Discussion on Why People Lie.
I have just involved myself in an on-line discussion on why people lie. It will be interesting to see what reponses I get, but being a very Zen answer, there may not be any!
As a Zen practitioner and therapist, I have studied the tendency to lie. In Zen I aim to deal in absolutes, that is, we are either lying or telling the truth. Lying is usually done out of some sort of fear. The fear could be great or small. For instance if you see someone who is wearing what you believe to be an awful outfit, but they seem very proud of it, it may difficult to tell absolute truth because there is a fear. Not a big-deal fear, but a fear of offending them. It is easier to say that it’s nice, than to say it is hideous and doesn’t suite them at all. So, it is not easy to tell the absolute truth all of the time.
Another part of this equation is that the mind exists on a lie, meaning that what we may totally believe is a lie.
For instance, in Zen, the truth is that whenever we judge another person, we are judging our self. But we totally believe that we are judging and perhaps blaming another person for something that upsets us. This is not so.
We can only perceive the other person as part of our own awareness, which we consider to be our self and then we create our ideas of what they are like, but thos ideas still isn’t truth. It is only our ideas about what may be truth.
So judging others is judging our own awareness which we believe to be our self! It’s a neat trap, if you can understand what I’m saying here. Most of life, we are strongly identified with our self as being separate from others in the world, This is another lie. But no-one will believe you if you were to realize this, because believing is not truth either, only realization and experiencing is! Only now is true as the past or future which we may think of as being real, is not truth.
As a Zen practitioner, I am as honest as living in this world permits me to be, and to tell absolute truth is a great challenge whilst the mind keeps interfering!
Nothing wrong or right about that, so it’s best not to worry about it.
Can we really say that there is truth in the world everywhere we look? I think there may be more untruth than truth in the world. That’s is a mystery that I love about Zen practice!
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June 27th, 2011 at 6:25 am
Can I guarantee with absolute certainty, beyond any shadow of a doubt that anything I know or anything I think I know is true? Truth is, I really don’t know. What is truth but another illusion from the windmills of the mind.
September 8th, 2011 at 8:26 pm
An interesting topic. First we have to be able to see absolute truth before we can speak it, and how can you tell the absolute truth anyway, since absolute truth is beyond the conceptual mind and just trying to put it into words diminishes it, if not downright distorts it. So we are left dealing with relative truth. People lie either to gain something, or avoid something or because they don’t understand the truth. If the white lie is told in order to avoid giving pain to someone else, rather than your own fear of offending them, then I think it’s ok, because your motivation isn’t selfish.
September 9th, 2011 at 2:27 am
Thank you for posting. Yes,we live in the relative world and our use of the conceptual mind gives us the ability to communicate. I think making the distinction between what is conceptual and what is experiential gives us a clearer awareness of truth and how we are motivated to use it. I feel that truth is more of a challenge than a set of rules. And Zen has the tendency of establishing something, and then completely turning it on its head. Don’t you just love it!?
November 2nd, 2011 at 1:08 pm
Thank you for posting