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An argument for radical truthfulness goes deep: Lying takes you out of alignment with reality. This was Gandhi’s position, based on the insight that truth lies at the very heart of existence, of reality. A yogic text, the Taittiriya Upanishad, says that God is truth itself, while a Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, calls truth “the signet ring of God.” In psychological terms, lying disconnects us from reality and it always makes us a little bit crazy. Anyone who grew up in a family that kept secrets will recognize the eerie feeling of cognitive dissonance that arises when facts are concealed. That dissonance currently rages through the bloodstream of society; lies and secrets having become so embedded in our corporate, governmental, and personal lives that most of us assume that the president, the media, and our religious institutions are continually lying to us.

When the consequences of lying are so spiritually and socially destructive, why would an ethical person ever choose to tell an untruth? First, an ethical person might decide to lie if telling the factual truth would compromise other, equally important values. In the Mahabharata, the great ethical treatise of the Indian tradition, there is a famous moment involving a lie. Krishna is guiding the righteous Pandavas in a pivotal battle against the forces of evil. Krishna, who is considered by orthodox Hindus to embody divine truth in human form, orders the righteous king Yudhisthira to tell a lie in order to demoralize the enemy general. Yudhisthira agrees to tell the first lie of his life—that the general’s son, Aswatthama, has been killed in battle. Krishna’s position is that in a battle against terrible evil, one does what one must to win. (The position is similar to the Allied disinformation tactic in World War II, which misled the Nazi intelligence about the real target of D-day.) In short, Krishna makes the decision to lie because it serves what he perceives as higher values: those of justice and, ultimately, peace.

My college philosophy teacher used to make this point with a personal example. As a Jewish child living in Germany, she was saved from being captured by the Nazis because a Catholic family lied to the Gestapo about her presence in their back bedroom. For the family to have told the truth would have brought about her death. It was a small lie for a larger truth.

Another situation in which lying might be ethical is when the truth is simply too harsh for the person who is receiving it. A friend of mine, when diagnosed with breast cancer, told her 90-year-old mother that everything was fine, because she recognized that telling the truth about her condition would create too much anxiety for her already-fragile mother.

Conversely, there are times when telling a factual truth can be an act of disguised or overt aggression. When Fran tells her friend Allison that she saw Allison’s husband with another woman, Fran may be speaking out of concern for her friend, but she may also be expressing a hidden hostility or envy. Most of us can remember less dramatic but equally painful examples of bitter truth telling: disclosures made in anger, hurtful comments about a friend’s or partner’s secret vulnerabilities, revelations that destroy trust. In the past 30 years, especially in certain spiritual communities, there’s been a prevailing ethic that privileges full disclosure, public confession, and extreme transparency in relationships. The results have been liberating in some respects, destructive in others. So it seems vital that we each find our own way of balancing truthfulness with other values. One great yardstick to use is called “the four gates of speech,” which include the following questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? and Is this the right moment to say it? When we feel caught between speaking a bitter truth and keeping quiet, these questions help us sort out the priorities.

As I’ve said, balancing the relative value of, say, truth and kindness, is not always easy, and it requires a high degree of honesty—especially about your own deep inner motives. If the compulsion to be relentlessly honest sometimes conceals aggression, the decision to hide the truth because of kindness, or because the time is wrong, can be a cover for your fears or for the desire to stay inside of your comfort zone. Radical truth telling is simple. You just plunge in and do it, regardless of the effect it has on others. Discriminating truth telling demands far more attentiveness, emotional intelligence, and self-understanding.

As you begin to look at how you lie, it becomes possible to find out why you lie. My friend Alice is getting divorced and is facing a child-custody battle. Her lawyer suggested that she write a description of all the incidents in which her ex-husband had failed as a father and husband. She wrote a series of “He said, then I said” dialogues, highlighting the ways in which her husband had hurt her and their daughter. When Alice reread the document, she realized that she hadn’t included her own hurtful words and actions. Part of the reason she hadn’t was tactical: She wanted sole custody of their child. But another part of it was her need to feel justified about leaving her marriage. “Once I started to look deeper at these conversations, I could see that both of us were at fault. In fact, there were times I acted like a total bitch. I so much didn’t want to see myself that way that my memory would literally distort what happened.”

