Honesty

Introduction

Being honest is to be real, authentic, and genuine. Being dishonest is to be false, fictitious, fascia. Honesty expresses respect for oneself and for others. Dishonesty does not respect the person himself or others. Honesty tinged life of openness, trust and sincerity, and expressed willingness to live in the light. Dishonesty seeks shade, cover and concealment. It is a willingness to live in the dark. Dishonesty would have no role in a world where reality prevailed and was inhabited by human beings fully conscious. Unfortunately, we live with dishonesty (Payton, pp. 71). Humans, harbor a variety of tendencies and impulses that spontaneously harmonize with reason. Human beings need to practice and study to become benevolent in which people return to the divine spark from which they emerged. In this attempt, to do many things that prudence advised hide. Lying is an "easy" tool of concealment and, when used often, soon degenerates into a vice that drags otherwise. Honesty is of utmost importance. Honesty is not just openness, ability to tell the truth, but in the honesty of legitimate work for an honest day's pay. A simple and consistent definition of honesty is instead this:

“Honesty indicates the human quality of communicating and acting truthfully and refrains from bad deeds to the next based on deception”

Discussion

I believe honesty is the heart of any addiction recovery plan. If we do not have a realistic, clear and honest vision of ourselves, our problems, and what we want to accomplish, we're could be in a great deal of difficulty (Simon, pp. 121). The very fact that we had continued and are active in addiction for so long is almost proof positive of our ability to delude ourselves. In the light of day, and with a clear mind, how could we possibly believe that we were not doing ourselves, and those around us serious harm by continuing our addiction. The only way we could allow ourselves to indulge in our using behavior is to create a fantasy around ourselves which essentially made it OK to use. These fantasies were self delusions that were rooted in dishonesty and self deception. For a long time, I had wondered what the word delusion means. I thought it meant 'crazy', (and there were certainly times I thought I was). I looked it up, and it simply means believing in something that is not true (Dale, pp. 4). For the purpose, of this discussion let's look at honesty not only in terms of being truthful and not lying, but in not deceiving ourselves. Here, is a simple definition of honesty: “Honesty is the absence of the intention to deceive”

There is a certain risk that is involved in being honest and frequently we fear the consequences and pain (mostly to ourselves) that may occur if we're honest. This type of fear is referred to in the 12 steps as self-centered fear the fear that we may lose something we already possess, failed to gain something we want or suffer a loss. There is ...