you’re making these green environmental changes but when you say something kind of as profound and over-the-top as all the problems are created when we start locking up the food – do you abide by that? I’m just curious of specific examples of things that you’re doing.
BLANTON: No, I still have money saved. I still am participating in the economic system as it is, but I’m changing my mortgage. My mortgage is already with a local small bank but I’m going to try to change it to a green mortgage company. If you just go out and buy a candy bar you’re still basically participating in a system that kills for profit and there’s no way around that and I’m still imbued in it now. I’m still flying back and forth to Europe on jet planes or polluting the atmosphere. I’m all kinds of hypocrite. I try to be honest about all my hypocrisy but it’s hard to keep track.
STADTMILLER: When was your last marriage?
BLANTON: Oh, it was about 3 years ago.
STADTMILLER: And you talk honestly about having been with over 500 women and half a dozen men?
BLANTON: Uh-huh. That’s the stuff that gets around.
STADTMILLER: If everyone were to lay this kind of thing out on the table how would life be manageable?
BLANTON: The thing is life is manageable, but in such a terrible way that it would be hard to f— up worse. I’ve had four successful marriages now. One of them was annulled right after I got
married when I was 18. I didn’t consider that successful. I have had four successful marriages meaning that all of these marriages would produce children. I’ve got one son who’s 15 years old and I’ve got a new son who’s 18 months old now and who lives in Sweden most of the time. They’re all wonderful kids. My daughter, Carsie Blanton, you can look at her on the Internet. She’s a wonderful singer-songwriter. She’s becoming famous. She just opened for Leon Redbone here the other day. My son’s a psychotherapist in Charlottesville and I’ve got a daughter who runs
International House at Berkeley in Oakland and I’ve got two grandchildren by her. All of our children are raised and contributors to society. We remain friends after we separated and we continue to love each other and communicate with each other. I’ve had successful marriages, they just didn’t last for an entire lifetime. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s perfectly all right. I’m happy and proud of my marriages and my children and the way that we’ve lived and done. I’m not totally happy. I’m writing my autobiography right now. There are some things that I’ve done that I’m ashamed of, but basically I’m not ashamed of having been married a number of times. I’ve had a lot of successful relationships and successful parenting. A lot of that is in my book, “Radical Parenting,” if you want to read it.
STADTMILLER: And when you say that you’re going to be writing an autobiography, when is that going to be out?
BLANTON: Next year sometime.
STADTMILLER: And what’s that going to be called?
BLANTON: “Some New Kind of Trailer Trash.” It’s about me. I’m trailer trash. I was born a lower class, white trash kid. I’m kind of like John Edwards. I came from a family with alcoholics and a messed up father and left home when I was 13.
STADTMILLER: When was the specific moment when you shifted toward this movement?
BLANTON: I don’t know. I can’t really figure it out. It was like a cumulation of a lot of things. I think it was mostly when I became a psychotherapist and my clients taught me. I learned a lot from Fritz Perls. I was trained with Fritz Perls and gestalt therapy and I had a lot of good teachers when I was getting ready to go out in the world. They were mostly theologians and philosophers and psychotherapists and developmental psychologists, but they had 16 years of psychotherapy. I finally got where I was like almost a halfway decent person
STADTMILLER: Where do you regard yourself now on that spectrum?
BLANTON: I alternate. Sometimes I feel like a terrible failure because I was a psychotherapist in Washington, D.C. for 30 years and as far as I can tell everything has just gotten worse. So what good did I do? And then every other day, on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, I think well I’m just great. About half of the week I think I’m a genius and the other half of the week I think I’m an asshole.
STADTMILLER: What’s happening on the days of the week you think you’re a genius?
BLANTON: I’m writing. I like writing and I like reading a lot. I’ve read lots and lots of books and I’ve written six and one half books. I just love when I read these books. I’m so excited by this book called “The Presence Process” by Michael Brown from South Africa. I get so excited. I’m also integrating these into what I teach people in these three-day workshops. I’m doing a three-day workshop in Oakland the week after next and about 30 people are going to come I believe it’s an exciting time to be alive because there is this edge we’re on. There’s going to be this turning or not. If there isn’t this turning then we’re in for the worst times human beings have ever known. I think that critical to the turning is honesty. We can’t keep just funning it up and make it. We just can’t make it doing it the old-fashioned way, which is to put on a show and withhold everything that might negatively affect your reputation. And try to manipulate and control other people to do what you want to get what you want so that you can be successful and your schedule and f— everybody else.
