What Lies Within...

How often do we lie to ourselves?

For most of us, it is every single day. But the interesting thing about the lies we tell ourselves is that they are much more subtle and believable than the lies we tell other people. Think about it. The majority of us have at one point or another lied to our parents – it may have been a “little white lie,” something that really didn’t matter that much – but it was a lie none the less. When your mother asked you who ate one of the cookies off the counter before dinner, you looked her deep in the eyes and told her, “The dog did it,” all the while licking the chocolate chip off the back of your teeth. That lie was blatant – you know ate that cookie. It was hardly believable – your mother knew the likelihood that you ate that cookie was very high, whether she chose to really believe you or not. Not so with the lies we tell ourselves. Think about everything you had to consider before you told your mom that lie: you had to weigh whether or not she would actually believe you, and whether or not it was worth simply telling the truth. You had to search through every mental file you had about your mother, her past experiences with you (or the dog), her gullibility, her naivety. Now think about how much better you know yourself, and therefore how much more you have to consider before lying to yourself.

When it comes to lying to ourselves effectively, the best example I can think of is the movie Inception. In the movie, Leonardo’s character posits that you can place an idea inside the mind of another person, but in order to do that, you must place the idea so deep within their psyche that they believe it was not only plausible, but their own original idea. When we lie to ourselves we are practicing inception. We travel deep down into our own subconscious, sometimes multiple levels down, in order to plant the lie – so subterraneously that by the time it actually reaches the surface of our mind, we believe it to be true. That’s why it’s so easy sometimes to forget that you actually lied to yourself in the first place. The lie is such a subtle, fragile thing, so deeply rooted that we honestly believe it is infallible truth. Until we experience what in Inception they called a “kick,” or an event so jarring that it dislodges that planted lie and jolts us back to reality.

Lying to yourself is dangerous. When you discover that it is possible, you start down a slippery slope, where you find yourself lying to that person in the mirror more and more. And yet the most interesting thing about lies we tell ourselves is that we never look into a mirror to tell them! If we were to actually stand in front of a mirror and attempt to lie to ourselves, it wouldn’t work. Lying, by its nature, means that you make a conscious decision to not see the truth, to look in any direction but at the truth. Seeing the truth means that you see things as they truly are, and a mirror will always show you just that. The next time you want to lie to yourself, I challenge you to stand in front of a mirror, and speak the lie aloud to yourself. I promise you that you will not be able to do it. That is because the lies we tell ourselves always start as a completely internal process. The lies we tell ourselves, at their inception, are so fragile, so delicate, that to give them voice would cause them to burst in the air like soap bubbles. Speaking them out loud means that we risk hearing them for all of their incredulity. So we keep them deep within ourselves, speaking them only with that soft, gentle internal voice. Only once we have let them take root in ourselves, and grow and feed on our negligence, do we chance speaking them aloud – and it’s almost always to someone else before we ever have the gall to say them aloud to ourselves.

So why do we do it? Why do we go through so much trouble to not only avoid the truth, but to cultivate a lie deep within ourselves, to the one person most likely to uncover it, knowing that at any moment we could experience that kick that rushes us unforgivingly out of our dream into reality? Perhaps it is because the truth, although it requires much less effort, is often something we are too fearful to face. We are scared to death of the truth. It takes a person with real strength of character and emotional fortitude to unshakingly face the truth. The truth will put you in your place. The truth will knock you off your high horse. The truth will cut you down with no remorse. But the truth will also set you free…

Too often I have lied to myself. I’ve done it so smoothly I barely knew I was doing it. I’ve become so adept at lying to myself that when I finally do see the truth, I find that swallowing that pill is like trying to swallow a boiled egg whole – I almost choke to death with the effort. Sometimes I say that the truth is too hard to face. It’s too difficult, too painful, or too unbelievable. “That can’t be true.” But in reality, I think it’s that I’m just too scared to face the truth. To see things as they truly are, to see myself as I really am, scares the life out of me. But I must see the truth. I must see myself as I really am. The more I admit and accept the truth, the more powerful I become. Sure, there is pain involved, and fear involved. But if I brave the tumultuous waters of the truth, on the other side there is peace, and understanding, and above all, freedom. Truth lights the way to me truly becoming the man I know I am destined and called to be. But only I can turn on the lights.

-JMC-