| by Flemming Funch|
It's when you act and speak in harmony with who you really are, what you feel, and what really is going on. It's the truth. Unfortunately we tend to be afraid of it.
Our society seems organized so as to thwart authenticity at every turn. There are rules to follow. You need to live up to expectations. You need to be able to back up your words and your actions with reasons and logic and references to more important words uttered by established authorities. You'll often be rewarded for constructing convincing lies, apparently out of facts. But not often for expressing the truth.
Imagine that it all changed. Most people most of the time doing and saying what they actually feel is right for them, as opposed to what they're supposed to do or say.
It could just somehow become fashionable one day, for unknown reasons. An evolutionary shift. Or, a movement could be engineered. It would require some prominent role models. Some famous people who stand up and say the truth, despite the consequences. Collections of success stories, people who did the right thing and it turned out well.
Just even talking about authenticity is difficult. Our language makes it sound a lot more fuzzy than it is. We can express our authentic experience in words, but the problem with statements made of words is that they end up kind of frozen. Words are transportable, tempting us to take them with us and apply them to other contexts. Where they possibly might no longer fit. Yet we try to hold each other to the standard of standing by our words, or being able to back up our words with strings of arguments.
I'm implying, mind you, that there's a depth of unseen wisdom inherent in authenticity. Or, at least, that's the aspect I'm speaking to. There are lots of things you can say that literally are true, but which don't get you anywhere good. Lots of things that you can feel at any given point that maybe aren't really YOU. And one could have long discussions about which things are authentic and which are not. What I am talking about is that inside of you there's a compass. There's a sense of whether you're aligned, not just with yourself, but with the universe. With the environment, with others, with life. At multiple levels. It's not a separate thing, it is a connected thing. And the claim is that it is a lot smarter than most of the complicated but simplistic structures we've set up to manage our society.
We're used to thinking of it as something vulnerable. It can sometimes be awkward and embarrassing to just say the truth. You might sound naive, you might open yourself up to all sorts of attacks. But, really, what I'm talking about is quite the other way around. You might plug into the collected wisdom of the universe, or at the very least, the vast parallel processing capability of your sub-conscious mind. As opposed to the card house built of societal norms, the expectations of others, and your collection of acquired factoids and supposed-tos. What really IS is usually a lot deeper than what "should" be. We might get used to it also being more viable, stronger, more productive.