STADTMILLER: Do you keep up with pop culture?
BLANTON: I watch TV some.
STADTMILLER: But not movies?
BLANTON: I watch a lot of movies. Why?
STADTMILLER: It makes me think of movies like “Office Space” and “Fight Club” and “Liar, Liar” where the premise people are just completely – you know what I mean? I was just wondering if any of those resonate with you?
BLANTON: I did a book tour right after “Liar, Liar” came out and I must have been on 30 television shows where they showed segments of “Liar, Liar” and then interviewed me so I’m kind of sick of it, but it was ok. It was a superficial, lightweight approach to it, but I still like that they’re out there in the culture.
STADTMILLER: So do you think that Hollywood grasps it?
BLANTON: They’re getting on to it. I liked “About Schmidt” because I thought it was pretty honest about where he was left having done everything the way it was supposed to be done. It was an honest kind of pathetic desperation and it was a good story about someone coming to terms with his life when he lost all of his presumptions and pretenses and expectations when his wife died. I liked that one and I use a lot of movies in my workshops.
STADTMILLER: Which ones do you use?
BLANTON: I like “Bullworth.” This movie I use in my 8-day workshop is “Ikiru.” It’s about 50 years old. It’s Kurosawa. I think it’s the best movie ever made, it’s called “To Live.” “To Live” is what “Ikiru” means. It has English subtitles but it’s a great, great movie.
STADTMILLER: So don’t you think that it’s impossible to completely escape personal mythology? Because even you’re creating this with the whole radical honesty movement.
BLANTON: No. It’s not exactly to escape it, but to be conscious about it. It’s like you can’t get away. You can’t not use your mind either, but you can be conscious about it. We sort of have a
blind faith in our minds in our culture because we’re taught minds will figure out everything. I think it’s very good to think a mind is basically a bull—t machine, which is the main thesis of my work. Basically that your mind is a very unreliable source of information and that the best source of information comes from what you perceive not what you conceive of.
STADTMILLER: Can you give me an example of that?
BLANTON: Well, if you just look at what you notice in front of you right now, your environment, wherever you are in an office or wherever it is. Noticing is an entirely different function than thinking and what we do all the time is that we confuse thinking with noticing. When we think something we act as though it has the same validity as something that we see. I’ve got a bumper sticker on my truck that says, “Don’t believe everything you think.” It’s like your thinking just goes on and on and on and on. And you know there’s a new AA group now for people who talk too much called On and On and On.
STADTMILLER: Is that a joke?
BLANTON: Yeah.
STADTMILLER: That’s funny.
BLANTON: What I’m trying to say is that when you perceive something using your senses there’s a certain presence to it as an experience that isn’t there when you’re just thinking and we confuse that all the time. We think that things we dreamed up are real. I’ve done lots of work with couples and I’ve never yet mediated an argument between two people in a couple that had anything to do with reality.
STADTMILLER: What do you mean?
BLANTON: Well they don’t ever talk about reality. They talk about the meaning they make out of reality, their interpretations of reality. It’s like if you abide by my interpretation of reality, we’ll get along fine, if not, we’re going to have trouble and both of them do that.
STADTMILLER: But don’t people fight about – oh someone cheated on someone – that’s the mind?
BLANTON: Well actually they get to the reality of it. What I have people do is describe exactly what went on, who they went to bed with and what they did and how many times they did it. I ask them to tell their other person in detail exactly everything that was said and done and performed and everything like that.
STADTMILLER: So take them through the entire – rather than just ‘oh he cheated on you’ you’ll say what exactly did you do with this woman? Isn’t that excruciating?
BLANTON: Well yeah it’s painful and it makes you angry but the willingness to experience the pain and the anger is what gets you through. What actually has to happen is forgiveness and forgiveness occurs when people face into their experience and doesn’t occur when they avoid their experience. So that if one member of a couple betrayed another and yet they still want to stay together then they have to forgive each other, both of them, and the bigger burden of forgiveness is the one who’s betrayed than the one who has been screwed around on. Although it often happens that both of them have done it and it doesn’t come out until one of them gets caught. Forgiveness is possible but it isn’t possible in an easy way. You have to go through stuff in order to get over it. You have to feel your way through rather than think your way around things.
STADTMILLER: I got you off track because you said, “I’ve never yet mediated an argument where they’re arguing about reality” and I didn’t have you finish that thought of how that isn’t reality?
