Lying, cheating, dishonesty, deviousness, deceitfulness,
“belief”…
Forgive
us, O Universe, for we know not what we do! We were born purer than we are now.
When our parents’ world crash-landed on our heads, when society took its toll,
and our minds adroitly began operating as programmed, being made to believe that
sense-perceptions were reality, and inventing our own identity, we threw down
our pacifiers, stood up to play, and we began to lie, telling ourselves all kinds
of untruths and believing them.
Lying
is slanting things to avoid rectitude, etymologically speaking. In Spanish – from
Latin “mentiri”, from “mens”, mind – we have “mentir”, picturesquely described
as “weaving trickery with our minds” (urdir un embuste con la mente),
ie, fibbing. But poor innocent us! It is only natural for the mind to weave its
webs of deceit in society. Our pristineness soon evaporated, and the accretions
of culture overcame us. We had no compass to point to the north, so any
direction, we told ourselves, was northwards, southwards, east or west. The 360º
degrees on the compass, with their minutes and seconds, are only man-made
conveniences; actually the angles are infinite, just like māyā, or illusion.
And so any direction pointed towards Truth and became a convenient Lie.
So
what do we do? It’s easy to buy a Smartphone or an iPhone with a compass. But
where’s the guidebook to tell us what’s phony in life, and what’s real?
Like
the other Virtues we are studying, the Vedantic approach is to look at the
negative to find a positive. The positive is already there. It is said that if
Truth or satyam didn’t “exist”, neither would we. So just remove
the negative and you’ll see it. The negative is all the lying, all the
cheating, all the dishonesty, deviousness and deceit. It is mind’s web of lies.
We have fed ourselves too long on untruth and we came to believe it.
Start
with minimal Self-Awareness. You are not your body, you are not
your feelings, you are certainly not your thoughts. Surprising? Are we taking
away all that is human in you? No. Moving, feeling and thinking are marvellous processes. But lying isn’t.
You are much more than a tired synapse reacting to a past input. “You” stand
far above that as simple awareness, presence, consciousness, call it what you
will. Spaciousness. You just watch, and things proceed as programmed. You are suddenly
free. It’s a quality called non-attachment or non-identification.
And
you fly straight north, like a flock of unerring geese in springtime. You will be your own compass.
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