GETTING AUTHENTIC

A couple of days ago. I was in two quite distinct minds about an issue at work that involved most of the staff, and I had to make a decision that could not please everyone. I called a meeting with one of my colleagues and another manager. I knew my colleague's position; it was quite unequivocal.
The other manager, as it turned out, took the opposite view. Suddenly and silently my colleague did a 180 degree U-turn under the table and came up beside her. I wasn't surprised; he is her boyfriend.

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A master was meditating one evening when a stranger entered his house, demanding the solid-gold begging bowl that had been given him by the king in gratitude for his sage advice.

The master asked “Why do you need it?” “I don’t,” replied the stranger, “but I am a robber – the best in the land. It is what I do.” He was expecting a lecture on the evils of thievery, but the master said to him simply, “I see. Well, keep stealing, but be aware,” and returned to his meditation.

Some nights later, the stranger again burst into his home, livid with frustration. “You have messed up my life!” he roared. “Last night I broke into the king’s chamber. There before me lay all the riches of the treasury. I reached out to touch some of it and your words came back to me – ‘Keep stealing, but Be Aware’. I froze. I couldn’t go through with it. I am no longer a thief!”

Oh, how we steal from ourselves on a daily basis!

Keep stealing, but become aware.
Thank you Colin Hayes

Let’s look at the basic assumption that you are a fundamentally nice person – a genuine, truthful, valid, authorised, reliable and trustworthy person. I’m not insinuating that you’re not, I’m simply inviting you to question your own assumption that you are. If you continue to assume what you’ve always assumed, nothing is going to change.

Here’s a question for you –

How do you know when you’re lying, if you’re a habitual liar and don’t know it?

You’d swear sincerely that you are honest. But what if you’re mistaken about that?

How can you test your assumptions (in this case about your authenticity)? By doing something you’ve probably never done before – by assuming for a while that, as a human being, you are often NOT authentic, possibly more often than you realise. Change your point of view, and then notice everything that comes up for you while you’re standing in that different perspective.

What’s the point of challenging your assumption of authenticity? Well, apart from the considerable entertainment value, it is fundamentally futile to work on your relationships, your health, your finances, your career, or just about anything else of yours if you are unconsciously duplicitous and deceitful, and deceiving yourself about that too.

Just as an experiment, sit in this possibility for a while -- a helluva lot of what we’re up to each day is about looking good, to others and ourselves. We don’t really mean a lot of the “polite” things we say automatically (e.g. “How are you?”, or “Have a nice day.”) and sometimes we know we don’t mean it. We don’t always believe the things we say we believe in, and we know that. Sometimes we switch to a diametrically opposite opinion in public in order to “get along”. We regularly swap around our hierarchy of values to suit the occasion and the company we’re in at the time, excusing our duplicity to ourselves with the tag of Pragmatism. We apologise without feeling at all apologetic. We go out of our way to be “nice” to people we really don’t like, because we want their approval. We make promises we know we may not deliver on, kidding ourselves that feeling guilty about it afterwards will be enough recompense. We’re afraid to express our fears, doubts and misgivings for fear of not looking strong. We withhold a truth for fear of hurting another person’s feelings. And so it goes on…………… We are so inured to being disloyal to ourselves that we hardly notice it any more, and when we do, we tell ourselves that “It doesn’t matter. It’s trivial. It’s not hurting anyone.”

It is, you know – it’s hurting you.

If you are inauthentic about your disloyalties to yourself, don’t be surprised when others are disloyal to you. In fact, be surprised if they’re not, sooner or later. Inauthenticity attracts inauthenticity. If you cannot cop to your dishonesties, you are a pushover for anyone else who can get at you through the bits you won’t look at. How else do you think our kids learn so early where, when and how to push their parents’ “hot” buttons? How do con-men find their victims so easily? By Implicit Invitation. It’s almost like we wear a neon sign over our head saying “Dishonest, vulnerable Victim here: come and get it!”

And if you want something from someone, you are totally at their mercy. All they have to do is look as if they might withdraw their approval from you, and you will flip over faster than a politician’s promise.

At a deeper level, our inauthenticity is the root cause of our insecurity, and all the separating emotions that emanate from that. If we were totally authentic, we would no longer feel vulnerable.

How are duplicity, disloyalty to yourself and inauthenticity possible? How did they come about?

THE ILLUSION OF DUALITY

We talk often about the importance of “being true to ourselves”. How can you be true to yourself if there is only one of “you”? How can you talk to yourself if there is only one of you? Who is talking; who is listening? How can you deceive yourself if there is only one of you?

We live in a dual-verse, a sub-section of the uni-verse. Everything has its opposite. Everything we claim we “are” has its opposite in us. To the extent that an opposite remains unacknowledged or disallowed, we are affected by it without our knowing it.

I strongly suggest that you look at that last paragraph again, put this down, and just BE with that for a while. Let it be.

The Law of Opposites is a Law of Life. Like another Law of Life, the Law of Gravity, it doesn’t give a hoot whether you believe it or not -- it just IS. Like gravity, when you are aware of its existence, it can be very useful to you, e.g. it keeps you grounded: but if you don’t know about it or fail to take it into account, it can do you a lot of damage, e.g. if you’re up a ladder and lean out too far, the ground comes up relentlessly hard and fast!

Have you ever experienced someone you thought you knew really well suddenly do something quite “out of character”? Of course you have. The only reason you could be taken by surprise, is that you have not heard of, or you’ve forgotten the duality/duplicity of human nature. The same applies to you. Have you ever broken a promise? Of course you have. How come? Because the bit of you that broke the promise has said “I didn’t have the microphone when you promised that one!”

I call this aspect of myself “I/Me Pty. Ltd.”

We used to play a game in Inward Adventure called the I/Me Statue Game. Anne Ameling would call out the word “I”, and we would feel into that and assume for ourselves a posture that expressed that feeling. Then she would call out the word “Me”, and we would feel into that and assume another posture that expressed that feeling. So the game went on for 15-20 minutes, alternating between “I” and “Me”, enabling each of us to get a first-hand experience of the difference between the two entities. You might like to try it for yourself now. Go on, give yourself a treat.

The Law of Duality has its good uses. Duality is an illusion that enables us stand outside of our self and look at who we are. Duality enables us to look at ourselves in a mirror image. If you really don’t know what unacknowledged parts of you remain undiscovered, look at the qualities of those people who show up in your face and whom you judge as “bad”, or “good”. Those qualities exist in you: they must, otherwise you could not recognise them. You are looking at yourself. Those people are mirroring something for you that you need to see about yourself. How neat is that? Be grateful to them.

When you acknowledge and say “Yes” to your duality, and the duality of everyone around you, you are more likely to see things as they are, and less likely to be vulnerable to surprise attack

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