BLANTON: Whenever something occurs in the world there’s always what occurred and then there is the story about what occurred and then there is the meaning made out of the story about what occurred. Most people stay lost in the meaning made out of the story or the story. They hardly ever get to what occurred. If they get to what occurred and they actually share it and they do all the crying and cussing necessary, they generally fall back in love like they haven’t been since they first got together. I’ve actually had a number of times when the woman calls the other woman that had sex with her husband and thank her and I’ve had the husband call the other man that had sex with his wife and thank him.
STADTMILLER: And what about the cases where it doesn’t work out? Where it just degenerates into insults and terribleness?
BLANTON: Then they get divorced, but if they handle the divorce then they forgive each other before they do that too.
STADTMILLER: So are you saying that every couple you’ve done this for always ends up forgiving each other?
BLANTON: No. I’m saying that most of the time they end up forgiving each other and when they don’t sometimes one of them forgives the other one and the other one doesn’t forgive the other one. In the new revised edition of “Radical Honesty” there’s a new section at the end that sort of summarizes this, but probably the most important thing a human being can learn is forgiveness. It’s very tough and it’s also very rewarding in the sense that you fall in love with that person that you forgave again. You fall in love with life. You fall in love with yourself and for a while it’s like being in love again until your mind dominates you again.
STADTMILLER: What year did you coin radical honesty?
BLANTON: 1993 it was, I guess.
STADTMILLER: How has it changed since then?
BLANTON: Well I have a whole lot of offspring. There was a woman named Susan Campbell who already had her PhD and had written a couple books before. She’s written about three books and one of them is called “Getting Real” which is just on the edge of being a best seller. A lot of people in organizational management and a lot of people in psychotherapy and a lot of people in social action have used my stuff. I ran for congress a couple times and I’ve been a social activist a lot. I get arrested every year or so just for my mental health and so I’ve got a lot of people who are sort of rabid social activists who use my stuff and they include me in what they write so I get mentioned a lot on blogs and stuff.
STADTMILLER: The article I read that mentioned the 500 women and six men and all that stuff it had said that it’s hard when you’re doing this lifestyle because you would actually be a lot more successful if you didn’t employ some of this because you could be using…
BLANTON: I’d be a better manipulator? Uh huh.
STADTMILLER: Do you ever think about that? Is that ironic to you that if you were a better manipulator or liar that you could be maybe be spreading the message more?
BLANTON: Nah. I don’t think that’s the way to do it. I think the way to do it is by doing it. It’s like you know all the PR for the sake of it. I do some of that too. I’m funny enough and I do lots of interviews and radio and TV and stuff and now and then I get carried away with myself but basically I think that I have this very compassionate philosophy called “F— em if they can’t take a joke”.
STADTMILLER: What does that mean though? That’s such a flip thing that a teenager might say.
BLANTON: That’s exactly what I mean to be. I hope to remain a teenager. I’m not going to cater to my own mind much less yours or anybody else’s. It doesn’t mean, “Oh my God. Oh, I’m so sorry.” Basically I just tell them, “I don’t agree. I’m not going to do that. So suffer whatever you want.” I love my mind and I love minds and I love people who can think and I like thinking, but I do think that you can get so lost by relying on your mind rather than on your relationship to gravity and your connection with other people. You can just do tremendously stupid things, which human beings do. There’s not anything stupid enough that you can come up with that some human being hasn’t done and could tell you good reasons for why they should have done it. You just cannot plumb the depths of human ignorance and it’s because we have minds.
STADTMILLER: Do you regard this as being self help?
BLANTON: I guess. Yeah.
STADTMILLER: I think the biggest phenomenon to happen in the past year is Rhonda Byrne and “The Secret.” Where does that fall into this?
BLANTON: The movie “The Secret”? I haven’t seen it yet. I just kind of avoided it but I’ve been reading about it.
STADTMILLER: Why have you avoided it?
