Johnny, Johnny,
Yes Papa!
Eating sugar?
No papa.
Telling lies?
No papa.
Open your mouth!
Ha ha ha..

Remember this rhyme? Since very early in our childhood, we start dealing with truths and lies. Lies creep into our life as we grow old even though lies are condemned in almost all societies and traditional cultures. However, lies are almost inevitable truths of our modern life and we don’t even bother caring much about these unless those are matter to a very big extent.

We lie every day to people around us. A child breaks a glass and points to his pet. He goes on lying to his teacher about his homework. Do you remember all those silly homework excuses you used to make? We lie our parents about why we are late from school. We lie about our grades. We lie about the bruises from the fight. We become accostumed with lying to “How are you?”. We say “I am fine” without even noticing that we may be lying. It is stored in our “muscle memory” to say that we are fine. Similarly, we go on lying about all the different things in life without much thought.

As we grow older and our lies only get bigger. We make excuses. We cheat. We become corrupt. People go on abusing other people. People steal. People murder people. People witness crimes and not speak a word. People are in pain but they continue showing they are happy. People suffer and pretend being alright. Our lies grow both in number and in size. In some rare cases, we may sometimes take a pause if the lie is little too big. Usually the first question would be, what if they find out? Rarely we may also think if it is ethical. Maybe you hit someone by your vehicle and ran because no one saw you and you have been hiding that truth. Maybe you abused someone and pretend that you never did. All because only you know that!

There are also cases where we lie unknowingly. We take something to be true when it isn’t. Sometimes, truths are distorted by individuals perspective or during communication intentionally or intentionally. Do you know the story where the Dharmaraja, Yudhistir reports about the “death of Aswathama”? What about the statement that “everything falls towards earth”? Do you realize how some historical truths are sometimes hidden from everyone for a long-long time? Maybe forever. Can we understand all Truth? What is the Truth of the Universe? Can we ever grasp the truth or we will only have a limited perspective of it? Can we hide some truths from ourselves? Can we trick our own mind to lie about something? Maybe! Sometimes people lie so much, to oneself and to others that they live in a completely different hallucinated world.

If you look at all the Truths that human hide, majority of those are because of some vulnerabiltiy in a way or other. We feel vulnerable to share our truths. We hide our inner beings from others because we have a fear of being judged, being treated differently, being punished, being discarded. Some traumatic truth keep or are kept buried because the individual cannot cope mentally or physically with it. Evolution chose to hide some traumatic truths away from us for our own safety.

Truths are often times be uncomfortable and challenging to find out, understand and accept. But not all truths are so. There may be truths that are pleasant and at the same time simple or obvious. Those who have claimed to have understood the “Ultimate Truth” have described it as liberating. In fact, the ultimate truth of existence is said to be something to “experience” and not just be known to mind or understood from the intellect. It is said that the Truth is to be “realized”. And there have been many who have claimed to have done so.

Have you known or met someone who has vowed to speak truth and only truth? Have you imagined how their presence in your life would make you feel? Have you tried doing that yourself? Have you experimented with truth? Have you tried to find out the deepest truth about anything? Anything!

Personally, I have realized that being truthful is much more meaningful than just uttering truth. Exploration and finding out truth is much more fun than accepting something as truth. Revealing all your truth is certainly not an easy experiment to succeed. Some truth are very private to you and it could shake your inner being to muster the courage to reveal those and I don’t mean to say that revealing everything is even necessary. The focus is just about how difficult it could be. We are brought up that way. Also, hiding truth is a form of lying while some lies sometimes could do overall good for everyone. As such truth could look complicated at times but what simplifies it is one’s intention to remain truthful. Being open and truthful is unburdening albeit painful sometimes. One can compare the pain of hiding and the pain of confession to the pain due to some disease and the pain one goes through surgery and its recovery.

What about more deeper truths? What about the truths of society deeply hidden in history? What about the truth of the crime and atrocities of the current world? Do you know the truth about the cobalt used in your phone? And the food you consume? What about the truth of how the world economy works? Did human really land on moon? Is climate change true? What about the truths of religion and mythological stories? What is Nature’s truth?

We are so caught up with our everyday life that we find ourselves dodging off these questions for some excuse, some of them genuine and some just sheer lie. Some of these truth are more relevant and carries more meaning to someone than to others. Is it even possible to actually know all these in one life time by an ordinary human like us? Probably not! But can we take a time to reflect on the truths and lies of our life? And can we think of the extent to which we have been practicing truth in our life?

If you observe closely, we realize that each individual has a degree of truth that they are comfortable with. We are okay living with a certain amount of lies and certain amount of hidden truths. We all carry our personal meter of how much truthfulness we can live with. Some people are so uncomfortable with not knowing the truth and keeping truths buried within themselves. I believe that their discomfort manifests in their adventurous and curious mindset. Socially, they grow as honest or daring person. I believe all great people of history must have had really high inclination to truth from day-to-day life to the ultimate truth.

How truthful do you consider yourself, percentage-wise? Give yourself a true answer.

Last Updated: Sat, 14 Oct, 2023 21:14:49 AEDT
Author: Madhav Om (scimad)