Lies Of Omission Quotes

The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.

Because everybody lies. It's part of living in society. Don't get me wrong-I think it's necessary. The last thing anyone wants is to live in a society where total honesty prevails. Can you imagine the conversations? You're short and fat, one person might say, and the other might answer, I know. But you smell bad. It just wouldn't work. So people lie by omission all the time. People will tell you most of the story...and I've learned that the part they neglect to tell you is often the most important part. People hide the truth because they're afraid." -Jo

What shapes us is not always our achievements but our omissions. Not lies; simply the truths we don’t tell.

Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.

Maeve had lied. Or lied by omission. But she knew. She knew what the girl had gone through-knew she'd been a slave. That day-that day early on, he'd threatened to whip the girl, gods above. And she had lost it. He'd been such a proud fool that he'd assumed she'd lashed out because she was nothing more than a child. He should have known better-should have known that when she did react to something like that, it meant the scars went deep. And then there were the other things he'd said...

I don't like lies," said Bran, and I knew I'd failed to keep the pain of his revelation from my face. "Not even lies of omission. Hard truths can be dealt with, triumphed over, but lies will destroy your soul.

Faeries make up for their inability to lie with a panoply of deceptions and cruelties. Twisted words, pranks, omissions, riddles, scandals, not to mention their revenges upon one another for ancient, half-remembered slights. Storms are less fickle than they are, seas less capricious.

He manages a sad smile. “An omission is not the same thing as a lie, Miss Bishop. It’s a manipulation.

Nothing strong can be built on a foundation of lies and omissions.

Secrets lie through omission just like shame lies through secrecy.

It’s not enough to be able to lie with a straight face; anybody with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that. The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth — but not all of it. The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it…but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying.

Direct lies, small lies, huge lies, and lies of omission… these are all self-serving and sources of self-destruction.

No artist knows everything (yea, even this artist - piss-artist, con-artist, body-artist) but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.

I have found that those who try to shield us from the truth, regardless of the reason, end up doing the greatest harm. Truth alone sets you free, not lies and omissions.

A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.

He wasn't yours to get hurt by. He was someone else's and you knew that, so why are you offended? What right do you have to be hurt when you were a part of the deception (lying by omission)?

Lies of omission do not exist. The concept is a very human one. It is the product of your story writing again. You have written a story about the truth, making emotional demands of it, and in particular, of those in possession of it. Your demands are based on a feeling of entitlement to the facts, which is very childish. You can never know all of the facts. Only I can. And since it's impossible for me to reveal all facts to you, it is my discretion alone that decides which facts will be revealed in the finite time we have. If I do not volunteer information you deem critical to your fate, it possibly means that I am a scoundrel, but it does not mean that I am a liar. And it certainly means you did not ask the right questions. One can make either true statements or false statements about reality. All of the statements I make are true.

And that’s when I realize how tired I am, of lies and omissions and half-truths. I put Wes in danger, but he’s still here—and if he’s willing to brave this chaos with me, then he deserves to know what I know. And I’m about to speak, about to tell him that, tell him everything, when he brings his hand to the back of my neck, pulls me forward, and kisses me. The noise floods in. I don’t push back, don’t block it out, and for one moment, all I can think is that he tastes like summer rain. His lips linger on mine, urgent and warm. Lasting.

When you keep a secret from those closest to you, even with the best of motives, there is a danger that you will create a smaller life within your main life. The first secret will spin off other secrets that also must be kept, complicated webs of evasion that grow into elaborate architectures of repressed truths and subterfuge, until you discover that you must live two narratives at once. Because deception requires both bold lies and lies of omission, it stains the soul, muddies the conscience, blurs the vision, and puts you at risk of headlong descent into greater darkness.

To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course , on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Everything she sang was true. I will leave it to you as to whether the truth can exist with details omitted, or if those lacks make a lie of it.

A lie by omission is still a lie,” I argued,

All the lies that have ever been told or ever will be told fall into three categories, or strategies: lies of commission, lies of omission, and lies of influence.

Lies of omission are one of the more subtle forms of lying. Instead of making a deceptive statement, the liar withholds the truth.

Lies of omission count as lies, sweetie—they can be the worst ones.

