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Authenticity

Who am I?

“The outer world is a reflection of the inner world. Other people’s perception of you is a reflection of them; your response4 to them is an awareness of you.” Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

If you are familiar with psychology, you can compare authenticity to Carl Rogers’ identification of the “Organismic Self”. With that he refers to that aspect of ourselves where we spend our lives trying return and express. It is the original true self that we were before we started taking on conditionings from our external world and processing them into our perception of our surroundings. Carl Jung’s equivalent would the “Self”. It is where we develop from. Spiritually leaning minds will refer to our authenticity as the soul aspect of ourselves. 

Irrespective of the conceptualisation, our authentic selves is that aspect of ourselves that is pure and without any influences from the outside. This aspect starts to be covered and hidden as we start experiencing the world and making conscious judgements as to what it means to us. If we had the wisdom to only learn about ourselves from our experiences and know that the outside world is only there as a reference point for us to experience ourselves, we would remain enlightened and authentic from birth, but then where would the fun be in that? However, it is concept important to keep in mind as we start peeling back the layers of the onion in pursuit of our authentic selves, it gives us a roadmap to find our way back to our organismic selves. 

If you have read any of my musings you will know that I consider most of humanity to be asleep, and in this respect most of us are unaware of our pursuit back to our authentic selves. In fact, in our blind unawareness we strive to react to the conditionings we have layered on top of our authenticity, which causes us to resist the path back to our origins. Waking up to this Indiana Jonesesque adventure only requires one thing and that is to sincerely and deeply ask the question, “Who am I?”. As you may know, once you ask a question with a sincere quest to find an answer, your entire being is compelled to give you an answer. You may not be your authenticity, but you quest to find your answer will be lead by the way of your authenticity and thus you will find it as a biproduct of your quest. However, once you find “it” and you discover other truths of who you are you will discover new aspects of your authenticity, thus you will only ever find your authenticity as it relates to the moment where you are perceiving yourself through your experiences. 

With “the question” you also begin a process of shifting your attention from an external to an internal locus of evaluation. Your perception is not; “who do others think I am?”, to “who am I projecting to others?”. When we then start to process our core wounds and how we act out from them, we can also start healing our original sensitising events (traumas). Through this healing process we uncover more and more aspects of our authentic selves. It is hard work and it is a lifelong process, but the rewards are immeasurable and will gradually come to you as you heal. 

So, as yourself the question, “Who am I?”, with a pure desire to wanting to know the answer. Good luck!

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