Let's Be Honest

As a yogi, you should always speak the truth—or should you?

By Sally Kempton

Tell It Like It Is

The conversation about the meaning of truthfulness has been going on for a long time. I see three sides to it. On one hand, there's the absolutist position taken by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutra: Truth, or satya, is an unconditional value, and a yogi shouldn't lie. Ever. The opposite position—familiar to anyone who pays attention to the behavior of the government, corporations, and many religious institutions—is what used to be called "utilitarian." This is the materialist position supported by Western philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and by texts like the Arthashastra, the Indian book of statecraft, which we might call the precursor to Machiavelli's writings. The basic utilitarian posture goes something like "Always tell the truth except when a lie is to your advantage."

The third position strives for a kind of ultimate balance and demands a high degree of discernment. It recognizes the high value of truth but points out that truth telling can sometimes have harmful consequences, and so needs to be balanced with other ethical values such as nonviolence (ahimsa), peace, and justice.

The absolutist position, though definitely not easy, has the merit of being simple, which is why it has so many major philosophical and ethical players in its corner. (Absolutists often feel better than the rest of us when they get up in the morning, because their position is so clear-cut.) The theologian Saint Augustine and the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, like Patanjali and Gandhi, called truth (as in no lies, exaggerations, or fudging) the absolute value, never to be abandoned.

No loopholes. Lying, according to this position, is the ultimate slippery slope. First, because a liar has to expend infinite amounts of energy just keeping stories straight. You start out telling your neighbor that your iPod he wanted to borrow for his party is broken, and then you have to maintain the lie by not letting him see you using it. You also have to make sure your wife knows not to let on. Already, the lie has cost you energy. And there is always the danger that it will be exposed in the future, after which your neighbor will never really believe or trust you. Not to mention your wife, who's probably already heard you lying about other stuff.

The second argument for radical truthfulness goes much deeper: Lying takes you out of alignment with reality. This was Gandhi's position, based on the insight that truth lies at the very heart of existence, of reality. A yogic text, the Taittiriya Upanishad, says that God is truth itself, while a Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, calls truth "the signet ring of God." In psychological terms, lying disconnects us from reality and it always makes us a little bit crazy. Anyone who grew up in a family that kept secrets will recognize the eerie feeling of cognitive dissonance that arises when facts are concealed. That dissonance currently rages through the bloodstream of society; lies and secrets having become so embedded in our corporate, governmental, and personal lives that most of us assume that the president, the media, and our religious institutions are continually lying to us.

When the consequences of lying are so spiritually and socially destructive, why would an ethical person ever choose to tell an untruth? First, an ethical person might decide to lie if telling the factual truth would compromise other, equally important values. In the Mahabharata, the great ethical treatise of the Indian tradition, there is a famous moment involving a lie. Krishna is guiding the righteous Pandavas in a pivotal battle against the forces of evil. Krishna, who is considered by orthodox Hindus to embody divine truth in human form, orders the righteous king Yudhisthira to tell a lie in order to demoralize the enemy general. Yudhisthira agrees to tell the first lie of his life—that the general's son, Aswatthama, has been killed in battle. Krishna's position is that in a battle against terrible evil, one does what one must to win. (The position is similar to the Allied disinformation tactic in World War II, which misled the Nazi intelligence about the real target of D-day.) In short, Krishna makes the decision to lie because it serves what he perceives as higher values: those of justice and, ultimately, peace.

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