My father is a liar and so am I. But I’m going to stop. I have to stop. I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight. No lies, no omissions. That’s my promise. This time I truly mean it.

As I had been forced to learn at a very young age, there’s no better way to mask a lie—or at least a glaring omission—than to wrap it in an emotional outpouring of truth.

For Obama, ignorance was never an excuse. Ignorance was a strategy.

Lies by omission are still lies.

Because deception requires both bold lies and lies of omission, it stains the soul, muddies the conscience, blurs the vision, and puts you at risk of headlong descent into greater darkness. As a boy, I could not have put

Although leftists are not uniquely guilty of lying, they are uniquely guilty of lying as a conscious strategy.

No one speaks the truth to anyone anymore. Lies either by omission or purposefully have become our national pastime. Backstabbing is an Olympic sport. Or at least it should be.

When the lies of omission unravel, so does the story.

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without. To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you'd crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.

A lie by omission is just as bad as a lie by commission.

Like pornography, postmodernism is hard to define but easy to spot.

Omission is a sin only if, in the process of deceiving, you forget the truth. Lying is a sin only if, in the process, the lie becomes the only truth.

Stop lying by omission

I’m not a very secretive person, mostly out of laziness: I refuse to take on the cognitive labor of tracking lies and omissions.

Companions were not allowed to lie. I don’t know why. I had tried a few times when I was young to get Benjamin to lie, and he never could. As we got older, I tried experiments, attempting to find a way for him to lie. Lies of omission, white lies, whoppers. Nothing. He couldn’t lie. My father told me that they were programmed that way. He seemed kind of proud about that. And now, I hoped, that would save my life.

By building mountains out of molehills, through lying by omission, agenda-setting, framing stories and issues in a certain light, and by manipulating what is spread through social media by either limiting its reach or artificially amplifying it, the major media and tech companies try, and they do, influence the way people think and thus how they act.

Were you ever going to tell me?” “About the Grail?” He returned to the couch and handed her a glass. “I wasn’t planning on it.” She knocked back the rum and swallowed, setting the empty glass on the table. Impressive. She met his eyes. “So even if we had slept together last night, you were going to keep telling me you were descended from a pirate, not an actual pirate.” He took a swig, his gaze locked on hers. “Would you have believed me?” “No.” She shrugged. “Just wondering how long you would have lied to me.” “I could ask you the same thing.” She rolled her eyes. “I played you. There’s a difference.” She shrugged. “Besides that, was before our no lies between us deal.” “I see this as more of an omission.” He finished off his drink and placed the glass beside hers. “In my defense, I’ve never told anyone who I really am. You’re the first.” She raised a brow. “Are you saying I should feel…special?” “Aye.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve never taken a bullet for anyone either, not even my crew.” “Thanks for that.” A reluctant smile curved her lips as she met his eyes. “Pretty heroic for a pirate.” He chuckled. “It’s less heroic when you’re certain you won’t die.” “But you knew it would hurt.” He nodded slowly. “True.” She pinched her fingertips close together in the air. “It might’ve been a tiny bit heroic.” Her dark eyes sparkled with the mischief he was growing much too fond of. “Not bad for a pirate.” He admitted.

Andrew put a thumb to the corner of his mouth and dragged it along his lips to erase his smile. "That sounds like an accusation, but I didn't lie to you." "Omission is the easiest way to lie," Neil said. "You could have corrected me." "Could have, didn't," Andrew said. "Figure it out for yourself." "I did," Neil said. He tapped two fingers to his temple, copying Andrew's mocking salute from their first meeting. "Better luck next time." "Oh," Andrew said. "Oh, you might actually turn out to be interesting. For a little while, at least. I don't think the amusement will last. It never does.

My life has been defined by the things I didn’t do. The things I didn’t say. I think it’s the same for a lot of people. What shapes us is not always our achievements but our omissions. Not lies; simply the truths we don’t tell.

He pictures the evening he might have spent, snugly at home, fixing the food he has bought, then lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself slowly sleepy. At first glance this is an absolutely convincing and charming scene of domestic contentment. Only after a few instants does George notice the omission that makes it meaningless. What is left out of the picture is Jim, lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.

