RE: Very likely Off Topic!11 Jan 2023 10:31
Love it Ozzy, here's bit on just how much we think we know until we examine ourselves in against purity.
Lying
“Lying is thinking or speaking about things that one does not know; this is the beginning of lying. It does not mean intentional lying—telling stories, as for instance that there is a bear in the other room. You can go to the other room and see that there is no bear in it. But if you collect all the theories that people put forward on any given subject, without knowing anything about it, you will see where lying begins. Man does not know himself, he does not know anything, yet he has theories about everything. Most of these theories are lying.
“People speak about everything as though they knew. If you ask a man whether there are people on the moon, he will have an opinion about it. And so with everything else. We have opinions about everything, and all these opinions are lying, particularly about ourselves.”, remarks Ouspensky in The Fourth Way.
It takes time in the work to begin to sort out the things we really know and the things that we have opinions about. We really know what we have personally experienced, whether in the course of our life or by doing this work. Especially in our inner world, we have many imaginary ideas about who and what we are. In a state of sleep, we believe these ‘lies’ and they serve to prolong the state of imagination, of the machine running on auto-pilot.
‘Lying’ refers mainly to a certain manner of speaking about things, as if we really knew what we were talking about. We repeat what we read in the Internet or hear from our friends as if it were the truth. In these days of fake news, conspiracy theories and general unconscious manipulation of and by the media, we have even more opinions than people of past centuries.
[ ] These subjects are excellent for leading meaningless conversations, both externally and internally. In a way, it is natural that the human machine would prefer this to external and internal silence - it takes much less effort. It is beautiful just to be together with friends without much talking and without the drive to repeat all the ‘lies’ that we have heard.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
