Spiritual Qualities: Authenticity
[Exploring Life] We live in an age of instantaneous global communication. We also live in an age of mass somniloquence. Each of us secretly desires the intimacy and art of a deeper more compelling conversation that authentically explores the alluring mystery of being alive. When we engage in authentic conversation we explore and exchange our thoughts, feelings and attitudes about the nature of our lives. The various masks we wear and various roles we play within culture and society have no place in authentic conversation. Hidden within the wonderful inventiveness of our new technologies are the seeds of isolation, dislocation, and superficiality. Even though we communicate with each other more and more, we seem to have less and less to say.
The speed and quantity of communication technology is steadily increasing in both speed and magnitude; we can say more and more at greater rates of speed to an increasingly larger audience. The endless drone of the news media have embraced this modern advancement and in doing so clearly reveal that “reporting the news” is about dressing up banal and superficial content in fashionable yet misleading language. All news is old news. More and more people are going weary of the endless tirade of cultural fodder ever more invading our lives through digital infiltration. The Internet, an environment for sharing, has been hijacked by our cultural addiction to materialism, consumption, commodification, ownership, species superiority, and of course environmental degradation. We are in many ways a suicidal species for a cause that is at best delusional and neurotic. It is this very addiction that has made our conversations shallow and dislocating; it is this very addiction that will destroy the earth unless we heal our presence within nature. Unless we embrace authenticity in living, we may become our own demise.
The Nature of Authenticity: One of the victims of our modern techno-industrial culture is the art of authentic conversation. An authentic conversation is one in which people imaginatively share their deep feelings about the mysterious experience of being alive. If a conversation is authentic then the origin of what is being shared is clearly the original and genuine expression of the individual. In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore describes authenticity as, “the place from which we converse with our soul.” Within the realm of the soul we find our innate identity, our genuine presence, and our essential being. I view the soul as something I exist within, that is, the soul is an energy field that embraces and imbues the body and mind with presence. In this sense, the soul is a phenomenon that is more pervasive and extensive than the physical realm of the human body. Authenticity arises from a place that is larger than our own ego, personality, and identity.
Authenticity in life is not as much “knowing who we are” as it is “feeling who we are.” The place of authenticity is the sacred playground of our intuition and imagination. The act of knowing something, and the resulting thing we call knowledge, are both fragile and transient spaces. However, feeling something deep within our body, mind and spirit is a much more powerful and influential form of “knowing.” During his visit to New Mexico in 1925, Carl Jung notes that, “Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.” Thus, the incessant and by now irritating banter about our so-called “knowledge age” originating the corporate bog of eternal stench imparts a particularly putrid odour. We do not need more knowledge in our lives; we do need much more direct and personal interaction with the world around us.
Without feeling we can know something while being completely unable to understand it. When we are being inauthentic in our lives we are living a life of self-deception. We sense that something is not quite right, yet the busyness and effort requited to survive within a cultural system that values an impressive repertoire of obsessive-compulsive disorders as a way of life often distracts us from authenticity. It is as if we are in fact living within the matrix, but there are no artificially intelligent robots confining us. We are caretakers of our own prison we refer to as culture or society.
Living an authentic life means we embrace possibilities beyond ourselves – beyond our own needs, wants, and desires. We cannot hope to achieve any degree of authenticity while we are dislocated and distracted from nature. Destruction of the natural environment is the precise equivalent of leading an inauthentic life of self-deception and delusion. There is no possibility of authenticity in the absence of a deep sense of belonging and immersion with all life everywhere on our planet. In the absence of authenticity, there is no art (only glamour, fashion, and triviality) and no meaningful conversation (only news, events, and mass somnambulism). We fail to have meaningful conversation as a society because society itself lacks authenticity. Our lives have become routine and subservient to a cultural morass that is subversively designed to assimilate our presence rather than encourage our individuality. We are attempting to tread water indefinitely in an ocean of mimicry and imitation.
