Most of the time, people talk about truth as if it were a tool by which they manipulate another person or are manipulated by them. Human beings, as most of us can attest, do, indeed, predominantly use the truth to manipulate and control others’ actions, reactions or feelings, as we determine to tell the truth, to tell a lie, or to withhold some aspect of the truth, or certain information, with the sole intent of controlling the reaction of the other(s) in question. A classic justification for lying is “I don’t want to hurt her/him.” The obvious answer to not hurting the person in question is to not do what would hurt them in the first place. You already hurt the person in doing the act, which exists independently of the person’s knowledge of it. Having done it, however, and then aggravating the situation and the imminent pain by trying to control the person you hurt by lying is wronging them twice. In this situation, lying is all about protecting the liar. If you wrong somebody, take responsibility for your actions, come clean, sincerely apologize, admit your mistake, then let it go and sit back and accept the reactions of the one you hurt. In the process, you’ll get a clear conscience and a huge weight off of your chest.

For humans, truth has predominantly been made subservient to our various personal agendas. Truth is not supposed to be a tool for manipulation and control, or to be made subservient to our agendas. Truth is not a tool. Truth is a goal and a virtue in and of itself, to which all personal agendas should be made subservient and which we all should strive for. If you can’t achieve a personal agenda with truth, abandon it, or modify it. As humans of principles, truth is our North Star as we navigate our way through life.

Implement truth with wisdom and kindness

Some people pride themselves on always speaking what comes into their minds, uncensored and unfiltered, and they think that by doing so, they are doing everyone they interact with a great service with their “honesty.” For example, they think it is honest to tell someone they have a big nose, or that they are fat, or ugly, or that they look like an elephant in those pants. This is not truth. This is more akin to teasing and insulting. While it may be a true portrayal of that particular individual’s opinion and general ill-will, since there is clearly nothing the recipient can do with such degrading and subjective information, the intent behind saying such things is primarily hostile, or mocking, and self-serving and the true intent of the speaker is to make him or herself feel better, or to raise him or herself above the recipient by making the recipient feel bad or by humiliating the recipient. This is just another way of making truth subservient to a personal agenda and of manipulating the reactions of others.

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We should aspire to make truth our guiding light in life, and we should consciously and deliberately avoid situations and actions which would lead to situations in which we would be tempted to lie, or where telling the truth would be too hard for us to do. At the same time, in general, we should impart truth with wisdom and compassion and use judgment when being truthful with others and not “tell the truth” from a place of spite or ill-will, or personal insecurity.

This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

- Shakespeare

Never Underestimate the Value of Delusion

Never underestimate the necessity of self-delusion in the life of a seriously depression or suicide-prone person. Self-delusion may be the very thread by which a suicidal person’s life is hanging. Self-delusion can save lives, literally.

In retrospect and through repeating the experience, I have realized that I got into love relationships that were so bad for me that I could never speak to another person about them, because I could not trust anyone to not be cliché. I could not trust anyone to see the real situation for what it was, nor to appreciate the situation as I saw it. I could not trust anyone to respect my perspective. I could not trust anyone to not immediately react emotionally.

The world is full of clichés who think they are special, unique, independent-thinking, tough people who “won’t take no shit from no one.” When I would desperately search my social surroundings, in the thick of this misery I was in with the guy I loved, it seemed like every person on the face of the earth was some kind of walking machine that had been pre-programmed to respond to my story in exactly the same way as everyone else. It was discouraging and tiresome.

I was in absolute and utter desperation to talk to someone about the mess I was in, but the times I dared to attempt to trust someone, I was barely able to speak more than two sentences about my boyfriend before all final judgments were passed by my listener. This happened time and time again, until I finally just determined to keep everything to myself.

If there had been someone in my life who would have listened to me, without judgment and without putting in their own 2 cents-worth of cliché and predictable garbage—without even having listened to a fraction of the problem—my situation might very well have gone differently, better.

The Folly of the Reality-Pushers

People feel like they are really clever when they think they are calling you out on your self-delusion. They feel good about themselves when they try to slap you out of your perspective, even when your perspective is literally keeping you from killing yourself. What such egomaniacal individuals don’t understand or care about, is that their harshness, their trying to beat their perspective of reality into the depressive person, could result in that person killing himself. People who look at a suicidal person who may be involved in some form of self-delusion and feel pity or feel hostility towards that person for being in self-delusion are playing with fire if they try to shake him out of his self-delusion.

