We humans walk around deaf, dumb, and blind to a secret of human anatomy. You might think that the great minds of modern science would have discovered it, but no! So, I’ll bust the secret open.

Contrary to popular opinion, you have four mouths, not one! Four!

Of course we all know the mouth that perches beneath the nose. Yet there’s also the mouth of your feelings – your heart. Your intellect also has a mouth. So too, your true nature or spiritual aspect.

Unfortunately, confusion reigns about how to nourish our humanity, resulting not only in simultaneous obesity and starvation, but also diseases in body and soul.

Others more knowledgeable than I can speak to you about nourishing your physical body. Regarding nourishing your feelings and heart, a daily diet rich in vitamins L(love), F(friendship), S1(self-soothing), S2(support), and others you might imagine have been found important for warding off unhappiness and depression. Research shows that another and another after-dinner snack are of no nutritional value for the heart.

Your intellect also has its own dietary requirements. Your skillful attention to feeding this mouth includes feeding yourSelf Vitamins N1(new experiences), N2(new ideas), A(the Arts), and even P(puzzles and games like Sudoku, chess). Failure to maintain a diet adequate in these nutrients may result in boredom, dullness, even mental decline. Contrary to public opinion, cookies and ice cream are not nutritional substitutes here.

Finally, your spiritual nature has the most intriguing dietary requirements. Often we overlook Vitamin H(honoring our humanity). Disparaging our humanity has been found to be toxic. Vitamins I (interest in the Mystery which surrounds you) and C (courage to develop your own personal spirituality) are essential as is Vitamin T(trust in true nature’s implicit beneficence). No, pretzels and chips are devoid of such nutrition. These and other similar vitamins will protect against nihilism and existential dread.

It seems that weekly television news reports about the epidemic of obesity which plagues our fellow citizens. I suspect in part it results from misunderstanding our nutritional requirements. We mistakenly feed our bodies, when it’s our hearts, minds, and souls which cry out with hunger.

How well are you feeding your own, precious humanity?

~Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter

Despite truthfulness being essential for an authentic life, we can deceive ourselves in innumerable ways. All to often we buffer ourselves from disappointment, unhappiness, and pain by avoiding things, not showing up in our lives, or lying to ourselves. But does putting your head in the sand really work?

Possibly you’re just not happy with your job, your partner, or your life, but changing would require too much effort and lead to an uncertain future. Your security is worth settling for less of a life, you tell yourself.

Maybe you drink a bit too much or get stoned every night or smoke cigarettes, and you tell yourself you could stop any time. Yet you haven’t yet, but you will, later. You can trash the days of your life, and get away with it in the end, you believe.

That recurring pain you’ve been feeling in your left side – sometimes you awaken at night in a cold sweat for fear it’s cancer. Yet you never do call the doctor in the morning. You still sleep beneath the teenage spell of seeming immortality.

Perhaps you think that you can lead a nation by calling a depression “the Great Recession” and incurring more national debt in order to reduce the national debt, because like Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels you believe a lie told often enough becomes the people’s truth.

Yet despite apparent invincibility, the Nazi war machine ended in ruin. Moreover people do die from untended illness, lives sometimes are wasted, and too many persons later regret a life not lived. Why? Because to paraphrase Ayn Rand, you can’t evade the truth forever. Life just doesn’t work that way. Truth is life-affirming, and evading truth is life-denying. You can’t fool Mother Nature.

The dictionary defines an “illusion” as a false idea, a false belief, or a false perception. If I am dis – illusioned, then life has purged from me an idea, belief, or perception which was false. It could be something as simple as puncturing a cherished, but false self-image. Although it is painful to be disillusioned, living in illusion eventually brings greater pain.

If disillusionment dispels the false, then it reveals the true. Therefore for lovers of truth and persons who wish to become more authentic, to be disillusioned is to be blessed by truth.

How might you be avoiding something, not showing up in your life, or lying to yourself? Is it really worth it?

  ]]> http://personal-authenticity-project.com/blessing-disillusionment/feed 0 http://personal-authenticity-project.com/blessing-disillusionment http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PersonalAuthenticityProject/~3/z_kFES2c4gQ/listening-within http://personal-authenticity-project.com/listening-within#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:13:37 +0000 Michael http://personal-authenticity-project.com/?p=2599 We are so very much more than what we take ourselves to be. Like a water skeeter bug which skates atop pond water, we skate the surface of our lives, ignorant of the depths immediately below.

So why would we wonder why our lives seem barren of depth or empty of aliveness? Why would it puzzle us that despite our intelligence and best efforts, we remain entangled in seeming intractable personal problems?

The logic of our situation is impeccable.

Continue reading Listening Within – Lifting the Veil of the Authentic Self

“Just pause thought. In that space, do you disappear? What is there in that space? Obviously you are there. You are quite present and aware. That is all. You are, and you know you are. There is both the sense of being or presence and a knowing capacity. Is that awareness ‘over there’ while you are ‘here’, or are you that which is aware? Realize that you must be the presence of awareness….”

~ John Wheeler
contemporary American nondualist teacher
in The Light Behind Consciousness

We are so very much more than what we take ourselves to be. Like a water skeeter bug which skates atop pond water, we skate the surface of our lives, ignorant of the depths immediately below.

So why would we wonder why our lives seem barren of depth or empty of aliveness? Why would it puzzle us that despite our intelligence and best efforts, we remain entangled in seeming intractable personal problems?

The logic of our situation is impeccable. We live on the surface of our being buoyed by incessant thoughts and thinking. Yet we can enter the silent depths of our souls and Being, and there find sustenance, but only when – we stop thinking.

Said differently, thought veils the authentic Self, the soul, Being. To lift the veil of these mysteries, we need to stop thinking and come to rest in the silent, ever present experiencing awareness which then immediately reveals itself.

One practice which establishes such a relation to our depths is listening within which has sometimes been referred to as presence or contemplation.

The very act of listening establishes both a mind which is silent and also you in experiencing awareness. How simple is this to experience for yourself? Just take a moment to close your eyes, and listen attentively to every nuance of sound in your room…. To hear, the mind must be silent.

And, who hears when the mind is silent? The experiencing awareness which you are. That ever-present awareness which preexists any of your thoughts such as “I”, your name, identity, ideas, ideals, beliefs, images, reactions, memories, desires, hopes, prejudices, attitudes, assumptions, positions, etc. Why? Because you are awareness itself; you are not thoughts such as these which are only the content or objects of the awareness which you are.

The world which reveals itself when we establish ourselves in experiencing awareness was pointed to when contemporary teacher, Eckhart Tolle, wrote “Spiritual awakening is awakening from the dream of thought”. Your incessant thinking veils the mysteries of your Being.

Of course, “listening” within is a metaphor for an attitude of awareness with which we turn our attention inwards to engage the flow of our inner experience. Just as in everyday conversation, you can’t listen and talk to someone at the same time, so too you can’t listen within effectively, if you are thinking at the same time.

To listen within is to step out of the known and the ego, and to step into an inner process which already and ceaselessly now unfolds within. Because thought is the known, and the ego is constructed of thought, when we step out of the ego, we engage our experiencing (inner and outer) without the mediation of preconception, memory, the known, the mind. We open to experience the living immediacy of the unknown, which is the next moment. This is the “freedom from the known” which Krishnamurti urged, like Tolle.

When listening, we are receptive. We let experience come to us. We do not grasp or appropriate or interpret or make meaning of or act upon our experiencing. For without thought, there is no “I” to grasp, appropriate, or interpret; there simply is Being which lets experiencing unfold itself with unconditional acceptance and curiosity.

From the unfolding experiencing itself, meaning and significance may reveal itself as thought arising organically from our experiencing. We “listen” to feelings, images, memories, which arise spontaneously as may arise essential qualities of Being and other states of consciousness (Being). The experiences which unfold do so with an inherent logic which seemingly seeks to optimize our being.

As we become more skilled in “listening within”, we find ourselves becoming more and more skilled in simply living as experiencing awareness throughout the entirety of our daily lives within and without.

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~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882),
American author, poet, and philosopher,
in The Over-Soul

Long ago, and far, far away lived a young man in his 20s… me. Then I dated a woman who was in training to become a therapist. I remember that amidst one of our arguments, she yelled out, “You need therapy!”

And so I soon began therapy. But given I didn’t earn enough money to afford private sessions with a therapist, I began with a group. One by one each group member would work individually with the therapist. As I witnessed others and myself work with our issues, I learned an essential truth which continues today to guide me and my work with my own clients:

You and I are Life, expressing as an unfolding process of becoming which is guided profoundly by an inherent logic and intelligence.

Many persons understand that “living in process” refers to the experience that you and I are a process. Instant by instant our experiencing unfolds through a ceaseless transformation of states, thoughts, feelings, sensations and worldly experiences. Not for one instant does your experiencing awareness remain the same. You are a verb, not a noun. You are a dynamic, not a static thing.

Less commonly do we understand that your process and mine are not haphazard sequences of chance experience. Instead our life processes are guided by an inherent logic and intelligence.

The intelligence which guides the presentation of issues to our awareness, seeks not to undermine us, but rather actualize our human potential. Psychologist Abraham Maslow alluded to this intelligence as the drive to Self-actualization. Back then in the therapy group, as others and I faced and worked on the issues which our processes brought up, we did not meet defeat; rather we inevitably experienced greater integration, effectiveness in daily living, and authenticity.

Moreover, our life processes do not limit their expression to our inner worlds. Just as the issues which arise from within us reflect the logic and intelligence of self-actualization, so too do the experiences and situations with which we are presented by everyday life. Psychologist Arnold Mindell affirms that the river of your unfolding process also expresses itself through the “world channel” of the experiences and situations which daily life presents you.

For example, it is not that issue with your partner that stymies you, but your not turning your face to the issue and working it. Similarly, the pain of that dissatisfying job or life situation calls you to growth, if you will address it, and choose to live more largely. Affirming that your life process expresses itself in your outer life, the Buddhist meditation master, Chögyam Trungpa, reminds us that, “Situations are the voice of my guru, the presence of my guru.” – the voice of that intrinsic intelligence which would carry forward our livingness.

Of course it’s one thing to understand these things intellectually, another to live them. Sometimes when my own humanness resists the flow of my own life process, a trickle of awareness stirs from my unconscious to remind me of a scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Standing outside the ballroom where he will meet Juliet for the first time, Romeo experiences prescient misgivings. He nevertheless decides to enter saying, “But he that hath the steerage of my course, Direct my sail.”

“…The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.”

~ Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935)
Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
in the decision, Abrams v. United States, 1919

“The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth.”

~Alan Binder,
(then) Federal Reserve Vice Chair in a 1994 speech,

Recently a 5-month-old post “Allegiance to Truth in an Age of Deception” has been “discovered”, and generated reader interest from across the net. The difficulties of making our ways happily in life amidst a culture of deceit seems to have struck a nerve with many of us.

After all, allegiance to – or – love of truth is an optimizing orientation to life. Within each of us there is a drive to become, to actualize our human potential. Environments of deception and falsehood thwart this actualizing drive, for if our day-to-day decisions are based on misinformation provided us by governments and corporations, then we cannot easily carry forward our lives.

We are challenged not only to renew our society by having the courage to live by the light of our own truth, but also to ferret out truth from the thicket of deception which ensnares it. There is an old adage that in the marketplace of ideas, truth will win out the competition. But what happens when truth is banned from the marketplace? Where then can we find truthful information with which we may guide our lives?

You wouldn’t think this is just an academic issue, were your mortgage under water or your family was hungry, because you were unemployed. If you had trusted Fed Chairman Bernanke’s “hopium”, you would have been sorely disappointed, given that since 2008 Bernanke has consistently understated the severity of the economic crisis (i.e., Source and Source).

Keep in mind also that the Bureau of Labor Statistics “Birth / Death” computer model inflates the “good news” about the monthly jobs creation. Thus far in 2011, the BLS computer has created more than a half million “jobs” out of thin air, but not one will put food on your plate (Source) Fixed-income seniors and anyone who buys groceries knows that inflation is higher than what the government reports (Source).

Just as we cannot rely on government to provide us the information we need to successfully govern our lives, so to we cannot rely upon the mainstream television, radio, and media. During the 80s and 90s the consolidation of the media resulted in a small

number of corporations controlling the media. Media concentration impacts freedom of the press, editorial independence, and diversity of views. The Conan O’Brien YouTube clip (at 1:15) to the right reveals just how scripted our news programs are. Moreover given how troubled our world is, you might think that television national news might not squander some of its 18 minutes of non-commercial reporting on amazing dog stories.

No wonder more and more persons turn to the internet for news. Yet even internet institutions censor information, for under government pressure Google delists sites and YouTube yanks videos.

Considering this difficulty of finding truthful information, I remember a political discussion with my neighbor. At a certain point, I asked him for the source of his information. “Fox News,” he replied. And which books had he read in regards to the topic? “None,” he answered, for he didn’t read books.

In search of the truthful information which we each need to successfully guide our lives, we must do more than rely solely upon sources whose existence depends upon the existing economic order. To a significant extent, the quality of our lives depends upon the quality of the information upon which we base our decisions.

Startled, I countered: “But you can’t do everything that comes to mind! You can’t kill someone because you detest him.”

He moved closer to me.

“Under certain circumstances, even that. Yet it is a mistake most of the time. I don’t mean that you should simply do everything that pops into your head. No. But you shouldn’t harm and drive away those ideas that make good sense by exorcising them or moralizing about them. Instead of crucifying yourself or someone else you can drink wine from a chalice and contemplate the mystery of the sacrifice. Even without such procedures you can treat your drives and so-called temptations with respect and love. Then they will reveal their meaning–and they all do have meaning.”

~ The character of Demian in Demian,
by Herman Hesse (1877-1962),
German author

Pulling out of a Dutch Bros. coffee stand the other day, I found myself idling behind a car whose bumper sticker read, “God bless everyone – no exceptions”. Yes! And, while we’re at it, how about God bless all parts of everyone, no exceptions.

No, I don’t believe in an unforgiving, long-bearded white man sitting atop a heavenly throne of gold. However, I do affirm the generosity of Being whose light shines upon all beings, great and small, virtuous and villainous. While most of us would welcome feeling the light of such generosity fall upon us, why do we shade the “lesser” parts of natures from such a kindly embrace?

Of course, it’s easy to present to others and take pleasure in those parts of ourselves which are compassionate, honest, patient, etc. But, oh no! It’s so very hard to admit our hatefulness, dishonesty, impatience, etc. Yet, the person who assists a senior to cross the street can be the very same person who gets in a huffy snit because the senior before him in the supermarket express line has several items more than the 10-item limit.

Within us there is a psychological drive that seeks to actualize the potential of our human nature. In a Christian culture, such as ours, which generally misconceives the message and the issue as being a dualistic struggle between good and evil, light and darkness, we may misunderstand our goal to be as “good” as we can be. Living so, we suppress and repress any part of ourselves which does not conform to our concept of goodness.

However the goal of this drive to actualize ourselves is not goodness, but wholeness as in the teachings of numerous contemplative traditions, i.e., “Be ye whole, even as your Father in Heaven is whole.” (Matthew 5:48, New Revised Standard Version). The practice of such wholeness neither suppresses, represses, nor shades from the light of awareness the less pleasant aspects of ourselves. Wholeness includes all. No exceptions.

Just as a loving parent might beckon an unhappy child to come near, and share her troubles, so we may beckon those difficult parts of ourselves to come near, to enter the light of our awareness, and to reveal to our heart’s curiosity how these difficulties arose, and how they might be healed. Inclusion into awareness allows the possibility of transformation, as suggested by the story of the Buddha’s compassionate inclusion of the serial murderer, Angulimala, into his community of monks. Angulimala later became a Buddhist saint.

No, the attitude of wholeness does not mean that we like all parts of ourselves. It does not mean that we give ourselves permission to act out. We continue to relate to each other according to the norms of right human relations. Yet inwardly, when for example we experience perhaps our hatefulness, dishonesty, or impatience, neither do we pretend nor do we presume to be other than the very human person we are.

(Were you interested in reading more about wholeness, see “Personal Authenticity Expresses as Wholeness, Not Goodness”)

~ P. D. Ouspensky (1878-1947)
Russian esoteric philosopher known for his writings on the esoteric teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff
in In Search of the Miraculous

We commonly understand personal authenticity to mean being oneself. While this is so, we can understand what it means to be one’s Self in different ways. The practice of presence points to what may be a deeper experience of authenticity.

The human condition is the context which frames an understanding of the import of presence. In brief, you and I are asleep – metaphorically – to our deeper nature from which authenticity originates.

Everyday a myriad of stimuli drown our awareness: innumerable thoughts, feelings, sensations, outer events and interactions. One thought, feeling, or sensation leads by association to another and another and another ad infinitum keeping the hamster wheel of inner imagination and self-talk turning ceaselessly.

Because you happen to associate one thought with another, is this “being yourself” or is this simply a mechanical byproduct of an electrical charge surfing your brain’s synaptic connections along a pathway of neurons forged by your past experience?

Were associative thinking not enough, typically we respond to many of these stimuli with reactivity. For example, your partner says something which “pushes your button”, and you react angrily. But, is your angry reaction “being yourself”? Or is it simply conditioning? Perhaps your mother had the same tone of voice when she talked down to you when you were a child.

Were you to doubt the extent of our entrancement by associative thinking and reactivity, I challenge you to conduct an experiment. For just one day, or if only for one hour, pay close attention to your thoughts and feelings. Note how many, if not all of them, result from reactivity and association. Quite likely your attention will have wandered (by associative thinking) from attending to your experiment within less than five minutes.