Are you lying by omission? Because by not telling me something I should know you are lying to me still. Or allowing me to believe something that isn’t true is just like lying. Are you doing either of those things right now?” After a moment’s thought, Asmoday simply says, “Yes.” “Are you going to elaborate?” “No.

I'm a coward. A willing coward, complicit in my own fall. I've never told him that I love him, as if refusing to say it aloud would somehow shield us both, but it hasn't. Like an untamed, sentient thing, full of I am and yet estranged from me, my heart discerns its own truth and knows that this omission is a lie.

His old priests might have told him there's sins of commission not omission. It's not always the things you do but the things you don't do that will cost you your soul. Sometimes it's not the spoken lie but the unspoken truth that opens the door to betrayal.

Even a supportive Obama biographer like David Remnick called Dreams a “mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, re-creation, invention, and artful shaping.

as a planned result of the separation of powers, the president must persuade Congress of the rightness of his choices, and that is the way it should be.

As has been seen, Obama clearly lied about transparency. As shall be seen, he lied just as spectacularly about the rule of law.

The greater the risk, the more delicious the triumph.

Obama is the classic turtle on a fence post. The faithful may believe he climbed up that post, but Obama knows otherwise

Edgar Allan Poe called it “the imp of the perverse,” that willful, self-destructive voice within that impels us to do things or say things that cause our undoing.

As Vladimir Lenin once reportedly said, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Although Obama did not drink deeply at this well, he drank deeply enough to be intoxicated with its spirit.

Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important—it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.

What remained? Loneliness, or worse still, far worse because it so deeply degraded the spirit, a life of perpetual subterfuge, of guarded opinions and guarded actions, of lies of omission if not of speech, of becoming an accomplice in the world's injustice by maintaining at all times a judicious silence, making and keeping the friends one respected, on false pretences, because if they knew they would turn aside, even the friends one respected.

But that’s not entirely. My life has been defined by the things I didn’t do. The things I didn’t say think it’s the same for a lot of people. What shapes us is not always our achievements but our omissions. Not lies: simply the truths we don’t sell.

When you keep a secret from those closest to you, even with the best of motives, there's a danger that you will create a smaller life within your main life. The first secret will spin off other secrets that also must be kept, complicated webs of evasion that grow into elaborate architectures of repressed truths and subterfuge, until you discover that you must live two narratives at once. Because deception requires both bold lies and lies of omission, it's stains the soil, muddies the conscience, blurs the vision, and puts you at risk of headlong descent into darkness.

He made so many promises,” said the deeply disappointed Obama acolyte Barbara Walters five years into the presidency. “We thought that he was going to be . . . the next messiah.” The messiah he was clearly not. He was not even an honest man. Lamented Walters, “People feel very disappointed because they expected more.

Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former far more harshly. The origin of this imbalance remains a mystery, but it surely relates to the value we place on a person’s energy and intent.

The first panel misquotes the preamble and conclusion of the Declaration of Independence, leaving out five words from within its selected excerpts. The architect requested the omissions so the text would fit better! Surely this memorable text should not be altered for so petty a reason. We know Jefferson would not approve, for whenever he sent correspondents a copy of the Declaration he took pains to show what the Continental Congress had added to his draft and what it had cut. The altered text reads,

I'm a big fan of the lie of omission.

I’m a big fan of the lie of omission.

To avoid contact with someone so as not to have to address the truth is a form of lying by omission, regardless of good intentions.

Silence is not a lie. A sin of omission, but not a lie.

Secrets lie through omission just like shame lies through secrecy

Obama has subjected America to what Marc Thiessen described in the Washington Post as “a fundamentally dishonest presidency.

The Clinton era was a turning point in the history of journalism.

Jonathan Turley was even more blunt in his assessment: “Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be.

To defend the indefensible, George Orwell once observed, political figures employ language that consists largely of “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

To be accepted by the public, transformative legislation—Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare—needed at least some level of bipartisan congressional support.

A lie of omission was much simpler than admitting to yourself you were going against the wishes of the person you idolised.

From Obama’s perspective, truth was what he said it was. The reason he despised Fox News, the nation’s highest-rated cable news channel, was that Fox alone among the news networks evaluated the validity of the White House narrative. In fact, on more than a few occasions, Benghazi included, Fox’s reporting showed the administration’s account of events to be pure hogwash. That rankled, and a wounded Obama struck back.

