Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot hear my word (‘bear to’ is not in the Greek). You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But, because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.” John 8:42-47
To speak is a sacred act. Our ability to speak comes directly from the I AM. The level of truth in our speech depends on whether it is influenced by the hindering spirits or by Christ. It is our love for Christ that makes our speech Right. - If God were your Father, you would love me.
It is through speech that we are able to reveal our inner being to others. The purity of such a revelation comes through a combination of Right View and Right Judgment. Revealing our inner being is not about telling people what we think of them, or worse, telling others what we think of someone who is not present. When we are able to reveal the purity of our being we demonstrate that we are the offspring of the father of truth not the father of lies.
Right Speech is intimately connected with truth and with freedom. While the father of lies influences us we cannot be free and we cannot love. Ahriman encourages us to speak before thoughts are fully formed. He lurks in the space between the thought and the word. To foil him we must pause long enough to create balance between our thinking, feeling and willing before we speak. This requires discipline and effort; will we speak before we test our words with the feeling for truth? Yes, often, we will speak too soon because we haven’t the strength of will to ensure that we have considered our thoughts fully? Or perhaps we may even lack the courage to speak at all. It is the industrious soul that creates the right balance.
Because lying is so pervasive in our modern culture, and the boundary between truth and lies is blurred, it rests on us to develop a love for truth, and an aversion to lies. Many people happily state that which is false, believing in all sincerity that what they say is true. We live with continual misrepresentation, from politicians, from marketers, from our friends and neighbours. Lies are regularly spoken to please others or to avert fear.
We are misled everyday by that which is false. We choose the largest box on the supermarket shelf only to find that it is half full. We are beguiled by the word NEW on a product that is not new at all. In this trust-less atmosphere people say, “After all, words are cheap” - the sacred is indeed profane.
Lying becomes more and more habitual. Lies breed more lies because once one is told, the next one is easier to tell. Then we begin to believe our lies. The hindering spirits lull us into thinking that it is ok to lie. Today it is pointless to tell a person that they have lied; they just say, “Whatever …”. Lucifer and Ahriman have joined forces. We become loose with the truth and at the same time passionate about it. Ahriman fathers our lies and Lucifer whips up our passion for the lie.
Right Speech depends on our awareness of the soul processes; of how words travel from our inner soul levels to our lips. Our speech is born out of the will levels in our soul. In the last reflection we followed the development of speech from our will, to our feeling and now speech arises out of thinking. It is when we let our speech arise out of thinking alone, when we don’t involve feeling and will, that we have the greatest opportunity to lie. Indeed, we can lie unconsciously. Lying is such an integral part of modern life that we have developed a science for lie detection.
Note also that lying isn’t always an intentional deception. We may say something that is ninety nine percent true, but that one percent that is untrue corrupts everything, like the one bad apple. If we can involve will and feeling in our thought-provoked speech then lying will be redundant. It is a simple fact that when we speak truth we create life. When we speak lies we kill. The father of lies “was a murderer from the beginning.”
If, every time we speak, we speak as if we were speaking to Christ, truth will set us free from the nasty snare of the father of lies.