There is a phrase — four words in Sanskrit — that, if truly heard, not as sound nor as concept, but as what it is, would dismantle the entire structure by which the human being lives. The structure of “I” and “other.” Of “inside” and “outside.” Of “sacred” and “profane.” Of “God” and “world.” Of “I” and “Brahman.”

Everything would be dismantled. Not by effort, but by clarity. Not by negation, but by vision. Not by destruction, but by recognition.

The phrase is:

Sarvam khalvidam brahma.

“All this is, indeed, Brahman.”

One of the simplest declarations of the Upaniṣads — and, like the simplest, the most ignored. When read, it seems too obvious, too “pantheistic,” too “everything is God.” It seems like a slogan, not a teaching. But simplicity is the obstacle: the mind expects complexity and finds clarity, and clarity is what it can least process.

The phrase does not say “all this belongs to Brahman.” It does not say “comes from Brahman,” nor “is created by Brahman,” nor “resembles Brahman.” It says “is.”

All this — sarvam idam — is — khalu — Brahman.

“All this”: what is here, now, before the eyes. What you see, touch, live, is. “Is”: not “will be,” not “could be,” not “should be.” Present. Now. “Brahman”: the ground, consciousness, being — that which sustains everything and is everything.

The copula, the “is,” is the most radical word in the phrase. Not the metaphor: the “is.” Not the analogy: the “is.” The “is” that unites without separating, that identifies without confusing, that declares without proving.

And when this “is” is recognized, everything changes — not the world, but the vision of the world; not the experience, but the relationship with it. Because if all this is Brahman, nothing is “profane” in an absolute sense, nothing is “outside God,” nothing is separate from the ground. The stone is Brahman. The river is Brahman. The body, the mind, the thought, the pain, the pleasure, birth, death, time, space — everything, without exception, is Brahman.

I. Where the Phrase Was Born

It was not born in a temple, nor on a mountain, nor in a retreat. It was born from the teaching of Śāṇḍilya. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad, 3.14.1, after all investigations, after all layers are removed, declares: Sarvam khalvidam brahma.

And, as always in the Upaniṣads, the declaration does not come as the conclusion of reasoning — it does not come as “therefore, we have reached X.” It comes as vision: what remains when the layers are removed, what shines when the veils become transparent.

II. The “All” the Mind Cannot Process

Begin with “all.” Sarvam: all. Not “almost all,” not “most of it,” not “the sacred.” All.

The mind, when it hears “all,” hesitates — because “all” includes what it does not want to include. It includes the stone and the trash, the mosquito and the cancer, the war and the famine, the most absurd and unjust suffering that exists. “All this is Brahman” includes all this? Yes. And it is here that the mind locks, that morality protests: “evil cannot be Brahman, injustice cannot be Brahman.”

But the investigation must be honest, without concession. The phrase does not say “evil is good,” nor “pain is pleasure,” nor “injustice is justice.” It says “all this is Brahman” — not as moral judgment, but as ontological declaration. Not as approval, but as recognition.

The sun illuminates the palace and the prison. It does not “approve” the prison, does not justify it, does not make it good. It illuminates. Simply illuminates. Thus, the ground sustains pleasure and pain without approving either — it simply sustains them.

And when “all” is accepted without filters, the absolute separation between sacred and profane dissolves. There is no domain called “profane,” an “outside of God.” But “sacred,” here, does not mean moral value nor goodness: it means that nothing has an independent reality outside of Brahman. Everything is manifestation, expression, dependent appearance. And appearance, as the tradition of māyā teaches, is not a second real: it is mithyā — dependent, without its own substance, incapable of subsisting separate from Brahman.

III. The “Is” That Is Not Metaphor

Even the smallest word in the phrase deserves the deepest investigation. Khalu gives emphasis: it declares, it identifies. Not “is like,” not “resembles,” not “is a reflection of.” “Is.”

It is what Advaita calls a-dvaita, non-duality. Not “two that are one,” but “there are not two.” Not “two things that merge,” but “there were never two things.” The gold and the ring are not two that are one: they are gold in the form of a ring. The water and the wave are not two that are one: they are water in the form of a wave. Brahman and the world are not two that unite — the world has no independent reality from Brahman; it is dependent appearance, mithyā, and not a second substance.

The “is” does not declare similarity. It declares that the being of the world is none other than Brahman. It simply is. Without mediation, without distance, without analogy.

IV. The Stone, the Mosquito, the Thought

The disciple, who has investigated the seed, the water, the river, and the fire, asks:

— Master, is the stone Brahman? But the stone does not think, does not feel, does not live. How can it be Brahman?

— Because Brahman is not reduced to thought, feeling, or life. Brahman is the ground that allows thought, feeling, and life to appear — and that equally sustains the stone. On the empirical plane, the stone exists, occupies space, has mass, has history: all of this is real on the conventional plane. On the ultimate plane, it has no separate existence from Brahman. The stone is Brahman in the form of a stone — and the form is not a second substance, but the appearance arising through ignorance.

— But the stone is “less” than the human being, less than consciousness.

— No. The stone is not “less”: it is different. The sun illuminates the stone and the human being with the same light — not “less” in the stone, different in the stone. Brahman, at the ground, has no “more” or “less,” no “superior” or “inferior.” It is the same in everything: in the stone and in the human, in thought and in silence, in life and in death. Not as empirical equality, but as ultimate identity.

The disciple then asks about what disturbs:

— And the mosquito that bites me, that transmits disease, that causes suffering?

— The mosquito is Brahman in the form of a mosquito. As the Chāndogya shows regarding food, it is earth that became larva that became mosquito — the same earth that became grain, body, human being. The substance, on the empirical plane, is the same; the form is different. And the suffering it causes is not “of Brahman” as approval: the bite hurts as experience, real on the empirical plane; “this is unjust,” “this should not be” is the narrative the “I” adds. Pain is experience; the narrative is construction.

Finally, the disciple investigates what is closest:

— And the thought that arises now? It changes, arises and passes. How can it be Brahman, which does not change?

— The thought changes as the wave changes. The wave arises and passes, but the water, which is the wave, does not change in its being. The ground is not “behind” the thought as a second thing: it appears as thought, without thereby changing. All this — the thought, the emotion, the perception, the memory — is Brahman. Not as metaphor: as identity.

— Then this instant of consciousness, now, is Brahman? It always was? It always will be?

— It always was. It always will be.

And the disciple, for the first time, asks no more. Because what was “content” revealed itself as ground; what was “distinct from me” revealed itself as what I am at the core.

V. What the Phrase Does Not Say

The investigation must be honest, without concession: there is what the phrase does not say.

It does not say “all this is good.” “All this is Brahman” is not moral evaluation. Suffering is Brahman, but it is not “good”; war is Brahman, but it is not “just”; death is Brahman, but it is not “desirable.”

It does not say “all this must be accepted.” It is not resignation nor passivity. The sage who recognizes that everything is Brahman acts — with clarity, with discernment, with compassion. And when everything is recognized as Brahman, compassion is not a moral duty imposed from outside that recognition: it is what remains when the separation between “I” and “other” ceases — the suffering of the other recognized as Brahman suffering as another.

It does not say “all this is the same thing.” The stone and the human being are Brahman, but they are not the same form; thought and silence are Brahman, but they are not the same expression. Non-duality does not destroy empirical difference: it recognizes the ground without denying the form, it recognizes Brahman in experience without canceling experience.

VI. What Happens When the Phrase Is Heard

The third millennium — with its networks, its algorithms, its feeds, its fears — lives as if there were “Brahman” and “non-Brahman,” “sacred” and “profane,” “important” and “trivial.” When the phrase is heard, this absolute separation dissolves. Not the world: the separation. Not the experience: the belief that it is “outside Brahman.”

When you open your phone and see the feed, the feed is Brahman — which does not mean it is infallible or morally good, but that there is no separate domain from the real. When you feel anxiety, the anxiety is Brahman: not “approved,” but sustained; not “good,” but dependent manifestation. When you eat, the food; when you sleep, the sleep; when you die, death. Everything, without filter, is Brahman.

And what happens, when the separation dissolves, is not indifference nor apathy nor nihilism. It is what the Aṣṭāvakragītā calls lightness: the lightness of one who no longer needs to separate, judge, protect the “I” from the “other.” Because there is no absolute “other,” there is no “outside,” there is no “separate.” There is only Brahman — being everything, being this, being you in the deepest sense, not in the sense of the ego.

VII. The Phrase the Ego Cannot Process

If all this is Brahman, then the “I” is not outside Brahman. Not “the I contains Brahman,” not “the I reflects Brahman”: the “I” is dependent appearance of Brahman, without being independent of it.

But as the essay on Aham Brahmāsmi showed, the ego cannot say this as possession. The “I” that proclaims “I am Brahman” and identifies with Brahman makes the identity an appropriation: it is the “I” crowning itself, the center becoming the protagonist.

When the phrase is heard not as “I am Brahman,” but as “all this is Brahman,” the “I” ceases to be the center. Everything — including the “I,” including the “other,” including the very separation between them — is Brahman. And the “I,” recognized as not separate from the ground, neither inflates nor crowns itself.

It dissolves. Not as destruction, but as transparency. And through that transparency, all this: Brahman. Always Brahman.

Epilogue. All This

Sarvam khalvidam brahma. All this is Brahman.

Not “all that,” but “all this.” Not what exists in some remote place, but what is here. Not what will happen, but what is happening now. What you read, think, and feel, is.

All this. Is Brahman. Not “will be”: is. Not “could be”: is. Now, in this instant, always now.

The Chāndogya Upaniṣad declared, millennia ago, the simplest and most complete phrase. And, for millennia, it has not changed, did not need to change — because it is not just a declaration about reality: it is reality declaring itself in the language of human beings.

What is, is not separate from you at the core.

Sarvam khalvidam brahma.

OM. Śāntiḥ. Śāntiḥ. Śāntiḥ.

Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma was originally published in New Earth Consciousness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are stories that spread like wildfire in a dry field, and the one about the Planetary Transition is one of them. It reached us through many mouths, in many versions, mixing spiritual channelings, contemporary texts, ancient traditions reread in light of the present, and predictions that ask to be taken seriously. Some speak of a profound shift in collective consciousness. Others speak of days of literal, physical darkness, covering the sky like a cloth over a window. Still others speak of an event that would separate the before and after of human history, as if the entire planet were waiting for a date. None of these versions is unique or consensual. They coexist, contradict each other, copy each other, reinterpret each other, and together form a field of ideas that has already become part of the cultural landscape in which we live. Many people embrace this narrative as a symbol of inner and collective transformation, and there is a legitimate search for meaning, for hope, for direction in this. What is proposed here is not to disrespect this search. It is to look at it with clarity, and with the question that rarely accompanies prophecies: is what we are being told a fact, or is it a construction that generates insecurity and fear?

Let us begin with the most widely discussed aspect, the one that circulates most and frightens most: the idea of three days of darkness. In some currents, it is a spiritual phenomenon, a collective purification, an interval of necessary darkness before a new era. In others, it is an almost physical description of what would happen to the planet, an interruption of light as we know it. There is no consensus on what exactly would happen, nor on when, nor on why. What there is, is repetition, and repetition has its own effect: what is heard many times begins to seem true, not because it has gained evidence, but because it has gained familiarity. Repetition is not proof. Familiarity is not fact. And recognizing this is not a lack of faith — it is care for one’s own mind.