This reflects a general tendency. People are more willing to lie by omission than commission. If I am selling you a used car, I do not feel obligated to mention that the car is burning a lot of oil, but if you ask me explicitly: “Does this car burn a lot of oil?” you are likely to wangle an admission from me that yes, there has been a small problem along those lines. To get at the truth, it helps to ask specific questions.

Lest he provide a target for his critics, Obama avoided all variations of the word “mandate” in his 2009 speech. Under his plan, no one would be “forced” or “mandated” to get health insurance; people would merely be “required.

If this new breed of activist urged Obama to hammer away at the Constitution, old-school civil libertarians lamented its demolition. The longtime Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff had fought many a battle for civil liberties and had scars enough to speak his mind. “Apparently he doesn’t give one damn about the separation of powers.” said Hentoff of Obama after the president’s “pen and phone” remarks. “Never before in our history has a president done these things.

No," Neil said, "but I would ask him why you're not medicated." There was a heartbeat of startled silence. The only one who didn't react was Andrew; even Kevin looked surprised. Nicky was the first to find his tongue, but he reverted to German to ask Aaron, "Am I crazy? Did I just see that happen?" "Don't look at me," Aaron said. "I'd prefer an answer in English," Neil said. Andrew put a thumb to the corner of his mouth and dragged it along his lips to erase his smile. "That sounds like an accusation, but I didn't lie to you." "Omission is the easiest way to lie," Neil said. "You could have corrected me." "Could have, didn't," Andrew said. "Figure it out for yourself." "I did," Neil said. He tapped two fingers to his temple, copying Andrew's mocking salute from their first meeting. "Better luck next time." "Oh," Andrew said. "Oh, you might actually turn out to be interesting. For a little while, at least. I don't think the amusement will last. It never does.

the left had been finessing labels for years: racial preferences to affirmative action to diversity; abortion rights to pro-choice to reproductive rights; global warming to climate change; gay marriage to marriage equality; liberal to progressive.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. (...) To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves." To protest

Reagan never worried about whether jobs were shovel-ready. He understood that the work of creating jobs was not the government’s, let alone his, but that of the nation’s employers. They would create the jobs that made economic sense, even if only burly men could do them.

In the three years after Obamacare was signed into law in 2010, the costs did not go down $2,500 per family as promised. They went up $2,581 a family. Yes, inflation would have pushed the costs of insurance coverage up regardless of Obamacare, but not that much, nor that quickly.

The problem was that by 2014 no one was quite sure what those challenges were. Indeed, the earth had not warmed in sixteen years, and this had inspired the savvier environmentalists, Obama among them, to at least shift the branding of the seeming crisis from “global warming” to “climate change.

Although immersed in leftism since childhood, he never left the shallow end of the pool. He proved so adept at breaking promises because he did not care deeply enough to keep them. What mattered more was that he be seen striking the right pose, finding the right groove, spinning the right narrative.

UN-Impressive Acts of Indiscretion • Forwarding other people's emails without getting permission. • Throwing other people under the bus to save yourself. • Talking loudly, being boorish and insensitive to the others around you. • Flagrant cheating. • Burning bridges. • Talking smack. • Dissing your competitor to your customer. • Oversharing and revealing too much personal information about yourself and others. • Breaking trust by sharing someone else’s secrets. • Being passive-aggressive to manipulate a situation or person. • Saying one thing and doing another. • Being two-faced. • Lying by omission. • Dispensing bulls#@%!

In October 2013, Caroline Glick, managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, spoke as bluntly as an Israeli editor can about an American president: “US President Barack Obama views lies as legitimate political tools. He uses lies strategically to accomplish through mendacity what he could never achieve through honest means.

In the month of his inauguration, 63 percent of African Americans held a favorable view of race relations in America. By July 2013, that figure had fallen to 38 percent. Among whites, the proportion had declined from 79 percent to 52 percent. Obama, alas, has failed in the one area in which even the opposition hoped he would succeed: bridging the racial divide.

The public largely misunderstands the “fake news” issue. Newspapers rarely fib outright. Most “lies” are errors of omission or emphasis. There are no Fox stories saying blue states have lower divorce rates, nor are there MSNBC stories exploring the fact that many pro-choice Democrats, particularly religious ones, struggle with a schism between their moral and political beliefs on abortion.

