When Lies Become Illusions

Do you feel like everything is a Big Lie? Do you have moments where you know your truth as you continue to support the lies? Stuart Wilde, author, mystic once said, "The only thing that is generally available is the lies." We are all faced with the search for greater truth in a world of official lies.

Is it real? Could our lies be a physical reality built through thousands of years of belief and emotion? Could our physical reality be our lies? Eastern religions speak of 'maya' or illusion. P.D Ouspensky, a disciple of the famous Russian mystic Gurdijieff listed as lying as a barrier to self-development. Maybe this is why a lot of self-help techniques don't work. You can read as many books as you like, listen to all the gurus, and attend all the nice seminars, but if you are lying to yourself nothing will do. You will simply be addicted to the external techniques rather confronting the lies. They feed your illusions.

But back to lies as a physical reality: What do they look like? What do lies sounds like? Taste like? Feel like? Children can sense the lies at an early age and find themselves using it as a survival tool. Then by the time they become teens, they are experts of lying. Body language experts say that you can tell liars by their eye contact; and their body takes up less space. But lying is more than noticing body language. Lying is a way of life in our world. It becomes the fuel for the official reality's engine. Corporations, advertisers, marketers specialize in creating grand realities of lies that ultimately become our illusions.

I am speaking of lying that supports realities of commerce and institutions that seek to justify their lies through philosophies of fear, and ideas of success and failure. Lying becomes a tool for manipulating the masses into particular thoughts & behaviors that feed the corporate ego. On a small scale, lying is used to achieve results that gratify the ego, and helps to reach its own ends. In relationships, cheating is a process for lying, not the result. Its techniques vary. People focus nowadays on the process, rather than the results. What are we trying to achieve as a community? As a society? as an individual? How does lying justify such ideals we hold as a species? The reality is that lying hurts both the individual and the group. People are struggling, hurting each other, and dying because they are lying to themselves and being lied to.

Is this a call to humanity to stop the Big Lie? Ideally, that would be the case, but there are many that are doing that very thing. Noticing both the lies we tell ourselves and each other is an inner journey that is difficult, painful, and downright frightening. There are so many levels to the lie. Noticing the larger structures of lying, on the surface, may appear as suicidal at first, in the death of an old self that lived in such lies, yet liberating in the end. How do you transcend illusions whose source is the lie? How do you free yourself while still getting your piece of the pie, your pot of gold?

Every day we are presented with an opportunity to examine our beliefs and ideas about life. If we are afraid to change, then it means being honest about our fears. Why do you believe that? Why are you afraid to change? How does that belief and way of thinking serve you? If you want don't want to change your beliefs, then it can be as simple as taking an action that reflects your desire for truthful living. The gap between our words and actions can lead to serious disease and suffering that ultimately forces us to accept the truth. Don't be one of those people. Though others may lie to you, it really doesn't matter because in the end, the truth was inside of you all along. :)