Midweek Faith Lift
May 9, 2018
#9 TRUTH Happens in You
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Good Morning! Today we are exploring the 9th Commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Ex.20:16) In our current era of alternative facts, and “truthiness” and how should we “spin” this so we don’t look bad, it seems that the essence of the 9th commandment has evaporated from human consciousness. Whatever happened to owning up to one’s mistake and making amends when necessary? Buttherworth begins this chapter by again speaking about the “social fabric” or the common beliefs and expectations that bind us together and as with stealing, trust is what undergirds the 9th commandment. He says on p. 124 of Breaking the Ten Commandments:
The fabric of any society is composed of the interlacing of human relations. The preservation of that fabric calls for certain self-evident ethical standards that are implied in the ninth commandment…It is said, “A man’s word is his bond.” If we cannot count on the word of our neighbor, then the ties that bind us together are perilously loosened.
When we want to manipulate reality, shade the truth, we are deluding ourselves and it is our own consciousness that suffers as well as the collective consciousness and the common good of our society.
The word “bear” means “to answer” and when we testify in a legal proceeding, we promise to answer with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. A lie is false witness, whether told to convict someone or to help them. We answer with our version of truth and only we can know what that means in light of the reality of the situation. It is so easy for our judgments and opinions to slip into how we are seeing things and even into what we see. Even when we are just trying to count something, we can miss something. Take a look at this:
http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html
Did you see the gorilla? If you didn’t then you would “swear” that it was not there and you would be honestly reporting your observations, but it would not completely reflect the reality of the situation, would it?
In ancient times under Mosaic law, when a sentence was pronounced on someone, those who had been witnesses were required to carry out the sentence. It was not carried out by the court. And if the witness was found to have committed perjury, the sentence that was pronounced on the accused would be his sentence. When you accused someone, you literally would put your own life on the line. It was dangerous to lie under this system and it was a strong deterrent to false witnessing. So where does that leave us with the 9th Commandment in this millennium?
When I worked in the schools, one of my responsibilities was to investigate allegations of child abuse made against school district employees. These situations involved bus drivers, teachers, principals, lunch ladies, janitors, anyone who worked in the schools. And boy did I learn a lot about “witnessing” and “truthiness.” My job was to interview all identified witnesses, the victim, the alleged perpetrator, the parents of the victim and anyone else involved in the event, anyone I wanted to talk to was available to interview.
The first thing I learned is that the people who were truly innocent were the most scared and upset about being accused because it was so outside of their reality of how they showed up. They weren’t defensive, they were truly distressed that a student would perceive them this way. The people who were generally guilty responded with anger, defensiveness and a list of their degrees, special expertise and credentials, years of experience and very negative statements about the student who had accused them. It was a clear pattern that held up over time.
Then, I listened to the stories by the kids, interviewing them one at a time. It quickly became clear if something had happened or not. It there had been an incident, the kids generally all reported it pretty much the same and were genuinely upset. If there was no incident, then the stories were really interesting, fanciful and highly varied in the describing how the event occurred. My favorite one is where it was the kid who had been misbehaving and called abuse when the adult reprimanded them. It was an interesting lesson in “truthiness” for that kid. Fortunately we had good support from the parent for that student to understand the consequences of bearing false witness!
What does all this say about the 9th Commandment? Well, these were children, and they have a developing consciousness. Some of the adults involved also had a developing consciousness, and at times so do we. Butterworth reports that the word “witness” actually comes from the old English word, witan, meaning “understanding,” “intelligence” and “wisdom.” It is related to the Hindu Scriptures or Vedas, and the root word is Vedanta which means “seeing” “knowing” or what we call consciousness. And that is where we want to hang out when we break open the 9th commandment. When we realize that Life is Consciousness, then it becomes crystal clear that we can’t really bear false witness. We really can’t, ultimately. How is that so?
Well, when we give our witness, our “wisdom”, it reveals who we are and where we are in consciousness. When we want to misdirect someone away from our error, then we are in fact revealing an awareness of our error, just like the teachers who wanted to focus on their credentials, not their behavior. You have to be aware of the “oops” in order to misdirect attention away from it. And that misdirection does nothing for our evolution of consciousness, nothing! It keeps us stuck. How do we get unstuck and what does that look like?
Well, let’s look at the deeper reality that the teacher who misdirected attention, also frequently said awful things about the kids and the kid’s behavior. The deeper reality here is that when you say these kinds of things about another, in reality you are saying them about yourself. Your subconscious mind does not know the difference. Every kid I talked to about the incident with that teacher said the teacher was mean and nasty…exactly what the teacher was saying about the kids. So what is the higher consciousness here? How do we get to a higher truth? How do we get to a consciousness that does not revert to self-deception?
The 10 Commandments are all “training wheels” for learning how to treat myself and how to treat each another. Self-deception is just as destructive as bearing false witness to another. My personal example is what they call “vanity sizing” in clothing these days. It is so far from reality that it is impossible to know by size if something will fit you or not. These days a women’s size 10 is actually a 12 or even a 14 from when I was in college. I wore a size 10 in college and I wear 10 today, and I KNOW I don’t weigh what I did in college. It is easy to buy into the deception because it feels good to see size 10 in the label. When I get on the scale at the doctor’s office it cuts right through the self-deception, however! Todd actually measured his 33 pants and discovered that they were 36, much to his dismay! That’s reality therapy and much needed in our culture these days.
So what we are going for here is a level of honesty within ourselves that calls for humility and a brutal candor, nothing less. When we are practicing this kind of honesty, then we will let go of judging ourselves and others harshly and realize that we are all lifelong students on the quest to see ourselves through eyes of honest compassion. Robert Burns, the Scottish poet laureate said it this way in his poem “To A Louse”:
O would some Power the gift ye give us
To see ourselves as others see us!
Burns is asking for some Power to give us this gift of seeing ourselves as others see us. He did not realize that we have that Power in our very own consciousness. It is the perfect pattern of the Christ, which we embody. Our life is a continual journey of discovery of the TRUTH of who we are and bringing our human self into alignment with our Christ-Self. When we are out of alignment, it casts a shadow of untruth.
When we recognize our shadow and admit and claim it, we come into alignment with our Christ consciousness and our light burns brighter. It is far easier to own our shadow that to defend it and try to explain it away. When we defend it, we move out of alignment and it just gets bigger and bigger. By now most of us have figured out that it is much easier to be upfront with the truth than to create a tangle of confusion with deception. After all, just because I can explain some dumb decision I made, doesn’t make it any less dumb and it doesn’t let me off the hook for it either. The real question is did I learn anything from it that will cause me to change my behavior in the future? Can I eat my humble pie with gratitude!
As Butterworth says in Breaking the Ten Commandments:
When we truly understand this process, we will keep ourselves humbly receptive to the divine flow. We will be true to ourselves in giving witness for the Christ pattern within. In this consciousness we will never be untrue to anyone else. We will be too big to belittle, too secure to be critical, and to humble to be boastful. This is why Jesus emphasized “love your neighbor,” for when you are loving you are living fully and receptively, you are in tune with God and in right relation with your fellow human beings. (P. 134)
We are all stewards of the Light of God and we have the responsibility to keep the Light trim and burning brightly as we let the Light of Truth shine in us and as us.
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb