How to Survive Your Childhood Now That You're an Adult

A Path to Authenticity and Awakening

New World Library

Contents

What Does It Mean to Be Authentic?

When someone tells me that he wishes to be authentic with me, my body tenses up as if it were about to be stabbed. Usually what the person means is that he wants to be brutally honest with me (emphasis on brutally), he imagines that what he wants to say is going to offend me, and he thinks that I will be more receptive and that it will somehow soften the blow if he claims that his comment falls under the pretense of "being authentic." This perception is inaccurate. Most people would not know authenticity if it bit them on the leg.

What then is authenticity? Colloquially, "being authentic" usually describes someone sincerely speaking his deep inner thoughts, a supposedly honest monologue, one that is often critical about something emotionally stinging or at least sensitive, and marginally beyond the scope of what we consider to be normal, acceptable, or polite everyday conversation. You would not say to someone: "I want to be authentic with you: I think it is going to rain." Most often people say things such as: "I need to be authentic with you: this relationship is not working for me anymore." Or: "Boss, I don't feel that business is my true calling; it doesn't feel authentic to me anymore. I quit this job to become a yoga teacher!" In general, it seems as if "being authentic" frequently relates to saying something negative to someone else in an attempt to modify his or her behavior in some way. And modifying someone else's behavior does include making that person disappear from one's life.

It appears that it is difficult to say something authentically positive about someone else. "I authentically love you," doesn't sound quite right — does it? "I authentically believe that your new hairstyle is a wonderful decision!" seems to betray some doubt. One assumption often made about authenticity is that we can be authentic only when decrying our own in authenticity. This means that an authentic statement can neither be about someone else nor be positive. For example: "I was lacking integrity when I did not return your urgent phone call — I'm really sorry." Or: "I acted passive-aggressively when we were at dinner the other night — please forgive me."

I am not sure we can only be authentic when decrying our own inauthenticity, but it is a provocative understanding of authenticity. Try to imagine other ways that we think of authenticity when we hear people use that word. Many times it has to do with vocations and people being trapped in golden handcuffs or life situations they did not foresee. For example: "What I really want to do is paint; but I have two kids in college, and painting will not pay the bills." Or: "I love teaching yoga, but if I quit my corporate job I won't be able to afford the mortgage on my new house."

Vocations are extremely important, and I address them in chapters 5, 7, and 8. For now, let's focus on what we mean when we talk about speaking authentically. The first thing we need to consider is language:

• How does language function?

• How does language relate to thoughts?

• How do thoughts relate to consciousness?

• What thoughts are unconscious?

• Do thoughts exist only in the form of words?

• How do thoughts relate to emotions?

• What are people doing when they speak?

Most of the time we are thinking in particular languages. The majority of my thoughts are in English. Is it possible to have thoughts in our minds that are not in a language? Is it possible to "think" outside of a language? Of course music, painting, sculpture, dancing, and all other art forms, and even making love, are languages. But when we are hungry, we do not normally imagine a sensual Rodin sculpture; we think, "I should get something to eat," and then we go eat something.

Thinking exists within a matrix of culturally accepted assumptions, norms, and mores; feeling exists within a matrix of culturally accepted assumptions, norms, and mores; language exists within a matrix of culturally accepted assumptions, norms, and mores; and writing exists within a matrix of culturally accepted assumptions, norms, and mores. All disciplines, too, such as art, music, politics, economics, and psychology, among others, exist within matrices.

• "Babso dax lanuga dondo" (gibberish) lies outside those agreed-upon assumptions.

• "I feel dead," when not taken as hyperbole meaning "numb," lies outside agreed upon assumptions about feeling (since dead people, to the best of our knowledge, cannot feel).

• The statement "I am going to eat the neighbor's puppy for supper" lies outside our agreed-upon mores.

• "Breathing air is profitable" does not make much sense.

The fact that a group of people more or less consistently agree on words meaning or referring to the same or similar concepts and things, constructs what I consider to be a paradigm. Our society — Western civilization — lies on a bed of agreements buttressed by beliefs that fall under the general categories that we refer to as science, capitalism, and religion. From our faith in science, capitalism, and religion, we derive our paradigm of order. Rules and laws dictate and maintain order in our society. People who disrupt social order are imprisoned or dispatched. Some of the central assumptions of Western civilization are: property ownership, marriage for life, money, voting, three meals a day, sex for nonprocreational purposes, inheritances, war, business, banking, debt, fossil fuels, electricity, mass transportation, media, and, more recently, mobile telephones, smartphones, the internet, social media, and virtual reality.

