Honesty With Yourself

Everyone can appreciate the importance of honesty for all practical reasons and yet it is often hard to be honest with our own self. It is seldom that we like to think of our weaknesses, tendencies, addictions, etc. Usually, we tend to go through all measures to provide rationalizations for our actions and justifications for our beliefs. For example, when we get angry, typically, the first thought is to find fault with the other party and justify our anger.

Why? Because we want to feel that we are doing the right thing; we want to preserve a certain self image of ourselves and take pride in living up to the image that we have created for ourselves. Does this make sense, though? First we create an image of ourselves and then we go through all troubles to live up to the image. Furthermore, once we have created this self-portrait, we expend our energies in projecting it onto others. Rather than thinking about why we have attached this unnecessary image to our existence, we become distracted with projecting that self-image. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to not only understand our faults, but to find them in the first place.

Being dishonest with oneself is a big hurdle to cross. At the root of this problem is the exaggerated importance that we place on our own self-image. During meditation, when we work diligently to free ourselves from this image, the ensuing honesty and humility allows us to clearly see the naiveté of our faults and gradually overcome them.