Dishonesty and deception

On Deception and the Moral

Holding that you have studied a little of what I have been speaking about, let us consider deception.

To a telepath, deception is dangerous—not first because of what it does to another, but because of what it does to your own perception. It is an injury to your own ability to know yourself. It distorts the very instrument by which you would seek truth.

Suppose you were once honest, then became deceptive, and one day said:

“Enough. I have stopped. I wish now to perceive without distortion.”

What then?

The difficulty is this: your life must remain coherent. Reality remembers the path by which you arrived. You may discover that you must sacrifice who you have become in order to return to who you once were and continue from that abandoned road. Imagine your mind having to become a teenager again—perhaps even a child. It is repugnant to the pride, yet it may be necessary. Once more, you become innocent in a world of adults. Those who learned deception may call you naïve, but it is precisely that innocence that allows you to escape what deception has built around you.

Or perhaps that road can no longer be found.

Perhaps, as a young man, you swung your sword into the air and declared that you would change the world. Then deception entered your life. If so, you may have to sacrifice not merely the deception but the very ambition that once carried you. That path has become inseparable from what distorted it. Years were invested in that pursuit, and you may never become as strong along that particular road as you might have been had you remained honest. Those declarations, those devotions, those claims—they have passed away.

Such is the cost.

Deception places a dark mark upon your progression. It is not truly you that continues forward, but dishonesty wearing your likeness. Somewhere you chose a shortcut to power. You ceased honoring yourself and began honoring power instead.

Yet power does not honor those who worship it.

What, then, is it to honor power rightly?

It is restraint.

It is to recognize that power exists and deliberately place it aside. To rely instead upon your own practice, your own discipline, your own character. I have believed, and at times witnessed, that power honors such a person not by granting them dominion, but by refraining from destroying them. You respected it enough not to depend upon it. You learned to stand without it. In doing so, you became capable of meeting it as an equal rather than as its servant.

So deception leaves its mark.

It places a shadow over years of speech and action. To those who understand such things, they may no longer see you in your own past. They may instead see the power that had begun speaking through you. Your face remains, yet your progression belongs to something else.

Thus the sacrifice becomes unavoidable.

Either sacrifice the mission you first believed yourself called to accomplish, or sacrifice everything that followed the moment deception entered your life and return to the last place where you were whole. Neither choice is easy. This is the burden that accompanies the misuse of power, when one sought influence rather than presence, certainty rather than learning.

And inevitably your moral comes into focus.

For somewhere you mistook another’s moral for your own. You imagined that your lesson required power, deception, exploitation, exposure, or influence over another. Yet your moral never required those things. It required only you.

So you begin again with a simpler question:

What is my moral now?

Not what power can accomplish.
 Not what deception can obtain.
 Not what influence can secure.

But what am I learning from my own life, honestly, without distortion, without manipulation, without borrowing another’s path?

That question may demand the greatest sacrifice of all.

You may have to look back upon the child you once were—the innocent soul who first stepped into the world with clear eyes—and admit that everything built afterward cannot remain. To preserve deception is to lose that child forever. To abandon deception is to ask that child to live again, even if it means relinquishing years of ambition.

Such is the price of returning to yourself.

And perhaps that is what redemption has always required: not greater power, but the courage to become honest enough that your own moral can once again lead you home.