Have you ever asked yourself
the question: “Why do I lie about certain things?”
It’s a simple question, but it’s enough to make
most of us squirm: answering it completely truthfully, even
to oneself, even in the privacy of one’s own head, can
be pretty challenging. However, it can also be a totally positive,
completely life-altering experience—figuring out why
we lie, and then stopping the lies, changes everything for
the better. The funny thing is that once you express your
truth and make it totally visible, all the pent-up secretive
energy you’ve been holding inside dissipates. This frees
you to be who you really are. And what a relief! This might
be hard to believe until you have experienced it for yourself.
“Hey, I’m the captain of the football team, and
I’m gay” might not exactly roll off the tongue too
easily, but if it’s true, why not? Really, why not?
What
better opportunity to transform your experience of life than
now in the new millennium? Unless you plan on hanging out
on Earth for another 1000 years, now is your chance for an
exceptional new beginning!
We are increasingly aware of the dissent and violence in our
world. We often wonder how we will survive on both a domestic
and a global level. Although it might seem a long road, the
path to peace among people begins with creating peace within
ourselves. This applies whether we’re talking about families
or nations, romantic relationships or local communities. Total
honesty is absolutely necessary for true inner peace. And
when we are honest with ourselves, we become able to be honest
with whomever we come into contact.
Imagine the effect on the world if everyone were making an
effort to attain inner peace! It feels like magic when you
see it working, because we have become so accustomed to the
way our world functions—or, rather, malfunctions—on
rampant dishonesty.
So, what motivates us to lie? Fear. The answer is that simple.
Fear can wear many masks, but it is still fundamentally fear.
But what are we afraid of? Are we afraid of how other people
might react to our truth? We all have had times, however brief,
when we’ve been afraid to be different, outcast, separated
from the collective.
How often have we based what we have said and done (or not
said and done) on someone else’s reaction, or what we
imagined their reaction would be, just because we were trying
to ‘keep the peace’? Our focus in those cases was
on keeping the other person ‘happy.’ But what about
our own inner happiness and inner peace, our own inner truth?!
Many of us have long been convinced that the way to happiness
exists in making those around us happy. We’ve believed
that sacrificing our personal integrity is a justifiable act.
We have lost track of the fact that, ultimately, being misleading
or dishonest with ourselves for other’s sake has nothing
to do with a genuine ‘keeping of the peace’ or authentic
‘happiness.’ Peace and happiness founded on the
shifty ground of deceit are not real and can’t last.
It’s like building a skyscraper in mud. As Neale Donald
Walsch writes in his spiritual (and not necessarily religious)
book, Conversations with God, “Betrayal of the self in
order not to betray someone else is betrayal nonetheless;
it’s the highest form of betrayal.” If you lie to
yourself about what is or isn’t okay for you, you wind
up lying to others by default; and, by the same token, if
you lie to others, you can’t help but be lying to yourself.
And sooner or later the effects of dishonesty rise to the
surface as bubbles of resentment, jealousy, ill will, and
even violence, as we observe every day in our world.
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The degree to which we allow other people to influence our
beliefs, is the degree to which we are owned by other people.
This sounds harsh, and it is. The key to breaking this destructive
pattern is to discover the fear behind the fear. A unique
combination of fears has been programmed into each of us since
childhood. It’s time to break away from all that programming.
As long as we allow others to influence our lives, we are
held captive from our own dreams!
Ask yourself: why do we allow others to rent space in our
minds? Why are we so reluctant to express who we really are?
Clearly, all too often we alter our thinking processes and
decisions in order to satisfy other people. Usually, we are
afraid of what others might think or say about us: “Oh
no, they’ll think I’m weak/vain/ugly/silly/ungrateful.”
We are especially anxious about being labeled selfish. Yet,
ironically, it’s precisely focusing on the self which
allows us the insight to be who we really are! We are so terrified
of feeling a negative emotion, even briefly, that we constantly
sacrifice our innate desire to be truthful. Often we hear
our conscience speak, even scream to us, and we just ignore
it. Sometimes we’ve been ignoring the little spirit on
our shoulder for so long that we can barely hear it at all!
