The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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Okay.

The child... As a child, I would get so enraged by hypocrisy, not annoyed, but really deeply affected and usually mobilized a lot of, a lot of anger in me.

And it wasn't that I thought I knew the ultimate truth, but it wasn't hard to spot lies.

And when I would see a society say one thing and do another,

or I would sense someone living deceptively using words to hide the truth

or when I would see something but nobody would acknowledge it or talk about it

pretended it wasn't even there.

It's hard.

And that was sort of how I felt about Dukka, you know, suffering.

Like nobody's talking about this all-pervasive force that I keep bumping into.

And as children, we learn and understand by interactions with others, often not always a parent.

We sort of arrive at a sense of consensual reality through interaction. And so, okay, what you're experiencing is coldness.

Here's some warm clothes.

You don't feel good because you're hungry. Here's some food. You're worthy of love. Here is my love. And this is really the basis for empathic connection, for making sense of the world together.

And in grad school, the research I was working on focused on risk and resilience in maltreated kids, abuse, neglect.

And when many of those kids faced trauma, part of what was so destructive and disoriented or disorienting was they didn't even really know what was real, you know?

Often they didn't have anyone to help them realize like, yes, this is true. This is real. I'm sorry. And in this way,

honesty feels like a kind of moral debt and it's owed to others so that they can make sense of their lives.

There's a Taravaden commentary said something like all evil states converge upon the transgression of truth.

And to deceive another is to, you know, is to induce a measure of delusion in them.

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