Right Speech
When we think of Right View and Right Resolve, there is a lot of thinking involved and what Buddhists term as Verbal Fabrication has an effect on how we feel. How we heard others talk, shows up in how we talk to ourselves and others. A lot of our boundaries are defended with how we talk, and a certain amount of anger and the ability to be outraged can be helpful in doses, but again in Buddhism, the pleasure of anger is mixed with pain. There’s also a deep lack of skill in most people on how to motivate others. Speech is essentially done to make ourselves feel better or to feel superior. There’s very little attention put into how little speech is needed at any given moment. There is often too much talk, idle chatter, gossip, and harshness. Again, this is easier to control in a monastic environment. Just look at how people talk when they are being rushed to meet deadlines, when there’s conflict over what cannot be shared. Look at how people speak when they feel resentment when being exploited or victimized. Perfectionism is not necessary but a certain amount of filtering can be skillful when around others. When people get good at this skill it can open up doors of influence, in a positive sense, not in a controlling sense.
The main focus is to refrain from lying, which I think is difficult in a world of spying, judgment, and persecution. But when looked at in the sense of beneficence, it’s about talking in a way that is truthful, benefits others, and is positively motivating towards change. Similar to how psychology likes to focus on behavior and not identity, people are not motivated by malicious criticism that doesn’t allow for learning, growth, and development. This is especially true in a modern cancel culture environment where people want to know negative details about you so they can cancel you. No room for development, progress, or growth. Cancel-ers also hide their own problems while exposing others because its a way to paint themselves as the “good side.” So criticism can be harsh, partially because truth hurts self-narratives, but it can be unnecessarily harsh at times because it’s about annihilating the subject of the criticism. Again, when dealing with Cluster B personality types, who typically look at lying and simulating as a natural part of goal orientation, a spiritual version of this would be lying in a spiritual way and getting away with the stuff that Right View wants to avoid and Right Resolve moves away from. Those rigid types who fail to learn often end up incarcerated, but if they truly get away with things again and again, like when they manipulate the justice system and mental health systems, which some of them are skilled enough to do, they will be involved in worldly pursuits and careen into other people with toxic criticism, fake politics, and false narratives. For example, during the early cancel culture period of the #Metoo movement, there were people who were telling the truth about a sexual harassment, but some of them were also accused of doing the same behavior. Do they really want to cancel someone else’s job, and in order to be consistent, cancel themselves as well? I think not. Sometimes people invented harassment scenarios out of whole cloth with fake outrage because they disgustingly had victim envy and a wish for the public attention that it affords. That’s how entangled narcissism becomes when people ignore individuals and look at groups and categories which are so inaccurate.
Narcissistic Supply: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
Meditation: Taking Stock: https://rumble.com/v1grdgd-meditation-taking-stock-wnaad.html
The reality is that people do Freudian displacement and blame others while covering for themselves, and this is especially so when many bad behaviors are so common that you find many people, including people who don’t have a personality disorder, have engaged in similar scandals. Scandal is regular. So when the truth hurts, self-protection narratives are generated and designed to soothe, and then scapegoating is activated when the powerful are implicated. They can use their false narratives to eventually accuse anyone who tells the truth and they can turn it into a toxic political movement based on a myth in order to preserve power. People are avoiding punishment and trying to cover their tracks. They are also rigid against the mistakes of others and their own leading to tormented mind states, or Dukkha in Pali, which is dissatisfaction. Truth in the end is a dangerous business that involves accusation, reprisal, and hypocrisy. Jesus famously implored “for those without sin, to cast the first stone.”
The ‘Wolfman’: https://rumble.com/v1gucp1-case-studies-the-wolf-man-13-freud-and-beyond.html
Violence and the Sacred – René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html
The skill of Right Speech is to speak the truth, at the right time for the person when they can be open to it, or it’s said in a way that makes it easier for people to be open to it. This is a big skill and it needs to be skillful because in this Buddhist system, lying to people in a skillful way does not enter in at all, though one has to be cognizant that people will stray from this, including spiritual people speaking in a spiritual fashion, but still lying nonetheless. It’s a skill that some will get better at but probably involve some failure and hypocrisy. Cluster B types, and even normal people under stress, are influenced by survival motives and they can’t afford to air their dirty linen to everyone and will lie by omission to protect themselves from cancelling. That’s true isn’t it? People are naturally afraid of stigma. You’re not going to see people say “I had drug problem but I’m better now” in their job interview. They aren’t going to say to strangers “I cheated on my wife, and I got therapy. We took a course and spiced up our sex lives. I’m much better now. My marriage has deepened.” Deep down a survival motive will be interfering with any kind of perfectionism and makes truth situational because people need jobs and need to eat. People who have been teachers, therapists, and anyone who’s been a parent and watched their kids change over time should be able to understand this point vividly. The purpose of therapy and religions, if done skillfully, is to bring people from darkness into light, not to behave in a superior way and to permanently judge people and “keep them over there!” The compromise and exceptions of course are criminality. The reality is that some people grew up in poverty, have a poor genetic makeup, and poor parenting all at the same time. The dice doesn’t always roll properly for everyone and that opportunity to allow change needs to keep the door open, in the right conditions of course, where people are internally motivated and literally have the capability in their biology to make the change. As usual, religions and other therapeutic modalities focus on certain areas of strength. Areas of weakness in a modality leads to a dumping ground where people have to try different things and worst case scenarios involve mental institutions and prisons.
Jeff Toobin apologizing for a Zoom call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8noCAW7z5Bk
Internal Right Speech is more naked and open, but can be even more rigid with permanent identities in the same way. It similarly has to have that ability to talk to oneself with the potential to disidentify with old habits and allow learning and development. This is something rarely seen in politics, and unfortunately it can be missing from religions and psychology environments that are supposed to be experts in these areas. Patients are also in these environments looking for someone to blame, and it’s true there are people that are blameworthy, but it totally ignores blame that one owns. It’s how the hypocrisy can creep up. Much of our energy is saved when aimed at oneself instead of trying to fix others. Certainly escaping bad influences of others and holding people accountable is important but in reality the justice system focuses on the biggest problems and one isn’t going to get revenge most of the time and some things are just petty and small. Victims can’t swim in a victim mentality and unconsciously abandon their own causes and effects which are happening in real time and need to be monitored.
Right Speech is one of the areas where we can see imitation at it’s strongest. People imitate how people speak, their accents, and their attitudes. How to undo those habits? “…You don’t learn new habits simply by stopping and not talking at all. You learn new habits by actually engaging with other people with right speech.” People learn by doing. Over time you can learn to give advice in ways that aren’t about permanent identities, unless of course you are dealing with people who repeatedly fail to adjust. If bad identities are about emotional feeding in the wrong places, and if the emotional feeding changes, then old identities can be dropped. If they don’t change, then one can’t be too passive with no boundaries. To be successful as an employee working in jails or in mental health positions requires a lot of boundary skills. Boundaries always becomes an issue for Buddhism because pacifism can make one co-dependent and victimized if one is not realistic. There’s also a sensitivity with attempts at Right Speech that eliminates humor and makes people colorless and incapable of laughing at themselves. Humor can have a sense of truth too. Political Correctness is a great example of lying that pretends to be Right Speech by sounding soothing.
Now most of the population is capable of developing, and it often comes in the form of what I’m doing here. People are already looking for an answer and when they bump into the advice, they are already open to learning because their intention is already primed to do so internally from their internally motivated search. Sometimes a person is eavesdropping on the advice and the person getting the advice doesn’t get it, but the eavesdropper does because they are the ones who are ready and internally motivated with personal goals that match the advice at the right time. Results from advise aren’t guaranteed. Trying to teach people who are impenetrable, resistant, and feel insulted by your help is not skillful. So in those situations saying nothing is better.
There are also situations where people need that appeal to authority, which is very dangerous, and they only take advice from people who are rich. When you imitate the rich and powerful, which is a form of spiritual worshipping, often made fun of as idol worshipping in Christianity, which is partially why people aren’t completely atheist when they do this behavior, the danger is imitating their good AND bad qualities, while thinking the good and bad qualities are connected, like it’s some kind of spiritual aura that they have. “Everything they do leads to success.” You behave in their manner, dress like them, speak like them, talk to staff members in the same way, and objectify others in the same way. One has to look at their procedures for getting money and assess those actions under ethics to get a clearer picture. If those role models have a lot of moral problems, you’ll find yourself being just like them in those weak areas if you unconsciously imitate. This is one of the things that happens when people first become an adult and are independent of their parents and schools. They look at how they dress, speak, and their job and go “what the hell?” You were in a dependent relationship and imitated for 2 or 3 decades. That’s what happened. If the goal in Buddhism is about mental peace, then external wealth has to be balanced by mental peace as a priority to change one’s fate. Right Speech has to increase your mental peace and the mental peace of others to be effective. This isn’t a false peace but one that actually influences others to have a similar priority so they behave and act in more peaceful ways.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu paraphrases: “There are times when, in deciding what to say, [The Buddha] would ask, first, is it true? If it wasn’t true, he wouldn’t say it. Second, is it beneficial? And if it’s one of those rare cases when saying something harsh would be beneficial, then the next question is, is this the right time and place for that? Only if he could say Yes to all three questions would he say those things.”
Right Speech – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/NobleStrategy/Section0008.html
MN 58: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN58.html
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/