I am a master at self-delusion. I have lived in both self-delusion and dreams ever since the violent divorce of my parents—and many years before that I believe. I may be living in self-delusion even as I write this. But you know what? I need my self-delusion in order to live!

If a suicidal person is in delusion, there is probably a very good reason for it. For me, any time something happened to challenge my perspective on the relationship I was in, those were the moments that I came crashing down. It was those times I began planning my death, those times I would research successful means of suicide. Indeed, it was the reality of my own devastation that the reality-pushers were trying to push on me.

What reality-pushers don’t know, is that people like me have no ground to stand on beneath their feet. So in order to stay alive, we weave an imaginary ground out of whatever shadow of good presents itself in our life. When a reality-pusher comes along and sets about destroying that ground, because he thinks that we have to see life and reality from his perspective, even in cases when he knows virtually nothing about the situation, he could be effectively hammering a nail in the coffin.

As an avid self-delusionist, I have struggled ad nauseum to grace the reality-pushers with the dismal and devastating experience of the reality they push me into when they start poking holes in the imaginary ground I have woven beneath my feet.

If I could just make anyone standing in judgment of me feel what it feels like to be suicidal, desperate, depressed, devastatingly frightened and alone… If I could have traded my heart with them for a day to make them have an ounce of compassion for me, or to whack them off of their egotistical soap box, to stop calling me selfish and self-centered, to stop shaming me into discounting myself and my own heart yet again by telling me to think about how other people will feel if I kill myself – stop trying to steal from me my life-sustaining delusions…or, if nothing else, just to leave me alone with my fate…

if somebody loved me
i know i would not cling to You
so unrelentingly
as these, the writhing limbs of the cursed,
tighten their grip
constricting wrathfully ’round my ankles
dragging me off with them
to eternal hellfire and damnation.

if somebody loved me
i know i would not clutch so desperately
onto Your shoestrings
fraying threads
dangling me over this wailing bottomless pit
sucking me violently into its black hole of eternally lost souls.

if somebody loved me
i know i would not grasp so frantically at Your heels
in futile attempts to save myself
from the fright of my living death
as i sink into my inescapable oblivion
momentarily pulling You with me
down beneath the line of sanity.

if somebody loved me
i could release my bleeding fists
too severely rapt in anguish
freeing You
laying to rest at long last
my abused heart
in a healing
bed of love

if.

So if you think you are going to rescue anyone from their self-delusion, you’d better make sure that you give them a soft and solid landing to fall onto when you cut the cord, because you don’t know to what extent their delusion is keeping them sane and alive.

Since I have been in this new habit of writing out lists of appreciation, now and then I manage to come up with some somewhat shocking and unexpected things to appreciate. The most shocking of these is this:

I am grateful for all the people who have hated and abused me in my life, including and especially family, because one who has been loved and cared for in life can never feel the overwhelm of divine bliss of being loved and cared for for the very first time.

I came upon this while basking in the glory of my love. Sometimes I think and feel that no one can appreciate this love that I am in with this man. Sometimes I am beside myself with joy and appreciation and love so deep for him that I begin to cry.

It was a moment like that that I realized the vast canyon between how I have been treated all of my life, and how good this man is and how he loves me. And I stand on the safe side of that canyon looking back on the abusive side and all the people on it – far, far away – and it makes me cry.

Do you know what hell is? People seem most often to believe that hell consists of some form of physical pain being inflicted on the earthly body. Perhaps physical pain is the worst kind, or even only kind of pain that many people can imagine. However, most people who might believe in hell or an afterlife will also believe that the body dies and that it is the non-physical elements of people that live on in the afterlife.

Our non-physical elements comprise, at the least, what is in our hearts and minds – what you feel, what you think, what you desire – from these stem all of our actions and words, our behavior and the reasons for how we treat others, the acts we choose to engage in in our lives and so on.

What do you love? What emotions do you cling to? Why? What emotions do you hate and want to flee from? Do you spend more time in ill-will, hating, disliking, criticizing, judging, psychologically or emotionally breaking down or destroying yourself or others than you spend in good will, loving, liking, complimenting, accepting, psychologically and emotionally building up or nurturing yourself and others? Now consider this; just imagine that once you die, you will be stuck for eternity in that ill-will or good will and in those negative or positive emotions that you carry inside you towards yourself and others…would you try to change yourself before you die?

Throughout my 20’s, I told myself, hell is here on earth and I am living in it – my emotional experiences were my agony and I strove in desperation to escape my agony. The emotions we choose to foster inside ourselves can be of heaven or of hell, and they can bring the agony of purgatory or the joy of heaven.

I had the following dream during a week when I was in the midst of what had been the single-most horrible and traumatizing ordeal of my life to that point in time. Believe as you wish, but for me, this dream showed me without the slightest doubt a true and accurate dimension of hell and the emotions that lead one there:

Evil woman spirit:

Some hours ago I had a horrifying “dream.” It was more than a dream though; its emotions bore a depth that was intense with reality, more intense and profound, more penetrating, in fact, than emotions I experience in people in reality. It’s the worst, scariest dream I’ve had since the one I had right before Jude [my pet] died. Elements of it were too real and felt far too deliberate to merely have been a fabrication of my mind.

I was in the large spacious room of a new house, light with windows, happily occupying my mind contemplating what sort of rug to put in it. Maybe it happened as I was thinking to myself…I’m not sure—but I felt an evil woman present, and I mean once trouble started, I could hear and even more FEEL her, not see her. One second I’m blissfully contemplating interior decorations in a silver-colored room, the next second I am being sucked under the floor and feeling this evil woman. She was evil to the core and I felt a blood-thirsty hatred that she had for me inside her. THIS and the aggressiveness with which she was trying to bring me down to her hell and destroy me were the things that made this feel more real—usually dreams and those in them are more passive. This woman was actively, deliberately and passionately trying to destroy me, and she had great power at her disposal to do so and she was exerting it all on me.

I found myself, like 2-3 meters under the floor, like in some other world, like hell, and this woman was pulling, TRYING to pull me deeper and deeper. The hell were the emotions—horrifying emotions, maybe they were hers—I couldn’t bear them and I felt her pulling me in deeper, so in desperation and horror I immediately began saying out loud “GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD” and I said GOD louder and louder, focusing on God in my mind, maybe I was shouting by the end GOD GOD GOD. And I felt I was pulled up out of that hell and stood in the room again in shock and, I think, very angry at that woman. I left the room to a different part of the house to try to get away from her. But I felt her beginning to try to suck me back into her dimension of hell again and again. This time, also in anger at her, I began shouting GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD. Somewhere in me I was worried neighbors or someone else might hear me. Again, also with my more aggressive shouting, she went away and I woke up, just barely. And, drifting off back to sleep, I could still feel her presence in my “dream-mind,” so I woke myself up as best I could and asked God to please don’t let me have anymore bad dreams tonight. And so I didn’t.

But I felt there was more to that dream than just being a dream, so before I began writing in here, I asked God to please protect me from that woman and all others like her. This dream scared the hell out of me. The horror and depth of the emotions in it defy description. I believe they were hers, and I felt that, in addition to being directed towards me, she lived in them. They are feelings I don’t wish to revisit, and I may not even be capable of revisiting them in order to even attempt to put them into descriptive words that you can feel. There are words though, they just don’t cause you to enter into the profound and extraordinary hell of what they really feel like: HATRED, FURY, ANGER, VENGENCE, BLOOD-LUST…this woman had some kind of power—she used it. She was power-hungry, blood-thirsty, murderous.

My name means light. I wonder if that’s why I inevitably feel even just a hint of despair come creeping into my soul as the Scandinavian autumn ushers in the darkness of winter. The days gradually get swallowed up into the darkness, more and more with each passing day.

Darkness is a black hole of unknowing, unseeing. It emphasizes your loneliness and makes you cry to hear a friendly voice beside you, to hold a warm hand. You can’t see in darkness. You can’t see what is in the very same space you’re standing in. Snakes could come slithering around your feet, wrapping around your ankles, constricting, to pull you off into the depths of hell. Or something could lash out at you and bite you with its venomous fangs. In the darkness, evil can see you, but you can’t see evil.

Light dispels evil. Snakes don’t dare show themselves in the light of life. There is nothing to fear when light is shining around you, for you can see everything that is there clearly. Nothing can sneak up on you and capture you away to the underworld. Dark beings and creatures of the night fear the light as I fear the dark.

I love autumn as a season, but no matter how happy I become, I just can’t shake the lingering loneliness and the cold that comes with the darkness of the Scandinavian autumn.

There would be one solution to that, I suppose – get a husband.

Well, to be fair, I’m not entirely alone; I have a pet fly named Stanley.

P.S. Stanley escaped out the door a while ago.

