Liars Cheats and Scoundrels

Lying murders sleep

Its hard to say which is worse sometimes … whether someone who kills a person … should be judged more harshly … than the person who betrayed your trust. In some ways … they have both killed the man. But certainly the man who was lied to … gets a second chance to live his life … and possibly to regain his peace as a person.

Sitting at chapel service in school … I listened to the speaker extoll on the benefits of virtue … and to imbue in our young minds … the preponderance to prefer virtue over vice. Its as much what my father always told us in the home … on the subject of goodwill and benevolence to all men … and how we will receive our rewards some day.

When we bring these guides into our behavior and our relations with others … it forms a circle of trust … so powerful sometimes … that we figure … its the salt of the earth … something that we cannot do without. That is … until the day … we heard something … a friend of ours says … that dismisses entirely anything we had thought as faith and trust in each other. In his criticism … he appears to have isolated us away … from the oneness we experienced … and makes it plain that we are different somehow.

Quite often … the error is one of omission. We take to a friendship in a deep and meaningful way … and that in itself … sets the stage for us to stretch a little the facts of our experience. Perhaps we begin to exaggerate a little the importance of what we do … and expect that our close circle of friends … would support that … and understand. It is after all our only social avenue for the expression of our deepest … and most profound personal beliefs … about ourselves.

Did we go on too long about it? Were we leaving no space for our friend to … be his own person … in our company? In dropping out from a social circle … we find ourselves in the great social circle of the world … filled with casual acquaintances … neighbors … the cashier at the clothing store … the waiter in the cafe … the barber … the laundry clerk … and they are all mysteriously transformed … in our thoughts … to be absent friends.

And then it happens … our circle of absent friends grows to include famous people … public personalities … bards … and then maybe prophets … and then of course God. The experience at this point … is referred to as Yogamaya by the Indics … a curious combination of fact and fiction … that tugs at our minds to come understand it and release it from its own closeted and fixated righteousness of itself. The Indics claim that it is a natural aspect of our development as human.

In returning from a visit to Yogamaya … and re-entering society … we realize that it is no different from what it was before. The speaker in the chapel … the father at home … the friend … they all continue with their apparent subscription to the good … like the music at the carousel … or the walrus in Alice … who prides himself on knowing what is right … not living in it.

If we find a change in ourselves … it is derived from our own self awareness of our thoughts and actions. We understand the context of the social circle … and bring ourselves to a measured relation with it. And in relation to it … we can see the person we were … in our insecurity and need for attention. In coming to understand ourselves … we realize that we don't necessarily have to label ourselves anything and be charged to be true to it. We are a part of the dynamic process of senses … and physical activity … to which we create our own spontaneous response every minute of the day.

In communicating this experience to the public … Hallmark may have crafted the story of a father who had a misunderstanding with his daughter … Disney might have told the story of a man lost in the jungle … who returns with its tribal charms … and the the remainder of the movie machine would have made a Highlander … Hercules … Matrix and so forth.

In looking around himself … the individual realizes that its what the world is about. Its a story about him … told in many different ways. Perhaps he himself would want to tell it his own way … to bring the real deal to it. But then again he may realize … there isn't a great deal of difference.

In the final analysis we are left to weigh the curious balance between a little lie … the separation that it caused … and the enormous learning opportunity it created … with the world of mind … Gods and men. Fitzgerald asked ' what foul dust floats in the wake of our dreams?' I'll have to say … its the wit of creation.