Dear Brothers and Sisters,

If you are honest to yourself, you will be honest to everyone else. Most liars are not honest to themselves. They lie to everyone and most of the time they don’t recognize that they are lying, because their lying is a reflex – they just do it without thinking about it.

A liar says, “I try to practice humility paramita every day,” but the truth is that he never practices; he just happened to read about humility paramita somewhere and started to boast. Probably he has told that lie to everybody hundreds of times, so the sentence has become a reflex, he wouldn’t think he was lying. People say: “When you lie about something for too long, you start to believe what you say is the truth.” I am not sure the liar believes his lie is the truth, but I am sure chronic liars usually don’t have a conscious thought about lying because their lying has become a reflex.

So, the test to measure your honesty, is a simple measuring method. Once in a while, when you say something to someone, ask yourself: “Did I just tell a lie?”

That is the test you administer to yourself and no one else knows about the test and its result. If you did tell someone a lie and you answer your test: “Yes, I just told a lie to that guy”. Then you are honest to yourself, and chances are you rarely tell lies. But if you answer the test: “That guy is a chronic liar, I shouldn’t be so naive with him,” or something of that nature, you are not honest to yourself and it means you lie to everyone often.

If you don’t check yourself often that way, there is no way for you to be honest to the world, because almost everyone, probably including you, lies as matter of reflex, without being conscious of their lying.

Wish you all be honest to yourself.

With compassion,

Hoành

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Trần Đình Hoành
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