This weeks focus is on a simple thing most Americans have difficulty with -- telling the truth. The goal is simple, no lying of any sort for this next week. No white, black, yellow, pink, or green ones. None to make people feel better or worse. Simple truth without any malice whatever. If you can't tell the truth, simply be quiet. If you want to tell a truth with malice, be quiet.

And don't lie to yourself either. Don't try to convince yourself that you feel like you should when you don't, that you love someone you don't, that don't feel hate when you do. Understanding your mind is not about jumping in with affirmations about what you'd like to think or feel. It is about seeing what actually flows through your mind -- garbage and sewage as well as clusters of lotus blossoms -- without being afraid of any of it. Of course, it also means not dwelling on any of it. But just don't lie about whatever happens to float by.

Don't let your mind lie to you by exaggerating either your purity or your impurity. The delusions the mind creates are often a way of falsifying a reality so that it fits what we'd like to think, or so that it distorts some unwarranted denigration of our dignity as a human being struggling for truth. Don't participate in this self-lying. See and accept what is.

A short note from one participant in last weeks focus.

Trying to do something that I decided was wholesome to do when I didn't want to do it turned out to be more difficult than giving something up. I had to face my strategy of procrastination, and endless variations of reasons why I shouldn't act. Acting also required the expenditure of considerable energy, something I found in short supply at the end of long hard day. In the end, except for one failure, I pretty much muddled through, but it wasn't pretty, and it wasn't pleasant.