Given that the mandate of science is "truth" — which really is a search for an accurate mapping of what's "out there" (not in our heads) — this leads to a brief but important distinction about truth and subjective/objective duality. Philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed that objective truth was "out there" and that we could never know it from our subjective points of view. I do not believe that truth exists "out there" in the world. I believe that the people within any paradigm form a consensus regarding what truth (currently) is. They agree on certain concepts, but upon inspection many of these concepts can be deconstructed. For example, I could say, "Well, we all agree that murder is bad," to which you could retort, "What about in war, or capital punishment — are those not murders?" Philosophers have rhetorically asked: When someone says the word red, and another person hears the word red, how can we be certain they have mental images of the same color? That does not render the concept of red useless. "Watch out for the rapidly approaching red truck!" is a useful phrase. But certainty on what constitutes red is difficult to achieve, if not impossible, when it is contingent upon language working in conjunction with optical nerves and neurons firing and wiring in our brains. Or definitions may be simply tautological, as in: "Red is red, and it is obvious to everyone — save the colorblind."

The following metaphor is useful regarding the subjective/objective distinction: "The map is not the territory." Every person has a map in his or her head that maps the reality "out there." However, some people are colorblind, some are tone-deaf, some are myopic; some have wonderful olfactory ranges and taste subtle flavors, and other people do not. In a graduate class in philosophy I attended in 1989, to argue a position, visiting professor Eddy Zemach asked another professor what it was like when that professor's wife experienced an orgasm. (I bet you thought that philosophy couldn't be so much fun!) The professor went into an elaborate and somewhat romantic description of blood surging up from his wife's feet and legs, heat rising and sweat beading, intensification of breathing, moaning, and so on. When he was finished, Professor Zemach disabused him of the notion of being able to know what it was like when his wife had an orgasm: "That's what happens when you have an orgasm. You have no idea what it is like for your wife to experience an orgasm. The best you can do is project onto her your experience when you have an orgasm."

I cannot see the world from another person's point of view; I can only see it from my own. The map is not the territory. Or as Magritte demonstrated in his painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe, a painting of a pipe is not a pipe. One cannot smoke a painting. Nor can one smoke a word. Language points to phenomena; language indicates. As we will see in my discussions of psychology, it is important to recognize that although we seem to agree on language, every person has a subjective point of view that is based on his or her experiences and the language he or she uses to think about and express those experiences.

But first let's examine how thinking, feeling, and communicating relate to each other: our cultural paradigm recognizes something we call "consciousness" that is a function of our "minds." Although we use the terms consciousness and mind frequently, if you really think about them they are difficult to define. For example, if I ask you to touch your consciousness or point to your mind, you would probably be flummoxed or at least uncertain. Both consciousness and mind are nonlocal: neither can be reduced to a particular place. Yes, some people point to their heads when asked where their minds reside; others, such as Tibetans, point to their hearts. My point is that many people conflate mind and brain and are quick to speak about neural plasticity and creating neural pathways, about "sensing" in some way their prefrontal cortices and corpus callosums and getting their right hemispheres to interact with their left hemispheres ... but it is actually difficult to precisely relate the concepts of mind and brain. And by difficult I mean impossible. In fact, I prefer to hear a Christian Scientist refuse to go to a hospital for a broken arm because he is convinced that Jesus Christ will heal it, than hear a meditation teacher discuss enlarging his corpus callosum.

What I am asking you to question is the way that the scientific paradigm has been appropriated by laypeople who really do not understand what has and has not been scientifically proven. Science has made exponential progress over the last few centuries but still does not know how a human brain functions any more than it can explain how gravity causes the tides to move in and out. There are theories. There are correlations. Correlations have been observed and noted. But the goal of science is to ascribe causality, not correlation. No scientist worth her salt will say, "I have located and isolated the gene that causes people to be homosexual" or "I have mapped particular neurological firings consistent in all human beings that occur when they decide to vote Republican."