BLANTON: It just has all this kind of la-la land overtone to it. It’s like I’m kind of some kind of street fighter or lower class turd not some la-la land theoretician about “Oh, there’s this great secret if you could just transcend.” I do believe that you can transcend your mind but I like doing it in funkier ways. Like because of your connection, because you get surprised, because of your relationship to children, because love attacks you and you don’t know where it came from, because there’s some things you didn’t predict and control, lucky for you. It’s like everybody’s trying to get systematic about discovery. I meditate all the time and I do this practice called the “Presence Process.” I teach people meditation and I do yoga all the time. I work out and do physical exercises and all kinds of things that have to do between noticing and thinking, but one of the things that you have to watch out for is the glorification of that into some kind of religious stature. I don’t know. I’ll watch “The Secret” sometime but I’m already kind of prejudiced against it because it’s such a glorious idea that there is this one secret. Yeah, that’s one of them. There’s about 40 or 50 others. Thinking has a certain value as a functional tool, but you can’t make reality by thinking. You can’t say. “Oh. I’m going to dream up something and as long as I stay committed to my dream it will happen,” which is what a lot of them say. I say think up something, stay committed to your dream, and you’ll tear yourself a new a–hole and fail probably. The point is what difference does it make?
STADTMILLER: Is there a way to practice radical honesty and be nice?
BLANTON: Most of the time it is nice. It’s just that people are more interested in the s—-y, but most of the time it’s just wonderful. People fall in love all the time, forgive each other all the time, and there’s a whole lot of laughter. People laugh their a–es off in my groups. There’s a whole lot more joy than there is grief and anger. There’s plenty of anger and plenty of grief, but we try not to be prejudiced against one emotion over another and let them emerge how they emerge. There’s a process that occurs. People go home from an eight-day workshop and sometimes a month after the workshops I’ll get a call from one of their parents saying, “They came home and showed me the video of their life story they told in the workshop and they told me all the things they kept secret from me. They resented me and I hate your f—-ing workshop. That’s a terrible book and that’s awful and I’m sorry you’re on the earth.” Then the same person calls me back about three months later and says, “We just had our Christmas vacation and it’s the second time we’ve been together since Thanksgiving. It was right before Thanksgiving when I wrote you that last letter or called you or sent you that email and now I want to tell you that I’m really grateful for everything that happened. Our whole family is different than we used to be. We all love each other and we talk about everything and nothing’s held secret anymore. You’re right and I’m sorry that I raised so much hell with you three months ago.” This has happened to me a bunch of times. It’s like a process of people. It’s fine with me that they get mad at me and then eventually forgive me. That’s just perfect. People get mad at me. People do all the time and sometimes I get mad back at them. Sometimes I just say, “Go ahead and get mad at me” and don’t even get mad back at them, but what I do is I tell them “Go f— yourself. I don’t care if you like them or not.” Basically I try to express my resentment and get over it so I can eventually laugh at it. It’s an imperfect process. I was thinking about doing a radio commercial on the hillbilly station here and the commercial is: “Radical honesty. It works pretty good! Most of the time.”
STADTMILLER: It sounds like a joke.
BLANTON: It sounded like a joke? Well it does work pretty good most of the time. It’d be theonly honest commercial. All commercials say, “This is perfect. This works all the time.” I say, “This works pretty good most of the time. It works better than the alternative.” That’s all. That’s all I’m saying.
STADTMILLER: So when you mentioned the book that you were writing, you said there were a couple things that you were writing in there that you were ashamed of. What were those things?
BLANTON: Times that I lied and kept secrets like when I snuck around and had sex and didn’t tell my wife about it. Mostly stuff that had to do with withholding
STADTMILLER: Like what?
BLANTON: Just not mentioning something about an affair or judgment or not telling the truth about what I really thought. I was in academia for a while, but I got out of it, but I pretended. Mostly it’s just being phony in ways and withholding things like that.
STADTMILLER: So you think that you’re not abiding by radical honesty if you’re withholding?
BLANTON: Withholding is the most pernicious form of lying. It’s the most important one, just not mentioning stuff, not saying what you think or what you feel or what you’ve done. When you don’t say it, then you let people go on with whatever they come up with in their minds or whatever they believe about you.
STADTMILLER: But wouldn’t society become unmanageable because you’d have people going around saying I resent your big ugly nose?
BLANTON: Yeah. I like society becoming unmanageable.
STADTMILLER: You must make decent money from all the books right?
BLANTON: Yeah. I have a nice house. My net worth is probably about a million bucks.
STADTMILLER: So do you ever get your feelings hurt?
BLANTON: Uh-huh, yep. I get my feelings hurt pretty easy.
STADTMILLER: You must be stressed out all the time living this life.
BLANTON: No, no, no. I just let my feelings hurt and I get over it. I cry or I get mad or I holler and then I feel better. Then I go ahead and go on with whatever comes next. The problem with getting your feelings hurt or getting mad is it’s not with the emotions, it’s with the suppression of them.
