6 u2e. What is an authentic life?

It is an ideal for individuals to move themselves toward, over the course of their lives. An authentic life is the realization of one’s full humanity.

It is a life-long individual project of sorts: to become the truest, finest, most harmonious and complete version of oneself.  In contrast to an authentic life are lives characterized by alienation, reaction, artificiality, mindlessness, discordance, and cliché.  This former view of life underscores your and my potential for taking charge of our lives amid the forces – both external to us, and within ourselves – that would mold us into something contrary to who we really are, and less that what we could actually become.  This perspective holds up the challenge to you and me, to everyone, to take responsibility – now, and next year, and on into the future – for the validity and measure of our being.

This project of approximating an authentic life involves a tension and interplay between two processes.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to know where one of these two processes leaves off and the other one picks up.  On the one hand, this orientation holds that each of us has a given nature: qualities, aspects, and tendencies, that are inherent to us as human beings and as individuals.  Such things as our physicality, cognitive capacities, and likely to some extent, (and maybe more that we think), our sexuality, personality, manner, drives, and predilections.  In these areas it is as if we are gardeners, tending to ourselves, nurturing that unique part, a rosebud that will become a beautiful rose.  The task is to grow that particular flower and not waver, thinking any flower will do.

On the other hand, an authentic life also holds for those number of crucial areas in which we can define ourselves.  In this case we can use the metaphor of the sculptor, with which we can shape ourselves.  In areas such as beliefs, values, philosophy of life, spiritual or religious commitments and practices, our character, our morality, our goals, our capabilities, and our actions in the world.  We have choice to control some of these aspects of ourselves.

And we have responsibility to ourselves to mold them into a configuration that we are deeply proud of.

Through our inherent powers of observation, reason, decision, and volition or willfulness, we undertake the project of becoming, and of defining ourselves.  The end product is a balanced life, where all the pieces fit, where each dimension of our being complements and contributes to the others.  It is an existence where it all comes together into a meaningful and personally satisfying pattern: heritage, home, family, friendship, community, play, solitude, and work.  This harmony, grounded in who we are and what we freely and reflectively choose to be, is an authentic life.  Whatever we do for work is also an element within this integrated totality, and serves the larger whole.  It can only be assessed in light of this larger and more fundamental reality.

The only currency that really matters in life is time.  Each of us has just so much of this currency, and we spend it as we do, and when it is gone it cannot be replenished.

Please throw away fewer moments than you did before. Be more responsible to them now than ever before.  Take them more seriously.  And while being more serious than I was, I am also lighter, more joyous, freer than before, I feel connected much more than I ever did.

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There are two dimensions of self-control: controlling one’s actions, and controlling the content on one’s consciousness.  If you have no influence on the content of your consciousness, the actions flow out by themselves, whatever they may be.  At that unconscious level, so many times the action will be disengagement, (for safety).  One of the reasons we don’t attempt to influence our consciousness, is that we have identified with it.  Whatever shows up there; that’s us!    So applying force, to the “US”, (the me) is a slavery, I won’t do it.

First of all, your thoughts are not you.  They come and go.  I don’t use the word “control”.  The connotation of control is by force and suppression.  That is how most people learn, by discipline, which is force and repetition, and trying to form a habit.

Habits are our robotic part.  I never aim for creating habits.  They create by themselves, because automatism and momentum is already a part of the human mechanism.

Actually, I wouldn’t have much success through discipline and force either.  What are you forcing?  If it’s what someone else said to do, it feels foreign.  If it was your own innovation, it would come naturally with no forcing. All my developing is through my own interest.  Very rarely would it be what someone else suggested.  Certainly not conventional wisdom.  I could take an interest in what others are saying.  Also, they could be saying what I am already interested in.

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When you talk, you may think you are addressing the other person.  Everything you say is also spoken to yourself.  If you are honest to the other person, you are honest to yourself.  Of course, the same if you lie or misrepresent.  If you “waffle” to the other person, “I’ll try to be there”, (with a very low probability), you are proving to yourself that what you say means nothing.  It is just some kind of extraneous vibration in the air.

Then you wonder: Why am I a victim?  People don’t consider me.

The way out is to fulfill everything you say, and of course don’t ever say anything you don’t fully intend to fulfill.  Nobody will ever honor your “word”, until you honor your own word.  You cannot guarantee good results from what you do.  That is an experiment, and you’ll learn from it.  But you can guarantee that you WILL do the experiment.

Perhaps we know what to do, or know what to try next.  But we don’t do it.  Why?  Something comes up, some thought or feeling or some impulse.  Maybe we attach to it.  Our intention is very weak.  It takes nothing to break it.   Just looking for some lame excuse.  This is a very deep hole that we have navigated ourselves into.

Clearly you can never be “authentic” if you can’t even count on yourself to follow your best judgment.  Some say you should practice self-control.  So we’re back into force and suppression.  Suppression of what?  It is the suppression of that uncomfortable feeling that is interpreted as “here we go again”.

I don’t suggest this kind of practice, but instead, start with something small.  This small success can happen almost by itself.  Just keep moving along this line, building to larger events.  Build a confidence, so you gradually know how much you can trust yourself.

Purposefulness is a powerful buffer against outside occurrences.  Ask what matters greatly to me?  Identify core values.  Our minds mirror the world.  The tone of that mirror comes from our yesterday.  Also from everybody else’s yesterday, it they are laying their trip on us. Today it may be out of sync.

What part of that are you willing to “buy”?  Keep aligned with your core values.  You know better who you are and who you are intending to be.  In that case outside arrows have nothing to adhere to.  It is not even a shielding; they just go right past you without effect.

Most everything has some good attributes and some things less good.  Can you build from a list of defects?  You have to concentrate on what works, and make it work better.  Some call that a constructive attitude.

People scoff at a “positive mental attitude”.  I am sure that they get a payoff from that dismissal.  I won’t hazard to guess what it is.  Positive does not mean you have to distort reality in your mind.  It is not a dream world.  The negatives are all the reasons for inner upheaval, loss of hope, gloom, complaints, and dishonoring or counterproductive conduct. 

Dishonoring yourself that is.

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