The Fear of Authenticity. Part 2 : Liberation
Your true nature does not fear fear.
The you that is the artist collaborates with fear and changes its state from one which is dense, constricting, and reductive to one of levity, inspiration, and expansion.
The goal is never to transcend your fears as if to hop the metaphorical fence beyond the domain fear but rather to knock on the front door when you are ready and to come inside for a cup of tea.
You may be very surprised by what you hear when you deeply listen to your fears and from where inside of you they are speaking.
Sharing a cup of tea with your fear is completely relaxing your identity.
There is nothing to uphold, you are with the most vulnerable part of yourself.
Beyond fear, there is no part of you that needs to enforce an identity.
There you simply return to your natural way of being, your authentic self that has never left you and never will.
So when we try to be authentic, from what place are we standing and trying to reach over for some thing as if its almost in your grasp?
I liken it to when you know that the lemon from the lemon tree is just out of reach of your extended arm but it is close enough to have you believe that you do in fact have it.
You may very well grasp it too, but the act of trying is not the way of being that you were designed to be in.
Trying is what it seems like culture wants and needs from us, and what if it is?
But do you want to try to be authentic, or do you want to just be authentic?
Words are words, and this is much easier said than done, but just one illuminating moment with the beloved that is You (capital Y You) and it becomes very difficult to un-see this You.
The authentic way of being cannot be sought nor can it found through addition.
It is revealed, like a diamond in your pocket, when we release the need to be a certain way and to just allow who we naturally are beneath all of the ideas and stores to arise.
This inner rising is congruent with an outer shrinking.
What I mean by this is that when we play the inside-out game,
The identity that we have reinforced and pushed out to the world retreats.
This is death in one form, and it is frightening.
It doesn’t matter if you have built a constructive or destructive way of being, there is a deep perception of safety in who you believe yourself to be.
To allow the arms and artillery of the idea of yourself to fall is absolute surrender.
Surrender to whom?
When we consciously allow a part of our identity to die,
Whom are we letting to live?
Better question,
Whom are we allowing the idea of our self to be re-born into?
The death of the idea of yourself is where liberation begins.
It is the end to the trying and the re-alignment to the being that never begins nor ever ends.
Your most creative self, you most authentic self arises from this place.
The domain of this inner landscape belongs to the You that you can never put in words yet have the challenge of translating its mysterious language into the world of creation.
You are the one and only translator of your true self,
You can be very assured that this a very difficult role.
Here is the paradox,
Just because it’s natural does not mean there will be no difficulty.
On the contrary,
The natural has struggle built into it.
The seed sprouting the darkness,
The spider scurrying to build a new web moments after a rainstorm,
A sea turtle sleepily scampering to the shoreline in its first moments of wakefulness having never before used it body whist being attacked by many forces.
Life must be a challenge for you to grow and the challenge will look different from person to person, perhaps in nuance or perhaps in radicality.
You are here to forget who you are so that you can remember who you are and pick up where you left off.
Who is being remembered is your most creative self.
This life is all about creativity and the challenge of becoming all that you could become.
There is no failing and there is no winning,
There is only being, but being human comes with a twist.
It comes with an innate desire to do and to have and to experience and to express.
The challenge is to find the balance between what comes naturally and what you have to work for.
The challenging of losing yourself to find yourself many a times.
The challenge of discovering your ego, only to kill it and for it to be re-born again again and again.
When we get a glimpse of our journey onto paper and take it for face value, it is absolute marvel and epic tragedy.
But how could it be any other way?
If you want peace,
Try being in peace and only peace and tell me what you want to experience after a week or two.
If you want fast, fame, and fortune,
Try being within that and only that and tell how long it takes for you to be ready for something anew
I would reckon that naturally, there’s that word, you would some sort of contrast, some sort of conflict in contrast to what you are currently experiencing no matter how minor.
Intimacy seeks contrast.
We want to know more of ourselves by nature of experiencing more of ourselves.
The path is usually a total shit show of flip flopping between extremes like a pendulum until we gradually center over a focal point of balance.
And if for some alien reason you somehow had it the other way around,
I reckon that the mud and the shit and the snow would sound pretty appetizing in contrast to the balance.
Life is such a beautiful play of, well, play.
The joy is to be lost in the play and to take it seriously so as to see the challenge, to experience it with commitment, to grown and to learn, and to come full circle back into remembering the play of life and doing it all again.
Its like surfing the wave of your life right on to the shore just to laugh about the infinite ways it could have been otherwise which justifies that it could have in no way been otherwise. Then, you jump straight back into the ocean knowing that the next wave will be a complete mystery to you on every level, perhaps even for the worst, but you do it with a smile on your face full well knowing that you are surrendered to the mystery.
This is the authentic way of being.
An opera of surrender
A cup of tea with fear
A remembering of a forgotten language
A devotion to the call
A challenge of a lifetime
And the laugh of lifetime.
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