Being authentic - sounds simple, doesn't it? Do your own thing, man. Be true to yourself. Follow your bliss? Er, no. Granted there are different degrees of authenticity, but to honour this pursuit at all deeply is one of the most difficult tasks on offer to a human being on this planet.
Authenticity requires removing, or at least getting beyond, the veil upon veil of fabrication that stands between our everyday experience and direct immediate reality. From the moment of our birth - or even beforehand, if we take seriously the work of Stan Grof and others - we are assailed by all manner of input and information drawing us out of our core. Very soon our direct perception of reality is being substituted by an interpretation of it, or what in the works of Castaneda is termed a description of reality. This normally happens seamlessly, a process of which we remain blissfully ignorant. Undoing the knots and tangles presented by this taken-on interpretation is a large part of the process of self-discovery, spiritual life, call it what you will.
Two main, though not completely discrete, elements of this fabrication of experience can be discerned. Firstly, there is what is commonly known as personal conditioning. A library of therapies has appeared over the last century with the aim of helping to untangle the knots and tangles (complexes), the distortions developed through our lifetime that have stayed buried, unconsciously skewing our experience of the way things more truly are. In Castaneda, this is referred to as 'erasing personal history': not that things didn't happen, but liberating us from the dark magic that their hold maintains over us.
Then there is the distortion created through the ever-present influence of the media, religion, the education system, the belief systems and taboos of the culture that we grow up in. As Neil Kramer vividly explains, it is almost impossible to be authentic, real, while remaining a heavy consumer of mainstream media, such is its power to tell you what is what, and what is not. A little research soon throws up the unsavoury truth that these are not organs passionately dedicated to getting to the bottom of things and aiding in our quest for liberating authenticity. Even if this was their more noble original intention, they function, in their mainstream guises especially, to put onto an unsuspecting public a particular version, or single tiny slice, of reality, making out that this is the whole story.
It is my observation that many people into 'spiritual things', while acutely aware of the former, often limit their degree of authenticity through ignoring, or denying, the second form of distortion summarised above. If you are being constantly put on, by the media, for example, and not even conscious that that is happening, what chance have you got of experiencing the deeper levels of your reality? We have a personal responsibility to delve below the surface, to try to see what is really happening to us, what we are really being fed and why. Taking personal responsibility is an integral part of developing authenticity. To get topical: if you believe hook line and sinker what international thugs like Obama and Kerry, Cameron and Hague, tell you about Syria, you are likely suffering from a severe unconscious reality distortion.....
Contact with greater authenticity is one of the main benefits of immersion in 'nature' as we call it. It could be anything: forest, desert, rivers or oceans. In my case, mountainous places are the main thing. Go to the mountains and you are confronted with authenticity. You can't escape it. Stones, rocks; heather, peat, mountain streams; wind, rain, sun; a deer on the horizon, a frog caught unaware in a pool of slime. All have no choice. They know no other way than to be authentic, whatever that might be for each and every one of them. Out of the tangled, distorted world of humans for a week, a day, for a few hours even. Recontacting, reconnecting. Back to source, giving our authentic self a chance......