Because there is a practical, almost banal question that is usually forgotten amid the astonishment: what can actually cause darkness? And the answer, when we look carefully, does not come from prophecies. It comes from the fragility of the world we have built. A collapse in energy grids, the interruption of satellites, the cutting of communication systems, and an entire city plunges into silence and darkness without any mystery having occurred. Submarine cables that cross oceans and sustain the global internet are physical objects, made of copper and glass and plastic, and can be cut by anchors, by earthquakes, by sabotage. Power plants and transmission lines are human works, and human works fail. Add to this the possibility of accidents or conflicts involving nuclear technology, or extreme natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions capable of releasing ash into the atmosphere, or intense solar storms capable of burning transformers and wiping out continental electrical grids, and the scenario of darkness ceases to be a prophecy. It becomes a known risk, studied, mapped by engineers and climatologists. Darkness does not need to come from the sky as punishment or promise. It can be a consequence of our own actions and the vulnerability of what we have built. And this is no less serious than a prophecy. It is, perhaps, even more important to care for, because it is real, because it is now, and because it depends on us.

None of these phenomena, however, amounts to the three days of total darkness described in the prophecies.

Now the uncomfortable question: why do stories like this spread so fast? Why does the prophesied darkness travel faster than the documented darkness? The answer has to do with the time we live in. In moments of uncertainty, the human mind seeks explanations for what it does not control, and a frightening explanation can seem preferable to the absence of explanation, because at least it offers a map, a script, a place to put the anxiety. Fear, when sold as certainty, has a curious and treacherous effect: it paralyzes. It generates unnecessary anxiety, diverts attention from the real problems that need to be solved, and turns energy that could become action into waiting. Those who fear the end of the world forget to take care of the neighborhood. Those who wait for the darkness of the three days forget to check if they have candles at home, if they know their neighbors, if they know what to do if the power goes out because of a storm. To question, to investigate, to ask for evidence before accepting a claim — this is not coldness and it is not a lack of spirituality. It is responsibility toward oneself and toward others.

And it is here that the conversation changes tone, because there is a question behind all these narratives, a question that the tales about darkness and transition only touch in passing, but which deserves to be brought to the center. If darkness covers the sky, what exactly would be left in the dark? The body, without doubt. The body can be affected by any event, by any accident, by any darkness. This is fact, this is solid ground, and no one needs faith to accept it.

But then comes the oldest question of all, and it is necessary to state clearly what we are doing when we ask it. Until now, we have walked on empirical ground: vulnerable infrastructure, documented risks, observable psychological mechanisms. The step that follows belongs to another territory. It is not a conclusion of physics, nor of biology, nor of any experiment. It is the metaphysical understanding of an ancient wisdom tradition, the one that holds that consciousness is not a product of the body, but the background in which the body and the world appear. Call it intuition, vision, contemplative investigation: what cannot be done is to present it as if it were a datum of the same kind as the fragility of a submarine cable. One thing is demonstrated in the laboratory. Another is contemplated. And a text that questions assertions without evidence has the obligation to declare when it leaves the laboratory and enters the temple.

Within this understanding, therefore, and not as proof of anything, the question is this: that which observes, that which feels, that which knows it is reading these words now — this is not born with the body and does not die with it. The body is born, transforms, departs, and this is natural, it is the course of things, and no apocalyptic narrative is needed for it to be true. But that which witnesses all this, says this tradition, is prior to form and independent of it. As it is read in one of its most ancient texts: there was never a time when you did not exist, nor will there be a time when you will cease to exist. It is not a result of measurement. It is the testimony of those who contemplated.

If this intuition is true, and not just another narrative among others, then the question completely changes shape. It is no longer: how to escape the darkness? It is: what is there to fear? If consciousness cannot be reduced to the body, no planetary event can touch what you ultimately are. Darkness may cover the sky, but it does not extinguish the light that witnesses the sky. The three days of darkness, if they come, will come and pass. Solar storms, if they come, will come and pass. Grids will fall and be rebuilt. Bodies will be born and depart. And what you are, if this investigation is right, was never at risk.

Perhaps the true transition is not something that happens to the planet. Perhaps it is something that happens within us, when we stop fearing the end and begin to live with clarity, presence, and love while we are here. The narrative of the Planetary Transition may or may not be a metaphor. But it should not be a reason to live in fear. The real risks exist, and they deserve our attention, and they are human problems we can face together: caring for the planet, for peace, for technology with responsibility, and for the relationships between us. This is the part that depends on us, and it is quite a lot.

The last word is yours. If there is truth in what this tradition contemplates, you are not the body that one day departs; you are that which is. So live here and now with fullness, for while form comes and goes, the being you are simply is.

OM Tat Sat

“Trust is not an abstraction: it is a fabric woven day by day, word by word, gesture by gesture — and it can be torn by a single false word.”

From the fragility of trust to the depth of betrayal: an exploration of how lying damages the most intimate bonds — family, friendship, and love — and whether broken trust can ever be rebuilt.

In the previous chapter, we followed lying into its most intimate refuge — the inner life of the individual, where it manifests as self-deception, denial, idealization, and rationalization. We saw how lying to oneself compromises consciousness, fragments identity, and multiplies into chains that gradually imprison the liar himself. But lying, as we have already had occasion to observe, is not a solitary phenomenon. It is completed in the encounter with the other — it is in the interpersonal relationship that falsehood finds its recipient, and it is in this encounter that its effects become most visible, most concrete, and, frequently, most painful.

Because it is in relationships — in families, in friendships, in loves, in partnerships of every kind — that trust becomes living matter. Trust is not an abstraction: it is a fabric woven day by day, word by word, gesture by gesture, and it can be torn by a single false word. Lying in interpersonal relationships is not merely an abstract moral violation: it is a concrete aggression against something that was built with time, with care, with mutual exposure. That is why the betrayal of trust — when discovered — hurts so much: because what is lost is not only the credibility of a statement, but the security of a presence.

I. Trust as the foundation of coexistence

Before examining lying in relationships, it is necessary to pause on what it damages: trust. Trust is, we might say, the air that human relationships breathe — invisible, indispensable, and powerfully noticed only when it is lacking.

We live surrounded by trust. We leave home trusting that drivers will respect the red light. We entrust our bodies to a surgeon trusting that he has been honest about its risks. We deposit our money in an institution trusting that it will return it when requested. We tell a secret to a friend trusting that he will keep it. In all these cases, trust is not a certainty: it is a bet — an act of faith, so to speak, in the word, the competence, or the integrity of the other. And it is precisely this dimension of a bet that makes trust so valuable and so vulnerable: because to trust is to risk, and whoever trusts and is betrayed not only loses the bet — they lose the disposition to bet again.

Trust in interpersonal relationships has a particular nature. Different from the trust we place in impersonal systems — the bank, the hospital, the State — trust in personal relationships is built from shared experiences, revealed vulnerabilities, and kept promises. It is, therefore, deeper and more fragile than institutional trust. When a bank deceives us, we feel indignation; when a friend deceives us, we feel a wound. The difference is not merely one of degree — it is one of nature. Because in the interpersonal relationship, trust is not only functional: it is affective. It involves not only the expectation that the other will act in a certain way, but the belief that the other knows us, respects us, and values us enough not to falsify us.

It is in this context that lying acquires its most painful weight. When someone we trusted lies to us, the immediate damage is not the falsehood itself — it is the shaking of our capacity to trust. The betrayed person not only discovers that a certain statement was false: they discover that their trust was exploited, that their vulnerability was used against them, that what they considered safe was illusory. And this shaking, once suffered, is not easily repaired. Lost trust is like lost innocence: one can rebuild something in its place, but it will never be identical to what was there before.

II. Lying and affection: when lying destroys bonds

The deepest human relationships — those involving love, friendship, familiarity — are, paradoxically, the most vulnerable to lying. Not because they are weaker, but because they are more exposed. The more intimate a relationship is, the greater the quantity of oneself that is handed over to the other — and, therefore, the greater the surface that can be wounded. Lying between strangers is an inconvenience; lying between people who love each other is a catastrophe.

Affection — the disposition to care for the other, to want their good, to share their life — is the substance of deep relationships. And affection, to develop, needs a terrain that only truth can provide: the terrain of genuine mutual knowledge. When I love someone, I want to be known by that someone — not the embellished version, not the facade, not the character I created to please, but the real person, with their qualities and defects, with their strengths and fragilities. And I want to know, reciprocally, the real person — not the idealization, not the projection, not the fantasy. Truth is, in this sense, the food of genuine affection. Without it, affection feeds on illusion — and affection fed on illusion, however intense it may be, is fragile: it is one true piece of data away from collapsing.

Lying corrodes this terrain. When I discover that someone I love lied to me — not about a trivial detail, but about something that matters, something that affects my perception of that person and of our relationship — what is shaken is not only my trust in that specific statement: it is my trust in the entire relationship. Because if they lied to me about this, what else could be false? What other truths were hidden? What other promises were empty? Lying, once discovered, casts a retrospective light over the entire shared history — and this light reveals, with cruelty, that what we considered solid may have been built on sand.

It is important to note that this destruction does not depend on the objective gravity of the lie. A relatively small lie — an omission, a half-truth, a fabricated detail — can cause a shaking disproportionate to its factual dimension, because what is at stake is not the content of the lie, but the act of lying. The question the betrayed person asks themselves is not “what was hidden?”, but “why did they hide it from me?” And this question, unlike the first, does not find an answer in factuality — it is found in the terrain of meaning, intention, and respect. Because lying to someone is, at bottom, an implicit declaration: “I do not trust you enough to tell you the truth,” or “I judge that you are not capable of bearing reality,” or “I prefer my comfort to our relationship.” Whatever the implicit message, it is a wound — and the wound, when it is located in affection, heals slowly and leaves a scar.

III. Lying in families, friendships, and love

The family — the first school of coexistence, the first laboratory of trust, and the first battlefield of truth — is, perhaps, the terrain where lying causes its most lasting effects. And this is for a simple reason: in the family, relationships are not chosen. We do not choose our parents, our siblings, our children. We are bound to one another by ties we cannot untie — and this inevitability confers upon family lying a specific weight: there is no option to simply leave, to start over with another interlocutor, to forget and move on. Lying in the family remains — like a foreign body in the tissue of relationships — and needs to be, sooner or later, faced.

Family secrets are one of the most common and corrosive forms of lying in the domestic sphere. Hidden paternity, unmentioned illness, the past swept under the rug, the history rewritten for the children. These secrets rarely arise from malice: they arise, most of the time, from the desire to protect — to protect children from truths they are judged unable to bear, to protect the family from external judgments, to protect oneself from shame. But protection has a price, and this price is always paid with interest: because secrets, sooner or later, come to light — and when they do, the damage is always greater than the truth told at the right time would have been. The child who discovers, in adulthood, that their family history was a fabrication, not only deals with the shock of the discovery: they deal with the perception that they lived in a lie, that the people they trusted most chose to deceive them, and that their own identity — built upon narratives that turn out to be false — needs to be remade.

In friendships, lying operates differently, but no less harmfully. Friendship, unlike family, is a chosen relationship — and it is precisely this voluntariness that confers upon friendly trust a particularly precious character. When I say to a friend “I trust you,” I am saying something I cannot say to a relative out of mere duty: I am saying that I choose, freely and voluntarily, to deposit in you something of value. Lying, in this context, not only betrays trust: it betrays the choice. The betrayed friend not only loses trust in the one who deceived them — they lose, to a certain extent, trust in their own capacity to choose well. “If I was wrong about him, what else could I be wrong about?”