One of the most disdainful and inept ideas that persists in society is that individualism is somehow wrong. While extreme forms of self-centredness in which our ego becomes too inflated and grandiose to fit into a room is of course a sign of incredible personal weakness and collective annoyance, however, being authentic in our life means we pursue our own individualism as a contribution to ourselves and the world around us. The grandmaster of social-cultural assimilation – the education system – is not a medium for the cultivation of authenticity. As Hermann Hesse describes it in The Glass Bead Game: “For, after all, obliteration of individuality, the maximum integration of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars, has ever been one of our ruling principles.” This insight is perhaps even more relevant today. The fundamental purpose of education is to assimilate, not to educate. Authenticity, then, can be understood as a lost art.
The Authenticity of Nature: Finding the place, space, and energy of authenticity is therefore illusive. At the same time, what value is there in leading a life in its absence? It is far more important to discover what the most genuine source of our creativity is, rather than merely deciding upon what we wish to create. Creativity is not, to my sensibility, something that is confined within me, but is an energy that resides within the very fabric of the planet itself. To the mind assimilated by modern society this belief perhaps sounds hopelessly mystical if not inept. But for me, a belief that the human species is the sole font of life and we live in isolation from our planet is hopelessly arrogant, exceptionally ignorant, and magnificently delusional.
The most innate, primal, and essential form of creativity lies within the beautiful and often mercurial presence of nature. Human beings are not the pinnacle of creativity, though we might like to believe we are. There is no creativity more relevant or more genuine than that which lies at the heart of the earth process. Authentic human creativity is a direct extension of these primal natural forces that surround and support all life. in this sense, authentic creative human expression supports the earth and encourages a deep sense of belonging and reverence for the creative forces that gives us life. Authentic creativity is therefore sacred.
In Becoming Animal, David Abram notes: “Many of our inherited concepts (our ready definitions and explanations) serve to isolate our intelligence from the intimacy of our creaturely encounter with the strangeness of things.” One of the tell-tale signs of our own internal insecurity is a discomfort with and avoidance of that which is strange, mysterious, and unknown. We spend a great deal of our lives attempting to insulate ourselves from any kind of change that might lead us in this direction. We wrongly believe that it is easy to stay with what we have because it is known, rather than make and change and venture into the unknown. However, it is the strangeness of things that ultimately enhances our lives and leads us toward deeper levels of authentic existence and presence. By maintaining the status quo we confine ourselves to parrot concepts, beliefs and ideas – even faith – that we never really know the origin of or question the presuppositions they are built upon. It is essential that we embrace the strangeness of things with our entire presence.
We are not here to dominate this planet; we are not here to own this planet; we are not here to commoditize nature in order to play our little games of conquest and power. We obsessively invent solutions to problems that either don’t exist or have created for ourselves in the first place. Much of this kind of activity is designed to make money and therefore attain power, even though it is all built on a house of cards. All of these forms of existence are both counterfeit and careless. Looking at the political divisions on a map of the world only reveals an entire species that remains too immature to live together without violence and war. The earth knows no boundaries; existence is innately interconnected and integral. Does it not seem surprising that modern culture has to be reminded through a “new discovery” that the earth is inexorably a single unified entity, even though the human race fails in this regard? This is clearly a symptom, if not disease, that emerges from the absence of authenticity in our lives.
Deep within the vast wilderness of nature is an outrageous creative energy that inspires, animates and imbues all life on earth. All animals, plants, insects, water, fire, earth, atmosphere, and universe are animated by this innate energetic essence that resides at the very heart of existence. In this sense, we, the human species, are in no way unique or entitled. If we are to remain authentic to ourselves, then we must also remain authentic to the wildness and strangeness of nature. Unless we retrieve our felt-sense of belonging to the earth, we live counterfeit lives. To be authentic means we know how to generate safety, intimacy and belonging with imagination and reverence.
The Art of Authenticity: To be authentic embraces a primal desire for belonging, relating, and interacting with other people, as well as the myriad life forms created and sustained by the earth. To be authentic is to be immersed in the mystery of our own nature, and to heartily accept the limits of our knowledge. To be authentic is to openly embrace the inevitable in life: transience, impermanence, mystery, belonging, interaction, reverence. To be authentic is to imagine and live through that which is sacred, without the confines of dogma or tradition. To be authentic means that we are all irrevocably and fundamentally artists of living, and we find our spiritual home wherever we belong to our authentic creative source.
