Seeking an Authentic Life Filled with Authenticity (Realness)
Many people want to get real.
We want others to be real, to be genuine. Many, if not most, of us have had experiences of feeling fake. Psychologists and inner work professionals often work with the concept of the ‘mask,’ a self we present to the world that is incongruent with the inner sense of self and beliefs.
The longing to be real and authentic is a primordial movement in the soul (individual conscious) to live and be one hundred percent its true nature. It is nothing short of the optimizing thrust of reality to know, reveal, and express itself in the manifest world.
Are you one of these people? Do you long to be real, to live in a real world authentically instead of a world of images, masks, fake news, and conformity?
There is a real self, the true self, the essential self. Everybody has that self. You can’t be a human being without having a true self which is not your own production. It has nothing to do with your childhood conditioning. You were born with it. But it is possible to see that you can go beyond that. The true self is needed, and must be realized for a person to move to the Supreme or universal self, because these are sparks of the same light. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch. 7
How do we get real?
We can’t ‘get’ a real self because we are fundamentally real. The issue isn’t about finding and getting. It’s more about remembering and seeing through what is blocking perception and experience of the underlying reality.
My recommendation is to try to be authentic in personal experience, to try to have one’s everyday experience, one’s everyday interaction, one’s inner atmosphere, one’s relation with the environment, be investigated, inquired into, opened up, understood, transformed. And in my experience, when I do that, that will bring about transformation. But of course this needs a tremendous amount of sincerity and dedication, and will require a person to have the luxury to investigate it, because, as we know, in our present time many people don’t even have time to make enough money to live. So this question also interacts with the social and political system. But I think what an individual can do is to really inquire into their life, inquire in the sense, of seeing what is real and what is not real, what is it that’s truly authentic? And to inquire into my position, beliefs, attitudes, to see if they’re valid or not. – A. H. Almaas
Start with where you are.
The way we work is to find out what is happening right now: What are you experiencing right now? What are you feeling right now? And then to follow that. If you don’t focus on right now, you won’t really have understanding. This is true even if you want to understand your childhood. You can’t understand it by just thinking about it. The only way thinking about it would help is if that brought the childhood experience into the now so you could experience it. For example, if you were hurt by your father in childhood, you can’t just think of the hurt and have it remain a memory in your mind—that doesn’t do it. If you think, “I was hurt by my father in childhood,” and then you feel the hurt now, in this very moment, then understanding can happen. Otherwise there is no understanding, no transformation. What matters is the experience in the moment, the lived experience, what you are actually in touch with. If it happens that you are not in touch with anything, then that lack of in-touchness is what you need to be in touch with. We have to start where we are. – Brilliancy: The Essence of Intelligence, ch. 3
In the Diamond Approach, we often say the Work is more about losing (disappearing) than getting. We don’t get enlightenment or a real self; what happens is that through exploration and understanding, the veils are lifted, the obscurations dissolved. In Sufism, this is referred to as leaving the world of lies. In Hinduism and Buddhism, it is equated to seeing through maya or illusion.
We see that all we experience, all of life, all of the universe, is ultimately an illusion, what Hindus call Maya, what Buddhists call mind. We realize the truth that we are something much more substantial, something beyond the mind, beyond the world. – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, ch. 10