In romantic love, lying takes on even more intense — and more complex — contours. Love, by its very nature, involves a reciprocal exposure unparalleled in any other form of relationship: whoever loves surrenders, shows themselves, lays themselves bare in a way they would with no one else. And it is precisely this surrender that makes lying in love so devastating: because what is betrayed is not only the trust of just any interlocutor, but the trust of someone who surrendered — who showed themselves vulnerable, who offered themselves without reserve.

Lying in love takes various forms. There is lying about the past — the secrets kept to avoid revealing a history one fears the other will not accept. There is lying about the present — the daily truths omitted to keep the peace, the dissatisfactions silenced to avoid conflicts, the encounters and meetings hidden. There is lying about oneself — the persona built to be more attractive, more interesting, more deserving of the other’s love. And there is, finally, lying by omission — the silence about what matters, the reserve about what should be shared, the retreat from the truth that could strengthen the relationship, but which demands a courage the liar, at that moment, does not possess.

In all these cases, the mechanics are similar: lying creates a distance — a shadow zone between two people who should, in principle, be closer to each other than to anyone else in the world. And this distance, the longer it lasts, the more difficult it becomes to cross. The couple that, over the years, accumulates omissions, half-truths, and significant silences may reach a point where both, although sharing the same table and the same bed, inhabit distinct realities — each with their version of the common history, each with their narrative, each with their secrets. And the saddest thing is that, often, this distance is felt as a lack of connection, as a cooling of love, as a mysterious longing for what is gone — when in truth it is the cumulative effect of all the truths that were not spoken.

IV. Silence and omission as forms of lying

In Chapter 1, we distinguished lying proper from omission — and we saw that the boundary between the two is, frequently, difficult to draw. In the terrain of interpersonal relationships, this difficulty becomes even more acute, because it is in this terrain that omission finds its most seductive justifications and its most corrosive effects.

Silence, in relationships, is not neutral. Keeping silent can be prudent, it can be respectful, it can be necessary — but it can also be a form of falsehood. The question is not whether silence is always lying — it is not — but under what circumstances silence becomes a betrayal of trust. And the answer depends, fundamentally, on three factors: what is silenced, why it is silenced, and to whom it is silenced.

The first factor is content. Not all silence is omissive: there are things that do not need to be said, details that do not matter, intimate thoughts that have no reason to be shared. The right to privacy is legitimate, and no one is obliged to make transparent every thought, every feeling, every experience. Omission becomes problematic when it falls upon something the other has a reasonable interest in knowing — when it affects decisions the other needs to make, when it compromises the image the other has of the relationship, when it violates tacit or explicit agreements of loyalty and transparency.

The second factor is motivation. To omit out of prudence — because the moment is not adequate, because the other is not in a condition to receive the truth, because one seeks a better opportunity to communicate — is very different from omitting out of convenience — because one fears the other’s reaction, because one wants to avoid a conflict, because one protects one’s own comfort. Prudence aims at the good of the other; convenience aims at the good of the liar. And although the distinction is not always clear — because human motivations are rarely pure — the question “why am I keeping silent?” is one of the most important one can ask in a relationship.

The third factor is the recipient. To omit information from a work colleague is one thing; to omit it from a spouse, another. The degree of intimacy, commitment, and mutual exposure that exists in a relationship determines what can reasonably be silenced and what must necessarily be revealed. In intimacy, silence about what matters is almost always a form of distancing — a refusal to share, a door that closes, a concession to loneliness within companionship.

There is, moreover, a particularly insidious form of omission in relationships that deserves mention: affective omission. It is not about silencing facts or information, but about silencing feelings. The spouse who never says “I love you” — not because they do not feel it, but because they fear exposure. The father who never expresses admiration for his son — not because he does not admire him, but because his upbringing taught him to withhold praise. The friend who never says “you hurt me” — not because they are not hurt, but because they fear that frankness will destroy the relationship. These affective omissions, although they do not constitute lies in the strict sense, produce similar effects: they create distances, fuel misunderstandings, leave wounds that are not treated because they are not recognized. And many relationships that fall apart — for lack of communication, for gradual cooling, for mysterious distancing — do not fall apart because of what was said, but because of what was left unsaid.

V. Wounded trust: is it possible to rebuild it?

A question imposes itself at the end of this chapter: when trust is wounded — when the lie is discovered, when the omission comes to light, when the distance created by falsehood becomes visible — is it possible to rebuild it?

The honest answer is: it depends. It depends on the depth of the wound, on the disposition of the parties involved, on the context in which the lie occurred, and, above all, on the honesty with which the episode is faced. Because the rebuilding of trust is not an instantaneous act — it is a long, painful, and uncertain process, which demands from both parties a disposition that is not always available.

The first step, evidently, is recognition. Not superficial recognition — the “sorry, I was wrong” said in passing to appease the other’s reaction — but deep recognition: admitting what was done, understanding why it was done, accepting the consequences without minimizing or deflecting them. This recognition is, in general, the hardest part, because it demands from the liar what their original lie aimed to avoid: facing the truth — about what they did, about why they did it, about what it caused.

The second step is reparation — not only verbal, but practical. Words of repentance, however sincere they may be, are not enough if they are not accompanied by an effective change in behavior. Trust is not rebuilt with promises: it is rebuilt with consistent action over time. Every true word, every gesture of transparency, every occasion in which the liar chooses truth over comfort — all this contributes, gradually, to the rebuilding of what was damaged. But the process is slow, and patience is an indispensable virtue — both for those who try to win back trust and for those who try to rebuild it.

The third — and perhaps the most important — is the acceptance that rebuilt trust will never be identical to the original trust. Just as a fractured bone can heal and function again, but will always bear the mark of the fracture, betrayed trust can be rebuilt, but it will always bear the memory of the betrayal. This does not mean that rebuilding is useless — quite the contrary. It simply means that one must be realistic about what can be recovered and what is lost forever. And that the best way to honor trust is not to rebuild it after it is betrayed, but to preserve it before the betrayal occurs — through the daily, modest, and perseverant practice of truth.

A note to the reader

This book is not for sale. It is being published in full, chapter by chapter, free of charge.

Truth, by its very nature, cannot be fenced in by walls of ownership. If these pages do you good, the only currency I ask in return is that you pass them on — discuss them with a friend, question them, or use them to illuminate some shadow in your own life.

A new chapter will be published every Sunday. The complete book, in PDF format, will be available for free download at the end of the series.

Printed editions will be available for purchase in Brazil and internationally, as printing and distribution involve costs.

— Wilson Vasconcellos da Silva

There is a word in the Bhagavad Gita that changed the course of humanity’s spiritual history and that, in the third millennium, has been reduced to two symmetrical caricatures.

Śraddhā.

The first caricature: faith. Belief. Believing without seeing. The voluntary acceptance of a proposition that transcends reason. The religious caricature transforms Śraddhā into an act of will, a decision of the “I,” a choice between believing and doubting.

The second caricature: structural trust. An underlying disposition. The nature of being. Something so profound that it is no longer psychological but ontological. The philosophical caricature transforms Śraddhā into the structure of reality, an operation of Brahman, something so abstract that it loses all contact with a person’s life.

The first caricature is too superficial. The second is too profound. And the truth, as is often the case, lies between the two.

Śraddhā is not mere belief. It is not ontology. It is something much more interesting, and much more human, than either caricature.

Śraddhā is the deep disposition by which a person orients themselves toward what they take as true.

In the Indian tradition, Śraddhā has a richness of meanings that includes faith, trust, and conviction. In this essay, I propose to investigate it from a specific perspective: not merely what we believe, but the disposition through which our convictions orient our existence.

I — The Disposition

“Disposition”: the word is precise. Not merely belief, but disposition. Not merely feeling, but disposition. Not merely structure, but disposition.

A disposition is not an opinion. An opinion can be expressed and ignored. A person can say, “I think honesty is important,” and then act dishonestly. The opinion remains on the surface. It does not orient. It does not move. It does not transform.

A disposition is not a feeling. A feeling comes and goes. Tomorrow, you may feel confident; the day after, insecure. Feelings fluctuate like the weather, the tides, and our moods.

A disposition is what remains when feelings fluctuate, and opinions fall silent. It is the direction in which a person moves even when they are not thinking about that direction. It is the angle from which a person looks at the world, even when they are not consciously choosing that angle.

In simple terms, it is what you take as true and what, precisely because you take it as true, shapes the way you live.

Not simply what you believe, but what you take as true. The difference is everything. “Believing” is an action of the “I.” “Taking as true” is an orientation of being. Believing can be chosen. What is deeply taken as true is not necessarily chosen. It is discovered. It is recognized. It is what has already been operating before you become aware of it.

And it is this disposition, this orientation, this way of relating to what is taken as true that I understand the Bhagavad Gita to be describing through Śraddhā.

II — The Bridge

Consider the difference between taking something as true and living according to that truth. This is the key to the entire investigation of Śraddhā Yoga.

A person may take it as true that time is limited. That life is short. That every moment matters. Yet, in practice, that person wastes hours, days, and years. Lives as though eternity were available. Acts as though time were infinite.

The truth has been accepted, but it does not orient. The proposition has been acknowledged, but it does not move. The belief is present, but it does not become life.

Another person, holding the same conviction, lives each moment as though it mattered. Not simply because they “decided” to do so, but because a deep disposition moves them. Not merely because they “chose,” but because what they take as true transforms their actions.

The difference between these two people is not what they believe. Both say the same thing. The difference is Śraddhā.

In the first person, Śraddhā is weak. The truth is accepted, but it does not orient. The proposition exists in the mind, but it does not become a disposition. The belief is verbal, but it is not lived.

In the second person, Śraddhā is deep. The truth is not merely accepted; it is deeply held. The proposition is not confined to the mind; it is expressed in life. The belief is not merely verbal; it has become a disposition.

Śraddhā is the bridge. The bridge connecting what we take as true with the way we live. The bridge transforms a proposition into an orientation. The bridge through which truth accepted by the mind becomes truth lived through the body.

Without the bridge, truth remains abstract. An opinion. A concept. A beautiful phrase.

With the bridge, truth becomes life. A disposition. A path. A transformation.

Śraddhā is the bridge.

III — What the Bhagavad Gita Says

In the seventeenth chapter, verse 3, Krishna says:

“Śraddhā-mayo’yam puruṣo yo yac-chraddhaḥ sa eva saḥ.”

“The human being is made of Śraddhā. What each person deeply places their trust in, that is what they are.”

Read as psychology, the verse seems to say that faith defines the human being. Read as ontology, it seems to suggest that trust is the structure of reality.

But I propose reading it in another way, one that reveals something particularly significant.

What we deeply place our trust in is not merely an opinion we possess. It participates in what we become.

Participates in what we become.

It does not simply constitute what we become; it participates in that becoming. It does not necessarily determine us; it influences us. It is not our substance, but a force that shapes us. Śraddhā is not the entirety of the human being, but it contributes to the person we become. It is not identity itself, but it participates in identity. It is not destiny, but it orients the path.

If you place your deepest trust in wealth, wealth participates in what you become. This does not mean that you are money. It means that money becomes part of your orientation. It shapes your actions. Directs your choice. Influences your relationship with the world.

If you place your deepest trust in truth, truth participates in what you become. This does not mean that you are truth. It means that truth becomes part of your orientation. It shapes your actions. Directs your choice. Influences your relationship with the world.

In each case, Śraddhā is not merely an opinion held in the mind. It is a disposition that orients. Not simply a verbal belief, but a bridge connecting what you take as true with the way you live.

