These two posts (one | two) over at the Garden got me thinking, and I’d like to reiterate what I said over there and expand upon it a bit.
- Where do lies come from?
- What are we supposed to do about them?
- What measure of control is achieved through lies?
- How much of that control is legitimate?
- What would it look like if everybody stopped lying?
I think that we can probably all agree that lies come from fear. Think about something you’ve lied about: What was your motivation for lying? For me it’s always fear, but then, I think you can trace 95% of your actions back to fear anyway, so that should come as no surprise to you. One of the most interesting things that I’ve learned in my Gnostic process so far is that it’s sometimes pretty painful to know yourself. I look at my actions (when I remember to) to try to discover the root motivation for why I did what I did. I’m going to start keeping better track and graphing the results in some way, but in short, most of the motivations I’ve discovered are either fear of rejection, fear of humiliation, and fear of being alone. Now if you’re playing along with our home game, you’ve probably noticed that fear of rejection and humiliation are more-or-less the same thing, but they come in direct conflict with fear of being alone. These insecurities, and the internal conflicts that they cause, I believe are the primary motivation for our lies.
The second question is either very easy or very hard to answer, depending solely on how you look at it. The answer has two parts: What do we do about our own lies, and what do we do about the lies of others? The first part is up to you, but the second part leads to the rest of the questions. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first: What do we do about our own lies?
If we lie because we are afraid, the the solution seems to be “Don’t be afraid.” It doesn’t sound so easy, but it can be. It’s like in JP’s post about “Just waking up.” if you want to stop being afraid, all you have to do is stop being afraid. There’s no process, no therapy, no path, there’s just you sitting down and deciding “I’m not afriad.” Easier said than done, but I’ve been able to do it occasionally. I wish I could give you something more specific.
Come to think of it, maybe I can, but I’ll have to talk about the other questions first. Keep reading, it may be worth your time.
Other people are trying to control us all the time, and one of the most useful tools of control is a lie. I was talking to somebody outside of Gnosticism and trying to explain some of this to her. Something interesting that I said off-the-cuff kinda stuck with me later, and I’m sure will evolve over time into a post of its own, but I said to her “One of the side effects of Gnosticism seems to be that it turns you into a conspiracy nut.” You know who you are out there 
But seriously, there’s something to that. If you believe that A) you are being manipulated and B) it comes from somewhere outside of yourself, then you’re a conspiracy nut by definition. Guilty.
So who is lying to us? The government? Sure. Societal mores? Sure. Our parents? Absolutely. Why? It’s probably beyond my pay grade to try to tackle this, but here I go anyway.
The way I see it, we are lied to by people of authority mostly for noble reasons. I have to believe that these people who decieve us intentionally do so for what they think is our own good, first and foremost, and then the less noble “for their own good” second. I can’t deny that there are many out there who are only lying to get what they want, but in the above three examples I think the majority of lies are told because they believe they are necessary to keep us safe and happy. This is the best trick in the book for the archons.
So we are manipulated, and on a subconscious level I’m sure we know we are being manipulated, but we allow this to happen. It’s like the metaphor I used in the second thread in the Garden:
Growing up, our parents (in most cases, primarily our mothers) had complete control over us. There was no questioning, no doubting, just complete dominion. As children we didn’t question this. We believed we were not free to do as we chose, and what our parents said, that was law. But at some point most of us came to the conclusion our parents only had control over us because we allowed them to control us, and we therefor began the process of freeing ourselves.
Now the obvious metaphor for this, and the one that is most relevant to us as Gnostics, is that of the demiurge, the archons, and the black iron prison. By extension it would be logical to assume that we allow ourselves to be trapped in the prison because we believe that there is no choice, which is the wrong assumption. Once we allow ourselves to understand consciously that we are being controled we can simply decide that we will no longer be controled. The power goes away, and we are truly free.
So my challenge is to truly understand that I am being controled by the lies that I am told, and then to remove that control from my life. Don’t assume that because I’ve written about 58 pages about it so far today that I do understand that. I often play these mental acrobatics that take me to the conclusions that I present to you, but that’s all they are, mental. There is a great image that I use when I’m thinking about this kind of thing, and I forget where it came from, if you know you should tell me so I can give credit where credit is due. The image is that of the knowledge of the body versus the knowledge of the mind. This whole thing so far has been knowledge of the mind. I’ve talked about this concept in previous posts, if you’d like to go back and look for it.
What would the world look like without lies? That’s a tough one, but maybe once that happens the world will trancend to a higher state and we can start worrying about something a little higher up the enlightenment food chain. Any theories on what this might look like, or how we might get there?
For your consideration,
