By Cathy Eck

What follows is a clip from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.  Trevor Moore, a comedian, made up fake and useless inventions.  Watch the innocent people who are asked to test his products.  Would you have fallen for his trick?

Marketing, Politics, Religion…Lies, Lies, Lies

Every day we are bombarded by marketing.  We buy things that we don’t really want.  We hope that the claims that the advertisers make are true.

We listen to politicians and hope they are telling the truth.  But do they ever tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

Recent studies claim that people don’t just lie daily, they lie hourly.  People lie about everything.  People no longer feel guilty or shameful when they lie; they only feel bad when they get caught.  Some people even feel bad when they don’t lie.

White Lies are Still Lies

This is a subject near and dear to me.  Growing up, I was unable to tell a lie of any color; then I married a man who was normal in the lying department.  I remember hoping that he would teach me how to communicate.  He did; over time, he convinced me that lying was socially correct.

In his eyes, I was rude and uncaring.  He saw lies as charm and kindness.  He told people what they wanted to hear even if it was complete crap. You might recognize him as a people pleaser.  People pleasers are damn good liars.  I went along with his beliefs for many years, but then I realized that I didn’t like myself anymore.

My relationships had become superficial, including my relationship with him.   When I didn’t tell the truth, I couldn’t tell if others told me the truth.  I accepted compliments that I knew were white lies.  Trying to figure out what others wanted to hear was too much work for me.

One day, I decided that I was returning to complete honesty even if it had a price.  I revamped my business around telling the truth, and my business thrived because it was my business.  But the rest of my life didn’t thrive.  I felt as if I had broken some sort of nonverbal agreement that said, “I won’t expose your lies if you don’t expose mine.”  But that isn’t relationship, at least not in my world.

Why Do We Lie?

I didn’t belong in that world, and I left it.  I don’t miss it at all.  Exiting from that world required me to face the reasons that I’d accepted lying as right, spiritual, or nice.  Here are a few:

1)  The truth hurts; people don’t want to hear the truth

2)  People don’t want your opinion; they want support for their opinions

3)  If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all

4)  Everybody lies

5)  Life is competitive — winner takes all

6)  You get punished if you tell the truth

7)  I hurt people if I tell them the truth

Lying has a price that people deny.  My husband believed that God wanted him to be nice, and truthful wasn’t nice.  Since everyone in his life was such a hot mess, then lying was being nice, I guess.  But lying perpetuates their mess.  Agreeing that someone is incurable doesn’t help them find a cure.  Lying keeps people stuck.

The Truth Does Set Us FREE

God wants us to live from truth and unconditional love.  When we lie to another or to ourself, we cut ourselves off from God.  Then we have to get from others what we would normally get from God.  We are people pleasers because we need people to like us — we are lonely because we are cut off from God.  It  is a giant circular mess.

Beliefs Are an Acceptable  Form of Lying

My biggest challenge since I reverted to telling the truth is that most people don’t believe me.  The truth often sounds stranger than fiction.  The truth feels odd when we are used to hearing beliefs, which are half-truths, and lies.

On some level, people want to be lied to.  Our false self doesn’t like when our beliefs are challenged.  We were programmed to be that way.  People would rather believe for a moment that their face will lose the wrinkles from an air machine or their junk will stay in place than face the facts and fix the true cause, which is always a belief.  People are suckers for beliefs that feel good in the moment because they hope that the new seemingly positive belief will counteract all the negative ones.

You can’t cure a belief with another belief.  At best, you get some temporary relief.  If these innocent people in the video knew they were beautiful or had junk that stayed in place, they wouldn’t even be pulled into the salesman’s world.  We don’t need hope when we live from the truth.

Letting Go Brings Us Back to Our True Self

The biggest lies we were ever sold are: we can’t let go of beliefs, we must believe authority, and we can’t tell the truth from a lie.  Those beliefs cause us to be gullible.

When we let go of the lies in our own mind, we see the lies clearly in others.  We don’t fall for other people’s beliefs, and sometimes they don’t like that.  Like this video, their thoughts, beliefs, and even their lies become funny to us.  We feel comfortable exposing them, and sometimes they even laugh along with us.  Sometimes they find someone else to lie to.  Either way, we don’t end up as the proud owner of  a Junk Jumbler.

While we are on the subject of lying, “Here are my Top Ten Biggest Lies Ever Told.