IV — The Bridge That Breaks

But here the investigation becomes honest: the bridge does not always hold.

Sometimes, what we take as true does not guide the way we live.

You take it as true that health matters, yet you neglect your body. You take it as true that relationships matter, yet you prioritize work. You take it as true that truth matters, yet you lie when it is convenient.

In each case, the bridge is broken. What is taken as true does not orient. What is accepted as real does not become life. The belief remains in the mind without crossing into existence.

And it is precisely this rupture, this disconnection, this distance between what is taken as true and the way one lives that Śraddhā Yoga investigates.

Not simply to “fix” the bridge. Not merely to “strengthen” trust. Not merely to “cultivate” faith.

But to see clearly where the bridge breaks. Where disposition fails to accompany belief. Where what is taken as true does not become part of life.

Recognizing the rupture is the first step toward rebuilding the bridge. Clarity alone does not always transform behavior. Habits, conditioning, and circumstances may resist what we know. But without recognizing the distance between what we take as true and how we actually live, we cannot even identify where transformation needs to begin.

V — The Śraddhā of the Wise and the Śraddhā of the Confused

In its seventeenth chapter, the Bhagavad Gita describes three types of Śraddhā.

The Śraddhā of the wise, sāttvikī, characterized by clarity, discernment, and the ability to see beyond appearances. The Śraddhā of the restless, rājasī, driven by desire, results, and attachment to achievement. The Śraddhā of those obscured by ignorance, tāmasī, characterized by confusion, denial, and an inability to see clearly.

But here is a subtlety that contemporary discussions often overlook: these three types are not merely “levels of faith.” They are not simply “degrees of trust.” They are not successive “stages of belief.”

They are three ways of orienting oneself toward what is taken as true.

Sāttvikī Śraddhā is oriented toward clarity. What is taken as true is investigated. The disposition is honest. The bridge between what is accepted and what is lived is sustained.

Rājasī Śraddhā is oriented toward desire. What is taken as true becomes a means of obtaining something. The disposition is restless. The bridge exists, but it serves the “I.”

Tāmasī Śraddhā is oriented through confusion and denial. What is taken as true becomes a protection against reality. The disposition is obscured. The bridge fails to connect professed convictions with lived experience.

In each case, Śraddhā is a disposition. A bridge. An orientation. But the direction, quality, and integrity of that bridge differ.

And it is the quality of the bridge, not the quantity of faith, that shapes the path.

VI — The Confusion of the Third Millennium

The third millennium has sophisticated tools for investigating beliefs, behaviors, emotions, and motivations. Psychology studies the relationships among these dimensions, while different therapeutic approaches seek to understand and transform their patterns.

But one question deserves to remain at the center of our investigation: to what extent does what we recognize as true actually orient the way we live?

We may understand our beliefs without changing our habits. We may transform behaviors without deeply investigating the values that sustain them. We may regulate emotions without examining the direction we give to our existence.

This is not to suggest that psychology overlooks these relationships. Rather, it is to investigate them here from a specific philosophical perspective.

From this perspective, I propose understanding Śraddhā as a bridge.

A bridge between conviction and existence.

Between what we recognize as true and what we actually live.

A bridge that may be strengthened, weakened, or interrupted by the contradictions of human experience.

Śraddhā.

VII — What Śraddhā Yoga Does

Śraddhā Yoga, the path of Śraddhā, is not merely a path of cultivating trust. It is not simply a path of strengthening faith. Nor is it a method for developing a positive mental state.

Śraddhā Yoga is the path of seeing the bridge.

Seeing where the bridge holds. Where what is taken as true orients life. Where a deep disposition guides our actions.

Seeing where the bridge breaks. Where what is taken as true fails to orient. Where disposition does not accompany belief. Where what is accepted in the mind does not become life.

Through seeing, through clarity, and through the honest recognition of where the bridge holds and where it breaks, the possibility of rebuilding it begins. Recognition does not automatically eliminate conditioning, nor does it make effort and discipline unnecessary. But it allows effort and discipline to cease being blind movements and begin expressing a deeper understanding of what truly orients our existence.

Śraddhā Yoga is not merely the path of faith, but the path of coherence. Coherence between what is taken as true and the way one lives. Between what is accepted and what is practiced. Between mind and life.

And this coherence, when deep, honest, and complete, is not simply an achievement of the “I.” It is not merely a victory of discipline. It cannot be reduced to the result of effort.

It is Śraddhā, the deep disposition, operating fully. The bridge holding firm. The orientation finding expression throughout life.

What is taken as true orients. What is accepted moves us. What is believed becomes lived experience.

Śraddhā.

VIII — The Śraddhā the Third Millennium Needs

The third millennium, with its anxiety, depression, loneliness, and confusion, needs Śraddhā.

But not the empty reassurance of “trust yourself.” Not “have faith in the universe.” Not “believe everything will work out.”

It needs coherence. It needs to see the bridge. It needs to recognize where what is taken as true orients life and where it does not. Where disposition accompanies belief and where it fails to do so. Where the bridge holds and where it breaks.

The third millennium, so often aware of what it professes to believe yet unable to live accordingly, needs to examine the bridge. Not merely belief, behavior, or feeling in isolation. The bridge. The disposition. Śraddhā.

Because the crisis of the third millennium cannot be understood simply as a lack of belief. Nor merely as a lack of knowledge or information.

It is also a crisis of Śraddhā. The broken bridge. What is taken as true does not orient. What is accepted in the mind does not become life. What is said is not what is lived.

And the gap between what is said and what is lived, between what is accepted and what is practiced, between what is taken as true and the way one lives, is one source of the anguish of the third millennium.

The anguish produced by the distance between what we recognize as true and what we actually live does not necessarily disappear through the accumulation of beliefs, knowledge, or information. Confronting it also requires recognizing our contradictions and investigating how our convictions translate, or fail to translate, into our existence.

It is in this encounter between understanding and life that Śraddhā reveals its importance.

IX — The Bridge That Was Always There

Śraddhā Yoga, understood in depth, is not merely a path of construction. It is not simply a path of cultivation. It is not a path of conquest.

It is the recognition that the bridge is already there. At some level, within some disposition, through some deep orientation, coherence already exists. There is already direction. There is already Śraddhā.

Yet the bridge may be obscured by confusion. Weakened by inconsistency. Concealed by the distance between what is taken as true and what is lived.

When the distance is seen, when confusion is recognized, when inconsistency is named, Śraddhā is rediscovered. Not as something entirely new, but as something that was already present. Not merely as an achievement, but as a disposition that can be recognized.

The disposition that orients. The bridge that connects. The coherence that sustains.

Śraddhā.

Not merely belief, but disposition. Not simply psychology or ontology, but a bridge. Not an “I” that merely decides, but a being that is oriented. Not an opinion one possesses, but a truth one lives.

Śraddhā.

The bridge between what we take as true and the way we live.

The bridge that, when sustained with honesty and coherence, allows truth to be not merely known, but lived. Not merely accepted, but practiced. Not merely spoken, but embodied.

Śraddhā.

Always — the bridge.

Always — the disposition.

Always — what we become when what we take as true becomes life.

Śraddhā Yoga was originally published in New Earth Consciousness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is a moment, in any spiritual tradition, treated with almost sacred reverence: the moment the master dies. Not just any death. A special death — one that has its own name, its own ritual, its own cosmic meaning.

Mahāsamādhi.

When the master dies, when the body lies down and the breath ceases, the tradition bows. Disciples weep. Temples celebrate. Biographies are written, miracles narrated, dates sanctified. And a question that should be the first is the last to be asked:

If the enlightened one was never the body, who is it that dies?

I — What the Tradition Says, and What Advaita’s Own Logic Requires

A distinction first, because it changes everything. Samādhi names states of meditative absorption in which ordinary mental activity subsides. Mahāsamādhi is something else: in yogic and devotional contexts, the final departure of a realized master — frequently interpreted as the conscious, voluntary abandonment of the body. It is not a synonym for death. It carries a claim.

And it is precisely there that the problem begins. The death of the body is an observable event: the breath stops, brain activity irreversibly ends. But who could demonstrate, from these facts, that consciousness decided to leave? A peaceful death does not prove enlightenment. Dying in a meditative posture proves nothing. When a master’s death begins to be presented as proof of realization, a spiritual interpretation has quietly become a certificate — and no biological event can issue that certificate.

Advaita Vedānta makes the difficulty sharper, not softer. It distinguishes the jīvanmukta, liberated while living, from the videhamukta, considered in relation to the end of the body. The jīvanmukta eats, walks, speaks, weeps — the body operates, the mind processes — but what they are, at the core, does not identify with any of it. They know, not as concept but as reality, that they are not the body, not the mind, not the biography, not the name. They are, as the Upaniṣads reveal, the background. Brahman. They did not become Brahman; they recognized they always were.

For such a one, death is not the culmination. It is what the dissolution of a wave is to the ocean: the wave breaks apart, but the ocean was never the wave. According to tradition, the body continues as long as prārabdha karma — the portion that sustains this particular existence — endures, and ceases when it is spent. But liberation did not happen because the body died. The body died only after liberation was already recognized. There is no provisional Brahman while breathing and a definitive Brahman once the breath stops. Brahman admits no degrees. The difference between jīvanmukti and videhamukti belongs to the description of a bodily condition — not to a hierarchy of realization.

So what, exactly, could death add?

II — The Relentless Question

If there was never a separate individual, who could attain Mahāsamādhi?

Advaita holds that individuality has no independent existence. The person — body, mind, memory, biography — belongs to the domain of manifestation. This does not mean the person does not exist in a conventional sense; it means they do not exist as an autonomous entity, separate from the reality that sustains them.

On the conventional plane, someone was born, lived, taught, and died. None of this needs to be denied. But if we read “the master abandoned the body,” “accomplished the departure,” “attained Mahāsamādhi” literally — as if an individual entity had made a definitive spiritual transition — we collide with the very knowledge the tradition proclaims. Brahman does not abandon the body, for it was never contained in it. Brahman does not depart, for it occupies no place to leave from. Brahman does not attain liberation, for it was never imprisoned.

What knowledge reveals is not a transformation of Brahman, but the non-existence of the separation that ignorance made appear real. The difficulty, then, lies not in the event of death but in what we make of it. The question ceases to be how did the master die and becomes ‘why do we insist on giving that death a meaning their own realization renders unnecessary?’

III — The Romanticization, and What Mahāsamādhi Is Not

There is something profoundly human in turning the death of those we admire into extraordinary events. When a spiritual master dies, the loss is not only of a person but of a reference — of the one in whom many placed their hope of liberation. On that terrain, death easily becomes a sacred narrative. The master did not die: they entered Mahāsamādhi. They did not lose their life: they chose the moment to depart.

A community may use such language to honor a master and preserve a tradition — and there it has a legitimate religious meaning. The problem arises when reverence starts to claim knowledge it cannot have: that the master chose the exact instant of death, that serenity in the final moments proves enlightenment. The third millennium sharpens this: a facial expression circulates as a sign of transcendence, a coincidence of dates as evidence of planning. But the intensity of a belief is not evidence of its truth, and the sincerity of a disciple does not guarantee the accuracy of their interpretation.

The image of the pot and the space holds the whole matter. When a pot breaks, nothing happens to the space that seemed enclosed within it. The pot had form, limits, duration; space never depended on them. In the same way, the disappearance of a body is not a transformation of the reality that sustained it. The form ends. That which was never limited to form needs no release from limits.