Huge thing’s your ego. Awful that you weren’t the only man for her. Girl scrubs your toilets for twenty-three years, you begrudge her the life she had when you weren’t around.” “But she lied,” he said. “Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.

a quote by David Schippers, a Democrat and the chief investigative counsel for the House Judiciary Committee. Said Schippers for the ages: “The president, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a criminal grand jury. He lied to the people. He lied to his Cabinet. He lied to his top aides. And now he’s lied under oath to the Congress of the United States. There’s no one left to lie to.

As a contrast to this kind of democracy we have the German democracy, which is a true democracy; for here the leader is freely chosen and is obliged to accept full responsibility for all his actions and omissions. The problems to be dealt with are not put to the vote of the majority; but they are decided upon by the individual, and as a guarantee of responsibility for those decisions he pledges all he has in the world and even his life.

In fact, Bush’s tax cuts increased the amount of revenue collected by more than 30 percent from his first year as president to his last, just as Reagan’s and Kennedy’s tax cuts increased federal revenue after they were passed. As economist Thomas Sowell argued, “Obama knew then that tax rates and tax revenues do not automatically move in the same direction. In other words, he is lying when he talks as if tax rates and tax revenues move together.

I looked through her phone a couple of times when she was in the shower, searching for text messages, but found nothing. If she’d received any incriminating texts, she had deleted them. She wasn’t stupid, apparently, just occasionally careless. It was possible I’d never know the truth. I might never find out. In a way, I hoped I wouldn’t. Kathy peered at me as we sat on the couch after the walk. “Are you all right?” “What do you mean?” “I don’t know. You seem a bit flat.” “Today?” “Not just today. Recently.” I evaded her eyes. “Just work. I’ve got a lot on my mind.” Kathy nodded. A sympathetic squeeze of my hand. She was a good actress. I could almost believe she cared. “How are rehearsals going?” “Better. Tony came up with some good ideas. We’re going to work late next week to go over them.” “Right.” I no longer believed a word she said. I analyzed every sentence, the way I would with a patient. I was looking for subtext, reading between the lines for nonverbal clues—subtle inflections, evasions, omissions. Lies. “How is Tony?” “Fine.” She shrugged, as if to indicate she couldn’t care less. I didn’t believe that.

The difference between hearing and listening is significant...Listening well means knowing when to interject questions, when to redirect the conversation, and, more importantly, in what terms to interpret the other's narrative. It means recognizing that the speaker is making purposeful choices, consciously or unconsciously, and considering what those purposes might be. It means accepting the tension between making judgments and withholding judgment as the other's story or line of reasoning unfolds. It means hearing and noting the omissions. And it means listening not only through the words spoken, but to them.

One great deception, however, underscored the entire Bergdahl Kabuki. It was the same one that underscored Obama’s role as commander in chief: he had to pretend that he cared. When Obama told the press in Brussels, “We have a basic principle: We do not leave anybody wearing the American uniform behind,” it was for him just another talking point. When Rice spoke about America’s “sacred obligation” to its soldiers, it was again just so much talk. Obama, in particular, saw nothing “sacred” about America’s past or about its presence in the world. Indeed, if he felt any obligation at all to Americans in harm’s way, he would not have spent the evening of September 11, 2012, plotting campaign strategy.

This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships. But not only is our subject-matter narrowed, but our whole attitude towards literature is coloured by loyalties which we at least intermittently realise to be non-literary. I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever—any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is “good” or “bad”—every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually “I like this book” or “I don’t like it,” and what follows is a rationalisation. But “I like this book” is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is “This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.” Of course, when one praises a book for political reasons one may be emotionally sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. In general, if you are writing for a paper that you are in agreement with, you sin by commission, and if for a paper of the opposite stamp, by omission.

