telling lies

The ego mind loves to tell lies. The ego mind loves falsity. It likes to distort, move away from the truth. And this comes out in our behaviour. We tell lies.

We might not exactly recognise that we are telling lies. They may be white lies; lies told with a good intention. To help reduce someone else’s suffering may be our motivation. We may tell small lies to help smooth over troubled relationships. It is like papering over the cracks in the wall, or brushing the dirt under the rug. We just pretend it’s not there. And this pretending somehow allows us to carry on, carry on in a dysfunctional relationship, carry on in a job that we loathe, carry on living life with an undercurrent of misery and torment. It’s a way of getting by.

We pretend. We pretend that things are okay when they are okay when they are not. Our lies may be white indeed. Our lies might be coming from a genuine desire to help someone, but they are also coming from our ego, because the ego does not care for truth. It does not care for the way things actually are. The ego is interested in playing games, games of the mind, games that involve putting more interest in what we would like to be than what actually is.

And this great pretence takes us away from our authenticity. It creates a mask, a persona. We become actors playing out certain roles, but in doing so we separate ourselves from each other and from existence. These little masks of pretence become barriers, barriers to real connection, barriers that stop us from touching each other. And we become isolated, feeling separate. And all of this because we would rather live in the fantasy world of our pretence than in the harsh reality.

But paradoxically, if we can find a way of living in the harshness of reality, then by a miracle, with that acceptance and that honouring of the truth, the harshness disappears, and we are left in paradise, once again living in the Garden of Eden. And all through the simple remedy of being truthful. Truthful to others, but also truthful to ourself. For as with everything in life, the way we respond to the outer world is a reflection of our inner world.

So all the little deceptions of other people are really just indicating that we are deceiving ourself. Dropping this self-deception, the other deceptions drop away too. As Shakespeare put it, ‘This above all, to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man’. So we too would do well to listen to such advice and be true to ourself. And being true to ourself, we will be true to life, which is being true to god.