Stanley Valkner.

From the Desk of George Barnard.

A Surrogate Reality.

Years ago I employed a sales representative called Stanley Valkner. Stan was a likable guy and should have been able to sell lots of our manufactured goods, but Stan was living a lie. In fact, he was living many lies.

He tried to at all times get out of servicing existing clientele that knew me well, but he was forever looking to make new contacts where he could offer these people an independent service and gain a small, but relative still substantial "spotters fees" from them, and, as well, I would of course pay him his salary and a commission for all work sold. Unbeknown to me, Stan was on my firm's payroll, and also on our new clients' payrolls.

I told Stan some five or six weeks after employing him, that for the huge number of miles he was doing each day, and for the little work he sold, things weren't working out real well between my company and his person. To my surprise, right then and there, he fired himself from the job with my firm.

And then he told me he had been collecting five lots of salaries, still sizeable overall commissions, and lots and lots of what he called "spotters fees" for selling cars, aluminum window frames, television sets, security doors and life insurance, cosmetics and... giant kites. There were lots of other sundry products, too, but it's too long ago, and I can't remember them all now.

He now still had those four other steady jobs, but since he liked me best of all his "sad-assed" employers, he had owned up and fired himself at this time, assuring me he could have easily convinced me to keep him for another three months if he had wanted to. He knew how to sell himself. He would also buy a newspaper later that day and have another fifth income by morning.

To celebrate his doubtful honesty, Stan and I went to the local hotel and had a few beers -- a fare-thee-well drink for our Stan. I told him he was living a lie, many lies in fact. He then told me he had four women as well, but he had only married just two of them, the other two being happy enough to remain "concubines". The three "extras" were all already married, too. They were costly assets, however, and so he needed five salaries.

Years later I again met up with Stan when I was organizing for a near-bankrupt company to be refinanced. Surprise, surprise! Mr. Valkner had lied himself right to the very top of a multi-billion-dollar financial organization. George Barnard came highly recommended, he told everyone within earshot of his well-appointed office, and of course I got my not-a-darned-question-asked $120,000 to help out the firm I was troubleshooting for.

Eight or nine years further down the track, sometime in 1981, Stan Valkner became my patient. That was after he spent over a year locked away in an institute for the mentally unstable and where he was classed as dangerous to both self and others.

The first thing he told me was; that no one on this earth had ever told him a more profound truth than I had told him. That was after we had those few long-ago beers, he said, and just before we said goodbye for good. I asked him what on earth that profound truth could have been, and he said, "You said that withholding the truth when you know it should be told was just as bad as telling a lie, but infinitely more insidious. It was an invitation to unreality, madness, for the truth you withhold from a significant other, you continuously withhold from yourself as well, until in the end it becomes your surrogate reality."

It wasn't me who said that, really. It came from one of my Spirit Friends, and it wasn't the first time he had told that to someone in my clinic, or elsewhere on one occasion. I had heard it said by me on three or four previous occasions.

Right now, in 2002, Stan Valkner has been unemployable for more than two decades. He has no home, no car, no wife, no family......only because he would never tell the truth until his whole life had become a lie.

And it's just a small thought from George Barnard.

11:11 Angels