Honesty (Part Two)

This is a complicated Post. It includes an excerpt from my book “A Simple Method”.

Honesty is to me the most important thing we can practice. It is far more though than just not telling a factual lie. For those of us good with words we can speak for hours and not tell a lie, yet not ever tell the truth.

In my opinion…..Honesty means everything we speak is a true and accurate reflection of what we think and feel about that which we speak. It also means we live as we speak, and as we think.

Honesty is an essential precursor to Faith. Which is why it is so important. It is of paramount importance.

Faith is the key to a happy and healthy life. No Faith, no happiness, no health.

When I say Faith though I don’t mean it exactly as most people of Faith mean. I am not telling you to believe in Mohammad, or Jesus, or Buddha, or Vishnu etc. I am using it in the sense that one knows one is looked after. By God. By Life.

Let’s distinguish Belief from Faith. I realize this is an arbitrary distinction in word usage which I am making, but I am doing so to explain my thinking.

I happen to be a Christian. Jesus is my guy. But, for me I don’t care much about the story of Jesus. Was he born of a Virgin? I don’t know. I don’t care. I realize that will rub many Christians the wrong way. This is Belief. ‘Jesus was born of a Virgin. He died on the Cross for our sins. Accepting Jesus Christ as your Personal Saviour is your entry ticket to Heaven after you die.’ Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t care. Those are what I mean by Belief. Islam says Mohammad was the Perfect Man. I don’t believe that. And, to some large extent those sorts of Belief merely divide us. Most of us need a story to Believe in, and I am okay with the story you tell yourself. But, I don’t think the story will do for you what you need done.

Jesus has told me, and taught me, I am looked after, and that fact means I can trust life. I can trust what is happening to me, and around me, and accept there is some sort of Organizing Intelligence taking us all into consideration.

This is Faith. If your Belief does not give you Trust or Faith then perhaps examine it. What is its purpose then, if not to take your fear away? Fear blocks Love. If your Belief does not take away fear, and fear blocks Love, then your Belief is not allowing you to live a life filled with Love.

Sermon on the Mount is a talk on how to live a fear free life. In my opinion. It is that aspect of Christianity I adhere to.

What follows is from ‘A Simple Method’. (This excerpt references ‘pulse’, which is mentioned earlier in ASM. This is part of my alternative health practice.)

Honesty

Faith is paramount for health.  And Faith is the basis for discovering Truth.   But increasing one’s faith in life can be a daunting task.  It can appear difficult to work  on Faith.  However, Truth, or honesty, which springs from  Faith can be worked  on and actively developed easily.  And as honesty grows, and Truth becomes established in your life, then Faith grows. From a practical standpoint we can say honesty then is the principal moral issue of our  lives.

What is the effect of lying? Simply stated, one cannot recognize truth while one is lying. What you offer to the world  is what you receive. If you lie, you cannot hear your Inner Voice. In the same way acting while fearing the future precludes one from choosing a correct action, lying precludes one from being able to see and understand what is correct at that moment.

Lack of trust underlies the desire to lie. Trust in life allows  one to  see the  effects of  one’s thoughts. Without  trust  the creative effect of the thought  is present, but its connection to our own requesting is not seen. We become complicit in our own delusion when we choose to distrust. This delusion is a form of lying  to ourselves. First comes distrust, then comes lying.

If I take someone’s pulse while  they are lying,  the pulse changes significantly.  The pulse indicates the person begins to vacillate between abstract and concrete perceptions, methodically  and rhythmically. This pulse is similar to, but not identical to, the confusion pulse, where there is an uneven, irregular vacillation between concrete thinking  processes and abstract thinking  processes.

‘I’m not sure what to do.’ ‘I don’t know what I really want.’ Statements like these indicate you have been lying.  Perhaps it was to yourself, perhaps to others. Maybe you were overly tactful to the point of misleading someone. When you lie, you create doubt in yourself.

The untruthfulness I am referring to here is more than just saying something not wholly  true. Full honesty means all your thoughts, all your words, and all your deeds are consistent with  one another.  It means no two thoughts contradict one another, no two actions are inconsistent, and all your words are in agreement. It means to live your life fully  expressing yourself in complete harmony with  yourself.  Practically, if you live  like  that, every word  that comes out  of your mouth is a full  and complete representation of everything you are thinking  and feeling at that moment.

For most of us there is a difference between who we are, or at least how  we see ourselves, that is our internal  world,   and  how  we  live  our  lives,  ourexternal world.  In extreme circumstances we can find ourselves living  a life that is far, far from what we envisioned for ourselves.

Have you ever had to ask yourself, ‘How  in the world  did I get here?’ You got there by lying.   The words  we use are the bridge between our inner and outer worlds.   If your words don’t  accurately reflect what  you are thinking  and feeling, how then can your outer world form in such a manner that it suits who you really are?

