The Doctrine of Threefold Mindfulness According to Jaws
“Radical Honesty” as Pro-Illness Therapy
Gentle Presentism
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” —Chuck Dederich, Founder of Synanon
“History is more or less bunk.” —Henry Ford, 1916
“Radical acceptance” is something a disturbed and fragmented person might come across in their despair, and discover that it may enable their illness by relieving them of the responsibility to pull themselves together into a coherency, because it may be read to perpetually truncate the self into the present moment, shorning it of the past.
One can “misinterpret” radical acceptance, and disturbed people who have given up on themselves will be inclined do so.
The Contraction of the Self
There is no misinterpretation possible with “radical honesty”. There is no figure-ground oscillation. It is only narcissistic enablement.
A disturbed and fragmented person who has made the choice to narcissize—to accept the truncation of the self to this instant, to the very present moment, off of which the past is always falling, and who thereby feels empowered to create any grandiose arbitrary future they imagine—will go seeking something like “radical honesty” in their flight from the moral culpability that coherence demands.
It is a license to lie.
The Doctrine: Flight from History
Sounds reasonably and suitably Buddhist. But wait. “Based on the bestselling book by Dr. Brad Blanton, the practice of Radical Honesty is not to be confused with a moral obligation to tell the truth.”
How can something called “honesty” have nothing to do with the moral obligation to tell the truth?
Because the gentle presentism of our world, of our epoch, is being pressed into overdrive: “Radical Honesty means simply to report out loud to another what you notice in front of you, in your body, and in your mind in the present moment.”
A bit more detail from Blanton’s February 13, 2015, TEDxCluj Talk in Romania:
We practice distinguishing between noticing and thinking. Now stick with me here. With a whole awareness continuum, everything we can possibly be aware of can be divided into three parts. You can be aware of what’s going on outside of you right now…. That’s one aspect of the awareness continuum. The second aspect, is you can be aware of what’s going on within the confines of your own skin right now… The third aspect is you can be aware of whats going through your mind, right now.
All of these awarenesses are right now. And that’s all there is…
….
The only problem is that if you actually say to those voices in your mind, “OK, go ahead I’m listening,” all of a sudden your mind doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. It just doesn’t say anything. Because it’s run by resistance. If you’re trying to stop your mind that’s the best way to keep it going.
So, the noticing, is noticing what’s happening outside of you, its noticing what’s happening in your body, and noticing what’s going through you mind. Radical honesty is reporting what you notice, period.1
To be as generous as possible, this may possibly be useful, if hysterically mislabeled. But there’s a problem—which is the reason you need a therapist to guide you. You just can’t be trusted to notice correctly.
There’s a problem about being honest about what’s going through your mind. And the problem is that we have three minds. We have at least three minds.
We’ve been taught all our lives that our mind is a very valuable thing and that thinking is the most important thing. I don’t think that’s right. Our first mind is called the reactive mind. And that’s basically… we’re a recording device. We’ve been recording multisensory recordings of what happens to us since we were in the womb… We have these multisensory recordings of successive moments of now [emphasis added].
We have them filed in a somewhat orderly fashion.
That’s one mind. That’s called the reactive mind. And that’s because whenever something was recorded that had a little bit of trauma in it or some shock or something like that, that got recorded with it. And every now and then those things just kind of pop up later on in your life.
The next mind is called the personal-construct mind. And that’s based on replicated experiences. We have this experience of something over and over again…
We have expectations associated with constructs we built in our mind. That’s what we call the personal construct mind.
And then we have the categorical mind, or the planning mind, the linear mind, the one we usually think of as our mind. It’s mostly verbal skills, it has to do with having definitions of things, it points to objects and ideas. The mind the way we think of it.
The problem is that these three minds turn on and off more or less at random. And they’re not very accurate.2
One needs to be protected from the intrusion of one’s own minds, specifically the “linear mind” and its demand for coherence across successive moments of now.
