Truth and Transparency Series: Introduction
Truth and Transparency Series: Introduction
Transcript
The following is a transcription of Truth and Transparency Series: Introduction, which is part of my practice of coming into full truth and transparency.
For the full series and depth to this practice visit: My Commitment to Truth and Transparency.
Hello Dear Friends,
I am sharing with you today from Big Sur, California. I’m 1,300 miles into my walk from Canada to Los Angeles. Today is day 143 of the journey, and this has been a journey … an internal journey of deepening my integrity, my internal truth, and my transparency. I’ve been doing a lot of work and a lot of practice on this journey and a lot of work in this realm over the last decade or so.
What I have decided to do on this journey is to share everything inside of me that I’ve been holding back. Everything that I have been holding a secret over the years. Anything that I’ve been guarding or hiding. The things that I’m embarrassed about or have been embarrassed about or, you know, any level of a shame or anything of that sort. So, as I’m doing this long walk, it’s an opportunity for me to let go of everything that no longer serves me, that no longer serves you, because my objective is to be of service. So, letting go of all of these things that are keeping me in the past, holding me back, holding me from being in the present moment, in the mindful moment and in the moment of service to Earth, to humanity and to the plants and animals that we share this Earth with.
So I made a personal commitment to myself that before arriving in Los Angeles, I would share all of this. And I’ve been shedding. With each step that I’ve walked forward, which has been over a million steps by now, I have been letting go. I’ve been shedding, I’ve been surrendering. And what is to come in this series of videos is this is what I’m just calling the truth series for some form of simplicity.
In this series, I’m going to share everywhere where I haven’t been in alignment with my integrity, where my actions haven’t been in alignment with my beliefs, where the self that I’ve brought to you hasn’t been the most authentic and genuine self. Some people would say that I’m releasing all of my lies, but I don’t look at it that way. I look at this from a much more holistic way, a much more holistic frame, and that is, I’m coming to a place of internal truth. I’m coming to a place of complete transparency with you, and all of this is a part of deepening my integrity.
So this is one big step forward. I’ve wanted to come to this place with all of you for a very long time. Many things have prevented me from that, primarily my own mind. So, it’s with a sense of relief I come to you and start this series of sharing my deep truth and also a sense of anxiety and concern and, you know, maybe a little bit of fear. Some of this is the stuff of my deepest despair. And also much of it is very lighthearted. And some of it I would even go as far as to say it’s probably going to be pretty funny. You know, truth can be pretty funny, and it can also be very painful. I think that we’re going to experience both of that together.
So, I’m going to be sharing, the main things I’m going to be sharing about are becoming Rob Greenfield or Robin Greenfield online. The areas in which I wasn’t in integrity, wasn’t in alignment, where my past ways are not in alignment with my current desire for integrity and truth and transparency. I’m going to share about my financial past, I’m going to share about my sexual past, and I’m going to share my experience with working with television, particularly Discovery Channel. I’m going to share some of the stories of my childhood and just the many different truths that I want to share with you, you know, so many different elements of my life.
So, this is a series of a handful of videos and this video is, well, I want to tell you why. You know, a lot of people don’t understand why I would want to share everything inside of me, to have no secrets, to have nothing to guard, nothing to hide. To a lot of people it’s just absolutely unfathomable. To me, I would almost say it feels like there is no other way.
First, my whole being is based on this concept of being the change that I wish to see in the world. Now a lot of you know me for focusing on sustainable living, or simple living and different environmental issues. But from the beginning, it’s always been about our entire existence. Because sustainable living is living. It’s every way in which we interact with the Earth and the ways we interact with people, the ways we interact with the plants and animals. It’s all connected.
So, for me, being the change that I wish to see is literally at the deepest level being that change. And, for me, a big part of that change is truth. It’s integrity. It’s transparency. These are very important characteristics in being the change that I wish to see in the world. My message, my purpose, is also to live my message out loud. To be an example. To be the change and show that this other way is possible, and this is all a part of that. This is all in alignment with that.
At the core of my being, I am attempting to be exactly who I say I am. I’m not just an … I’m not an environmentalist. I’m not an activist. I’m not any … a cyclist or a walker or a forager or a gardener or a humanitarian or whatever label that could possibly be applied. I’m a human being that wants to go to the deepest core of being a human being and operating in the highest level of integrity, truth, and transparency, in as compassionate a way of being that I can on this Earth with my fellow humans.
