The Truth About Lying

Lying is a beginner’s game. It is always about one thing: decreasing sensation. That’s the only reason people lie—to reduce the intensity of what might happen if they told the truth. Because all sensation, all real feeling, happens in uncertainty. Lying creates a false sense of control, a crafted narrative that allows people to believe they have stability. And most people, living in their own crafted stories, receive those lies in return, reinforcing the illusion. But the moment you tell the truth—especially a truth with weight, one that shakes something loose—the entire game changes.

The biggest lie isn’t even the words we say; it’s the withdrawal. Every secret we hold back is a lie. And if you really think about it, especially with the people you care about, imagine how much sensation, how much aliveness, is lost in the effort to manage those secrets. The constant negotiations—If I say this, then they’ll think that. If I tell them this, I might lose something. If I show too much, I’ll scare them off. No one ever stays after I reveal this part of myself—it’s exhausting. It eats up bandwidth. So much energy goes into management. And for what?

Instead of all this tight control, what if we simply offered our truth? Took the risk, opened ourselves to rejection, and just placed it out there—raw, trembling, unpolished. No wax coating to make it more palatable, like they do on fruit. Just the real thing, exactly as it is. That’s how resurrection happens. That’s how you rise from the dead—by offering the living, breathing, untold truth to the right place, where it was meant to go.

And then, things come alive. The deadening force of secrecy dissolves, and aliveness takes its place. And once that aliveness begins, it grows. It becomes iterative—living from this raw, real place creates more life, more truth, more being. People fear that if they reveal everything, they’ll be left with nothing, as if the secrets are all they have. But what if that’s just the beginning? What if the real game doesn’t even start until after everything is revealed? Because as long as there are secrets, as long as there’s withholding, the archetypes—the deep forces that move through us—can’t fully express.

Withholding is particularly insidious. People say they don’t lie, but they withhold. They don’t offer the whole thing. They give the polished, cooled-down, repackaged version. They don’t bring the heat. And so by the time it reaches another person, it’s already dead. It’s been sitting under a heat lamp for days, and now they’re expecting it to be alive.

But intimacy—real intimacy—is raw. It is two people discovering themselves at the exact same time they are discovering each other. It is not something pre-scripted, pre-formed—it is an arising from the unknown in real-time. It is one person revealing something they have never revealed, and the other receiving something they don’t yet know if they can hold.

And if it’s too much? If the intensity is overwhelming? Then you open. You let it move through. You don’t grip. You don’t contain. You let the forces beyond you handle it. And you stay warm-hearted.