The Word of the Day is “Truth”

Steven Barnes
5 min readAug 26, 2024

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The two most basic models in the MAGIC formula are the Three Centers (body, heart, and mind) and the Three Gates (Is it True? Kind? Useful?). You formally connect MAGIC and the Centers in the Yellow Belt level, by creating a goal of health/fitness, emotion/relationship, and mind/money. This gets YOU moving.

And people may not ordinarily focus on all three arenas, but they will rarely argue against the need for health, the desire for love or escaping fear, and the value of understanding the world enough to make a living.

But they DO argue about the Three Gates. They will literally argue for their right to lie or be cruel, without realizing that by doing so they diminish the actual effectiveness of their actions in terms of delivering the real values of life.

LYING may be USEFUL, even efficient and effective — but the truth is ultimately like having an accurate map. You NEED to know what is true. And lying to others always seems to lead to lying to yourself. You lose your way.

CRUELTY is often useful, even efficient and effective. And the truth is that all animals have the self-preservation instinct. Harming others in defense of your life, family, or core values is right in alignment with those animal instincts, which is REALLY REALLY useful to awaken before opening your heart, if you would be safe. But advanced martial artists often practice partially so that they have OPTIONS in self-defense. So that they can survive without harming others. (Aikido is all about this, but pure Aikido, without atemi striking…well, you’d better be pretty close to perfect, that’s all I can say.)

USEFULNESS, the ability to measure the effects of your actions, compare those results with your intentions, is critical. This requires MEASUREMENT of results, which can be difficult in some arenas. But “usefulness” connects with truth, and so does the duality of kindness and cruelty.

The discipline of “Core Transformation” suggests that EVERY human action is, ultimately, an attempt to connect with the Divine, or perhaps the sense of peace we experienced in the womb. I believe this, and that the implication is that there is ALWAYS an honest, loving way to accomplish your goals. That said, if you are under immediate stress, you may not have time to find such a path, and must respond with an animal survival reaction.

But afterward, it is common for moral beings to ask if it was NECESSARY to take that life, damage that person, tell that lie. We go to friends, parents, therapists, priests and so forth to contextualize, to look and see: did I really do the best I could with the resources and time I had?

If we can see that we did the best we could, then we might ask how to prevent being in that situation again. How might we have communicated differently. Or seen warning signs faster. Or avoided that dangerous dark street. Or noticed when your “yum” trumps your “uh-oh!”

We try to do better. We realize that EVERYTHING we did was an attempt to reduce our pain and fear, and increase our joy and love. If we can forgive ourselves, and others, we enter a new world IF that survival drive is triggered. We HAVE to deal with that first.

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I said this because that first step: “Is it True?” is so damned important. It requires that we CARE about truth, and recognize that almost any situation that demands we lie is corruptive. Lying to others is not NECESSARY, but often USEFUL. Most liars will say that they HAD to lie. No, they CHOSE to. Maybe that actually was their best option. Maybe not. But they need to take responsibility for that.

And as an essential follow-up to this, we need to develop our error-checking. HOW do you know what is true? We probably cannot, ultimately. Our memories, senses, and cognition are fallible. But we must take action, or lose our lives. So the action itself becomes part of our tool: taking small actions every day, testing the results.

Here’s a great tool: IF you know the truth of your own heart and capacity…and IF you accurately see the world as it is…it should be hellaciously useful in reaching goals. Have an accurate map? Then if you follow it, you should reach your destination.

So those small daily goals, in all three arenas, are testing your knowledge of self and world, because if you understand the world, you understand what it takes to reach a goal. If you understand yourself, you know whether or not you can and will pay that price.

Get it? By setting small goals in each arena, then looking at your results, you are CALIBRATING.

  1. Did I understand the cost of this goal?
  2. Did I understand the way to divide up that cost into daily chunks?
  3. Did I keep my word to myself?
  4. Did I tell myself the TRUTH about who I am, what I can and will do, and what the world demands to accomplish this?

By carefully choosing your goals, and processes, and setting things up so that there is no RATIONAL external reason not to do it, we can learn about what’s happening inside us.

  1. Physically, can you trust yourself to BREATH five times a day, sixty seconds of diaphragmatic breathing, at the top of the hour?
  2. Emotionally, can you use that time to focus on GRATITUDE, dig in and really find things that make you happy for those sixty seconds?
  3. Mentally, can you take a single “atomic action” that will move you toward your career goal? Say, “a sentence a day”? Can you commit to a 1% weekly improvement each of the Three Centers?

NO ONE with the time and resource to read these words cannot do these three things. But if you commit to them, you will find yourself breaking that promise to yourself. If you will notice the ways you do this, what triggers you to forget your obligations to self and others, you will begin to take your power back from the world. YES, there is poverty and oppression and gaslighting. But if you cannot trust yourself to be as honest, kind, and effective as YOU are capable of being, you have no leverage to blame OTHERS for being dishonest, cruel, or incompetent.

START WITH YOURSELF. Always. And you can start today, just by BREATHING, creating little goals in all three arenas, focusing on gratitude, and committing to 1% weekly improvement, tiny “atomic” steps.

But all of this starts with a commitment to honesty, both practicing it, and constantly improving your ability to determine it.

Remember: if you know the truth of yourself, and the world, you won’t set a goal you cannot reach. By constantly having small failures and successes, we are using the Scientific Method to create our internal and external reality maps, without which we are lost…and vulnerable to any gaslighter who can spin a web of bullshit.

Namaste

Steve

www.realherosjourney(dot)com

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Steven Barnes

Steven Barnes is a NY Times bestselling author, ecstatic husband and father, and holder of black belts in three martial arts. www.lifewritingpodcast.com.