All humans have the ability to choose to increase or decrease their awareness of themselves and their surroundings. Frequently, unintentional ignorance in the present is caused by willful ignorance in the past. Awareness cannot be partial. You cannot see much of anything while there are yet things you are unwilling to see. As you voluntarily turn away from your perception of yourself or the world, you decrease in your ability to see yourself, others, and the world accurately. When you do anything less than live up to reality as you sincerely perceive it, you damage your ability to remain as aware of reality as you presently are.
It is dishonest to ignore or reject the measure of reality you have the capacity to perceive and respond to. To the extent that you do not notice or respond to reality, you are not just being dishonest, you are also diminishing your awareness—something that carries the most serious and wide-ranging penalties. Essentially, the largest and leastoften identified consequences of dishonesty are actually consequences of reducing your awareness.
You can’t lie without reducing your awareness of the truth. Lying in one thing dims your vision in all things. When you ignore or reject reality in anything , you diminish your awareness of it in everything . Lies in specific situations will always rot your ability to see the truth in all situations. Even if the present effects seem negligible, the future effects will not be. Lying can even cause you to forget that you have lied, making it extremely difficult to correctly recognize the consequences of having done so.
Most people are so well-trained in subconsciously detecting feelings, thoughts, and actions that would cause them shame that they can ignore them before even consciously noticing them. Their normallyfunctioning awareness instantaneously darkens to the degree it needs to in order to avoid their glaring deviation from how they see themselves or would like to be seen, just as quickly as a welder’s mask darkens in the moment the arc begins. Unlike a welder’s mask, their awareness will not fully and instantly return after what they don’t want to see stops. People tend to willfully ignore what is unflattering often enough to render them progressively less capable of seeing everything about everything, not just what they do not want to see.