Try on this metaphor, please: the brain is the hardware and the mind is the software. Although it is in vogue to discuss neural plasticity and neural pathways, the next time a meditation teacher tells you that you will create new neural pathways when you meditate, please ask him to show you which neural pathways are created. A brain can be discussed only with the aid of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. Most people do not have these $1.5–$3 million machines constantly at their disposal, so it is easier to reach an agreement about a Jackson Pollock painting than about the electricity bouncing around inside a human head. Human beings do not have direct introspection into brain states. At no time in your lifetime will you hear someone say, "Synapses 85,932 and 700,774 just fired. I need to take an aspirin." Or: "I just created a new neural pathway for a color between orange, brown, and green!" You will never hear someone say, "I can feel the dopamine rushing through my brain!" You will hear: "I am happy." You will never hear someone say, "My serotonin levels are very high." You will hear: "I feel good." We must continue to use the concept of mind to mediate between what we sense and feel and how those stimuli are processed through our brain states and then translated into language. We cannot directly see into, or otherwise sense, our brain states or any other parts beneath our skin, so it is inaccurate to talk as if we do. When I speak with neurologists, they tell me they are baffled by the ignorance of laypeople who feel qualified to discuss neural plasticity and how our brains create neural pathways. Of course the brain creates new neural pathways — so what? We will never directly observe our brains creating neural pathways, so why is it popular to use these terms today? Laypeople prefer to have an inaccurate accord about brains than to speak with precision about consciousness.

In the 1960s, Thomas Kuhn wrote that scientific paradigms shift every generation, or approximately every twenty-five years. He obviously did not anticipate a behemoth such as the internet that would cause paradigm shifts in time periods much shorter than a single generation. Science is a system. And that system is dynamic. If we tried to explain to our grandmothers in 1975 that someday cancer would be manageable, gay people could marry, a black man would be president of the United States, or marijuana would be legal, they would have looked at us askew — the same way you would look at me if I told you that someday marijuana would be mandatory, all religions would be illegal, America would be ruled by a dictator, and the only edible meat left on earth would be from rats. We are all fish swimming in a cultural sea of language and norms and mores that we cannot see, that we consider to be "normal." If in 1950 you had told an American to eat raw fish, he would have laughed in your face, maybe called you a commie pinko. Today there is a sushi restaurant on every other corner. "Normal" changes faster than we imagine.

When exploring what it means to be authentic, we must take cultural context(s), as well as history, into consideration. For example, observe how quickly pathologies shift within one culture: 150 years ago many women were afflicted by something identified as hysteria, during which the patient lost control over her acts and emotions and often fainted or had sudden emotional outbursts and seizures. Hysteria was treated, most notably by Sigmund Freud's teacher Jean-Martin Charcot, with vaginal massages and hysterectomies. Today a vaginal massage by a physician is not a treatment; it's a lawsuit. If a woman went into a psychiatrist's office today and listed the above symptoms, the doctor would study the 947-page fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to determine a diagnosis for the ailment and then — since 56 percent of the DSM's authors have been employed at some time by pharmaceutical companies — probably prescribe a medication. Please note that the first two editions of the DSM, written before 1973, listed homosexuality as a mental disorder.

If you have the opportunity to spend time with the DSM and comb through the fascinating afflictions and disorders that plague people in first-world countries, such as shaky leg syndrome and ADHD (have you met anyone who does not have ADHD?), please ask yourself: "What is the metric of mental wellbeing in our culture?" The fourth edition of the DSM had a "bereavement exemption" for people grieving the loss of a loved one; however, the fifth edition of the DSM eliminated the bereavement exemption because psychiatrists found that the same pharmaceuticals used to treat depression were equally effective in treating bereavement. I argue that the barometer of mental health employed in our country is the following: "Are you a productive member of society? Are you able to show up for work? Are you capable of spending most of your waking hours working? Are you able to do your job?" And if you cannot, then there are probably some pills that can inspire you to go back to your lathe, mill, bus, computer, assembly line, orchard, or other work station.

If your best friend told you that she had just spent two weeks lying in bed, eating gummy bears and caramel popcorn, watching reality television, and contemplating the meaning of existence, you would ask, "What's wrong with you?" Maybe something is wrong with her and maybe something is not. Maybe she simply feels as if her limited time visiting planet Earth is more pleasantly spent lying in bed instead of flipping burgers, waiting on tables, or being objectified by men. However, with just a few more symptoms, such as decreased interest or pleasure in most activities, significant weight change (5 percent) or change in appetite, change in sleep, or fatigue, she would be diagnosed as suffering from a major depressive episode and probably offered a prescription for the latest antidepressant medication developed by a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company whose sales representatives have wined and dined the doctors while touting the benefits of their products.