A week after I posted my resolution to be Authentic, I received following tip from Andrew Cohen. My first instinct on reading this is to share this on my blog and I am not at peace till I do that. Now that I have done it, I feel authentic.
Fighting for Authenticity
Authenticity means freedom from pretense. The ego is a veil of pretense, a mask over the self. It’s an appearance, an image that is false and inauthentic. Authenticity is the expression of an integrated self—in whom the appearance and the reality, the motive and the action have become one seamless movement. But the capacity for authenticity is something we have to cultivate and something we have to fight for. The degree to which we are identified with ego and narcissism is the degree to which we will find authenticity emotionally unbearable. Many of us are so used to being inauthentic that it doesn’t trouble us at all. We have become numb, out of touch with our own souls. It takes guts and courage to become emotionally committed to authenticity to such an extent that if we found ourselves swerving into pretense, we would experience extreme discomfort. As our own deepest intention to evolve displaces the ego as the fundamental locus of identity, we will begin to feel a natural preference for authenticity, an attraction toward transparency and integrity. When that evolutionary impulse—which I call the Authentic Self—becomes the strongest part of who we are, the unselfconscious expression of our humanity will finally be free from pretense, free from the ego’s need to protect a false image.
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Andrew Cohen |