So many of us spend lifetimes of energy in fear that the skeletons
in our closet will be ‘found out’. Yet if we pull
the impressive array of skeletons out of the closet, we become
able to spend our energy proactively instead of reactively.
We regain our ability to proactively choose the life we were
always meant to lead, and we recapture the faith we had as
children that anything is possible.
To recover complete autonomy over our own lives, and reclaim
the potential to reach our greatest dreams, we must strive
to deliberately choose honesty at all times. This means we
need to work to stop telling even those little white lies
we tell each other sometimes to candy-coat how we really feel.
Even these contribute to the false sense of peace we talked
about earlier. There are gentle, caring ways to be truthful.
It might just take a little more effort to identify them,
but it’s so worth it.
Harry Palmer, author of the inspirational book Resurfacing,
writes about the importance of honesty in this way: “We
are each born with a spark of divinity. When this spark glows
brightly we experience our best and noblest aspects. We cooperate
and are real for each other…On the other hand, when the
spark disappears we feel separation, and the egoistic and
rapacious aspects of our nature appear. Custom and pretense
replace realness in our relationships. Conflicts, quarrels,
fear, and mistrust become commonplace… What determines
if our spark of divinity glows brightly…? Honesty. Honesty
is the measure of our willingness for others to know our actions,
our thoughts, our feelings, and our intentions.”
Dishonesty is a denial of responsibility—the responsibility
we each owe to our self, to our own feelings, and to our own
truth. Your truth is the answer to the question of who you
really are. It is that significant. And who you really are
is who you deliberately decide to be! This needs to be done
entirely independent of anyone else’s approval or expectations.
If you do not follow your truth, you rob yourself of the remarkable
choice to be who you really are. However, when you do follow
a path of deciding who you are, something divine within you
begins to awaken and grow. You grant yourself freedom from
all the secrets that have bound something inside of you that
is, in actuality, boundless. All of the fixed attention you
once had on preserving your hidden truths is freed and allowed
to flow. This now-free attention is the key to your liberation—or
we could say enlightenment!
Dishonesty originates in those energies (feelings, intentions,
thoughts, and actions) that we are reluctant to exhibit openly.
Our reluctance doesn’t necessarily have to originate
in our belief that these energies are bad; ironically, we
often are hesitant to express feelings, intentions, thoughts,
and actions which we believe to be good, such as love. When
we are not able to consciously integrate and acknowledge these
energies within our own consciousness, we project them onto
other beings. This happens because energy cannot be destroyed
and can only be transformed. The secretive energy is pent-up
inside of us, tormenting us, until it finds an outlet. Then
it escapes and gets projected onto others in our environment.
As a result, we make ourselves smaller than we really are
and we force the others in our lives to assume the identities
that we are denying in ourselves. They become who we really
are (but are denying) outwardly expressed. They become the
tricksters, cowards, liars, lovesick fools, martyrs, etc.
that we can’t admit in ourselves. All the while these
people are acting out our secrets, our own innermost thoughts.
Yet it is just as simple to make the opposite choice—to
choose to express the grandest version of the greatest vision
we ever had about ourselves. We achieve this by being deliberately
honest, inside and out. But…if it’s so simple, why
don’t we do it more often?
What is the belief behind the belief, behind the belief that
we find limiting us all the time? The greatest barrier to
our enlightenment is our underlying fear that if we display
our truest selves we are somehow inadequate. Fear saps our
courage to be real with others about how we truly feel. As
Harry Palmer writes in Living Deliberately, “Fear is
a BELIEF in our inadequacy to deal with something. And that
belief precedes any evidence of failure we have collected!”
This inadequacy belief has been passed down for thousands
of years. The root thought resides in the myth that the basic
nature of humans is inherently evil. So, we resist any feelings
inside of us that even vaguely resemble what we conceive of
as evil— envy, grief, anger, fear, etc.—despite
the fact that they are natural emotions which we use as tools
to craft our experience of life. Our belief in this myth,
buried in our collective consciousness, has unfortunately
led to abundant guilt for most of us. Society, too afraid
to accept the truth of who we really are, condones and even
encourages the lying that these feelings of guilt engender.