Henry David Thoreau stated that, “Most men [people] lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” He is describing an unlived life, a life devoid of art, a life in which neither the creativity of the spirit nor the felt-meaning of the soul were permitted the imaginative breath of light. Ironically, an unlived life can, in cultural terms, be considered a highly successful life, while remaining an arid and barren experience in spiritual terms. The presence of quiet desperation is becoming less quiet and even more apparent today, and we might update Thoreau’s statement to read: Many people lead lives of intensely busy desperation and go to the grave not being aware that the bellowing noise of life silenced a song waiting within. The reason we lead this kind of unfortunate life lies in the absence of art as a means to navigate the confluence of our own existence.
The purpose of creativity in our lives is to the provision of both security and sanctuary from the burdens that inevitably surround us. Life is not easy, simple and straight-forward; we are immersed in a labyrinth of possibilities that lie outside of our awareness until they make a mercurial appearance. Some of the possibilities are joyous and happy while others immerse us in suffering and pain. The experience of living is not neutral or sterile, and we cannot, as we might like to delude ourselves, control what happens to us to any meaningful degree. Thus we sometimes feel as though we are surrounded by psychological burdens that feel like a curse. Our response to the vagaries of experience must remain imaginative. There must be an openness to accept all of our thoughts, feeling, and emotions – however potent – as creative opportunities for learning, gestation, and growth. To do this, we must artistically venture into our wounds to explore them and discover the treasure within, rather than move away from them.
Strangely, we often suffer from a burden of not having enough time. I have witnessed and observed this unwelcome presence in my own experience. It is an uncomfortable and distracting feeling. I wonder, for example, if you have read this far if you are wondering (perhaps even hoping) if this entry is coming to an end – perhaps you have already scrolled down to see. I wonder how many might have started reading this entry, but never reach these words here. Part of it is of course a lack of relevance in my writing with respect to their unique situation, and another part may be that this writing is simply not inspiring. What I have personally discovered by moving into this feeling and allowing it to flourish within is that it really isn’t so much that I don’t have enough time, but it is that I am not using my time in a manner that is authentic. In this sense, my feeling of not having enough time is misguided – the feeling is really informing me that I am misusing my time. Often this feeling of misuse originates while I am sleepwalking through some habit or routine such as checking my news reader or watching television. It seems as though my soul has other intentions, for it seems to reach out and provide me with an uncomfortable embrace of a burden that truly feels like a curse until its meaning is revealed.
The art of authenticity then relies on a very clear and established sense of self-reliance. In other words, our imaginative venture into the discovery of our authentic presence, is unavoidably both a solitary and unmapped journey. There are no standardized forms, routines, or patterns of information that can assist us; authenticity is a journey that demands improvisation, sensitivity, and imagination. We embrace art in our lives in order to provide a psychological, emotional, and spiritual medium in which we can nurture, care, grow, cooperate, belong, and share. Art demands that we become familiar and intimate with our own unknowing. In this sense authenticity invokes a deep sense of creative self-reliance and provides a radical opportunity to re-enter life from an entirely new perspective. And we re-emerge with more to offer the world and those around us.
The natural world, the earth, is easily the most profound and important source of creativity in our lives. The essence of life is an endless creative expression of living forms. The source and origin of all true art is nature. The power of life exists outside of ourselves in the external world and through it we are permitted to live. In other words, our lives are dependent upon powers that are clearly beyond both our control and comprehension. The answers to our longing are found within the realm of the natural world, rather than the endless confluence of conditioned thought that traverses through our minds.
Embracing the artist within is a means to provide ourselves with security and sanctuary. We cannot control our lives, but we can learn to respond to the inevitable confluence with sensitivity and imagination. Deep within that which causes us suffering, inside our most sacred wound, is a treasure that we can offer to the world. However, to venture into this realm is not without risk nor is there any guarantee of relief. But this too we must accept if we are to embrace authenticity in living. The presence of nature, the essential creativity that is the source of life, must inspire our dialogues, imbue our conversations, animate our discussions, shape our actions, and inform our dreams. When we embrace nature directly through our artistic and imaginative sensibilities we embrace the very essence of authenticity itself.