So we can honor a master without attributing powers to their death, recognize the depth of a teaching without turning its last moment into proof, preserve a memory without making a biography into mythology. The truth of a teaching does not depend on how the one who transmitted it died.

IV — The Question That Says More About the Living Than the Dead

Why do we need a master’s death to be extraordinary? The answer reveals less about the one who died than about those who remain.

While the master lived, their presence offered more than teaching. It offered security — someone who seemed to know, who had walked the path, whose very existence confirmed the possibility of what the disciples were still seeking. Then the master dies, and the disciple stands before the question that accompanies all of humanity: if even the one who recognized the truth died, what was really achieved?

If the master simply died, like any other human being, the disciple must face the fragility of existence. But if the master consciously entered Mahāsamādhi, death becomes a demonstration of freedom — a spiritual victory rather than a defeat. The interpretation comforts. And there is no reason to despise comfort in the face of loss. The difficulty is only this: finding meaning in a narrative is one thing; using it as proof that a belief is true is another.

Here lies the quiet irony. The master who taught the investigation of the ego’s identifications becomes, after death, the object of a new identification. The image must remain extraordinary; the death must confirm the greatness. As if a life devoted to recognizing what transcends birth and death needed, at the end, an exceptional death to be legitimate. As if Brahman needed a witness — as if that which was never born had to be proven by the way someone died.

And the deeper truth is unglamorous: understanding a proposition and fully living its implications are separated by a distance. One can affirm “I am not the body” and still fear death; repeat “there is no separate self” and still want the master’s death to guarantee one’s own liberation. There is no hypocrisy in this — only the human condition. The problem is not feeling it. The problem is turning what comforts us into knowledge of what we do not know.

V — What Never Began Needs No Ending

Perhaps the difficulty is our hunger for grand endings — stories that close on a revelation, lives that find in the last instant the confirmation of all that came before. But a life devoted to the investigation of truth does not need to end extraordinarily to have been meaningful. A master who taught for decades does not lose the depth of that teaching because they died in a hospital, in pain, surrounded by equipment. None of these circumstances alters the truth or falsity of what they recognized.

Advaita points to a radical simplicity we keep missing: ultimate reality does not depend on special events. It does not reveal itself only in exceptional circumstances. It needs no memorable death to be what it is. The body is born and dies; the biography begins and ends. None of it transforms Brahman.

So the most coherent homage to one who taught the investigation of truth may be precisely this: not to abandon discernment when the one who taught it is no longer present. We can mourn a death without calling it a failure and remember a life without turning its departure into an achievement.

The initial question remains. When the enlightened one dies, who is it that dies? In the world of forms, the body of someone who lived a story. In ultimate reality, no separate entity that could ever be born or die. If Brahman was never born, Brahman cannot die.

Death closes a biography. It does not close what never began.

And what never began is you.

Always — you.

OM Tat Sat.

Mahāsamādhi: When the Enlightened One Dies, Who Is It That Dies? was originally published in New Earth Consciousness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Author’s Note

Last week, I accidentally skipped Chapter 3 and published Chapter 4 instead. Today, I’m correcting the sequence.

An appropriate mishap for a book about lying, perhaps. But let me clarify: I made a mistake. I didn’t lie.

After all, there’s a difference — and that’s precisely what this book is about!

“The moral world is not black and white; it is a spectrum of grays, and wisdom lies in learning to distinguish them.” — Paraphrased reflection on moral nuance

From harmless white lies to systematic ideologies: a cartography of the many forms lying assumes — because not all falsehoods are equal, and understanding their differences is the first step toward honest moral judgment.

Every attempt to classify human phenomena faces a dilemma: reality is continuous, but language is discrete. The types we name are cuts we impose on a fabric that, in itself, presents no seams. This is the case with lying. Between the grossest falsehood and the most subtle omission, between the lie told out of desperation and the one calculated with coldness, between the falsehood born of fear and the one erected upon calculation, there is an uninterrupted spectrum of gradations, mixtures, and hybrid forms that resist any rigid scheme. Yet — and precisely for this reason — classification is a necessary exercise. Without it, we risk treating profoundly different phenomena as equal, or confusing, under a single label, actions that deserve distinct moral judgments. The types we will present below do not claim to exhaust the reality of lying; they aim, rather, to offer a cartography — a first ordered approximation — that will allow us to navigate the following chapters with greater precision.

I. Harmless Lying and Harmful Lying

The most immediate — and perhaps the most intuitive — distinction is the one that separates the apparently harmless lie from the one that causes damage. We all know the first: they populate our daily lives with the discretion of those who do not wish to be noticed. “I’m fine, thank you,” replies the one who is not fine. “It looks great on your hair,” says the one who thinks otherwise. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” assures the one who feels hurt. These are the so-called social lies — formulas of courtesy, conversational shortcuts, smoothers of coexistence. Those who practice them rarely feel guilty, and those who receive them rarely feel betrayed. They function as a kind of oil that reduces the friction between the gears of life in common.

But this innocence must be examined with care. Because the harmless lie may be so only in appearance — or only in the short term. The child who is told their drawing is “beautiful,” when it is mediocre, receives momentary comfort but may grow up without developing the capacity to evaluate their own work with realism. The colleague who is told their presentation was “great,” when it was confused, loses the opportunity to correct flaws that others have already noticed. The harmless lie, when it becomes a habit — when it transforms into the permanent climate of a relationship or a community — can produce an insidious cumulative effect: the loss of trust in the other’s word. If everything is always “great,” “beautiful,” “wonderful,” how can one distinguish sincere praise from an empty formula? Kindness, when it becomes automated, impoverishes communication and impoverishes, by extension, the relationship itself.

The harmful lie, on the other hand, is the one whose negative consequences are recognizable — and frequently grave. The false accusation that destroys a reputation. The adulterated information that leads to a harmful decision. The betrayal of a secret that undoes a marriage. The promise made with no intention of keeping it that ruins a business. In these cases, the damage is concrete, measurable, and sometimes irreparable. The distinction between the harmless and the harmful lie does not depend only on the intention of the liar — it also depends on the context, the vulnerability of the deceived, and the extent of the consequences. The same false phrase can be harmless in one situation and devastating in another.

However, it is necessary to go beyond this binary distinction. The reality of lying rarely divides itself between “harmless” and “harmful” with the cleanliness of a surgical cut. There is a vast intermediate territory — that of lies whose damage is diffuse, delayed, or difficult to attribute. The lie that harms no one immediately but slowly corrodes trust. The falsehood that does not change the facts but alters the climate of a relationship. The omission that causes no visible loss but deprives the other of something that would be useful or necessary. In this territory, moral evaluation becomes more delicate — and it is precisely in this territory that ethical reflection is most necessary.

II. Defensive Lying and Offensive Lying

A second classification, complementary to the first, distinguishes lying by its direction: it may be defensive, when it aims to protect the one who tells it, or offensive, when it aims to attack, harm, or manipulate the other.

Defensive lying is the oldest and most frequent. It is born, as we saw in the previous chapter, from fear — fear of punishment, rejection, humiliation, loss. The employee who hides a mistake to avoid being fired. The spouse who omits a fragility to avoid being seen as weak. The teenager who lies about their whereabouts to escape excessive parental control. In all these cases, lying is a gesture of protection — a wall erected against a perceived threat. And it is important to note that, in many of these situations, the threat is not imaginary: it is real. The employee may, in fact, be fired. The spouse may, in fact, be rejected. The teenager may, in fact, suffer a disproportionate restriction. Defensive lying, in these contexts, is not simple cowardice: it is a response to an environment in which truth carries a high cost.

To recognize this, however, is not the same as to justify it. Because defensive lying, even when understandable, has a price that the liar frequently underestimates: it substitutes one problem — the confrontation with reality — for another problem, often greater — the erosion of trust and the need to maintain, indefinitely, a false version of the facts. The employee who hides the mistake today may be confronted with their dishonesty tomorrow — and then the damage will be double: the original error and the attempt to conceal it. The spouse who omits their fragility deprives the other of the opportunity to know them truly — and, in doing so, builds a relationship on false foundations. Defensive lying postpones pain, but does not eliminate it: it capitalizes it, with interest.

Offensive lying is of a distinct nature. It is born not of fear, but of the will to dominate, to harm, to subordinate. The slander that aims to destroy a rival’s reputation. The fraud that aims to enrich oneself at the expense of another’s naivety. The manipulation that aims to control the decisions of others. The seduction that aims only at the pleasure of the seducer, without any consideration for the other. In these cases, lying is not a shield: it is a weapon. And its moral character is, as a rule, more grave than that of defensive lying, because its purpose is not self-preservation, but aggression. The offensive liar does not merely wish to escape: they wish to advance — and to advance upon the other.

It is true that, in practice, the two forms can mix. The lie that begins as defensive can become offensive when the liar discovers the power it confers. The employee who first hides the mistake out of fear and then begins to fabricate results to obtain a promotion has transitioned, perhaps without noticing, from defense to attack. The transition is subtle, but its moral importance is decisive — because it marks the passage from a lie that is, to some extent, reactive, to a lie that is entirely deliberate and directed.

III. Altruistic Lying and Selfish Lying

If the previous classification is based on the direction of lying — whether it protects the one who tells it or attacks the other — this third classification is based on its beneficiary: whom does the lie serve?

Altruistic lying — also called beneficial lying, pious lying, or, in Latin, mendacium officiosum — is the one practiced for the benefit of others. The doctor who softens a terminal diagnosis to spare the patient immediate suffering. The friend who hides painful news until the other is in a condition to receive it. The soldier who lies to the enemy to save their companions. In all these cases, the one who lies does not do so out of self-interest, but out of consideration for the other — or, at least, that is what they claim. And altruistic lying is, of all forms of falsehood, the one that provokes the most heated moral debates, because in it two equally precious values confront each other: truth and compassion.

The defenders of altruistic lying argue, with some reason, that there are circumstances in which naked truth is unnecessary cruelty. The terminally ill patient who, upon receiving the diagnosis with all its details, falls into despair and loses their last days of life in anguish — would it not be more humane, they ask, to spare them this pain? The small child to whom the death of a loved one is explained gently, omitting the most brutal details — would this not be a form of care, and not betrayal? The critics, on the other hand, counter-argue that no one has the right to decide, for another, what the other can or cannot bear. That altruistic lying, however well-intentioned, is a form of paternalism — a way of treating the other as a minor, incapable of dealing with reality. And that, in practice, lies told out of altruism frequently serve the comfort of the one who tells them less than they serve the other: the doctor who softens the diagnosis is, in part, sparing themselves the discomfort of communicating bad news.

The debate is genuine and does not resolve itself easily. But it may be possible to offer a distinction that helps us think: altruistic lying is morally more defensible when it is temporary, when it aims to prepare the other for truth rather than permanently replace it, and when it is motivated by genuine consideration for the other’s well-being — and not by the desire to avoid one’s own discomfort. Telling a patient that “the results are still being analyzed” while preparing an appropriate moment for full communication is very different from omitting the diagnosis indefinitely. The first is a form of prudence; the second, a form of betrayal.

Selfish lying, by contrast, is the one that serves primarily — or exclusively — the interests of the one who tells it. The merchant who conceals the defects of a product to avoid losing the sale. The politician who fabricates promises to win votes. The boyfriend who swears fidelity while maintaining other relationships. In all these cases, the beneficiary of the lie is the liar themselves, and the other is, at most, a side effect — someone who may even incidentally benefit from the falsehood, but whose interests were not, strictly speaking, considered. Selfish lying is, in general, the most easily condemnable, because in it the instrumentalization of the other is more transparent: the liar uses the trust of others as a means to an end that is, ultimately, their own advantage.