STADTMILLER: What’s an edict that you give someone in your workshop to help them remember what they’re trying to incorporate. Is there a question you tell them to ask themselves?
BLANTON: I just tell them that the truth is usually descriptive. It’s where you’re describing something. You’re describing some sensation in your body or some occurrence in the external world. You’re describing a thought going through your mind as if you were looking at it consciously rather than advocating it as a reality. Basically it’s about your presence. It’s about being present and reporting what you notice. That is the main thing. If you find resentment about something that was said you’d say, “I resent you for saying that”, just like a dummy. I teach people to be dumb. After about eight years of doing the eight-day workshop we discovered this chant which always leads to enlightenment within 3 minutes and the chant is, “Duuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhh.” If you go “duh” for three minutes whatever comes out of your mouth next will be the truth. You’ll go around there like a dummy and all of the sudden your life will improve and you’ll get laid more and you’ll make more money and everyone will be happy and you’ll laugh a lot.
STADTMILLER: So if you just go out there like you didn’t know any better and tell the truth like a child, people will be relieved that you’re finally talking about what they’re hoping no one ever talks about?
BLANTON: They’re usually dreading something that occurs that wasn’t as bad as they thought.
STADTMILLER: But see I don’t’ agree with that – I’m six feet two and the thing that drives me nuts is when people want to talk about my height because I find it so completely boring, but it’s the thing that people notice.
BLANTON: So if someone says, “God, you look tall,” do you get offended by it still?
STADTMILLER: I don’t get annoyed. It’s just boring. It’s like going up to a black person and saying, ‘You’re really black. What’s it like being so black?
BLANTON: Well boredom is anger and you haven’t expressed your anger sufficiently to all those other people that ask you about being tall. You still have a lot of resentment about people judging you as tall and probably some resentment about being tall. So when someone says, “What’s it like being so tall?” just say, “F— you! Eat s— and die and I resent you for saying I’m so tall.”
STADTMILLER: (Laughs) But then wouldn’t that just foster the resentment?
BLANTON: No. You have to be a little patient now. It’ll get you through the process that allows you to not be bothered by it one way or the other –
STADTMILLER: If I say, “I resent you for saying that,” then I would appear like this easily hurt social leper.
BLANTON: You’re worriedbout how you would appear, see? That’s what you think your identity is. It doesn’t matter how you appear. You’ll appear differently in another half a minute anyway because people’s registry of how you appear changes very dynamically. For a while you appear to be a leper of some sort and a little while later you’ll appear to be someone who’s very brave and willing to talk about things honestly. Later on you’ll appear as a kind of person to be trusted because you’re not going to be withholding from them all the time. Give it a shot and see.
STADTMILLER: Is there anything like that with you?
BLANTON: I don’t have anything that stands out for me right now. Someone said something about my golf game the other day and I took offense at it. I said, “F— you. Shut up.”
STADTMILLER: That’s a common thing with you? You say that a lot throughout the day?
BLANTON: When I’m playing with these Republicans that I play with at the golf course, but mostly it’s just there. Sometimes when we play poker. I cuss a lot playing backgammon my friend just told me.
STADTMILLER: Is a big thing in radical honesty just saying f— you?
BLANTON: I would say it’s probably OK. Everybody has to get over that anyway.
STADTMILLER: And the other thing I’ve noticed is you start sentences with the words “I resent.”
BLANTON: There’s a very good reason in Gestalt therapy and in radical honesty work for saying, “I resent you for” and naming the behavior that the person did. It’s to get you into your experience and out of your mind. It’s so you can say “I and thou” in the same sentence so that there’s a you and the other person that you’re relating to them. You’re looking at them and you speak to them and you speak in a tone of voice and a loudness of voice that seems to fit the degree of resentment and you stay in touch with them and pay attention to your experience. When you do that your experience changes so that a minute later you no longer resent them.
STADTMILLER: Don’t you think there’s a little bit of a sadist-masochistic dynamic going on?
BLANTON: No. It’s about healing. It’s about getting over stuff by being honest about it. Yes, people can use radical honesty as a rationalization for being a–holes, but that’s not what I’m
working on with them. The general purpose of it is for you to experience your experience so that it comes and goes and when you do that you actually end up appreciating somebody for the same thing that you resented them for 10 minutes ago. You pay attention to the sensations in your body and when you get a rapid heartbeat and kind of a tension in your back and shoulders and a tightness in your stomach, you stay with it. You pay attention to that experience. You pay attention to them. You listen to what they say back and they do the same thing and then what happens is in about three or four minutes you hug each other and it’s over. That’s the way we operate in the eight-day long community of the radical honesty workshop and actually people authentically get over stuff.
