The Clothes' New Emperor

[GliderGuider]

Lately I've been thinking about authenticity. The rather facile description I came up with for what that means is, "Stepping into authenticity means allowing the innate perfection of all that is to unfold as it will, moment by moment - without resistance or expectation, but with acceptance, compassion and gratitude." Now that's all very cool and new-agey. There's even some truth in it - just ask Eckhart Tolle.

Then someone else mentioned that authenticity requires that we act out of conscious choice rather than habit. I like that too, because I've spent a lot of time in the past couple of years working to recognize the ways in which I am a walking bundle of tapes, scripts, patterns and programs. We all share this programming, it's just part of the human machine. Some of these programs are undeniably convenient, but all of them interfere with the full expression of the Self to some degree.

So at first glance "acting out of conscious choice" seems like a pretty good definition for "being authentic". Acting from conscious choice seems much more authentic than reactively playing back our old tapes, re-reading our learned scripts or dancing to the tune of our childhood wounds.

However, a subversive thought has occurred to me (and I completely blame that bitch Advaita Vedanta...)

If we fully and completely self-actualize, one of the key realizations is that at any level we care to examine, the self is revealed to be a fiction. There is no "real me" there at all, just a suit of psychological clothing that I weave and wear, with a pattern and design that I present to others as being "me". It's a perverse inversion of the Emperor's New Clothes, in which the clothes are real but the emperor wearing them is invisible.

So if there is no "real me" there at any level, what does that mean for the notion of making choices? Who is making them? If no-one is making the choices, what is happening? At that point, is there a difference in "degree of authenticity" between acting consciously and reacting unconsciously?

If there is no "me" to be conscious or unconscious, no-one making choices or acting, how can there be any notion of authenticity at all? The concept - and even the word itself - collapses like a soap bubble. Poof! Gone...

[westerebus]

1. To be OR To do

possibly

the conception expressed as do or did identifies

the conception then is a what it does or did

remove do or did

the conception remains

possibilty to do implies awareness

to be.

I am

the conception I am.

the observation to identify the self as

what I do

is closed to the possibility of awareness

of who I am.