So, this is all part of that. There’s no way around it with that being my mission. I also see the field of truth and integrity and transparency as a part of healing. I’ve done a lot of work over the last decade plus to heal. And some people in our society would say, “Heal? What’s wrong with you?” Well, my belief is that we all need healing. Our bodies at every single moment are healing. Our minds at every single moment are healing. When we sleep, that’s a form of opportunity for healing. Rest is healing. Positive thoughts are healing, and for me coming into truth is a substantial part of that healing process.
A lot of us deal with traumas. I have my own. I haven’t … I don’t have major suffering from traumas, which I’m very grateful for. But, I have my past, that I hold in a way that I hold pain and suffering inside of my body. So, this truth is about healing. It’s about healing myself. It’s also about healing my relationships. I really believe that truth and transparency play a large role in being able to help heal my relationships. And also, this is about healing for you as well. I want to be an example of showing how healing it can be to be truthful. Truthful with ourselves and truthful with others.
So all of my work online is creative commons. My videos, my writing, even my recent book is creative commons, which means it’s owned by the public. I don’t own it. So, these videos, this writing … you can use it as you wish. I’m experimenting with making my mind creative commons. This idea that I don’t even own my own mind … that my mind is here to serve the public good … that’s kind of the concept of dedicating your whole life to being of service, which is my ultimate goal. And this step of complete transparency and truth plays a very substantial role in that.
You know, I don’t have all the answers, and this is definitely an experiment, but I have a very strong belief that it will release all the barriers, all the walls that are put up and it will deepen the connection that I have with you. I believe that it will deepen the connection I have with myself. I believe that it’ll deepen the connection that I have with the Earth, and again, with the plants and animals that we share this home with.
So this is very much about opening up in order to deepen my relationships. I don’t have really a present day example to model this experiment off of completely. I don’t believe that I’ve met anybody who exists in a state of complete truth and transparency. I’m sure that there’s people that are out there, but in our society it’s the exact opposite of how we’re built, how we’re designed. We’re … our society … the society in which I was born is one that is founded upon fallacies and lies and delusions. And so, it’s not something that I have an exact model to follow. That’s why I call this an experiment.
But one of my greatest models and influences has been Mahatma Gandhi for over a decade, and in the last couple of years, I’ve really deepened into his work even more. And as I was reading his book “Experiments with Truth,” towards the end, which was SORT of an autobiography, he said something along the lines of ‘and the last 13 years, there’s no need for me to write about because it’s all public.’ And I read that as him saying for the last 13 years of his life at that time, that 100% of what he was doing was for the public good. And he was one of the most radical experimenters in truth and integrity that I know.
He’s been one of my great influences and inspirations in that, in this realm. Now, because this is sort of the unknown, because our society is so built around keeping us from getting to the deepest level of integrity, I’m kind of viewing myself as an astronaut of integrity. Integrity is this vast unknown, unexplored field and, of course, we know some about it, just like we know some about outer space but, you know, for most of us, we would have to put on some sort of astronaut suit in order to go fully, deeply immersed into the realm of truth and transparency and integrity.
I’m not sure exactly what’s going to happen. I’m not sure exactly what changes are going to happen inside of myself, how I’m going to feel, how I’m going to perceive the world. I don’t know how others are going to perceive me, but I’m definitely entering into a, for me, an unexplored realm and I am, I’m excited. It’s again … it’s something that I feel some uncertainty about and some concern and some anxiety about. But for the most part, I’m feeling really just absolutely excited to get to dive into this, this space of integrity.
This is very much an inner journey, but part of this is dissolving the inner and entering into a more interconnected state. So, as much as it’s an inner journey, it’s also just as much an outer journey, because I want to be a leader … a leader of integrity and a leader of transparency and a leader of truth. So, I’m on this journey to be on this journey with you. I really want to be here for those of you who are striving for these same characteristics that have similar life goals to me.
You know, a lot of you have seen me doing outer work: growing food, foraging, living in a tiny house. You know, minimalism, owning very few possessions, riding my bicycle across the country. And the reason I do a lot of that is because I’m talking about solutions: what we can do to move forward as humanity in a way that’s in harmony, in a way of reciprocity. And yet, my belief is that we as humanity need to do the inner work if we’re ever going to be able to come together as humanity, to come to a place of living in harmony with this Earth.
I think that the outer work is incredibly important, but if we leave out the inner work of coming to this place inside, that we will never be able to come together with our neighbors, our next door neighbors and our global neighbors, to really solve these issues that we’re working on; to really be the change as individuals and come together as a society to overcome this way of being that is one of such exploitation and of such injustice and inequality, inequity and destruction.