But even this distinction is not always clear. There are lies that serve both the liar and the other simultaneously — and there are lies that, although selfish in intention, produce consequences that benefit third parties in unexpected ways. The complexity of moral life stubbornly resists simplistic schemes. What reflection can offer, and what the classificatory scheme helps to organize, is the clarity of asking, in each case: whom does this lie serve? Who pays its price? And who, if anyone, profits from it?

IV. Institutional Lying

Until now, we have spoken of lying as an individual phenomenon — an act practiced by one person, directed at another, motivated by reasons that can be analyzed in psychological and moral terms. But lying is not limited to the realm of interpersonal relationships. It settles, frequently and with redoubled efficacy, in institutions — in the collective structures that organize the social, political, economic, and cultural life of human beings. Institutional lying differs from individual lying not only in scale, but in nature: it becomes, so to speak, impersonal — it is no longer the lie of an individual, but the lie of a system.

Political lying is, perhaps, the most visible and most studied. It manifests itself in multiple forms: in the propaganda that fabricates an idealized image of the ruler; in the manipulation of statistics to hide failures or inflate achievements; in the construction of fictitious enemies to justify repressive measures; in the electoral promise made with full awareness that it will not be kept; in the official discourse that flagrantly contradicts the reality that everyone can observe. Political lying is particularly dangerous because it seizes the apparatus of the State — and therefore has means to impose itself that the individual liar would never have: mass media, educational systems, security forces, legislation. When the State lies, lying is not merely a moral option of an individual: it is a policy — a deliberate strategy of social control.

Religious lying presents its own contours. It is not, evidently, a matter of affirming that religion is, in itself, a lie — a question that exceeds the limits of this work and belongs to the domain of faith and the philosophy of religion. It is, rather, a matter of recognizing that religious institutions, like every human institution, can be vehicles of falsehoods — when, for example, ecclesiastical authority uses fear of the divine for purposes of temporal control; when promises of salvation are exchanged for obedience and financial contributions; when sacred texts are selectively interpreted to justify practices that benefit the holders of religious power. Religious lying is especially grave because it clothes itself in the authority of the sacred: it not only falsifies reality, but does so in the name of something the believer considers inviolable — and, for this very reason, is more difficult to contest.

Advertising lying, and more broadly, commercial lying, constitute another vast field. Advertising, by definition, is not an impartial search for truth: it is an art of persuasion, and persuasion operates, frequently, on the border between information and manipulation. When a product is presented with qualities it does not possess, when its risks are concealed, when its image is constructed to evoke emotions that have nothing to do with its real value — in all these cases, we are faced with forms of institutionalized lying, sustained by considerable budgets and by a technical sophistication that individual lying could never achieve. And most worrying is that advertising, by becoming the ambient language — by populating streets, screens, public and private spaces — normalizes manipulation: it accustoms us to live in a world in which truth is systematically subordinated to commercial interest.

Power relations in general — in companies, organizations, bureaucratic structures — offer another fertile ground for institutional lying. The company that conceals negative environmental data. The organization that silences internal reports of irregularities. The bureaucracy that fabricates processes and reports to justify its own existence. In all these cases, lying is not practiced by an isolated individual, but by a system that distributes responsibilities, dilutes guilt, and protects its agents under the mantle of the institution. “I was following orders,” “it was company policy,” “everyone did it this way” — these justifications, as familiar as they are unsatisfactory, reveal the mechanics of institutional lying: it makes it possible for people who, individually, might not lie, to collectively participate in an enterprise of falsehood.

V. Systematic Lying: Ideologies, Collective Narratives, and Social Myths

Above institutional lying — which operates through identifiable organizations — rises an even more diffuse and, in a certain sense, deeper form: systematic lying. This is the kind that is not located in a specific institution, but that permeates an entire culture, an entire era, an entire society — so widespread, so rooted, so naturalized that it is no longer perceived as lying.

Ideologies, in the broadest sense of the term, are one of the privileged vehicles of this form of falsehood. When a system of ideas crystallizes to the point of determining what can and cannot be said, thought, or questioned — when adherence to the system becomes a condition of social belonging and dissent is punished with exclusion — truth ceases to be an autonomous value and becomes a subordinate of doctrine. Facts that confirm the ideology are amplified; facts that contradict it are silenced, reinterpreted, or denied. And most remarkably, in these contexts, even the liars do not perceive themselves as liars: they are so immersed in the collective narrative that the distinction between truth and falsehood seems to them irrelevant — or, worse, suspicious. “Who needs facts when you have a cause?” seems to be the implicit motto of every ideology that becomes dogma.

Collective narratives — the stories a people tell about themselves — function in an analogous way. Every nation possesses a version of its past, and this version is, inevitably, a selection: it highlights certain events, minimizes others, interprets all of them in light of a meaning that gives the community a unifying common identity. This is natural and, to some extent, inevitable: it is not possible to narrate the totality of the past; every narrative is, by definition, a choice. But when this choice becomes deliberately falsifying — when massacres are hidden, tyrants glorified, defeats rewritten as victories — the collective narrative becomes collective lying. And collective lying is extremely difficult to dismantle, because it is sustained not only by the ignorance of those who receive it, but by the affective, identity-based, and political investment of those who maintain it.

Social myths — shared beliefs that, without being explicitly formulated as doctrines, guide the perception and behavior of a society — constitute an even deeper layer of systematic falsehood. “The market is always fair.” “Meritocracy works for everyone.” “Technological progress is inevitably beneficial.” “History has a meaning, and it is positive.” None of these statements is, strictly speaking, a lie in the strict sense — because no one utters them with the deliberate intention to deceive. But all of them can function as falsifications of reality when they are taken as absolute truths, when they are used to silence dissenting voices, when they serve to justify inequalities and comfort the privileged. The social myth is the lie that has become landscape — so naturalized that we no longer see it, so widespread that we no longer question it.

It is here, perhaps, that the difference between individual lying and collective lying becomes most visible. Individual lying can be discovered, denounced, and corrected with relative ease: it is enough to confront the liar with the facts. But systematic lying — ideological, narrative, mythical — is not combated only with facts, because it is not sustained only by false statements: it is sustained by a worldview, by a structure of feelings, by a distribution of power. To challenge it is to challenge not just a person, but an order. And it is precisely for this reason that truth, when it manifests itself against a systematic lie, is so frequently received not as a correction, but as an aggression — because it shakes not only a belief, but an identity.

VI. Closing Note on Part I

With this chapter, the first part of our work comes to an end. We have traversed, until now, three moments: we defined lying, distinguishing it from its neighboring forms; we investigated its psychological, social, cultural, and philosophical roots; and we drew a cartography of its types and classifications. We did so not out of love for classification itself, but because conceptual clarity is the condition for any moral judgment that wishes to be honest. One cannot evaluate what one does not understand; one cannot combat what one does not distinguish.

Now that the ground has been prepared — now that we know, at least in general terms, what lying is, where it comes from, and what forms it assumes — we can move on to the second part of this work, in which we will examine lying in its various dimensions of action: in the inner life of the individual, in interpersonal relationships, in the public sphere of society and culture, and in the moral and religious traditions that have tried, over the centuries, to understand and combat it. If the first part was that of anatomy — the dissection of lying into its components — the second will be that of ecology: the study of lying in its habitat, in the multiple ecosystems of human experience where it manifests, adapts, and reproduces.

A note to the reader

This book is not for sale. It is being published in full, chapter by chapter, free of charge.

Truth, by its very nature, cannot be fenced in by walls of ownership. If these pages do you good, the only currency I ask in return is that you pass them on — discuss them with a friend, question them, or use them to illuminate some shadow in your own life.

A new chapter will be published every Sunday. The complete book, in PDF format, will be available for free download at the end of the series.

Printed editions will be available for purchase in Brazil and internationally, as printing and distribution involve costs.

— Wilson Vasconcellos da Silva

Lately, I have been living between sadness and anger. Two emotions that seem contradictory, but have learned to coexist within me. For almost a year, anguish has settled in, enthusiasm has waned, and a kind of paralysis has taken over my days. I procrastinate on almost everything. Even the texts I have been publishing were written a long time ago. Writing, which has always been one of my ways of understanding existence, has become difficult.

In the early hours of this morning, I woke up again.

Outside, the night was still blue and silent. The world slept, indifferent to the restlessness of those who remained awake. But something awakened in me. It was not just any memory, the kind that appears to return us to suffering. It was an understanding that seemed to have been dormant for a long time, hidden among events, disappointments, and the stories the mind insists on telling.

Suddenly, without warning, came a very clear sensation: that of being with her.

I did not remember a specific conversation, a hug, a trip, or the plans we made that later unraveled. There was no particular scene. There was only the sensation of being by her side.

Simply being.

And in that instant, I understood something that, despite so many years of study and reflection, I had perhaps never recognized with such clarity.

It was presence.

When we were together, my mind did not need to run toward tomorrow or return to yesterday. There was nothing to resolve, no experience to conquer, no place to arrive at. I did not need to look for happiness because I was not looking for anything at all.

That instant was enough.

I only remembered that time existed when I needed to leave.

While I was with her, there was no clock. The future demanded no answers, the past made no claims. I did not need to fill the silence with words or invent activities to justify our being together.

We could simply be together.

And the silence was pleasant.

Not that awkward silence, where two people desperately search for something to say. It was a silence that did not need to be interrupted. There was no void to fill, because nothing seemed to be missing.

I did not need her to do anything special. I needed no grand gestures, no promises about the future.

Her company was enough.

For a long time after the relationship ended, I believed my sadness came exclusively from her absence. I missed the person, the intimacy, the conversations, what we had built, and what I imagined we could still build.

And I also felt anger.

Anger over the disappointments, the circumstances of the breakup, over what happened and what will never happen. The mind transformed memories into accusations, frustrated expectations into resentment, and lost possibilities into suffering.

The past did not remain in the past. It was reconstructed daily, as if each repetition could finally produce a different answer.

But in the early hours of this morning, something unexpected happened.

For the first time in a long time, the memory did not immediately make a demand.

It brought an understanding.

Perhaps what made being with her so wonderful was not only the person beside me, but the state of mind I experienced in her presence.

Perhaps she was not the origin of that tranquility, but the space where it flourished.

This distinction changed the way I looked at the memory.

It does not mean she was irrelevant. It would be absurd to deny her importance or try to reduce a human relationship to a mere phenomenon of the mind. There was affection, intimacy, complicity, a shared history. All of this was part of the experience.

But I was attributing exclusively to her a happiness that also depended on something happening within me.

When we were together, the search ceased.

And when the search ceased, I needed nothing more.

I spent so many years studying Advaita Vedānta, reading about the nature of consciousness, discussing the relationship between desire and suffering, writing about the illusion of seeking in the world what no experience can permanently offer.

I knew the arguments.

I knew how to explain that the desired object does not contain, in itself, the happiness we attribute to it. That the satisfaction experienced after the fulfillment of a desire may be related to the temporary disappearance of the restlessness that the desire itself produced.

But knowing an explanation is not the same as recognizing its relevance in one’s own life.

And above all, it does not prevent one from suffering.

It is relatively easy to write about detachment when we are not trying to detach from something. It is easy to speak of impermanence when what we love is still present. It is easy to explain that happiness does not belong to objects when no object seems indispensable.

The difficulty begins when philosophy ceases to be an intellectual exercise and becomes something we must confront in our own lives.

It was then that I realized something else.

