Building strong character by being truthful

Background

I read Seven Habits of Highly Effective people in February 2008. Since then, a desire to be honest has developed in me. This would not happen without speaking truth. The intensity of this desire has been growing since I started meditating daily. I realized some new dimensions such as not telling lies, answering to the point, diverting the topic. But speaking truth is different from all those. I conducted an experiment on myself for the last two months to know why do we lie, why cannot we speak truth all the time, and observed some interesting patterns. We will analyze the results of this experiment and see the advantages of speaking truth in this blog.
Truth has a glut of definitions. More or less, most of the definitions lead directly or indirectly to the meaning of truth as sincerity and integrity. Mark Twain said, “Always tell the truth. That way, you don't have to remember what you said”. No one wishes to be a crooked person but then why do not we stop lying? Why do we struggle to remember what we said to which person? Many times, the lies which we say may not cause serious harm to any person or may not result in property loss. But still we are liars. In fact, these small harmless lies are taking us to the negative comfort zone where we are not aware of that we do not wish to speak truth. Gradually, fear is instilled in us to the extent that we cannot face the truth. Michael Levy said, “You can bend it and twist it... You can misuse and abuse it... But even God cannot change the Truth.” So, we will end up in living with unreal self. That is, we live with unreality or far away from reality. I believe that self analysis is the best analysis and conducted an experiment on myself for about two months. Unfortunately, the bottom-line of my experiment is that many of us kill ourselves without our knowing because the pain is hidden on the short run and unseen on the long run.

Courage factor

Humans exude confidence by being truthful. By observing myself and others, I found that courage plays a crucial role. We can categorize people who could speak truth into two buckets:
1. People having courage
2. People who do not require/need courage.
In this contemporary world, human mind is teeming with pollution because of the shoddy thoughts carried by us in our day-to-day activities. Sinister thoughts became part of human life. Hikes, power, positions, awards, rewards etc became part of human’s life. In realizing some of the above, some persons are even ready to drench or murder other person. We do ingenious contrivance to get the things done in our favor. Deals are not always completely kosher. Under such unhygienic environment, you definitely need to have courage if you want to speak truth. Because you started speaking truth, sometimes, either you or others may be in trouble. At times, truth may be unpleasant but don’t step back. Have the courage and consider the feelings of other person before telling. That means we need courage with consideration. Express the genuine truth in a palatable manner. Henry David said, “The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard”. For example, you cannot go to media and reveal your company’s confidential data. You cannot call such violation of trust as courage. The courage of a person should be prudent, not imprudent. People will slowly show great reverence towards you.
The other category is not like many of us who spend most of our lives as grouches. If you are pure at heart having no evil thoughts, genuinely happy for others success, able to forgive unintentional mistakes, then you don’t require courage to speak truth. For example, Does a saint require courage to speak truth? No, because he lives in a pure world, he feels only good and has no hatred. Not that these people don’t have courage but they don’t need the use of courage to speak the truth. Confidence gushes out of them. These people carry great character sustained with unyielding integrity in them and are usually impervious to criticism.

10 tough days

I decided to speak truth for 10 days and belabored the point to myself to digest the significance. At the end of each day, I had retrospective meeting with myself. By the end of 10 days, I said many lies. But the desire to speak truth has made some changes in me. I am not sharing the actual conversations happened during this experiment for various reasons but we will see the conclusions. All my lies fall into the below four categories:
1. When a person is made low by others, the person will tell lies to match the expectations of the other person.
2. When a person is forced to answer, the person will tell lies to escape or change the topic.
3. When a person wants to win his/her point, the person will tell lies to show his/her command on that point.
4. When a person wants to see/support the other person for whatever reason, the person will tell lies to show his/her respect/support towards other person.
For some days, I thought why humans do so many wrong things for the sake of others. But later I realized that humans do all these wrong acts to protect themselves or their image. There may be more categories than what I mentioned but I am sure that we would lie to protect our own image in any category. I am sure that many people will get ample number of examples in each of those categories. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Similarly, the journey of every liar starts with a single lie.

Common denominator

The other interesting pattern which is common in any of the above categories or common to people who tell lies is: we think when we lie. We may run the thought process before telling lies if a lie is constructed in planned way or after telling lies if a lie is constructed on the fly. Think of your own situations when you try to prepare the various possible answers to possible questions (Eg: to support your resume in an interview). We try to estimate the other possibilities to escape/protect ourselves. When this process increases, it creates stress in us. The more you vacillate, the more you become subject to all the fickle forces at play on the outside. Note the difference that person who thinks need not tell lies but person who tell lies, by and large, cannot avoid thinking.

Coming out of the pit

The impeccable solution is to be spontaneous in any situation. Never use your latitude to think & choose what to tell others. Be spontaneous. This will devoid the unnecessary stress in us. At one shot, this may be tough. Remember, every major change takes some time. I found one more interesting observation. When you try to speak only truth, slowly you will avoid telling lies, however minor it may be. You can slowly avoid the situations fraught with danger. Indirectly, you will not be a part of the situation where you need to tell lies. This in turn means that you are doing well in all walks of your life. Speaking truth does not mean to dig your past and tell everyone. Let bygones be bygones. You can build a better tomorrow, not yesterday. You need to show the commitment of allegiance to speak truth. As you don’t lie, you don’t need to encounter the situations filled with remorse. Your self-integrity increases by leaps & bounds. Slowly, you will achieve what you want through noble ways.
Failures are the stepping stones to success. But intentional failures are stepping stones to disaster. We often cheat ourselves into oblivion. We think that others do not know us. But we are what we are and others can easily see us, at least on the long run. Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”. Be spontaneous, you will surely enjoy the ethereal beauty of being truthful.