I think this inner work is just as important as the outer work and the two must absolutely go together. So, I’ve done a lot of work to put my life into alignment in the physical realm, and right now a lot of my work is in the internal realm. I’m so glad to be able to still share this with you and be on this path together. This practice is also in alignment for me with one of the practices that’s been very meaningful to me as of late, which is Vipassana, which is a practice of silent meditation that’s designed to help with purification of the mind; of emptying the mind, of liberation of the mind.
It’s about finding a place of completeness and wholeness within. I don’t see completeness and wholeness happening without truth and without transparency and without integrity. So this is about finding that completeness and wholeness within. So much along those lines is about finding that inner peace. My belief is that if I release it all, everything I’ve been guarding and hiding – if I release all of that, I can come into a place of much greater clarity and focus.
It’s very much in alignment with my objective to find contentment within, so that I don’t need external sources. I don’t need anything outside of myself to be content. And when we become content human beings, I don’t think we need to exploit, we don’t need to pillage, we don’t need to destroy, because we’re content. We are whole inside, we have everything that we need.
Now, another part of this is part of my strategy, my long-term strategy as an activist, by sharing everything inside of me, there’s nothing out there to uncover, which is an incredible sense of lightness. As a person who’s in the public, some would say like a public figure, to have nothing that can be uncovered, nothing to be concerned of for the future, and nothing in the day-to-day to be thinking, “Oh, what do I do in order to make that not be seen? How do I guard that? How do I hide that?” To release all of that. That is a form of protection.
It’s protecting me from things being shared in the future that I wasn’t truthful and transparent about. I’m going ahead and just saying, “This is everything. This is everything and you can take me or leave me.” I have done things in the past that are not in alignment with my belief system, that I mourn over and that I feel sadness, that I feel pain inside about. And this is it. And you get to decide: do you cancel me or do you see me as the whole human being that I am?
This is me going ahead and just taking care of that right now. So I get an incredible … you know, I think that I’ll have a substantial sense of lightness, and … but I don’t want to downplay that this is also about healing as well. Healing for others as well. Especially when I’m going to be talking about my sexual past. That’s the area where I have the most pain and where I still have healing that I want to do, and connections that I would really like to make, and reconnections.
So, that’s going to be the area of this that’s the absolute most challenging for me: to come to you in a place of full truth and transparency. Another aspect that I want to share about one of the reasons that I’m coming into complete truth and transparency. I really like to deeply analyze the mind and understand why we do the things that we do. I would say that I think part of it’s ego, of almost wanting to be right, possibly because if I share everything, it’s a way that I’m getting to control my existence … control my being.
I’m fine with having an ego. We’ll always have an ego. My objective is to shed every area of the ego that doesn’t serve the public good and myself and hold on to any area of the ego that actually is a useful tool in being of service and in living a life of deep integrity. So, one of the things I want to bring up is when I shared that I was going to be doing this, some people said, you know, things along the lines of, “Don’t subject me to your stuff. You know, I don’t want to hear it.” And, “Maybe it’s not fair of you or right of you, or whatever judgment, to share all of this. Maybe we don’t want to hear it.”
My answer to that is, “I hear it. I hear that you don’t want to hear it and that’s wonderful.” So this is the agreement that I want to make: that you’re a human being that is responsible for watching what you watch. I’m a human being who is responsible for sharing what I share. I’m here sharing and if you want to be here watching this, then watch this and listen, and if you don’t want to be, then just go ahead and shut this off. I’m not making clickbait. I’m not making short videos that I’m just going to slip into your mind.
This is a consensual agreement that we’re making. You’re here because you want to be. I’m here because I want to be. We’re here together because we want to be and if you don’t want to be here, then simply turn this off. And it’s really as simple as that. So let’s be here together consensually and if you don’t want to be here, then see if there are some other topics that we talk about and not this one.
I love you and I’ll see you later. At another time. Now, another thing that people assume is that I’m doing this from a place of shame or guilt. And what that says is a lot more about themselves than it says about me. That says that if they were sharing, they would be doing it from a place of shame or guilt most likely. Now I’m not doing this from a place of shame or guilt. I’d like to share that with you. I don’t do anything from a place of shame or guilt.
In fact, I have this book right here: Nonviolent Communication, also called Compassionate Communication, and that has played a really substantial role in my life as of the last few years or so. And we talk about never doing anything from a place of duty or obligation, of have to or should do, of guilt or shame. I’m sharing this all from a place of this is what’s singing out of my heart. This is absolutely what I want to be doing. This is a part of my life path of healing.