There is a pre-Kantian, modern-primitivist ideology at work here, as though one can avoid thinking or having thought about things. But it’s the thought that counts with such Buddhist pseudo-enlightenment pretension.3
What you have to do is, “you just get dumber than a stick. Dumber than a box of hammers. That’s the way you start if you want to get enlightened. You don’t get enlightened by being smart. Being smart is the biggest block to enlightenment there is, all right.”4
By demanding that one not even process one’s noticings, but just spit them out from whichever of one’s three minds produces them, this ideology not only provides a license to deceive, but even denies one’s responsibility for clear communication.
Consider that what you call gaslighting is just my linear mind rationalizing things my reactive mind comes up with while trying to protect my personal-construct mind. You probably do the same thing from time to time. And it is not my responsibility to explain the relationships between my minds to you. We’re just supposed to be noticing in the here and now, and now you’re trying to make me think about things. Furthermore, you calling it gaslighting makes me feel like you are trying to make me feel bad, and like you are trying to establish power or control over me. What’s wrong with you?
So not only does radical honesty enable anti-social behavior by licensing deception, but it is actually positively anti-social itself, in practice.
Buddhism for Sharks
The reward for such strenuous disavowal of history and its demand for coherence? The payoff from such intentionally mangled communication?
[T]he reason for doing all this is this: when you experience an experience, it comes and goes. When you resist experiencing an experience, it persists.5
A weightless, atomic ego, untethered from experience, and therefore from any obligation to learn or change from it.
Utter Confusion at Best
The best one can expect from this is a sort of encounter-group Babel: a cacophony of mutually unintelligible solipsistic monads condemned forever to noticing the motes in one another’s eyes. This can be a relatively benign experience, as in a postmodern writers’ workshop, but it can also devolve into a sort of attack session, wherein some mutually unintelligible solipsistic monads gang up on another one, like “The Game” in Synanon, or like when the gang tortures and kills a disobedient member.
Inside-Out
Before I conclude this, I would like to invite you, gentle reader, to feel the stakes of the individual soul here. Out of the trauma-induced fragmentation and incoherence of a life dominated by feelings and behaviors you have not been able to control, you want always to be forgetting, so that you only ever experience a perpetual present, because you have forced your mind into a state of structural amnesia.
This is to deny the very nature of mortal life. It is to pretend that you are immortal, and that you can be free of an arc. You are always a point on a tangent, never bound to the actual curve of the parabolic trajectory of your life.

You have contracted with Lacuna.

You have asked the vampire to bless you with an eternal curse.
You are choosing madness, and you must become a monster.
Oblivion and the Flood This Time
“I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”6
But what about these artificially intelligent personally crafted electronic photonic oceans of corporate-sponsored oblivion designed to lubricate our interactions in Marketworld? What about negligent public health policy that pretends to care about the social media cesspools, Youtube holes, and TikTok backwaters of conspiracy theory, misogyny, misandry, and fascism, but that are actually only censorship and surveillance mechanisms, designed to further enhance Marketworld’s grip on our imagination?
The proliferation of manifestly malignant pro-illness ideologies like radical honesty are a large part of how life in the Grand Hotel Republic ends. A macro–micro transmission mechanism, if you will. A manmade, corporate-sponsored flood of narcissism churning up reality shows, podcasts, TikToks, TED talks, and TV segments into which vulnerable people fall, talking past one another more or less entertainingly for all eternity, the very concept of communication having been lost, where there is only babbling into cameras, and words being broadcast so that someone surely hears.
There is no wisdom capable of running such a world. It has already drowned.
We build an ark apart.
Brad Blanton, “How to get over sh*t and be happy”, TEDxCluj, February 15, 2015.
Brad Blanton, “How to get over sh*t and be happy”, TEDxCluj, February 15, 2015.
Get it? It’s the thought that counts with anti-thought! Haw haw.
Brad Blanton, “How to get over sh*t and be happy”, TEDxCluj, February 15, 2015.
Brad Blanton, “How to get over sh*t and be happy”, TEDxCluj, February 15, 2015.
9 Genesis 11 (NIV).