We see it everywhere—in our court systems, governments,
love relationships, work environments, etc. This is the vicious
cycle we create and live in when the root thought is not serving
our greater good.
How do we break the cycle? By changing the root thought creating
this condition of lying, i.e., the root thought about our
inadequacy, so that it does serve our greater good. The most
rapid way to change a root thought is to reverse the thought,
word, and deed process. Did your mama tell you to think before
you act? Well, forget it!
The way to change a root thought is act before you think.
“Do the deed that you want to have the new thought about,
then say the words you want to have your new thought about.
Do this often enough you will train the mind to think a new
way,” writes Neale Donald Walsch.
Yes, this is a form of mental manipulation. And just how did
you think our minds came up with their current thoughts? The
world has been manipulating our minds to think as we do for
millennia. As Walsch puts it, “Wouldn’t it be better
for you to manipulate your mind, than for the world to? Would
you not be better off to think the thoughts you want to think
than those of others? Are you not better armed with creative
thoughts than with reactive thoughts? Your mind is filled
with reactive thought, thought that springs from the experience
of others. Very few of your thoughts spring from self-produced
data, much less self-produced preferences.”
What the world needs is a paradigm shift from thinking to
feeling.
This is the answer to how we can stop all the lying. The goal
is to get out of our minds and get back to our senses. Thoughts
are merely utterances, mental constructions, made-up creations
in our minds. Feelings, on the other hand, are the real thing,
the way our souls speak. And the soul speaks the truth; it
does not and cannot lie.
The key is to ignore your previous experiences and instead,
to stay in the present moment: “…when you come to
each moment cleanly, without a previous thought about it,
you can create who you are, rather than reenact who you once
were…When you create an experience based on your now
truth rather than react to an experience based on a past truth,
you produce a new you,” writes Walsch.
Acting solely out of what is true for us accelerates our enlightenment.
Sometimes we might leave some people feeling a little uncomfortable
as they sift through their thoughts about us, but it’s
far less damaging to ruffle someone’s feathers than to
leave your soul feeling uncomfortable. How well we send out
messages is more important than how they are received. We
are not accountable for how well someone else accepts our
truth, but we can take responsibility for how well we communicate
it—as Walsch says, “not …how clearly, but how
lovingly, how compassionately, how sensitively, how courageously
and how completely. This leaves no room for half truths, the
brutal truth or even the plain truth. It does mean the truth,
the whole truth and nothing but the truth…”
Stay in the present moment all the time. Be here now. You
do not need any approval from any outside source. Know that
you are the source of your happiness. Loving yourself for
the feelings you have, and honoring your truth no matter where
it might bring you, heightens your awareness in a very positive
way. Releasing your feelings is a way to place them in front
of you to see if they serve you or not. When we hold truths
in, we make ourselves unable to examine or relinquish them.
Often after expressing negative, ugly, violent and angry things,
we realize that they do not hold such power over us as we
had imagined. Conversely, when we express positive, beautiful,
loving things we usually find ourselves experiencing a greater
sense of peace and oneness with the world. Did you ever hear
someone say, “I’m so glad to get that off my chest”?
Well, that is exactly what you are doing when you let go of
old outworn beliefs that no longer serve you, and rediscover
the beliefs which do serve you.
“The fastest way to stop hiding out is to tell the truth
to everyone all the time. Start telling the truth now and
never stop. Begin by telling the truth to yourself about yourself.
Then tell the truth to yourself about another. Then tell the
truth about yourself to another. Then tell the truth about
another to that other. And finally tell the truth to everyone
about everything,” Walsch explains. Prove to yourself
that the act of speaking the truth speaks louder than your
mere thoughts. The time is now!
“Honesty is a path that leads to happiness. Becoming
honest is an act of self-renewal… The result of living
honestly is feeling and sharing—compassion and empathy!”
writes Palmer. If we wish for the world to change, we have
to change the world within us. This takes a conscious effort
on our parts, but the rewards are endless!
What
better opportunity to transform your experience of life than
now in the new millennium? Unless you plan on hanging out
on Earth for another 1000 years, now is your chance for an
exceptional new beginning!