This is a part of my life path of being of service. This is something that I would go as far as to even say I’m finding joy in. I find incredible joy in truth. Within this concept of non-violent communication, we have what are called “The Needs List” and then “The Feelings List.” So the basic belief is that all of us human beings are at every single moment doing the best that we know how to meet our needs. So, that’s what I’m doing. I’m meeting needs.
So, I’d like to just go through this little exercise and share what needs I’m meeting by doing this. So, I would say some of the big needs that I’m meeting for this are peace, self-care, self-knowledge, self-love, self-responsibility, to understand transcendence, consciousness, aliveness, awareness. There’s so many needs here: self-expression, power in my world, discovery, to be seen is definitely a basic human need as well; self-respect. I have a need for equality and equity. These play a role. And integrity is certainly a need. A need for community.
Let’s see if there’s any other really important ones here. Authenticity, compassion, integrity, presence, to understand, to be understood. So all of the ones under the empathy category. And then there’s the love category: acceptance … I have a need for acceptance, and belonging and connection, harmony. So there’s so many needs that I am meeting in this. This is about meeting needs as an individual.
Now there’s one need here under love, that’s attention, and some people say that, you know, they have the idea that I’m doing this just for attention. Well, I’ll tell you what. I have a lot easier ways to get attention that get a lot more attention than sharing the deepest depths of myself. So sure, attention plays a role. It’s a basic human need that we’re all meeting and I’ve … for the longest time, always had a need for attention. But that is not at the top of my needs that are being met here.
You know, I can get that attention by just going out and foraging and teaching about the plants that I love or by immersing [myself] in my different activism campaigns that I absolutely love and reach hundreds of times more people than this ever will. So, if that’s your concern … that this is coming from a place of just wanting attention, I also welcome you to release that and deepen into the place of what this is: a true pursuit of truth and transparency and integrity. And definitely this is not to gain followers.
I’ve already like, pretty consistently over the last handful of years, this has all resulted in less people following me online. This is not the stuff that the majority of people who are following me really want to be learning. So for all of you that are here, it means a lot. I’m really happy to be here with you. I’m very grateful.
So, I want to talk just a little bit about what to expect and just give you a little note that there’s a good chance you’re going to experience some judgment. There’s a good chance you might experience surprise. There’s a chance you might experience disappointment, disheartenment; maybe sadness, maybe frustration, or maybe anger. So watching this series, there’s definitely a very good chance that different feelings are going to come up inside of you.
I welcome you … if you want to get the feelings list out, you can get this online through nonviolent communication. You could see what feelings you are experiencing and use this as an opportunity to get in touch with your own feelings. So the feelings you have can be very widely varied. Some of you are going to probably feel inspired and motivated to deepen your own truth and transparency and others are potentially going to just, you know, you might experience being triggered and some of you might just be annoyed and frustrated and disappointed and, you know, turn it off and say, “Well, I’m done with that guy.”
That’s quite possible and that’s okay if that’s what you decide.
Coming near a close here, I would like to share some of my concerns in sharing my truth and transparency to the deepest level. You know, overall my concerns are on the minimal side because I have released attachment to what people think about me for the most part. There’s still some of that there, of course, and that’s deeply in the core of all of us because we have a desire for safety and security and to belong, etc. But for the most part, I have dropped caring what people think about me.
In the pursuit of … I’ve said the word so many times, but, this is what we’re talking about … truth and integrity. So, I’m not so concerned what people will think about me. However, I care about you. I care about every human being, but I really, in this instant, care about people who have followed me for a long time. Some of you have been with me for over a decade on this journey, so part of my concern would be that you don’t understand and instead you judge and you write me off. You don’t see the humanity. You don’t see the full humanity in me and that we lose that relationship that we have, that connection that we have.
I would definitely feel some sadness over that and I would feel a heavy-heartedness over that. So that’s one of my concerns. My biggest concern is that this isn’t the right move as a servant. You know, people have mentioned this idea of oversharing and with me sharing the depths of myself and being so far from what you see other people doing, I’ve never seen anyone do this … share all the depths and there’s some solid reasons for that and our society is not set up to be able to really understand the intricacies of the mind.
In fact, we have been taught not to express ourselves. And most of us don’t express ourselves. So what that means is that we don’t really know what’s going on inside of people’s minds to a large degree, especially at the depths of them. So, for me to share the depth of my mind, I think that the average person who hears it is going to not understand because nobody’s really going this far, especially with people that they don’t know really well and have a relationship built with.
