Don't Lie... to yourself

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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Jesus once said

“the truth will set you free”

I’ve wondered about that sometimes

I remember a card I once read

“I have abandoned my search for truth

And am now looking for a good fantasy”

I get that !

We have this idea that the truth is an inconvenient thing

That a deep dive into who we really are

Will always be, uncomfortable, disturbing

Perhaps even painful

But I have slowly learned a weird thing

The truth is not as painful as my attempts to avoid it

It is less painful to engage in this world as I really am

With all my shortcomings and failures

With all my rumpled past

It is less painful to truly be who I am

Than to try and live a lie

It takes a lot energy to lie to ourselves

And then lie to others

Lies are like a force field

That we must constantly keep in place

Lest others get in, and see who we “really are”

We must maintain them at all cost

And the cost, ultimately, is that we lose touch with ourselves

And we lose touch with others

Lies are like Spiritual hazmat suit

They isolate us

But not from bad things,

From all the richness of life

From growth and

Change and passion

But mostly from love

Above all from love

It must be painful

In a strangely numb way

To live inside a bubble of lies

Afraid to see the truth

Afraid that others will see the truth

Liars have terrifying eyes

Some of them are merely empty, black holes

Others are angry, or cold

Cruel

We know those eyes

We see them all around us

We see them standing at the podium

Pink rimmed and cruel

We see them as we walk down the street

Those eyes that do not see

We seem them in the glittering glance of the

Abuser, the oppressor

We see them I suspect in the eyes behind the gun

As the mass shooter pulls the trigger

Yes, the truth has its own sort of pain

Its own sort of inconvenience

But the eyes of truth

Are the only eyes that can hold love

For in fact the truth does set us free

It does not set us free from pain and inconvenience

As much as it sets us free for love