STADTMILLER: I can see how this would work in a workshop setting, but in interacting with a stranger who’s not part of the experiment, it could really dangerous and twisted and offensive.
BLANTON: There’s a whole book about it called “The Truth Tellers: Stories of Success by Radically Honest People.” I just edited that book. I didn’t write it. It’s the best book I’ve ever written because I didn’t write it. It’s written by people who did workshops with me and it’s about what happened to them out there in the world when they were practicing radical honesty. There’s some very moving stories there about people’s confrontations with strangers that had to do with real compassion emerging with real love occurring with forgiveness happening right there in the world on the street.
STADTMILLER: So do you say those are the three goals? Compassion, love and healing?
BANTON: And forgiveness, yeah.
STADTMILLER: Would you say that’s what you think of when you think of this?
BLANTON: Yeah, basically. It sounds awful Christian. I’m ashamed of it, but it’s the best I can come up with. It’s not Mike Huckabee Christian, but it’s something that has to do with valuing the process of noticing as a healing thing. When you pay attention rather than run off in your mind, what goes on is an evolution of feeling, an increase and then a decrease in sensation because when you experience an experience it comes and goes, but when you resist experiencing an experience it persists. If you want to get over being mad at people about saying how tall you are, you have to experience the experience you have in your body when they do that. Express it, experience it, get over it, and then people can say, “Jesus. You look like a goddamn skyscraper” and you’ll just laugh your ass off.
STADTMILLER: I think of all the things you’ve said, that is the most clear. When you were talking earlier about doing these workshops, how much do you charge?
STADTMILLER: What’s the point of telling a life story in your workshops? Is your thesis that people aren’t honest about what their life story has been and that’s a place for them to really confront what they’ve been there? It’s a little like AA. You want people to then confront those people that have hurt them?
BLANTON: Yeah, but the story itself is to get in touch with your personal myth, to get that your life story is fiction and that you have a sales pitch going on. Those of us that have been through lots and lots of workshops, we finally got it down to where we have our life story. We can tell our life story in 27 seconds.
STADTMILLER: So what is your story in 27 seconds?
BANTON: I was born to an unusually inept couple of parents and due to my particular stamina and virtue turned out to be the wonderful person standing before you now in spite of their ineptitude. (Laughs) That’s everybody’s story.
STADTMILLER: Really?
BLANTON: Yep. It’s pretty much that way.
STADTMILLER: So you think that your kids have that story about you too?
BLANTON: Yep, although we laugh a lot about stories. My daughter who is 22 who is this songwriter and singer is home-schooled so she didn’t go to school except for 7th grade. She drew straws with all the home-schoolers and had to go to 7th grade and report back what was going on. Part of her home-schooling was she’d sit in on the life story times at the workshops from the time she was eight years old. She heard all these people tell the story of their lives including their first sexual experiences and when they were left home and all of the things that happened to them. She heard a lot of human beings tell the story of their lives and now I go to her concerts and people say, “How did your daughter get to be so wise at such a young age?” I just say, “I kept her out of school,” but it had something to do with her getting people when they were telling their stories about what their life was really like.
STADTMILLER: There was a critique that your stuff was too ’60s or ’70s hippy-dippy, naked workshop stuff. You do that kind of stuff right?
BLANTON: Yeah. People have to get naked and talk about their bodies.
STADTMILLER: It’s a group of people sitting around being naked talking about their bodies?
BLANTON: They stand up one at a time and get videotaped talking about their bodies and the next day we watch the video tape, all of us together. I am a hippy-dippy guy. I was a hippy and I’ve taken a lot of acid and I’ve done every illegal drug known to man several times and I smoke marijuana every now and then. I have for the last 43 years. I took mushrooms about three years ago. I don’t do it very much, but I’m open to it. I’m thinking about doing an iowaska thing with somebody in South America. It’s a medicinal, kind of like peyote in the south. Everybody in California is doing iowaska now.
STADTMILLER: Do you drink?
BLANTON: Yep.
STADTMILLER: Do you think that that contributes to being honest or not?
