I don’t know if any of you have heard this story of Mahatma Gandhi. A woman and her child approached Mahatma Gandhi one day. She asked him to tell her son to stop eating sugar. He looked at her and said “come back in 6 months”. Six months later, she came back and he brought the boy into his office and said sternly “do not eat sugar”. With that he kindly dismissed the woman and her son. She stopped at the door and turned to him. She asked him why she had to wait six months for those words. He replied that he'd had to give up sugar himself before he could tell anyone else to do so.
This is the essence of authenticity. The absolute integrity that says, “I will not tell anyone how to do anything unless I have done it myself.
I also will not tell you anything that I have not experienced to be true.
I talk a lot about relationships - how to use them as a barometer to see where we are really at – how healthy we are, what we need to work on. Our relationships should show us who we really are and where we need to pay attention to.
Now I am very respectful of relationships and want you all to have strong, healthy ones …but very honestly, the relationship I care the most about is the one you have with yourself. The relationship you have with yourself correctly reflects how you understand the universe and your relationship with it. The degree that you know and love yourself is the degree that you will know and love the universe.
How well you understand your human existence will accurately reflect your understanding of how the world works. This is the microcosm in the macrocosm – a human life holds all the elements of the larger whole. To understand the Self is to understand the universe.
And that is why authenticity=consciousness. To know the Self is to know the whole.
For example, when you are sitting in your room, in your house, and you are surrounded by the walls of the house that define the space you sit in – you feel the space inside the house is separate and different than the space outside the house. But if we tear down the walls of the house, the space inside the house becomes the same as the space outside – it is all the same space, made out of all the same stuff.
Our physical body is the house and most of the time we feel separate from the source of the universe. But it is in that physical body that we realize who we truly are by becoming more and more consciousness. This awareness reveals authenticity and the more authentic you are, the more awake and aware you are, and the more connected you are to the source of all energy that operates the universe.
How we live our experience of Truth determines our authenticity. We may have had an epiphany, a glimpse of how things really are, and intellectually we “get it”, but can we put it into practice? Can we bring it back into life and can we “be” what we know?
The process of coming out of our heads and into out hearts into the present moment is the path toward authenticity. (to be continued)
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