If you're withholding information that's pertinent to the situation, are you lying? My mother believes that you are. She used to tell my sisters and I that if we only told half the story we were lying, and that we would be in trouble if she heard the other half of the story from somebody else...Her question to us ..."Why You Lie?"
When I was about twelve or thirteen, and considering a means of income, my father told me that when he was my age he had two paper routes. A week or so later I started delivering the Chicago American newspaper, and about five or six years after that we visited my father's boyhood home of Stamps, Arkansas, and they still didn't have a newspaper... The question I wanted to ask my father back then..."Why You Lie?"
In the first example it's pretty obvious that deceit is involved when you tell only half the story, and in most cases, telling the other half would be self-incriminating. When my mother asked me where I was, I could readily say that I was down the street, but I could't say I was at Tuley Park because I wasn't supposed to cross King Drive Avenue. It was the fear factor ya'll. I was afraid that if I told the whole truth, omitting nothing, then I would be inviting more drama into my life and I certainly didn't want to have any more problems than the onesI had already created.
The second example also demonstrated fear, but this time on my father's part. He, like any loving father, was afraid that his son might choose a way of life that did not foster discipline and accountability. So he said and did what he thought was necessary to insure that I was involved in activities that provided the best means for my becoming a disciplined, self-supporting adult. What he said would probably be considered what is called a 'little white lie', that was told for my own good, but nonetheless, it was not the truth.
There you have it. Examples of two different situations, each stemming from an entirely different motives...the first to hide an act of disobedience, the second to inspire responsibility. However, they are both based on the same consciousness...that consciousness being one of fear. Now I'm not going to discuss the duality of lying through omission or telling a little white lie for someone else's benefit, nor am I going to judge either of them as being right or wrong. But I will suffice it to say that the reason we lie is out of F.E.A.R., an acronym for False Evidence Appearing Real. My momma believed my false evidence and I believed my daddy's and as a result we will never know how our lives might have been different had the truth been told.
The reasons we give in response to the question... Why you lie?... can be rationalized, intellectualized, fantasized or our response can be just another lie in and of itself. The fact of the matter is that we give false evidence because we are afraid of the consequences that might ensue if we tell the truth. Let's start living in the today and thereby eliminating the fear of being found out tomorrow. We don't know how our lying will affect us or the other person(s) we have involved in our falsehood, but what we do know is that telling the truth will definitely shed some light on our situation, and possibly make us accountable for being who we truly are. The end result can then be looked at and discussed in terms of whether or not telling the truth will ultimately benefit all involved in that particular situation.
We're spiritual beings having a human experience, and because of it's very nature, our humanness negates perfection. Nonetheless we can all strive to be in a place where our answer to the question...Why you lie?...becomes "I didn't". Let's give it a try ya'll, let's try to always tell the truth and watch what happens.
I'll holla...
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