One evening I sat in my room reflecting on life. As I replayed events and experiences in my mind, it appeared to me as if I had suffered inordinately in my life, either as a direct or indirect consequence of my concern and sensitivity for others, of my honesty and the respect and the consideration with which I treat others, in a nutshell, for my commitment to my own integrity and to a strong moral conscience and sensitivity to others’ feelings.

It followed from these thoughts that I began to feel angry as I pondered the individuals who had wronged me and caused me such suffering, those who have little integrity or have become deaf to the soft-spoken voice of their conscience. “How grossly unfair this world is,” I thought. Those individuals were clearly no worse off for their foul behavior, in fact, overall, they were better off than I was. What’s to keep anyone from becoming consumed with his or her own selfishness and indulging in lies and deceit, themselves, to manage better in this world??

The reality goes against everything I have ever heard in Christianity, where it is the good and moral who prosper and get rewarded, and, in the past when I would fall into this train of thought, I would take issue with God, who I perceived to be punishing “the good” and prospering “the bad” and just overall discouraging, even punishing everything good that can be expressed in human behavior.

This time, however, I turned to my angels and asked “What do you say to the one who has a strong conscience, a virtuous, empathetic and fair heart, living and relating with others from a basis of noble principles and integrity, but who finds him or herself constantly suffering or falling prey in life to others who are morally bankrupt, heartless, unscrupulous or without integrity? What do you say to the one who, no matter what is done to him (or her), he has not the heart to be as all others who wrong him, forsaking his integrity, love and principles in order to facilitate and ease life in this world?”

And my angels responded without hesitation:

That you do right by others and by your conscience does not mean you will prosper or gain favor with others. Therefore do right, not for gain or to be treated better, only do right because it is good and right, and make that your core and reason.

You are responsible for yourself and for your own actions, regardless of what others do, and you alone shall reap their consequences when the day comes. Do right by others and retain your clean conscience and peace of mind. Do right for right’s sake, not to gain favor or to avoid suffering. Only this is a commitment to what is good.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With Thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

January 9th, 2009

I talked to an angel. She was an angel of love above all else. Her love for us, for each and every one of us, was just like the love a mother feels for her new-born child as she holds it in her arms, so I called her Angel Mother.

One day, as usual, I was on the subway going into the city center. The diversity in the people that come onto the subway train never ceases to captivate me. Often I spend my time on the train observing people as they get off or come on the train, or as they sit talking, reading or listening to music, and this particular morning was not an exception. On this particular morning, a very large, very round young woman stepped onto the train. Despite her size and shape, she was wearing a denim mini-skirt. I had never seen someone so overweight wearing a mini-skirt before and I was a little surprised by the sight.

I, being mired and moored too much in this world, felt the precursor to some critical and unkind thoughts about this young woman start to well up inside me. However, because I wanted to change myself, a question came to me instead and I asked Angel Mother “But what do you think? Isn’t she fat? And isn’t it then also in particularly bad taste to wear a mini-skirt?”

Angel Mother’s response was instantaneous, firm and blunt: “I do not concern myself with her external appearance. I only care about her inner being.”

What Angel Mother expressed felt so beautiful as I experienced it, that tears came to my eyes as I sat on the train. I tried to wipe my tears away quickly and suppress my emotions so no one would notice; unfortunately my stop was next and I could not linger in the experience.

“Angel Mother loves everyone without prejudice and without discrimination,” I thought, ”she will be my mentor and my role model.”

It’s very funny how people can see the same thing from completely opposite angles. It was the funniest thing (not necessarily ha-ha-funny), that when I was in the midst of my worst and darkest time, in 2007, I had become reckless and crazy. I had a death wish basically and I didn’t care in the least what happened to me and secretly hoped something so bad would happen to me that I would die.

I had, in a very disorganized and utterly unplanned manner, gotten rid of my apartment of 10 years in Finland, sold or put all my stuff in storage except for a large suitcase, I had bought a ticket to Algeria with no plan, nowhere to go, no nothing except money. Really I just gave up my apartment, got rid of my stuff and left just like that. Because I had a death wish and really hoped I would die.

I always get slightly shocked when I tell that story to people (without explaining what was going on in my heart and mind at the time) and they respond to my utter insanity with this unabashed admiration for my courage. That just amazes and amuses me as much today as it did the first time I experienced it! Actually not one single person I have told my story to has understood my true state of mind and reasoning for doing what I did – they all understood it as some expression of great courage! I love it, actually, it makes me sound a lot better than I was.