Ouspensky on lying

“What is lying?

“As it is understood in ordinary language, lying means distorting or in some cases hiding the truth, or what people believe to be the truth. This lying plays a very important part in life, but there are much worse forms of lying, when people do not know that they lie. I said… that we cannot know the truth in our present state… How then can we lie?… We cannot know the truth, but we can pretend that we know. And this is lying. Lying fills all our life. People pretend that they know all sorts of things: about God, about the future life, about the universe, about everything, but in reality they do not know anything, even about themselves.”

P. D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution

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