13 October 2014 - QA 4

How can I stop telling lies and be open with my parents?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

You are already tired of telling lies, that’s why you want to stop it. Good, so you are on the right track. A point will come when you say, ‘My god, I can’t handle any more’, because if you keep telling so many lies you’ll forget what you’ve said before. Truth is freeing and relieving, but you can’t say it to all the people at all times. You need wisdom and discrimination. There is this tendency in some parts of the world where people feel that ‘I have to be truthful, I have to tell everything’. Yet you don’t know how much truth is there in your perceptions.
I will give you an example of an incident that happened right here in the Canadian ashram. An elderly couple came here with their daughter who watched some of these shows in which a child said , ‘My father touched me here and my mother did so and so’.
Suddenly this girl had an idea that her father had touched her inappropriately when she was two years old. The parents were devastated, to the extent that the father wanted to commit suicide. And the daughter started believing this and said to her father, 'You prove to me that you haven’t done this'.
They came here, they were crying and the father was saying, ‘Would I ever even think of that?’
This is true for many people. We impose something on our conscious, our psyche and we think this has happened to us. You feel that you are a victim and you find some glory in being a victim, because the victims were glorified on TV and the young girl thought in her subconscious mind, I should also be like that.
If it really happened and the child remembers it, then it is a different issue. But imagining that things are happened to you, that too when you were two year old. How can a two year old baby remember? It has to be at least six or seven years old to remember any such thing.
It was so painful to see such a happy family completely destroyed. Our perception many times may not be correct.