I don’t know about you, but my conscience seems to work a lot better than my intellect. I mean, I may not always know what the right thing to do is, but I always know when it’s wrong. It’s somehow easier. Telling the truth is difficult, not because it’s hard to do, necessarily, but because we don’t always know what the truth is. There are so many possibilities. But lying...hey, that’s easy. Who doesn’t know when they’re trying to cover their own ass, right?
Some people, however, have lied so much that they begin to believe it themselves. They lose the ability to tell the difference. And that, to me, is quite dangerous, because how could it not affect every aspect of a person’s life? It’s a form of corruption at the deepest level of one’s being. Why would anyone do such a thing to themselves?
Maybe that’s what Mardi Gras is for, or getting drunk, or ventriloquists with their dummies who will say the most outrageous things. Maybe these things are a kind of relief valve for the truth. Put on a mask and you find out what you really want to do. Talk to a dummy and it will tell you what you really think. Destroy your inhibitions and you get to be another person, perhaps the one you keep locked up in the basement, like the Gimp in Pulp Fiction, chained to the wall with a rubber ball stuffed in his mouth. Who knows what he could tell you if he could speak?
How much of our aberrant behavior is the result of telling lies? What does that do to us over the course of a lifetime? And how many ways are there of lying? Maybe much of what we do is a lie—not just false but an outright lie. Simply going to work at a job we don’t like—one that’s stultifying or even unethical—can be a lie. Perhaps acquiescing to a relationship that is either abusive or exploitative—maybe that’s our lie. Even being afraid to step out of our comfort zone and do something risky or adventuresome (if that’s what we really want to do) can be a lie. When we live like that, everything we say and do becomes a lie by default. How could it be otherwise?
There’s a great saying: “Always tell the truth. It changes everything.” For example, your partner asks you, “Do you love me?” (This goes WAY beyond “does this dress make me look fat?”) Your answer could alter how you live the rest of your life, either by liberating you from someone you never wanted to be with in the first place or by opening up—possibly for the first time—a meaningful conversation with your significant other. It’s painful to think that the truth of how we’re living is so unbearable that we resemble more a cockroach scurrying from the light than a grownup human being.
Lying is a real problem, but the worst kind of lie is the one we tell ourselves. It’s like deliberately causing ourselves to go blind. Our motives get all screwed up. We forget who we are, what we’re about, what our values are, and our dreams. Our lives become ineffective, and people can sense that there’s something about us that is fundamentally untrustworthy. As the chief of the undercover division of the police department in the movie “The Departed” says to a potential recruit, “Here we deal in deception but not self-deception.”
In a sense, we are all undercover agents. Life demands a certain amount of conformity and restraint, which isn’t always a bad thing. But if we lose our connection with the actor behind the mask, we lose something we might not easily get back, if ever.
The idea that our soul is somehow immutably pure and sacred is a dangerous one. It might be cool, in the name of seeming enlightened or anti-religious, to dismiss the notion that a soul could be lost and in need of being “saved,” that there is no such thing as hell or original sin, but this is usually nothing more than a coping strategy, a reluctance to take responsibility for one’s own spiritual well-being than it is a declaration of spiritual independence. We must be careful to never allow our ideas of truth get in the way of what is actually true. A child’s idea of hell as a literal place of eternal burning is quite different from that of a spiritually mature person, especially one who has been there.
Every time we face the truth about ourselves squarely, we peel back a layer of crust from the source of light within us. But trying to do this by design is a potential quagmire of self-centered indulgence. When we set out to “discover” ourselves, we are just as likely to invent problems as we are to uncover them. It is far easier and more real to simply tell the truth when the situation calls for it. That takes courage whereas the other only takes imagination.
Unless speaking the truth has a certain quality of confession, it’s not likely to be true. And I don’t mean confession in the sense of “oh, I’m so sorry” but the stand up straight, look you in the eye kind of telling it like it is. It’s when we don’t do that that our lives usually start to unravel and devolve into our own very special kind of hell. The sins of omission are far greater than the sins of commission, especially in their consequences.
Some people have perfected the art of using this kind of truth-telling as a weapon. But unless you’re a standup comic, it’s best to save it for when it really counts and not use it as a way to intimidate others into believing that you are somehow dangerous and therefore deserving of their respect. After a while, they will see you for what you are—a cynic who only wants to avoid the give-and-take of a compassionate life. Using the truth to keep others at bay only shows them how vulnerable you are, not vulnerable as in “open” but vulnerable as in “weak.”
We have to make a pact with ourselves to devote at least some of our energy to questioning who and what we think we are, whether the world sees us as we see us. Unless we do, we risk building up a carapace, a shell of impenetrability around the divine spark of our being, one that neither allows light to enter or to radiate out. We risk becoming a black hole that sucks the life out of everyone around us, and they begin to withdraw from our lives. Such a condition doesn’t dissipate when we die but is carried forward, not only into our next life but into the in-between state, too. What could be more hellish than that?
It’s easy, relatively speaking, to be accountable when you're alive than it is to be accountable in the afterlife. But you can’t be accountable and hide at the same time. The two are mutually incompatible. Do what you say you’re going to do. Be where you say you’re going to be. And if you can’t tell the truth, at least don’t lie. It’s better to remain silent than to blow smoke in people’s eyes. Otherwise, as you intentionally blind others, you blind yourself.
But remember, not everything is a secret. Some things are just private. You are never required to divulge your inner life, not unless it misleads others, and sometimes even that is not your responsibility. You have a relationship with God that no one else is permitted to share, nor are they allowed to demand entrance into that inner sanctum.
When you know that about yourself, you strengthen it in others. There is no greater act of service than to reinforce the right to privacy in your fellow human beings. Their humanity depends on it, as does yours. Whether you like him or not, Edward Snowden hit the nail on the head when he said, “Saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.” The true value of personal freedom is far greater than most people realize.
The way you treat your own soul affects everyone, and it affects them not only in the present moment but for the rest of their lives and yours.
Live as though you matter.