Changes

Something you believe to be true—which probably was true for a time—on which you partly base your action, but which, in actuality, was only one opinion. You thought it was a truthful finding with all its logical consequences, and your action (part of your action) was based on it, so that everything proceeded from it automatically. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/agenda/04/august-24-1963#p2</ref>

==Honesty as a Superstition==

This phenomenon is very real, concrete, it is felt with all the reality and intensity of even a physical phenomenon. But each person describes it with a form particular to himself, except as I say, when he has read and studied, and his brain is full of all that is written in books; then automatically what he has read gives a form to his experience, and this takes away from it something of the spontaneity which gives such an impression of being sincere and truthful; it becomes a mental construction. If you have read and read much that it is like a serpent which is coiled up, well, quite naturally when you concentrate and try to awaken it, you see a serpent which is coiled, because you think about it like that. If you are told about a thousand-petalled lotus, you see a thousand-petalled lotus. But it is a mental superimposition upon the fact of the experience itself. But the feeling of something that's innumerable, that's one and innumerable at the same time, and that kind of impression of something opening, awakening, beginning to vibrate, responding to the forces and giving you an intensity of light, of understanding, of opening to higher regions, this is... the substance of the experience. Yet when you begin to describe it with images which you have found in books, it is as though suddenly you were making it either superficial—fossilised, so to say—or artificial or even insincere. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/22-june-1955#p10</ref>

It is not the fact that if a man is truthful (in the sense of not lying), all he says happens. For that he must know the Truth—be in touch with the truth of things, not merely speak the truth as his mind knows it. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/speech-and-yoga#p6</ref>

==Honesty and Fear==

Even when by chance, as in the story of Abu Abbas, it forces a man to speak the truth, that does not make him truthful; for, at the very next moment, fear may drive him to speak without frankness, as did the fox in our previous tale. And that is what most often happens.