Then the Yogi suddenly fell silent, and when I looked puzzled he shrugged and said: ‘Don’t you see yourself where the fault lies?’ But I could not see it. At this point he recapitulated with astonishing exactness everything he had learned from me by his questioning. He went back to the first signs of fatigue, repugnance, and intellectual constipation, and showed me that this could have happened only to someone who had submerged himself disproportionately in his studies and that it was high time for me to recover my self-control, and to regain my energy with outside help. Since I had taken the liberty of discontinuing my regular meditation exercises, he pointed out, I should at least have realized what was wrong as soon as the first evil consequences appeared, and should have resumed meditation. He was perfectly right. I had omitted meditating for quite a while on the grounds that I had no time, was too distracted or out of spirits, or too busy and excited with my studies. Moreover, as time went on I had completely lost all awareness of my continuous sin of omission. Even now, when I was desperate and had almost run aground, it had taken an outsider to remind me of it. As a matter of fact, I was to have the greatest difficulty snapping out of this state of neglect. I had to return to the training routines and beginners’ exercises in meditation in order gradually to relearn the art of composing myself and sinking into contemplation.” With a small sigh the Magister ceased pacing the room. “That is what happened to me, and to this day I am still a little ashamed to talk about it. But the fact is, Joseph, that the more we demand of ourselves, or the more our task at any given time demands of us, the more dependant we are on meditation as a wellspring of energy, as the ever-renewing concord of mind and soul. And – I could if I wished give you quite a few more examples of this – the more intensively a task requires our energies, arousing and exalting us at one time, tiring and depressing us at another, the more easily we may come to neglect this wellspring, just as when we are carried away by some intellectual work we easily forget to attend to the body. The really great men in the history of the world have all either known how to meditate or have unconsciously found their way to the place to which meditation leads us. Even the most vigorous and gifted among the others all failed and were defeated in the end because their task or their ambitious dream seized hold of them, made them into persons so possessed that they lost the capacity for liberating themselves from present things, and attaining perspective. Well, you know all this; it’s taught during the first exercises, of course. But it is inexorably true. How inexorably true it is, one realizes only after having gone astray.

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33 Freyd: The term "multiple personality" itself assumes that there is "single personality" and there is evidence that no one ever displays a single personality. TAT: The issue here is the extent of dissociation and amnesia and the extent to which these fragmentary aspects of personality can take executive control and control function. Sure, you and I have different parts to our mind, there's no doubt about that, but I don't lose time to mine they can't come out in the middle of a lecture and start acting 7 years old. I'm very much in the camp that says that we all are multi-minds, but the difference between you and me and a multiple is pretty tangible. Freyd: Those are clearly interesting questions, but that area and the clinical aspects of dissociation and multiple personalities is beyond anything the Foundation is actively... TAT: That's a real problem. Let me tell you why that's a problem. Many of the people that have been alleged to have "false memory syndrome" have diagnosed dissociative disorders. It seems to me the fact that you don't talk about dissociative disorders is a little dishonest, since many people whose lives have been impacted by this movement are MPD or have a dissociative disorder. To say, "Well, we ONLY know about repression but not about dissociation or multiple personalities" seems irresponsible. Freyd: Be that as it may, some of the scientific issues with memory are clear. So if we can just stick with some things for a moment; one is that memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted no matter how long ago or recent. TAT: You weigh the recollected testimony of an alleged perpetrator more than the alleged victim's. You're saying, basically, if the parents deny it, that's another notch for disbelief. Freyd: If it's denied, certainly one would want to check things. It would have to be one of many factors that are weighed -- and that's the problem with these issues -- they are not black and white, they're very complicated issues.

Ascending from contents to the act, then, one can discern a man’s intention to eclipse reality. This intention can become manifest in a large variety of forms, ranging from the straight lie concerning a fact to the subtler lie of arranging a context in such a manner that the omission of the fact will not be noticed; or from the construction of a system that, by its form, suggests its partial view as the whole of reality to its author’s refusal to discuss the premises of the system in terms of reality experienced. Beyond the act, finally, we reach the actor, that is the man who has committed the act of deforming his humanity to a self and now lets the shrunken self eclipse his own full reality. He will deny his humanity and insist he is nothing but his shrunken self; he wiU deny ever having experienced the reality of common experience; he will deny that anybody could have a fuller perception of reality than he allows his self; in brief, he will set the contracted self as a model for himself as well as for everybody else. Moreover, his insistence on conformity wiU be aggressive - and in this aggressiveness there betrays itself the anxiety and alienation of the man who has lost contact with reality.