Alice was confronting what most of us would recognize as a particularly insidious form of untruth: the justifications, excuses, and blaming strategies that we use to avoid facing the gap between how we want to act and how we actually behave. For the postmodern, psychologically informed yogi, Patanjali’s vow to unconditional truth demands much more than a commitment to factual accuracy. It asks you to become transparent to yourself, to be willing to gaze unflinchingly, yet without bitterness or self-blame, at the parts of yourself that you are afraid to expose to scrutiny. Only when you’re willing to look at your areas of falseness can you discover the deepest possibilities of the practice of truth.

Here are the basics in the practice of truthfulness: Pay attention to factual truth. Notice and make a point of calling yourself on the urge to conceal embarrassing facts, make yourself look better, justify mistakes, or run away from confrontation. When you notice yourself telling an untruth, acknowledge that you did it. As much as possible, make a point of not saying anything you know to be untrue.

As you learn how to catch your own characteristic patterns of untruth—both inner and outer—you will also begin to notice that sometimes truths need to be spoken, and other times remaining silent is an acceptable alternative. In other words, your commitment to truthfulness comes to include an authentic and trustworthy capacity for discriminating speech. Truth is a genuine teacher. When you decide to follow where it leads—constantly asking questions such as, What is my motive for speaking? Is it kind and necessary to say this? If not now, how will I know that it’s right to say this?—the power of truth will show its subtleties as well as teach its wisdom. Patanjali says that through truthfulness we gain such a power that all our words turn out to be true. I don’t believe that he means we become alchemists, able to turn the base metal of lies into the gold of reality just through our words. Instead, I believe that he is actually talking about the power to speak from inspiration—to hold firmly to the truth that is not only factual, but that illuminates, that can be received, and that reflects the deeper state within the heart.

That’s the problem with infotainment media, says Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason. It has created a culture of passive, uninformed Americans accustomed to being spoon-fed their informaiton. At its most innocuous, infotainment is grossly over-simplified, occassionally inaccurate and often irrelevent “news” passed along to a less than vigilant public. At its most insidious, infotainment is the carrier of disinformation – partisan agenda maquerading as fact. It’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, the War on Terror. It’s the vague and ill-defined threat to our Democratic ideals.

But we know all of this. We know the story is bullshit, we wknow the network is owned. We know that every second of soft-interest celebrity update peddled to us with the manic urgency of breaking news is a fallen soldier unrecognized, a humanitarian crisis ignored. We know that We Were Lie To. But still, we come back for more.

Why?

Jacoby’s argument – explicated in the book with frightening historical support – contends that since the time of our nations inception, we have become steadily more divorced from the process of reason. Citing factors such as the rise of religious fundamentalism, the decline of educational standards and our growing technological dependence, Jacoby argues that, as a nation, we have become not only dumb, but increasingly incapable of rational thought. Six out of ten adults can’t find Iraq on a map, but we fail to see how that’s a problem. Fewer Americans are learning foreign languages because more and more of us don’t believe that it’s necessary. Our collective standards for knowledge have become frighteningly low. Our expectations of each other and ourselves, increasingly slight. And with each generation born into the ever-darkening age of unreason, we move further from the enlightened ideals out of which this country was born.

But Jacoby’s arguments, no matter how fresh, how sound, how meticulously researched, are all-too easy to forget. That failure isn’t hers, it’s ours. Jacoby offers perspective – a map charting the paths that have brought us here. It’s a tool designed to help us understand the past. But history offers nothing if we’re unable to understand ourselves in relation to it. Every shrug, every mindless utterance of baseless fact – every time we roll our eyes at the depraved state of media but continue to watch – we contribute. We look around and see the problem. We sadly shake our heads. And then we go about our lives. We are the reason behind unreason.

Yoga practice is meant to teach us how to untangle inner knots. Often, you don’t realize how much difference your practice has made until the day that you find yourself dealing with a crisis without going into an absolute meltdown.

