Telling the Truth Will Instantly Enhance Your Life

Let’s assume everyone were to lie about everything all the time. Could we as individuals and as a society survive? The answer is a resounding no. For even if we were to convert in our heads every lie into its opposite, we would still not arrive at the truth in each and every case.

Most of the time we would be guessing at the truth, and clearly this would complicate our lives infinitely. More than that, one can think of any number of instances where telling lies would have fatal consequences for the other person, possibly even for ourselves.

Telling the truth, on the contrary, is inherently life-enhancing. Not only does it simplify our interactions with one another, it is also ennobling and dignifying. For in sharing the truth with another person, we affirm that person’s intrinsic worthiness. Above all, through truthfulness we participate in truth itself. It will become clear what I mean by this.

We can readily observe the chaotic effect of untruthfulness in daily life, especially among our leaders. Politics has become almost synonymous with lying and cheating. Big business is another area where lying is considered expedient, lest the truth should require sounder ecological and other standards.

But lying may go even deeper than that. Two and a half millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Plato wondered in his Republic whether one could contrive a “noble lie” that would carry enough conviction for a whole community. In fact, such a core lie—though it may not be all that noble—is operative in our Western society. That lie is the belief, spawned by scientific materialism, that life is one-dimensional and that all talk about a higher Reality is so much fantasy.

From this central lie springs an entire outlook on life that deprives us of our participation in the higher dimensions of existence and thus of our human dignity. For as long as we think and reinforce in each other the belief that we are mere meat bodies destined to vanish into nothingness at the hour of death, we are living a lie that diminishes us.

The Yoga of Telling the Truth

Little wonder that truthfulness has traditionally been celebrated as the highest moral virtue, and the foundation of all other virtues. Thus in the Mahanirvana-Tantra, composed over 1,000 years ago, we find the following declaration:

Without truthfulness, worship is futile. Without truthfulness, recitation is useless. Without truthfulness, asceticism is as unfruitful as seed on barren soil…. Truly, truthfulness is the best asceticism. All actions should be rooted in truthfulness. Nothing is more excellent than truthfulness.

This expresses a sentiment that once was global but that, today, is generally little more than a pretty saying. However, the spiritual traditions of the world, notably yoga, contain many poignant considerations of the nature of truth and truthfulness, which have lost none of their relevance.

For the traditional yogi, telling the truth is a manifestation of the absolute Truth, which is the Divine. That is to say, when we are truthful, we participate in some way in the ultimate Truth. To be true means to respect, adhere to, and even communicate with the Divine. Therein lies the power of truth.

By being truthful, we are true to our higher, divine nature. The Sanskrit word for truthfulness is satya, which is both etymologically and semantically related to sat, denoting that which is real or truly existent. We transmute a part of the cosmos—our immediate circumstance and life—into a piece of heaven.

This is the central task of all spiritual work: to transform nature, our own as well as nature in general, and to make it conform to the Divine. Truthfulness is the moral foundation upon which the yoga practitioner can build his or her temple of spiritual discipline and conscious living. This is as true today as it was thousands of years ago.

Truthfulness has many aspects. One above all is sincerity, which is absolutely essential on the spiritual path. As the great Hindu scriptures remind us, so long as we are prone to deception, self-deception, dishonesty, pretense, hypocrisy, and posturing, our spiritual seeds will fall on barren soil. Lies are like quicksand, sucking into oblivion even our best endeavors.

These thoughts seem almost outlandish to our modern mind, which is so used to a wide variety of deceptions.

There are occasions when it would be brutal to tell the truth, as when a young child eagerly anticipating Santa Claus is told that Santa Claus does not exist. But there are many more occasions when telling the truth may hurt in the moment but bring about wholeness in the long run, as when we confess a transgression. But truthfulness takes courage and trust, two qualities that call for what was once called the heroic disposition.

Sincere yoga practitioners are constantly challenged to bear the ultimate Truth in mind (and in their hearts). Yet their highest aspiration is sustained by those countless little truths that demand to be respected throughout the day.

Yoga expects us to be heroes and heroines, not of the swashbuckling kind, but of the sort that go about their daily routine with integrity and in the knowledge that truth is a great power and integral to self-actualization and self-transcendence.