I did not just miss her. I also missed how I existed when I was with her.

Without rush.

Without searching.

Without that permanent sensation that something needed to happen for life to be complete.

And this perception brought a consequence that, until then, I had not considered with the same clarity.

If that tranquility depended exclusively on her, it would have disappeared definitively with the end of the relationship.

But if her company favored a state of presence that I was capable of experiencing, then perhaps the possibility of that presence had not disappeared.

The circumstances ended.

The possibility of being present did not.

This does not mean I can simply decide to recover that sensation. Nor does it mean that suffering ended this morning, as if an understanding were enough to dissolve almost a year of sadness, anger, and resentment.

It would just be another spiritual fantasy: replacing the promise of happiness in a relationship with the promise of immediate happiness through a philosophical idea.

The mind does not work like that.

Understanding can arise in an instant. Conditioned patterns, however, do not always disappear with it.

Painful memories still exist. Feelings I did not choose to experience still exist. There is still a shared history that continues to affect me emotionally, no matter how deeply I understand its impermanence.

But something changed.

I do not need to turn everything I lived into a lie to accept that it ended. I do not need to diminish the love I felt, nor turn the memory into a prison.

I can recognize that there were extraordinary moments, even if the relationship did not survive. I can admit that I was profoundly happy in that company, without concluding that I will never experience happiness again.

One thing does not demand the other.

What we lived does not cease to have existed because it ended.

And what ended does not need to continue happening inside me, indefinitely, in the form of suffering.

This is the hardest part to understand.

For months, my mind tried to solve the past. It revisited events, imagined conversations, formulated answers that were never given, and looked for explanations that might never be sufficient.

As if understanding all the details of what happened could modify what happened.

But in the early hours of this morning, I did not need to solve anything.

The memory arose, and I simply observed it.

Without looking for culprits.

Without demanding reparations.

Without trying to rebuild what no longer exists.

And for a few instants, that same tranquility seemed possible again.

Not because she had returned.

But because my mind, for a moment, stopped demanding that the past be different.

Perhaps presence is exactly that: not an extraordinary experience we need to conquer, but the possibility of being with what exists, before transforming it into a demand that it be something else.

In Advaita Vedānta, consciousness is not a place to be reached, nor a pleasant state that comes and goes. Joy arises and fades. Sadness arrives and stays a while. Relationships begin and end. But the awareness in which all of this is known does not depend on any of it.

That does not make sadness less human, nor love less true. Understanding does not ask us to stop feeling. It only lets us see that no feeling, however intense, is the whole of what we are.

Today, when I think of her, I still feel a deep sense of longing.

It would be dishonest to claim otherwise.

But I can begin to look at this longing without immediately transforming it into a condemnation of the present.

I can be grateful, at least inwardly, for the instants when time seemed not to exist.

Not because I wish to return to them.

But because they existed.

And because, somehow, they showed me that life can be experienced without the permanent need to look for something else.

That presence did not leave with her.

The relationship ended. The paths separated. The story took a direction I did not desire.

But the possibility of being fully present does not belong to another person.

I spent months trying to recover an experience, when what I needed to recognize was that no experience can be recovered exactly as it happened.

The past does not return.

And it does not need to return for the present to be enough.

Time, which seemed to disappear when we were together, returned to occupy my thoughts after the separation. I began to live between what happened and what I wished had happened.

In the early hours of this morning, however, there was a small interval.

I do not know how long it lasted.

Perhaps a few seconds.

Perhaps more.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt no need to measure it.

What an irony.

I spent so many years studying, discussing, and writing about Advaita Vedānta.

And yet, I still suffer before I understand!

OM Tat Sat.

The Moment That Does Not Fade was originally published in New Earth Consciousness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The greater the promise, the smaller the demand for demonstration seems to become.

People are not necessarily buying knowledge. They are buying the hope that someone knows a secret they do not.

Good small hours to you

Sleep, which should have come to embrace me hours ago, stubbornly refused to arrive. So I got up, turned on the soft light in my little study corner, and went to see what the inbox had brought.

Among the usual messages, one caught my attention: it came from a Substack author offering me the first pages of a rather promising essay. The opening lines were engaging, mixing known scientific facts with hypotheses not yet demonstrated, sprinkling everything with a touch of mystery, and within a few paragraphs presenting what seemed to be a key to transforming our relationships and our emotional lives.

To find out the rest, all it took was to subscribe: seventeen dollars a month.

A sum that may seem small at first glance, but that repeats month after month, feeding a business model in which the promise can be worth far more than what is actually demonstrated.

I stayed reflecting, with the email still open on the screen.

There is a strange and persistent rule that seems to govern much of the contemporary marketplace of ideas: the grander the promise of a definitive truth, the less rigorous the demand for evidence appears to be.

Those who announce they have found a complete and infallible path do not always feel the need to present solid data, submit their claims to debate, or acknowledge their own uncertainties.

And yet, this model can work commercially. The promise awakens curiosity, curiosity feeds expectations, and expectation can turn into a subscription.

It is not necessary to demonstrate that the method works. Often, it is enough to convince the audience that there is something extraordinary waiting to be discovered.

On the other side, those who choose to investigate seriously, to question established concepts, to dismantle poorly founded assumptions, and to point out the illusions surrounding us may find much lonelier paths.

The audience is not always large, recognition may be slow or never come, and often their words go unnoticed. After all, they offer no magic formulas or quick shortcuts to happiness.

Sincere investigation requires a disposition we are not always prepared to exercise: admitting that we do not know.

Recognizing limits. Examining evidence. Accepting that certain questions may remain unanswered.

And above all, understanding that reality is often more complex — and less comforting — than we would like.

The irony that occurred to me in that early morning, between the silence of the house and the glow of the screen, is even deeper.

The people who pay are not necessarily buying knowledge. Often, they are buying the hope, almost the affective certainty, that someone holds a secret they do not yet know.

They want to believe there is someone who knows. That the enigma of life has a simple solution. That happiness, love, prosperity, or inner peace are within reach of a method, a revelation, or a monthly subscription.

It is, in part, the marketplace of voluntary ignorance.

But a distinction must be made.

Not all those who buy these promises consciously choose to ignore the truth. Some are unaware of the mechanisms of persuasion. Others are going through moments of suffering, loneliness, or insecurity and find in these promises a hope of relief.

Voluntary ignorance begins when we have the opportunity to examine a claim, confront it with evidence, and recognize its weaknesses, but prefer to protect it because it offers us comfort.

It is not simply not knowing.

It is preferring to keep believing.

And perhaps it is precisely this disposition that sustains a significant portion of the marketplace of certainties.

What is sold is not just an explanation. What is sold is the possibility of no longer needing to ask.

What is offered is not just knowledge. What is offered is the tranquility of believing that someone has already solved the problem for us.

And there I was, at that late hour, writing about the anatomy of the lie — investigating how it is built, how it disguises itself, how it spreads — while others find commercial opportunities precisely in what I seek to examine critically.

This is not about condemning those who charge for their work. Knowledge has value, research requires effort, and writing is also work.

The issue is another.

Charging for knowledge is legitimate. Charging for the promise of a certainty that cannot be demonstrated is something that deserves to be questioned.

And it is not a matter restricted to money.

It is also about our relationship with what we believe we know.

Between the comfort of illusion and the discomfort of investigation, we frequently choose the former. Not necessarily because we are incapable of understanding, but because understanding may require us to abandon some of our most cherished certainties.

I continue writing, therefore, not out of naivety, but because I believe there will always be those who prefer to investigate, even when the investigation offers no pleasant answers, beautiful packaging, or promises of guaranteed happiness.

And I end with a request.

The book I am publishing, chapter by chapter, on Sundays, has already had published what theoretically should be its final part: a kind of vaccine against dubious claims, manipulations, and mechanisms of deception.

Please, use it!

Including against what I myself write.

Question my claims. Look for contradictions. Demand demonstrations. Do not accept an idea simply because it was presented in a convincing manner.

Use the artificial intelligence of your preference as well. Better yet: consult two or three different tools. Ask them to examine the arguments, identify unfounded claims, raise objections, and indicate verifiable sources.

But do not forget to question the AIs’ own answers. They also make mistakes, invent information, and can agree with each other without any of them being correct.

Agreement does not substitute for demonstration.

And, above all, before believing — or paying — ask a very simple question:

What is being demonstrated, and what am I merely being invited to believe?

Perhaps this question will not make anyone emotionally magnetic.

But it may prevent some unnecessary subscriptions.

And, who knows, some illusions.

OM Tat Sat.

“There is a lie that precedes all others — which is, so to speak, the matrix from which the rest are born.”

From self-deception to the chain of lies: an exploration of how lying begins in the most intimate terrain of all — the relationship we have with ourselves.

There is a lie that precedes all others — which is, so to speak, the matrix from which the rest are born. It is not the lie we tell the enemy, nor the friend, nor the stranger. It is the lie we tell ourselves. Before deceiving the world, the human being learns to deceive himself; before falsifying reality for others, he falsifies it for his own inner consumption. It is this phenomenon — the most intimate, the most difficult to dismantle, and perhaps the most damaging of all — that opens the second part of this work, dedicated to lying in its various dimensions of action.

To speak of lying in individual life is, in a certain sense, to speak of lying in its pure state — before it projects itself into relationships, before it becomes institutionalized in social structures, before it crystallizes in collective narratives. It is to speak of the point of origin: the moment in which a consciousness, confronted with a reality that unsettles it, chooses — not always with full clarity, not always with full awareness — not to see what it sees, not to know what it knows, not to recognize what it recognizes.

I. Lying to oneself: self-deception, denial, and idealization

It is paradoxical, at first glance, that one can lie to oneself. If lying requires, as we defined in Chapter 1, knowledge of the truth and the intention to deceive, how can the same person be, simultaneously, the liar and the deceived? Would this not be a logical contradiction — as if someone could, at the same time, know and not know the same thing?

The paradox, however, dissolves when we understand that the human mind is not a monolithic unity, but a divided structure — capable of holding, simultaneously, beliefs that contradict each other, of knowing and refusing to know, of seeing and looking away. Self-deception is precisely this: an operation by which consciousness distances itself from what, at some level, it has already perceived. The alcoholic who says “I can stop whenever I want” — although he has tried to stop countless times and always failed — knows, in some hidden corner of himself, that he cannot. But this repressed wisdom, buried under layers of rationalization and denial, is not accessible to him as admitted knowledge. He knows and does not know at the same time — and it is precisely this inner split that constitutes the structure of self-deception.

Denial is the most elementary form of self-deception. It is a raw psychic mechanism: confronted with an unbearable reality — a serious illness, an irreparable loss, a betrayal, a failure — the mind simply refuses to admit what the facts demonstrate. “This is not happening,” the denier repeats, in the face of evidence that leaps to the eye. And the most remarkable thing is that denial, although it seems irrational, fulfills a real psychological function: it protects the individual from suffering for which he, at that moment, lacks internal resources. Denial is a temporary anesthetic — and like every anesthetic, it has its clinical usefulness. The problem begins when the anesthetic becomes permanent: when the refusal to see crystallizes into an inability to see, when the temporary becomes chronic, when protection turns into prison.

Idealization is a more sophisticated form — and therefore more difficult to detect. Instead of denying reality entirely, the idealizer partially acknowledges it, but reinterprets it, emphasizing the favorable aspects and hiding or minimizing the unfavorable ones. The father who sees his son as a genius, ignoring obvious signs of mediocrity. The lover who projects perfections onto the object of his love, refusing to see flaws that everyone around him has already noticed. The entrepreneur who, faced with a failed business, insists on seeing signs of recovery where there is only deterioration. Idealization is not, in general, a conscious lie: the idealizer does not feel dishonest. He genuinely believes in his version — because his affective need for it to be true is so intense that it contaminates his perception of the facts. It is desire that shapes belief, and not the other way around.

