People of the Lie

(7)

What brought this subject to mind on this occasion was the persistent memory of a woman talking on her cell phone. I was in the local super market several weeks ago, and I overheard a women who chose an interesting way to terminate her call. She said something like, 'Well, I'm in checkout now, so I'll have to let you go.' She then terminated the conversation. What struck me about her was that she had told an obvious lie: she was in the rear of the store nowhere near checkout. Yet she made no attempt to prevent me from hearing her deception. Why not?

There must be a dozen or more possible explanations for her lack of 'consistency' and I won't bother to comment on all the possibilities. But the memory of the incident stuck with me, eventually achieving an almost permanent status: I had actually seen another person tell a lie! I was unable to forget the incident, not that I tried.

As I occasionally thought about the encounter over the weeks that followed I arrived at the most probable conclusion: the woman did not realize she was telling a literal lie. To her it was enough of a truth to pass: she would indeed soon be in checkout. Close enough.

Then I was reminded of Ouspensky's Fourth Way and the ubiquitous human practice of lying. I just now consulted the book in question in search of a juicy quote. Here it is on page 30:

'There is a definite obstacle, a definite reason why we cannot have consciousness as we are. This chief obstacle in the way of development is lying. I have already mentioned lying, but we must speak more about it, for we do not know what lying means because we have never studied this question seriously. Yet the psychology of lying is really the most important part of the study of the human being. If a man could be described as a zoological type, he would be described as a lying animal.'