So there’s some concern that people won’t understand and that it will actually harm my ability to be of service, to reach a lot of people and to be here, because I become less and less understood by society. And that is a risk, that by going into this place of complete truth and transparency, I do risk becoming ostracized from society. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve avoided sharing, because it’s like people can’t handle the truth, sort of, because most people want to even not be truthful about what’s going on in their own mind.
They don’t want to share the truth. But the reality of the situation is that everybody has done a lot of things that they would not want other people to know about. We’ve all thought things that we don’t want other people to know about. And if we all just shared it, wow, the incredible relief that we would have as a society, the huge weight that would come off our backs, the sigh of relief that we would have if we stopped having these stories inside that we’re weird or we’re crazy or we’re so different.
The reality is that I would imagine every one of you out there has a whole lot of things that are just as weird as what I’ve experienced in both physical actions and in thoughts. But my concern would be that people aren’t ready for it and that I end up being ostracized. And, you know what? It’s fine if nobody likes me, but it’s important that people understand and like me because if they don’t, then I can’t be a change maker.
I can’t really effectively be of service. And especially with my objective to reach millions of people and to be a positive influence for millions of people, that’s a concern. That’s a challenging area. And two small parts of that is we … you know, my concern would be that people’s attention span can be fairly short today. We’re being bred to have a short attention span with the quick skimming of the short clips on social media. So because I’m really sharing this in depth, my concern would be, you know, they would just take little clips in their mind and they would just remember, “Okay, that’s that,” and then they would create these associations, these stories, and leave out the whole bigger picture.
So a simple way of saying that is that people wouldn’t see me for the whole human being that I am. I think at the core of all of this is a willingness to lose it all. Over the last year or so, I’ve been willing to say if I’m going to make my whole essence to be around integrity, then I have to be willing to lose it all, to lose everything that I’ve built and everything. To come into a place of complete integrity and complete truth and transparency in a society that is so built around the opposite of that: of lies, of delusions, of fallacies, of greenwashing, of just getting people to buy the stuff at whatever cost it is to their soul.
We are a society that was built upon genocide and on slavery and it is baked into the inequity and injustice of our nation, but sold as this supposed land of freedom and equal rights for all. But, if you look, it’s not. You know, we have this idea of a democracy. If you look at the reality, we don’t have a democracy in this country. So, we have this society that’s built around false perceptions, around lies.
So much of it is masked, with actually saying, “But it’s truth,” when, at the core, it’s the essence of ‘not truth,’ of pulling the wool over our eyes, of keeping us from living in integrity. Because if we as a community come together and live in full integrity, that’s power. And, in my opinion, it’s not what the corporations want. It’s not what our government wants. Our government doesn’t want us living in full integrity. The corporations don’t want us living in full integrity. Because if we live in full integrity, we don’t need their stuff anymore.
There’s so much power in it. I’m really grateful to be on this journey with many of you. Some of you expressed that you didn’t understand why I’m doing this and so I hope for those of you who that was the case who watched this, you came into a deeper understanding.
Now throughout this series, if you have questions that arise, I do encourage you to write them down and post them in the comments. And then, what we’ll do is we’ll go through the comments of all the videos and then I’ll create one more video that answers the questions that are most commonly asked. We won’t get to all of them, but I will answer the ones that are being asked by the most people in one more video that I do afterwards.
I also invite you to go to my website, if you want to dive into this a little bit with me, you can go to robingreenfield.org/transparency. That’s where I’ve been sharing my financial transparency for quite some time, since 2016. You can go to also, robingreenfield.org/vows, and that dives into my long quest for integrity, truth, and transparency.
So, I have been sharing about these things a lot for a very long time and I invite you to use those along with this time. I also invite you to dive into compassionate communication, also called nonviolent communication. You could get the book while we’re doing this. I think that would be a great practice to go along with this and … that’s it. I know that was a long video. I don’t know how long, but I’m so grateful finally to have shared this and now for a lot more sharing to come.
I love you all very much and see you soon, Dear Friend.
Articles referred to:
My Commitment to Financial Transparency
My Vows to Humanity
My Experience with Nonviolent Communication (NVC) / Compassionate Communication
The above is a transcription of Truth and Transparency Series: Introduction, which is part of my practice of coming into full truth and transparency.
For the full series and depth to this practice visit: My Commitment to Truth and Transparency.