When you're sitting at home on your couch watching Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich look straight at an interviewer and swear he did nothing wrong, do you have the urge to stand up and shout: How can you lie like that on national TV!? When O.J. Simpson was convicted and sent to jail for his Las Vegas fiasco, did you go around telling your friends how happy you were that his lies had caught up to him and justice was finally served? Are you still shaking your head in dismay at the whopper of a Ponzi scheme cooked up by Bernie Madoff?
There's a connection, however, between these public whoppers that take our breath away and the little lies we tell. Let's admit it, we all tell lies now and again. About our age, or our weight, or our sexual history. Did you ever lie to your spouse about an affair, or to your boss about why you showed up late to the meeting, or to your friend about how flattering her new hairdo or dress was? You know you did. Sometimes, we write creatively on our resumes or our taxes. People even write memoirs about events that never happened.
If we're all lying to one degree or another, why are we surprised by the CEOs or politicians or criminals who are caught telling the really big ones?
The truth is that we're all connected. Consciousness is shared. If many of us are lying, even in small and supposedly harmless ways, that is the consciousness "soup" we are swimming in. Unlike our four-legged friends who don't have a drop of deceit in their make-up, we humans excel at fabrications. On the other hand, because we are all connected and consciousness is shared, when a new paradigm presents itself-like the concept of transparency (read: no more lies) as promoted by the new administration-that too can spread. It's the hundredth monkey thing.
What could a resurgence of truth bring our way?
For one thing, it could turn our attention to where it needs to be: taking responsibility for our lies-the important lies, the ones we tell ourselves! We lie to ourselves all the time. We may believe we had a happy childhood, when in fact we simply buried or forgot or denied the abuse we suffered. We may not have grieved over a loss, and later get diagnosed with breast cancer. Our tendency to road rage might be the lie that covers up the pain of our divorce.
When we are hurt, when we are not loved, when we are rejected, those feelings stay in our bodies unless we have fully expressed and released those painful emotions. When we learn to do the work of acknowledging our personal truth, we can heal many of our problems in life: we can get healthier, have better relationships, get out of debt, and even lose weight. We'd all be a lot happier as well!
So let's stop shouting at the liars on TV and look inside. Who knows? If we can stop lying to ourselves, we can create a consciousness of truth that will touch us all.
