So the last topic I covered was the nature of my lies. So when you finally reach a place where you decide that in order to have real things in life, you have to BE real, it's a hard process to break the cycle. You decide that lying in all forms is self-defeating, you can't just resolve to stop lying to others, you also have to pick out the thorns in your side that are causing you to lie to yourself. I lost a lot of really great things in my life early on and I have to sit back and question just how my life would have turned out differently if I had decided early on to be better than my nature and if I'd truly been able to understand that lies were self-defeating. This leads back to the "they'd do it to me" or the "they deserve it for reason X" or "No one's being hurt by this" or living under the false assumption that lying to someone was giving them what they wanted.
After I began to strip out the lies, life started to become easier. I found that if I was truly open and honest with people, the burden on my soul was eased tremendously. Sure there were cases where people lied to me - I knew they were lies - but that was on them. The lies hurt me, but not nearly as much as if I'd fallen back into the trap and started lying as a recourse for their actions. I call it a trap because in these instances it's real easy to say "Well they're doing it, so they deserve it" but this is never a punishment for this person, it's falling back into self-defeat. If someone I know were an alcoholic and they came to my house and cursed me and stole stuff and hurt me in their actions, the last thing I'd do is become an alcoholic so I could go to their house and repay the favor. Who have I hurt there? Sure they get a taste of their own medicine, but in doing this I've subjected myself to the sin and self-destruction of becoming exactly what they were : unreasonable, belligerent, angry and damaged.
But the nature of mankind is lies and deception. I'm not saying all people are liars, but all people lie in some form. Whether you lie to yourself or lie to others, everyone lies in one form or another. Sometimes it's an attempt to be helpful to others. When someone is ravaged by disease or illness, we might lie to them and tell them everything will be ok, when we know for a fact they won't. Whether or not these "white lies" are wrong, I can't say. I am not the judge of human condition, merely an observer, and whether or not we say these things, it all boils down to justification.
I still have a problem with justification. Sometimes it's hard for me to admit that I'm wrong, and I have to say it's not solely about thinking I am always right, but mostly because I can often find ways to justify why I think I'm right. In the moment, it's easy to think you are right about a certain fact, because you've justified the reasons why you would be right. Even though I've tried my best to stop the careless act of blatantly lying to people about things, I still have issue with lying to myself that my words or actions are justified. This, I've found, is often just as bad. Justification for actions which aren't fully correct are just a watered-down form of lying. Justification in an effort to rationalize why you have to be correct about a given topic or argument is really no different than lying to someone and saying "they deserve it because...".
So whether you lie or not is a matter of your own mind. No one can say "Hey, you're lying and you need to change it because you're hurting yourself" because those are words that can't be heard. They just can't be processed. If someone back in the day had said "Look I know you're lying and you need to quit" my immediate reaction would have been "No I'm not", because when you're trapped in that pattern of fail, it's much easier to cover lies with lies. It's easier to lie to the person and tell them you're not lying and also lie to yourself to the point where you can justify it and think those lies are a necessary form of interaction.
