A better understanding of how awareness expands and contracts is required in order to more fully understand the damage dishonesty causes. It is impossible to retain the same degree of awareness over time, as awareness is always growing or diminishing. Awareness increases when you attend and best respond to the information available to you, and decreases when you ignore, reject, or otherwise inadequately respond to the information available to you.
Dishonesty is one of several forms of awareness-shrinking response to information. You can’t lie without decreasing your ability to calculate what is best. To seek anything but what has the most value is dishonest because it creates a disconnect between what you believe to be the most valuable and what you most desire.
Dishonesty reduces love for the truth. Only an honest person can fully derive the value of truth, which requires living it completely. As long as you remain misaligned from the truth, you will lack the motivation to undertake the costs to obtain what is of greater value:
Behold, ye trust in lying words, that cannot profit. (Jeremiah 7:8)
We expand our awareness through perceiving more of what we sense and living up to all we perceive. As sentient beings, we are constantly exposed to information from within and without that registers across the many senses. However, what you sense is not the same as what you perceive. You can think, feel, see, hear, taste, or do something without noticing or acknowledging it. To perceive something requires you to first pay attention to it. While sensations can come to you involuntarily, your attention requires your choice. As you choose to actively attend to your senses to a greater degree than you have before, you will find yourself with much more information than you previously had.
“Living up to what you perceive” is a shorthand phrase that refers to sincerely integrating all new information available into the information you already have. Living up to your perception is about changing your thoughts, feelings, and actions as needed to align yourself with the best outcomes according to your new understanding of reality.
The strength of your preference for greater value will determine how much of it you obtain. Turning away from value harms your ability to detect value. Your ability to estimate value is dependent on what you look for. To the extent that you do not prefer what is most valuable, you will not see what is most valuable. To the extent that you do not seek what is best, you will not see what is best. Your ability to perceive the value of what is valuable will degrade according to the frequency and intensity of the lies you live.
Your efforts to obtain value will determine how much of it you obtain. What is better always comes through what you presently perceive as best. All dishonesty deviates you from the best path possible given your present understanding. To deviate from the best path presently possible is to deviate from all better paths, all of which are accessible only through the gate of the best you presently know. You can’t act against your idea of what is best without doing more damage than alignment with it would bring. When you lie, whatever you encounter will be less than the best reality has to offer for those who intentionally aim for the ideal. Dishonesty always carries a higher cost than the truth.
Though most have not heard about it, the need to attend to sensed reality is something that secular thinkers have spoken about. Less often spoken of is the need to live up to what you perceive in order to perceive more. For now, the religious domain seems to be the principle source of information about the need to live up to what you already sense in order to sense more.