BLANTON: A little bit. It depends on if you just had a couple of drinks. If it’s more than that it just gets to be in the mind again. I think that when people relax a little and they get one or two drinks out of it, then they take another drink and ruin it.
STADTMILLER: So if I were to do an equation for radical honesty, it would be, I resent you for X, then I forgive you for X, and then healing and love?
BLANTON: Yes. What we’re most terrified of is joy and the hardest work is getting you to permit yourself joyfulness.
STADTMILLER: And why do you think that is?
BLANTON: I don’t know. I can’t tell if it’s just cultural or human but I think it’s mostly cultural. I’m angry a lot too and I understand it, but it’s like people resist grieving until they finally do. Then they have kind of an orgasm of grief and they cry and they sob and before very long, usually just less than five minutes, they are no longer depressed because they experienced it. I’ve had people come to me who have been grieving for a year and a half since somebody died and they can’t stop. I had them really get into expressing their resentment to the person for having died, which they couldn’t acknowledge and when they do, underneath that resentment, is a real sobbing and a real grief. When that happens then suddenly they’re able to go on. What I just mentioned is what I want to mostly say – people seldom have the opportunity to do that with regard to joyfulness because they think, “Sure, I’m happy. I want to be happier, as happy as I can be.” They’ve got a whole lot of defensive things about how we all have to be happy. We’re supposed to be happy. We’re supposed to be doing a good job of taking care of ourselves so we pretend a lot around it, but people are really scared when they start really loving someone. Do you have any children?
STADTMILLER: No.
BLANTON: When you have a little baby there’s this thing that a lot of us have talked about that we just suddenly get afraid for the baby. We think, “Oh, this thing is so little. You’ll never make it.” We love the baby so much that we’re so afraid of just loving it wholeheartedly. I think human beings in our culture are more afraid of love than they are of anger. That was my point anyway.
STADTMILLER: I realize that’s probably impossible to think of a one-sentence answer to that, but why?
BLANTON: Neale Donald Walsch and I wrote a book together called “Honest to God.” There’s this conversation between me and Neale about why we think it is that people are so afraid of love. I can’t remember all of that conversation, but what I think is that it’s that it will undo us with regard to our identity. If you’re just joyful and recklessly joyful you might not behave. You might not do what you’re supposed to do. You may not keep track of your identity the way you’ve been taught that this is our identity and our culture. It’s a threat to who we are. At least that’s what I think today.
STADTMILLER: What do you think of a pop psychologist like Dr. Phil?
BLANTON: He doesn’t really know what he’s doing I don’t think.
STADTMILLER: Why do you say that?
BLANTON: He’s kind of a moralist. He’s sort of like a cultural teacher. He’s telling people how to do right and behave and stuff like that. It’s mostly moralizing. It’s not doing any serious psychological work.
STADTMILLER: So that’s what it comes down to. There’s no moralism in what you’re doing?
BLANTON: No. There’s still moralism. Moralism is a disease and we all have it. It’s like herpes. You can’t cure it. You just have to treat it and handle it and manage it, but you can’t get rid of it. It’s like diabetes.
STADTMILLER: Why do you say that?
BLANTON: Because you can’t grow up in this culture without becoming a moralist. Moralism is a disease where you think that being right is more important than anything else and we all have it. A lot of radical honesty has been an attempt to give people a handle on not having moralism control their live, to transcend the disease of moralism or to handle it in some way, to manage it.
STADTMILLER: But aren’t some forms of moralism a good thing? Otherwise you could use radical honesty to justify every time you wanted to cheat on your spouse and say, “Sorry. I was being radically honest.” Wouldn’t that be an instance where it’s a good thing?
BLANTON: No. It’s OK if you’re moral or if you have moral values. It’s the attachment to them. Moralism is a disease of not being able to have any perspective or distance of what’s driving you. It’s like being so attached to being right and not being wrong that it’s the most important thing in the world. It’s more important to be right than not to be wrong than life itself. Whereas if you’re not, you can have moral values but not be so attached to them that you think they are more important than life itself. That’s just a matter of a little bit of detachment in there
STADTMILLER: If there was one thing you wish they would do what would it be – since not everyone can take workshop?
BLANTON: I think probably it’s the thing that I said in radical parenting – that they start learning from their children instead of trying to teach them. That when you have a baby that first couple of years it’s for your being instructed in what you’ve forgotten. It’s to remind you about what it is to be alive, awake and joyful.