You know, ideas and words of wisdom are so often just all over the place and contradictory to each other.
And we look at them from different fields of life, and we get teachings in one area that go against the other area.
So it’s often interesting to kind of combine these, see how they apply, taking teachings from one context and seeing how they go in another.
So one thing that I’ve been thinking about is, you know, you have this this idea about being honest with yourself.
Being honest with yourself: it’s difficult, because we all tell convenient lies, comfortable lies, adjustments of the truth, subtle reframings and rephrasings of the truth to just make everything a lot more palatable, to make it a lot easier to go down, when we don’t want to think about some of the more difficult things about ourselves.
So this idea that, you know, lying to yourself, it is kind of done for our convenience and comfort, whereas, you know, it’s often recommended that you have to do the hard work of being honest, facing the hard truth.
And this is your challenge, to you know, steel yourself to be ready to take on the hard challenges of truth, being honest with yourself, face all the difficulties and go through that struggle.
So that seems like a valid point.
But then it makes me think of, in another context, looking at honesty and lies, and I remember always being taught that, you know, lying is difficult.
The truth is easy, in a different context, from a different perspective.
Because when you’re telling the truth, you can simply look into your memory and you try to remember what really happened, or you just actually try to, just without any kind of tricks, just directly look at a situation and say what you think about it.
You’re just there, oh, that’s what I see, that’s what I’m gonna say.
Whereas when you’re lying about something, it adds a whole new layer of work, because you have to think about well, OK, here’s what really happened, or here’s what I really see.
This is the real thing.
And now here’s the image that I want.
So yeah, I didn’t do anything wrong.
So here I’m presenting this picture of me never doing anything wrong.
Or I am a perfect person who has no flaws, and so I’m imagining this picture of a perfect person with no flaws.
And OK, so now I have to match this picture.
Oh wait, but some things about me are not perfect.
OK, so I have to kind of avoid those, kind of respin those, make them fit into this picture.
You know, yeah, of course, like everybody, I’ve made mistakes, but it was always, you know, very innocent, my intentions are always good, and it all fits into this picture of perfection, or whatever the lie is that we’re trying to tell.
So we have to make this extra layer of work.
Beyond simply directly reporting the truth, we have to then shift it.
We have to look to see does it fit with my image that I want, and then how can I adjust what is really going on to fit the image that I want? And so we have to make all this kind of craftsmanship to put this whole lie together.
And then, possibly the worst part, is we have to remember all that, all the details of how the truth is being adjusted into this picture.
Now we have to remember all that.
Whereas, you know, remembering details of a true story usually is as simple as looking into our memory. […]
Whereas if we’re remembering our lie, it’s so easy to mix up the details, and you know, then something’s off in the lie, and then we have to make up new lies to patch the hole in the lie, and it’s a lot of work to maintain a lie.
So how do these fit together? It seems like since it’s so much work to maintain a lie, whereas telling the truth has this kind of simple, relaxed nature to it: what if we applied that to ourselves? What if we looked at the way that we lie to ourselves and try to make things more palatable and comfortable by making these stories to, you know, make us feel better: what if we see that as being more difficult? That is a whole concoction.
Maybe a lot of it happens unconsciously, but we have to concoct all these kind of adjustments of reality to make things fit so that we can be people that we want to be, and sort of just cover over and patch over all our flaws with this perfect image.
But what if we see that as being the difficult, challenging thing? What if being honest with ourselves is simply the easy, the lazy way to go? Just like yeah, OK, that’s me.
I’m simply going to report me, and I’m not even going to try to come up with this lie, because I’m too lazy.
So we could almost use laziness as a driver towards honesty, by simply saying “I am not going to work on building this elaborate lie about myself.
I’ll just simply look at what I see and report it as it is, because I’m too lazy to do anything else.” So I’d be curious to hear what you think of this idea.
Can it really be easier to be honest with ourselves? Or does that just open up a whole new world of challenges?
#toolazytolie #honesty #lyingistoomuchwork