Everybody lies occasionally.  We all do it.  And so lies come with different monikers describing the weight of the occasion – names like: white lie, fib, exaggeration, etc.  But they’re all lies – just different levels of lies.

Fact of the matter is that it’s one of those few things in life that is black and white.  It’s either the truth or its not.  If it’s not, it’s not truth-full and so the part where it’s not the truth, is the lie.

A white lie is often told to protect someone’s feelings – like when your wife just spent $250 at the beauty parlor and had her hair cut and the goofball ruined it and she comes home proudly, but looking like somebody else, you say, “Hey honey, you look real cute.”

Fibs are harmless lies that really don’t matter like telling your neighbor that you didn’t come to their party because you weren’t feeling well when you really went out to a movie instead.  Fibs and white lies both fall under the same confusing category.  The term “white lie” is pretty laughable when you think about it.  Does the word “white’ make it OK?  Is the lie more pure because it’s white?  Is it cleaner?  Pretty confusing.

And then there’s exaggeration – a fault that I’ve been accused of probably too often.  I like to say when accused, “Well, I’m in show business.  Think of it as promotion – making the success or the adventure or the story just a tad more interesting or dramatic or even a bit more heroic.  But truthfully, I’ve learned to see that they’re all just a bunch of lies and that, essentially, if we slow down and think things out and live higher and more noble lives from moment to moment, we do not have to lie.  Lying is just really a bad habit.

And then there are the inveterate liars…  These are the people that have a disease – a dis-ease with the truth.  They lie so often that they lose consciousness of the truth and lose the ability to discern between the two.  Their lying becomes so habitual that they lose their connection with the reality of the truth and lie so often that they begin to believe their own lies  — in essence, they lie so much that they even lie to themselves about lying.  A vicious circle.

In my life I’ve suspected several and absolutely identified two.

One was a man who I worked with for many years.  He was a fine musician and we had a great partnership in music, a great musical simpatico between us and a terrific collaboration that always resulted in powerful production.  I loved him like a brother and we were joined at the hip.  But I began to watch him lie and not know what to do about it.

Confronting a liar is very difficult.  It’s easier to confront a thief or a murderer.  With a thief, you point out the stolen money in his hand and if you catch him red-handed, you’ve got the material proof.  With a murderer you’ve got the body or the gun or the fingerprints.  But with a liar, it’s all a bit nebulous, and usually a liar can and will back up his original lie with another ten to do anything he can do to wiggle out.

Even the experts say that confronting a liar is a near impossible thing.   It’s very hard to make it stick and ruins the relationship and destroys the moment.

With my male friend, his lies became so obvious to me after a while that I would be embarrassed by his effrontery – so much so that I could not even protest the most obvious of lies.  I would stand and listen to him unravel his whoppers and be so flabbergasted that he would actually think that I was dumb enough to believe him, that I could not say anything in retort.  To challenge him would be so difficult that I would just say nothing and walk away shaking my head.

Of course, the more he “got away with it”, the more he did it.  It grew to such proportions that it absolutely destroyed our relationship.  I lost my trust in his center.  I never knew when he was lying or truthful because he didn’t know either.  To him, it was all the truth and to me, they were all lies.

In the end, I stepped away from this friendship and never worked with him again.  I’m not sure he ever really understood.  I think he was very hurt by my pull-back, but I could have never confronted him with the enormity of my doubt and the absolute reality of what I knew to be true.  I’ve realized that I got trapped in his consciousness and, by not nailing him, actually took part in his avoidance of the truth.  In the end he made a liar out of me.

It was an extremely difficult situation and, to this day, I don’t know how I could have fixed it – and so I walked away from the entire mess and never went back.

The second habitual liar that I’ve encountered was a woman that I employed.  She was extremely bright and could have been hugely effective in her job, but she too was such an inveterate liar that she even believed her own BS.  At first she would lie about the things she had accomplished, the promises she had made and the hopes that she offered me.  When none of these came to any reality, she would always have ten more in the ready.  As the lies began to pile up, she couldn’t remember her own lies and would change her stories and when I would question her change of story she would get angry and lie her way out of the confusion.

Because not everything was a lie – there were actually occasional truths mixed in – it took a longer time to see and be able to identify the patterns, but within months, I had seen enough and heard enough.

No one wants a lie to be a lie.  Lies are told to right a wrong, not wrong a right.  Lies are told to make something OK or better or even wondrous.  And so we too want them to be true, but after a while, when we finally see and understand the patterns of lying and suspect, and then know that we’re being lied to, we simply stand demoralized and wait for the next lie to appear.  When it appears, we see it immediately.

With this lady (she was no lady), as much as I wanted her to be successful, as much as I needed her to be successful, ultimately she was hollow.  There was no real substance to her.  It was all false fabrication.  I kept wishing it weren’t, hoping that some of the promises made would come true, but ultimately she was simply ineffective because she was so distant from the truth.

Even when I would confront her with the hollowness of her words and the failures of her so-called efforts, she would weave such a tale of falsehood to get out of the trap that she had gotten herself into that there was nothing I could do except relieve her of her duties and ultimately her job.

The saddest thing about the whole mess was that she was so caught up in her lying that she absolutely believed herself.  That was what was so wondrous to me.  She would say things that we all knew were wild fabrications of the imagination and absolutely believe them.  She was so used to lying that she instantly bought her own lies lock, stock and barrel.

I know only one way of healing such a condition.  To pray about it.  Stepping away from the person , as I did in both cases, let’s be clear, was not a healing solution.  It rid me of the problem to a great extent, but it did not heal the error.  A habitual liar has a mighty problem to deal with and it’s tougher, in a way, than a cancer.  A cancer you can see, you can feel.  It becomes something you have to deal with.  It confronts you.

Lying, on the other hand, is something that when confronted, the habitual liar simply lies their way around and lies their way past.  Ultimately this is a problem for a power greater than I.

Perhaps if I were a sharper judge of character and could nip it in the bud in the beginning that would help.  But we don’t want to start new relationships that way – looking for the untruths.

Perhaps if I were more centered myself and closer on a more consistent level to the absolute truth moment to moment this would help.  Sounds like I got something here…

Identify more with the truth.  Live the truth more fully.  Attract the truth.  Raise the bar.  Set a higher standard of truth around you.  Purify the atmosphere.  Demand honesty both from within and without.

Dictionary definition of lying: To pretend with intent to deceive.

Pretty damning…

Physician, heal thyself.

NOTE: You have just read Peter Link’s 400th Blog Post.  Cause for some form of quiet celebration among readers… :o)