Truthfulness is a very important Parami. To be able to understand the Truth, we have to begin with Truthfulness. Truthfulness is also linked with wisdom, naturally. Wisdom helps to uncover the Truth. Truthfulness helps to lead us to wisdom. Now, what do I mean by this? If we look at the Four Noble Truths, we see that the First Noble Truth is that Dukkha exists and the Second Noble Truth is that this Dukkha comes from our ignorance, unwise reaction and craving. Now a lot of people don't want to acknowledge responsibility for their suffering. So Truthfulness to ourselves is extremely important to be able to get to the true cause of suffering.
Most of our conditioning is towards seeing suffering lying in the external conditions, other people, the world, fate, etc. Developing Truthfulness is very important, so we can get some Right Understanding and then learn how to get to the true causes of suffering. Now this means not justifying to ourselves so many of the things we usually try to justify, or trying to change things to make them look more pleasing to ourselves.
In order to be more truthful it's very helpful to develop more Compassion. More Compassion for ourselves, understanding that it's truly compassionate to ourselves to be truthful to ourselves. Truthfulness to our direction, understanding when we are not truthful to our direction, understanding when we are not truthful in our speech and in our actions. When we look at Truthfulness in our speech, of course we have to be truthful first to ourselves and understand the true causes of suffering and have more Compassion to ourselves and others, not bending the Truth to make it more acceptable to ourselves or what we think will be acceptable to others. Being truthful about who we are and not changing it so that we make ourselves more acceptable to others. This ties into understanding the power of the eight worldly conditions. Many times when we're swayed by the eight worldly conditions we may not be truthful about who we really are, because we are afraid of blame.
Truthful to our direction and our principles: If we really want to develop, we have to try to understand what correct principles are, and what we will not compromise just to get the praise and the acceptance of others. Truthfulness to our direction involves being truthful to the principles of morality. Sometimes there is the idea that it is okay to lower our standards to make ourselves more acceptable, so we have to understand that only we are really going to look after ourselves in this world. We have to be concerned about our own Kamma. Death reflection helps here so that we can refer our direction to the one certainty in life. We also need to understand that other people's opinions are not really able to help us with our Kamma when we die, but being truthful to our principles, being truthful to our direction, truthful to our understanding of suffering and the true cause, are going to be very important when we die.
Truthfulness is a very important Parami and difficult sometimes to really put into practice. Sometimes in speech we may be asked questions where it may not be appropriate to say the Truth. At these times, what are we going to do? We have to very skillful in not bringing up an untruth to make it more convenient at that time or make it more pleasant for others. So if we're going to link Truthfulness to Lovingkindness we have to learn ways how to avoid answering certain questions. One way to avoid answering certain questions is to ask a counter question or change the subject somehow. Actually I have found that's very helpful, because a lot of people ask us some things, yet they are often going from one thing to another so if you change the subject it's like their own mind anyway. They're changing from one subject to another so it's okay with them. I tend to like changing the subject a lot when I'm back in the West. You don't have to give information about yourself, if you don't want to. So, changing the subject is very helpful at these times to remain to Truth.
Another thing about Truthfulness in speech is avoiding gossip. It's very easy to get lost in talking about others when we actually don't know if what we are talking about is true. Being careful about what we pass on to others is very important, because we may not know that it is actually true. So trying to avoid getting into talking about gossip is quite important to keep to Truthfulness. If we've heard something from others and we are asked to give some account of this for whatever reason and it's necessary for us to do so, then to keep to Truthfulness is to say, "I've heard this" rather than, "I know this" or, "I heard this from others, I don't know if it's true or not" rather than, "I know this".
So Truthfulness in speech is very important to keep to Compassion for ourselves and for others. And I could go on and on and on about Truthfulness probably for quite some time, but I'm going to have to stop there, because I have to give a guided meditation.