October - November 2001
Lies
Lies, lies in my papa's looks
Lies, lies in my history books
Lies, lies like they teach in class
Lies, lies, lies I catch on way too fast
Fire, fire upon your wicked tongue
Lies, lies, lies you're trying to spoil my fun
- Keith and Mick, Rolling
Stones
Lies are not just a way of concentrating power by gaining
control; lies are a means of becoming the very master of the
universe, in one's own mind. This is extremely stressful. It
never lasts forever. Enormous work is necessary to maintain a
false world, or a false self. Worst of all, it's all unreal while
it lasts.
There are no lies that do not involve sex, death or money.
Lies are born of pain, in particular, the pain that we are
not in control of our lives. They are an attempt to gain control
of our reality. The less in control we felt as a child, the more
we learned to lie. Usually, as Brad
Blanton and others point out, we lie by withholding. This
is the seeming halfway ground between lies and truth: secrecy.
Secrecy is upheld by many rationales. Most of them are lies.
But often, people outright and overtly lie about how they
feel, about what is motivating them, whether or why they did
something, what they have in their history, what they want or
what they need. Since all lies come back to sex, death or money,
lying is clearly intended and practiced by most people as a survival
tactic, but it's one that works out a lot like eating your own
leg for dinner.
Lies divide us internally. We live one reality with one person
and another with another person. To do this, we need to split
ourselves up, and separate off the "other identity"
from a person from whom we are concealing facts of that identity.
I am not saying this is immoral. I am saying it's exhausting
and doomed to fail. We can hope we fail by being found out; the
other way to fail is to have these two or more "parts"
of who we are take on such powerful lives of their own that each
forgets the other exists, which is one of the more common forms
of crazy.
We may say we are lying or withholding out of shame rather
than survival, but shame is perceived as a matter of survival
or else we would not dare rewrite the universe to cover it up.
I believe that there are two kinds of relationships, ones
in which people are honest with one another, and ones in which
they are not. The real divisions between the supposed types of
relationships in this world are not between monogamy and polyamory,
or one kind of monogamy or another, or one kind of polyamory
or another. Not at all. In one kind of relationship, people are
honest about how they feel and what they do, and in the other
they are not.
Usually we lie because we were taught to, and because we feel
we had no other choice in the matter. It is not our fault that
we lie, but it is our option to learn to tell the truth: to be
real.
Telling the truth is such an act of surrender and requires
so much trust and guts we can truly say that it's an act of faith.
Telling the truth is a religious experience you can have every
day. In the beginning it may seem to repel love, but what what
is repelled by the truth was something other than love. Where
there is love, telling the truth will make set love free.