There is, moreover, a form of self-deception that deserves special mention: rationalization. Different from denial, which refuses reality, and idealization, which beautifies it, rationalization accepts it — but justifies it. The individual who knows he acted wrongly, but builds an elaborate reasoning to demonstrate that his action was inevitable, necessary, or even virtuous. The lazy person who turns his inaction into a philosophy of life. The envious person who disguises his envy as a sense of justice. The coward who calls his flight prudence. Rationalization is, perhaps, the most insidious form of self-deception, because it presents itself as thought — as logical reasoning, as careful analysis — when in truth it is a defensive operation that uses intelligence in the service of lying. The rationalizer is not stupid: on the contrary, he is often brilliant — and it is precisely this intelligence in the service of self-justification that makes his falsehood so resistant to correction.

II. Impact on consciousness and personal integrity

Self-deception has a cost. It may be an invisible cost, slow, difficult to measure — but it is real, and over time it proves devastating. This cost manifests itself in three main domains: consciousness, integrity, and the capacity to judge.

In the domain of consciousness, the most immediate effect of self-deception is the loss of inner clarity. Whoever lies to himself frequently loses, gradually, the capacity to clearly distinguish what he thinks from what he pretends to think, what he feels from what he believes he ought to feel, what he wants from what he believes it is right to want. Consciousness, which should be the most faithful mirror of inner reality, gradually becomes clouded — like a mirror in a humid environment, which loses its capacity to reflect with precision. And the more clouded consciousness becomes, the more difficult the way back becomes: because to escape self-deception it is necessary, first of all, to recognize that one is deceived — and this is, precisely, the operation that self-deception prevents.

In the domain of personal integrity, the effects are equally profound. Integrity — a word that comes from the Latin integritas, and which literally means “being whole” — is the quality of one who is the same inside and out, of one who does not fragment into contradictory versions of himself. Self-deception fragments. It creates an inner division between what one is and what one pretends to be, between what one knows and what one admits to knowing, between lived reality and narrated reality. This division is not merely uncomfortable: it is corrosive. It produces a kind of existential weariness — the weariness of one who needs to maintain, permanently, two versions of himself: one for internal consumption and another for external consumption. And the longer this division persists, the more difficult it becomes to reunify — because the two versions, over time, move further and further apart, and the distance between them becomes, itself, a source of anguish.

In the domain of the capacity to judge, self-deception produces an effect we might call epistemic erosion — a progressive deterioration of the ability to evaluate reality with precision. Whoever becomes accustomed to falsifying reality for his own consumption gradually loses the criteria to distinguish the true from the false — not only regarding himself, but regarding everything. Self-deception does not confine itself to the theme about which one lies: it contaminates the entire faculty of judgment. The individual who systematically deceives himself about his own motivations becomes, little by little, less reliable in evaluating the motivations of others. His perception of the world becomes as distorted as his perception of himself — and he, poor soul, does not notice, because the instrument that should alert him to the distortion is the very instrument that is distorted.

III. Lying, identity, and inner coherence

The relationship between lying and identity is deeper than it may seem at first glance. After all, the question “who am I?” is not a question about objective facts — it is not like asking “what is my height?” or “what is my date of birth?” It is a question about meaning: what narrative articulates my acts, my choices, my experiences into something that can be called a life? And it is precisely in this narrative terrain that lying can cause its deepest damage.

Identity, to a large extent, is a story we tell about ourselves — a story made of selected memories, chosen interpretations, attributed meanings. No one tells their own life with the objectivity of a report: we all emphasize certain episodes, minimize others, and organize the material of experience into a plot that gives the whole some meaning. This is natural and inevitable. But when lying infiltrates this narrative — when we begin to include, in the story of ourselves, episodes that did not happen, motivations we did not have, qualities we do not possess, mistakes we did not make (or, worse, that we made but refuse to admit) — identity becomes a fiction. And a fictional identity, however comfortable it may be, is fragile: it holds only as long as no one — not even the individual himself — dares to confront it with reality.

Inner coherence — the sensation of being the same person over time, of one’s acts being a genuine expression of one’s convictions, of there being continuity between what one thinks, what one feels, and what one does — is one of the most fundamental psychological needs of the human being. And lying, when it settles in inner life, compromises this coherence directly. Whoever lies to himself lives in disharmony with himself: there is a part of him that knows and another that refuses to know, a part that acts and another that justifies, a part that feels and another that represses. This disharmony can be tolerated for some time — the human mind is remarkably capable of bearing internal contradictions — but over time it becomes unsustainable. The price of lost coherence manifests itself in varied forms: diffuse anxiety, inexplicable irritability, a sense of emptiness, weariness without apparent cause, difficulty making decisions. The individual who lies to himself feels, often without being able to name it, that something inside him is not working — that there is a piece missing in the puzzle of his existence — but he cannot identify what, because the very capacity for self-knowledge was the first victim of his dishonesty with himself.

IV. The chain of lies: one lie begets another

There is a relentless mechanics in lying that must be understood: it tends to multiply. A single lie, even the simplest, even the most apparently harmless, creates the need for new lies — and these, in turn, create the need for even more lies, in a progression that can become vertiginous. It is the chain of lies — and to understand it is to understand why the first lie is always the most dangerous.

The logic is simple. When I say something false, I create a discrepancy between reality and the version I presented. This discrepancy must be maintained — because if it is exposed, the entire structure collapses. And to maintain it, I need new falsehoods: justifications for the original lie, supplements to sustain it, diversions to draw attention away from inconsistencies. If I say I was in a place where I was not, I will need to invent details about the place. If someone asks whom I was with, I will need to invent companions. If the companions are questioned, I will need to fabricate confirmations. Each new lie makes the return to truth more difficult — because returning would mean admitting not only the original falsehood, but all those that followed to sustain it.

This progression has a psychological consequence that deserves emphasis: the longer the chain, the more difficult it becomes to break it. Not only for practical reasons — although these are real — but for emotional ones. Admitting a lie is painful; admitting a chain of lies is devastating. The individual who, over the years, has built a false version of himself — of his achievements, his motivations, his past — reaches a point where dismantling this version seems to him impossible, not for technical impossibility, but for psychological impossibility. He has already invested too much. His identity is already, to a large extent, built upon fiction. Dismantling the fiction would be, he fears, dismantling himself. And so, for fear of undoing himself, he proceeds — adding layers upon layers of falsehood, each time further from reality, each time more a prisoner of his own construction.

It is here that lying to oneself and lying to others intertwine inseparably. Whoever deceives himself inevitably becomes someone who deceives others — not out of malice, but out of structural necessity. His version of himself must be sustained before the world, and to sustain it he will need, sooner or later, to falsify reality also for others. The chain of lies, which began in inner silence, overflows into relationships — and there the damages multiply, because they no longer affect only one consciousness, but a web of trusts.

V. A note on self-knowledge

If this chapter seems excessively dark — if the description of self-deception, denial, idealization, and the chain of lies may give the impression that we are condemned to live in illusion — it is fitting to add a note of balance. Self-deception is real and frequent, but it is not inevitable. The human mind, which is capable of deceiving itself, is equally capable of knowing itself — and the history of each individual is, to a large extent, the history of the oscillation between these two possibilities.

Self-knowledge — the capacity to look inward with honesty, to recognize one’s own motivations without beautifying them, to accept one’s own limitations without denying them — is one of the most difficult and most important exercises to which a human being can dedicate himself. It is not obtained once and for all: it is a continuous work, which demands vigilance, courage, and above all humility — the disposition to admit that one may be mistaken, even about oneself.

The ancient philosophers knew this. “Know thyself,” proclaimed the inscription at the temple of Delphi — and Socrates, who made this maxim the center of his philosophy, showed that the path of self-knowledge passes, inevitably, through the recognition of one’s own ignorance. Only those who admit they may be mistaken open the door to truth. And it is precisely this door that self-deception — every form of self-deception — strives to keep closed.

In the pages that follow, we will see how lying, born in inner life, projects itself outward — into relationships with others, into life in society, into structures of power. But it is important to retain, from now on, this elementary truth: before fighting lying in the world, one must be willing to fight it in oneself. Not because the inner fight is more important than the outer fight — both are necessary — but because without the first, the second becomes impossible. Whoever is not capable of being honest with himself will hardly be honest with others. And whoever does not know his own lies will hardly recognize the lies of the world.

A note to the reader

This book is not for sale. It is being published in full, chapter by chapter, free of charge.

Truth, by its very nature, cannot be fenced in by walls of ownership. If these pages do you good, the only currency I ask in return is that you pass them on — discuss them with a friend, question them, or use them to illuminate some shadow in your own life.

A new chapter will be published every Sunday. The complete book, in PDF format, will be available for free download at the end of the series.

Printed editions will be available for purchase in Brazil and internationally, as printing and distribution involve costs.

— Wilson Vasconcellos da Silva

Lying — Part 05/17 was originally published in New Earth Consciousness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I want you to feel. Not as punishment — as revelation. I want the hours before dawn to reach you the same way, with that silence that is not silence but the sound of a presence that has gone, and that, in going, left everything more present. I want you to discover what it is like to be in the same room as always and realize that the room was never the same — that it was you who made the space exist this way, with that smell, with that temperature, with that particular gravity that has now dissolved, leaving everything floating without direction.

This is not vengeance. Vengeance presupposes two sides. This is something else. It is as though I knew — with a certainty my skin cannot contain — that there is only one water, and that I am drowning in it, and that you are on the other side of the wall believing yourself dry. I want the wall to fall. Not so that the water reaches from me to you, but so that you realize you have always been in it. That separation is not what happened. Separation is what you believe happened. And believing it is the only thing that hurts — not the distance, not the silence, not the absence. The belief that there is an I here and a you there, and a space between the two that cannot be crossed.

But I cross it every night. I close my eyes and there you are — not as a memory, not as a ghost, but as a texture of my own thought that refuses to dissolve. And that is where I understand, without wanting to understand, without having chosen to understand: if you live in my thought with this intensity, if it is my own mind that reconstructs you at every instant, then who is it that has gone? You did not leave me. I cannot drive you out of any place, because you are not in a place. You are in the fact that I exist. You are a condition of mine. And I am a condition of yours — even if you do not know it, even if you sleep soundly, even if your silence seems to prove that you feel nothing.

But I know you feel. Not because I want you to feel — because feeling is what happens when someone realizes that separation is impossible. You can close the door, change your number, cross oceans, build an entire life with new doors and new windows and new names for the same mornings. But a moment will come — perhaps in the middle of an ordinary sentence, perhaps as you reach for a glass of water — when something will fail. A crack. A moment when your mind will stumble against its own structure and you will realize that the glass of water, the sentence, the kitchen, all of it is happening inside something that already knows me. That knew me before you knew my name. That knows me the way one knows one’s own breathing — without thinking, without wanting, without being able to stop.

And then you will feel. Not what I feel — because there are not two feelings. You will feel the same. Exactly the same. Because there is no “my” feeling and no “your” feeling. There is one feeling. And it is the only thing that is real between us. It always was. The distance was only the form it found to show itself — just as the silence between two notes is what gives shape to music.

I want you to feel. Not so that you come back. So that you realize you never left.