“The greatest fear in the world is the opinion of others, and the moment you are unafraid of the crowd, you are no longer a sheep, you become a lion. A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom.” Osho
Have you ever wondered why peer pressure is so powerful? If we are to ever live in peace and harmony, we must learn to be and live as our authentic selves. I like Brené Brown’s definition and descriptions of personal authenticity: “To be authentic, we must cultivate the courage to be imperfect – and vulnerable. We have to believe that we are fundamentally worthy of love and acceptance, just as we are. I’ve learned that there is no better way to invite more grace, gratitude and joy into our lives than by mindfully practicing authenticity…There’s never any doubt or questioning the integrity of an authentic individual. Their behavior, in terms of ethics and morals, is as predictable as snow during wintertime in Minnesota. You know what you’re going to get.” In other words, try just being yourself – no need to impress others or get any feedback about your worth because you know you are.
I observe, as do many psychologists, that most people are people pleasers or manipulators (sociopaths on a continuum from mild to psychotic). I’m sure that many of us know narcissists that are completely self-absorbed with themselves. Our modern world through its consumerism mindset attempts to make us all mild narcissists by continually promoting out self-image as the most important thing in our lives, but it does so by continually making us feel inferior to abstract images of perfection we can never achieve.
We live in a paradigm of separation, fragmentation, and isolation. We are so much more. Our authentic selves are simply comfortable with who we are without having to gain approval. Don’t get me wrong, approval is all very nice but it’s not worth losing who you really are. We individuated expressions of the infinite divine. We have been indoctrinated to be dependent on the system. We are so much more resilient and adaptable than mainstreams narratives would have us believe. Why is it so important to be right or to be liked? Why is a different perspective so threatening? This is particularly true in our Covid world today where social shaming is a technique used to quell dissenting opinions. Heaven forbid we should not all agree all the time.
We as a species seem to love dividing ourselves by a series of labels, which we then continue to subdivide to find more and more separation among ourselves. We gain these labels through our conditioning as children and they are then reinforced throughout our lives. It’s what makes us victims in our lives. We find ourselves identifying with our experiences rather than simply as a conscious being having the experiences. This is critical to understand because we end up being a set of labels. In a Star Trek: The next generation series, I recall an episode where the Enterprise has to host an unusual alien species that was extremely difficult to talk to. In it the alien ambassadors kept wanting to find out about the humans on the spaceship and kept asking, “who are you.” Of course, everyone kept giving their job, rank, species label, and who they were as a self-identity. But it wasn’t what the aliens were really asking, and it was this lack of comprehension that created the communication barrier. Who are you without your labels?
Our conditioning creates the stories we tell ourselves and how we define ourselves through the labels that structure our stories. Ego and labels go hand-in-hand. The ego always wants to justify itself and usually does so at the expense of others. In politics and academia this is a given as people struggle to gain recognition for themselves in order to promote their agenda’s that often seem to be themselves and what they do as priorities. We might sympathize with others but rarely do so many readily empathize.
The modern business doctrine is ‘Maximizing Shareholder Value,’ which is like a sports coach putting the needs of the fans over the needs of the team. One of my business colleagues always said that one of today’s greatest business problems is balancing the books by cutting costs over generating revenue. So many modern bosses use fear to keep people motivated. Who will ever admit to lacking knowledge or a skill, or doing something wrong or poorly, if fear of losing their job is the prime motivator? Fear conditions people makes them conform to what is expected and so they fear being an authentic individual. Isn’t it amazing how so many conformist people are so willing to punish and suppress individualism such that they go out of their way to enforce social conditioning, often through simple peer pressure? Personal power comes from not reacting to those that abuse you, but from how you respond to the abuse.
Fear is what keeps you in your place. Becoming an actualized person takes courage to be yourself. It isn’t to fight those that try to control you but to stop reacting to the multiple triggers of your ego self. Your authentic self recognizes the conditioning and responds not from an unconscious programming where past experiences drive the reactions, but from a place of considered response that is beyond ego. More in the next post. Becoming authentic and able to begin creating a better world is not that hard, but it does require a desire to want to create a better world. So many years ago, when I began this path to understanding a true Sustainable World, I little realized how a spiritual focus was a key to doing it. Not a fluffy religious kind of spirituality, but one where life is recognized as a key component of the interconnectivity of everything.
“The past is no more and the future is not yet: both are unnecessarily moving in directions which don’t exist. One used to exist, but no longer exists, and one has not even started to exist. The only right person is one who lives moment to moment.” Osho
To be continued ………….
0 Comments