If you have a moment of doubt, know that you have been untruthful. Don’t think  you can clear up your doubt until  you start telling the truth, and living  in a manner that is true to yourself. It can’t happen.  At those moments ask yourself, ‘What is true about this person, about this situation?’ Or, ask, ‘How best may I express what is true now?’

What we are concerned with  here, is the actual effect lying  has on the person doing  the lying.  I’m  not looking at the external effect, just the internal effect.

The following is a good  exercise, but  very challenging:

Over the next few days, after having read this, monitor yourself and notice how often what you speak is not a full and accurate representation of what you are thinking  and feeling.   When you answer a question, does your answer really convey everything that is going on inside you?  If it doesn’t, you are lying.  If it doesn’t, you are sowing seeds of doubt and confusion in yourself.   Let’s call this a lie of omission.

Notice  how  often  what  you  speak is not  wholly accurate. You are late for a meeting and when you arrive you say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.  Traffic was terrible.’ It might be true traffic was terrible, but you were late because you chatted on the phone with  a friend well past the point you should have.  You are lying.   We could say this is a lie of obfuscation.

A friend  has invited  you to go somewhere.  As the date approaches you wish you had not agreed to go. On the day of the event you call your friend and say,

‘I’m sorry, I really can’t make it.’  And then you add,

‘Billy  has a school project due tomorrow  that he just told me about.  I really should stay home and  help him with  it.’   Yes, Billy  has a school project, but he didn’t  just tell you about it and anyway, that’s Billy’s problem.   But you  don’t  want  to say the truth,  ‘I haven’t been having a good time with you lately, and I’m not really not up to spending the evening with you.’

These are three types of lies.  The non-expression of all you are thinking  and feeling, fuzzy little  weasel lies, so you can pretend you haven’t done anything wrong, and lies of integrity.   There are more types of lies than this, by the way, but I am mentioning these three because these, in particular, cause problems and these are the types of lies many people choose not to consider as lies.

Each of these lies creates an unhealthy effect in your body, and brings to you an event not of your liking.

After  you have spent a few days determining  how often you lie, begin to consciously choose to speak ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. Note each time you won’t or don’t, or feel you can’t. Day by day push the boundaries of speaking the truth.   Speak it when it seems you can’t.  Speak it even when  you  are afraid.    Please don’t  delude yourself into thinking  anything other than the whole truth,  with  no misleading statements added to it, is anything but a lie.

The last type of lie we will  deal with  is the underpinnings of the other lies. It is a lie to ourselves. Let’s call it a lie of delusion. The main way we do it is we take scant facts and fill in a full  story in order to judge someone else. Your spouse comes home from work  and is a little  distracted.  Obviously,  he hates you!   Or, your husband is pushed around by his Mother.   Obviously,  he is a ‘Momma’s boy’, and is now worthy of your disrespect.

Does he hate you? Is he pushed around by his Mother?  Is he a ‘Momma’s boy’?  Once you declare those things to be true, he certainly will  appear to you to be that.  But are those things true?  Possibly, he doesn’t deal well with his Mother.  It might be no one in the world  deals well  with  his Mother.   It could have nothing to do with  being pushed around.  He just might not yet have figured out a healthy way to deal with  her.   Of  course, that  means he isn’t  a ‘Momma’s  boy’ and that means you shouldn’t disrespect him.  But that means your whole story is blown, and you will  have to review how you respond to him.

Taking  a fact, or facts, in  this case your  husband doesn’t deal well with  his Mother, and extrapolating them into definitive statements is the most dangerous of all lies. They underscore our false judgments, and trade the real foundations of our lives for ones made of sand.

This last type of lie deserves its own book.  It is how we create the illusions  we see so ‘clearly’.   There is little we can actually know, and what we can know is entirely about ourselves.  Almost nothing of anyone else can we know  as clearly as we think  we can. What we can know, we are confused about. What we can’t know, we feel we know very well.  This is how we create an illusion instead of a real life.

It is a bit harsh to confront this in yourself, and I am deliberately bludgeoning you with the word, ‘lie’, but I am doing this for a reason. There is a real world  out there, and it is beautiful  and full  and complete, but we don’t see it.  Largely we don’t because we lie.

That ends the Excerpt.

As we learn to speak a better and better Truth what happens is our heads clear. We are confused less. Correct actions become more and more apparent.

Think of it this way: Each time we speak what is True, we then hear what is True in our own minds. Let’s take the position we can always hear what is correct, but for some reason it seems less clear some days, and more clear at other times. When we lie in any way, even a little weasel lie, we cloud our ability to hear what is correct. And, when we then speak Truth, we hear it and see it everywhere.

And, most importantly when we speak Truth we find our Faith grows. Not our Belief, as defined earlier….as our Belief might be wrong. But, our Trust in Life grows, our Faith in God, in Life grows, such that we can walk fearlessly through the world.

When that happens we start to Love better.

IN MY OPINION, so you can ignore this of course….we are here for three reasons:

To seek Truth.

To learn to Love well.

To discover who we truly are.

All this begins with us speaking what is true at all times.