Lying — and its consequences

When I was a junior or senior in college, I wrote a paper on the American reaction to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, and in discussing one of the Luce magazines I said something like “they published things they must have known were not true,” to which my professor remarked in a side note, “what a shocker!”

I always have been very naïve. Despite what I saw around me, my own internal reading of reality was always realer to me than reality itself, and so I didn’t see what I was seeing. (As I told my daughter recently, I’m an intuitive, and intuitives aren’t necessarily known for having common sense.)

But the point was, and is, that something within me couldn’t and still can’t accept that we should be surrounded by newspapers, magazines, radio and television shows, internet sites, etc. that lie to us.

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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