Prelude to a Moment of Truth

I learned to lie best when I was a teenager. I had to. I knew my mother would never approve of me sleeping with my boyfriend, so every Friday and Saturday night I'd tell her we were going to dinner and a movie with friends, or to a party, or anything that sounded plausible. I didn't have a curfew as such, but I was supposed to be home by one or two a.m. I knew she'd wait up for me.

Usually we did go out and do something, but it was never exactly what I told my mother, because it always included going back to my boyfriend's house and doing exactly what my mother would not want me doing. We'd be in bed and invariably the phone would ring at the time I was supposed to be home and, even though I never picked up, I knew it was my mother. So I'd scramble to get myself together, we'd drive across town, and I'd nonchalantly greet my mother with some lie about how I was late because the traffic (at 1:30a.m.) was just terrible coming back from Atlanta, or something equally lame. This charade went on for almost a year, until I left for college. To my way of thinking, I'd gotten away with something.

Looking back, I see how my need to define myself as an independent operator caused me to step a long way outside the bounds of honesty and integrity. I lied because I didn't see how I could get what I wanted any other way. At the time I was so desperate in my quest for individuality that I felt entirely justified in my actions, even though when I was eventually caught, my face flushed with shame. But for years I persisted in defending my right to live my life exactly the way I saw fit, even if my rebellion hurt me or others (and it did).

For years I lived the question Would you rather be right or happy? certain that happiness was a function of being right, of being me. When I was right, even if no one else agreed with me, I was secure. The dynasty I ruled from the throne of my aloneness had "I've Gotta Be Me" as its anthem. I'd fight to the end for the right to do things my way.

This particular brand of happiness proved to be pretty miserable, however. Isolation eliminated the discomforts of intimacy, but I was plagued with loneliness. The longing to belong with someone or something bigger than just me became stronger than my desire to fight the good fight. But still I fought on. By this time it was what I knew how to do best, and the alternatives were threatening. My identity was at stake and this was not something to put at risk for any reason.

How do any of us come to realize we are living a lie, or at best, a half-truth? How could I have known then what I know now to be true? For at any point in my first thirty or so years (and for more often than I care to think a good long time since then) I would have argued my truth of the moment, and in that moment, this is what was absolutely true for me.

Of course, over time, I noticed that as different aspects of my personality stepped onto the stage of life, there was actually more than one truth that I had to claim as my own. The one who thought it was true that she had the right to sleep with whomever she wanted whenever she wanted, was in conflict with the one for whom it was true that she wanted to settle down with one true love. The one who truly wanted to be free of all schedules and worldly responsibilities had to meet the one who honestly wanted to make a meaningful contribution to the world. No one version of what was true for me in one moment was sufficiently true for me in all moments. So as I fought for all my truths of the moment, the contradictions in me worked their chaos.

Recently, I've come to see this "Fight for What's Right" quality in me as one of what Gurdjieff referred to as my Chief Feature. It's that fundamental misperception that is the kingpin holding the ego's sense of self in place. Without it, the ego doesn't know what to do. Without it, the ego relaxes. And a relaxed ego, the ego fears, portends something dire. But what is dire to the ego is bliss to the soul.

The moment the ego surrenders its various truths of the moments, gives up its right to fight for those many relative truths, the soul is free to experience a moment of truth. In the light of a moment of truth, all the shenanigans the ego use to define us as who we think we are, are seen as a ruse for a kind of self-defense that is completely unnecessary. As the phantoms of fear flee, when the ones that made it seem desperately necessary to be different, to be right, to be "me" are scattered like dust in the wind, reality can finally be seen. Things as they are, not as we have imagined them, are revealed in the twinkling of an eye. Facts of the situation before us may not change, but because there is nothing , no "I" to separate us from what is absolutely true, we find ourselves dissolved in love, like a sugar cube in a glass of clear water.

How do we get "here" to love from a "there" so filled with fear and fight? Oddly, by being true to the truth of the moment. By sticking to my guns, it eventually became so painfully obvious how partial "my" truth always is. When my soul cried out, I realized the soul never indeed needed to be right to be happy. The soul only wants to be whole, connected, in relationship with life, to be in the truth of what is - to experience its true nature. A wise saying of the Ojibway native tribe observes, "I walk along pitying myself while all along my soul is blown across the sky by great winds. And so it is.

Copyrighted, NCM Press, 2002