Tapas literally means “heat” the inner heat created as we undergo discipline or hardship for the sake of change. When we understand tapas, any hardship can be seen as a purifying fire, removing veils from our awareness. Laura’s intense, painstaking effort to rehabilitate her brain was a tapas that actually purified her mind. In fact, for a yogi, any effort can be reframed as tapas. My friend Scott kept it together through years of working with a difficult boss by telling himself that he was doing tapas. He figured that each moment of forbearance was helping purify and dissolve his tendencies toward impatience and anger. Understanding the concept of tapas as purification has taken many a worldly yogi through challenging situations that can be as mundane as surviving a 14-hour plane ride or as primal as a serious illness or the death of a parent.

Asana practice offers basic training in tapas: You are emotionally strengthened each time you make the physical effort to stay in a pose while your legs burn. Meditation and mindfulness practice teach us to sit through boredom, mental restlessness, and emotional upheavals. Another form of tapas is the effort we make to practice kindness and nonviolence and to tell the truth. But during hard times, tapas often means pure endurance hanging tight when fear, sadness, and frustration threaten to send us into a tailspin. Doing this kind of tapas, we actually become heirs to the great spiritual practitioners who experienced long periods of difficulty, doubt, and darkness, figures like St. John of the Cross, Ramakrishna, and Bodhidharma especially if, like them, we also remember to practice self-study and surrender.

As with his other pieces, he is looking for a deeper level of engagement between art and audience. In “This Is New,” museum attendancts read newspaper headlines and visitor responses determine the continuation of the work. In “This Success/This Failure,” young children pull passersby into an empty room to play. In “The Situation,” Seghal is asking the audience to consider larger issues along with the players, while expressing his discomfort with our culture’s love affair with consumption and his impatience with the conventional search for political solutions.

“The big new task of my generation is, how can we morally defend our lifestyle, which will not be possible for future generations,” he says. “A political solution won’t do it.”

“The food and transport industries say the issue is more complicated. The debate has put some companies on the defensive, including Tesco, Britain’s largest supermarket chain, known as a vocal promoter of green initiatives.”

“Some of those companies say that they are working to limit greenhouse gases produced by their businesses but that the question is how to do it. They oppose regulation and new taxes and, partly in an effort to head them off, are advocating consumer education instead.”

“Tesco, for instance, is introducing a labeling system that will let consumers assess a product’s carbon footprint.”

“Mr. Datson of Tesco acknowledged that there were environmental consequences to the increased distances food travels, but he said his company was merely responding to consumer appetites. “The offer and range has been growing because our customers want things like snap peas year round,” Mr. Datson said. “We don’t see our job as consumer choice editing.””

It’s nothing new to say that men and women can fundamentally misunderstand each other’s needs, but it may be interesting to begin mapping out a new territory for marriage, especially if marriage is to survive beyond children and mortgages and sleek waistlines.

Is it any surprise to you that, according to a recent piece in The Globe and Mail, the majority of divorces above the age of 40 are initiated by women?

Is it any surprise to you that marriage is one factor that statisticians say has proven to increase our life spans? Just as we spurn it, we discover it’s the best thing for us.

As more and more people separate, choose to live alone, or decide not to be married in the first place, marriage becomes the exception not the norm.

Traditional gender roles have changed but many couples are still confused because they don’t know what the new rules are. What does he do? What does she do? Who decides about the position of the toilet seat? How do we find the right balance between our own needs and the needs of our partner?

Baby-boomers are not only facing retirement surrounded by issues such as “the meaning of my life” and the “legacy of my life,” but they also have to pay for the Darn Good Life, and we all know it ain’t cheap.

When people feel a lump on their body, they see a doctor as soon as possible. When people sleep next to what they think is a lump, they’ll wait five, ten, maybe 25 years to do something.

It’s important to have a daily meditation practice, to have a developing ability to see thoughts clearly, and to reside in our bodily experience. But having deep experiences during meditation is not enough. If we want to know how we’re doing in our practice, we have to examine our life. Unless we begin to connect it with the rest of our life, our practice—however strong, calm, or enjoyable—ultimately will not be satisfying.

The real measure of practice is whether, little by little, we can find our edge, that place where we’re closed down in fear, and allow ourselves to experience it. This takes courage, but courage isn’t about becoming fearless. Courage is the willingness to experience our fears. And as we experience our fears, courage grows. Noticing our edge and trying to meet it also allows us to develop compassion, not just for ourselves but for the whole human drama. Then, with an increasing sense of lightness and curiosity, we can keep moving toward a more open and genuine life.

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