Sure, if we wish, we may live a life of ceaseless association and reactivity, and fool ourselves into thinking we are being ourselves. Yet living ensnared in ceaseless inner imagination and reactivity is a life of mechanicalness, entrancement, hypnosis, metaphorical sleep.

What we sleep to is the experience of the Self, Being, our True Nature from which spontaneous, unconditioned, authentic expression of being one’s Self originates. To awaken from such sleep, we need to find a way to interrupt our ceaseless imaginings so as to allow the light of Being to pierce through the din of stimuli which fog our awareness.

One such method is the practice of presence which has been known to contemplative traditions around the world by different names such as: conscious attention, self-remembering, mindfulness, bare awareness, awareness of awareness, etc. Presence is the state of being consciously aware of ourselves while we also go about the business of our daily lives. We are present to our lives while we go about living them.

Presence is to our daily living what concentration is to meditation. Just as concentration interrupts the monkey mind of associative thinking thereby allowing the possibility of our awareness opening to a deeper experience of Being, so does the practice of presence interrupt the monkey mind we experience throughout our day, thereby allowing the experience of Being to enter our daily living.

Practiced over a lifetime, presence increasingly stabilizes our awareness in the experience of Being whose spontaneous expression is itself authenticity.

~ Dogen (1200-1253),
founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan

In their search for enlightenment, some persons cross deserts or and climb mountains at great peril to themselves. Others seek realization at the feet of their beloved masters listening expectantly to every word. Still some attend weekend seminars or study sacred texts late into the night.

While there are a great many seekers, there appear to be few finders. Perhaps this confirms that, by definition, a seeker can never be a finder.

If I am seeking, I am seeking some thing – an object which is other than me. I am the seeker; the object is the sought. There is the duality of I – and that which I seek.

If I am a seeker of spiritual realization, I first conceive of realization and its presumed attributes (calm, equanimity, bliss ?), and I presume that such fulfillment rests there in the enlightenment I seek, not in the lowly person I take myself to be.

Such a seeker must think that the great sages have been in error. But might such seeking be mistaken instead? The Buddha taught that buddha-nature (the intrinsic potential to become enlightened) exists within every sentient being. The Christ taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is within. Nondual teachers point to our inseparability from the natural perfection of all that exists. Like the Buddha and Christ, they suggest that what we seek is not in the Himalayas, at the feet of a master, or in a book – but “closer than your nose.”

“Closer than your nose”? Yes, because you are that which you seek. The awareness which now peers out through your senses and would traverse the world in search of enlightenment is itself the sought. The seeker’s dilemma is like a donkey and carrot, always chasing, never nearing the other. Were the seeker to stop seeking, he might find himself coming to rest in his essential, perfect nature which is in unqualified accord with the givenness of the Now.

To point to “awareness” as the source of realization as I have done above exemplifies another error in seeking. This may be difficult to follow. Seekers conceptualize truth – as in the word “awareness”. In conceiving “awareness” or “enlightenment”, an object or thing is conceived in thought. Yet the Mystery in which we swim is not an object. It is no one thing, for to be some one thing, it would be other than all else which has sprung forth from It. It can neither be touched, tasted, seen, nor conceptualized. Yet it is. And you are That.

With regard to the tendency to reify (make a thing or object out of) the Mystery, Lao Tsu, founder of Taoism, remarked: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”

Paradoxically, with due diligence, seekers may find precisely what they have conceived, but that will not be the Mystery, rather one of its infinite number of faces.

Contemplative traditions consider the practice of presence the sine qua non (“without which nothing”) of spiritual unfolding. The Tibetan Dzogchen master, Namkhai Norbu, for example, considers presence to be “the ultimate” practice.

Presence could be considered the unreactive resting of awareness in the experience of the moment-to-moment experience of the Now. Initially the practice of presence requires sustained voluntary attention. Ideally and impossibly, we would be in presence uninterruptedly throughout the day. Yet, unless you are a master, inevitably distractions will interrupt your attention leading you to not be present.

The internet and your neurons relate directly to your capacity to practice presence. To understand how they relate, it’s helpful to know of the relatively new science of neuroplasticity. Perhaps you think, as once I did, that your brain stopped developing when you reached physical maturity. Not so!

Your brain matter changes incessantly. Your ongoing experience, knowledge, and behavior can generate new synaptic connections between neurons, atrophy others, and even create new neurons. Such changes in brain structure can be as immediate as within a second of exposure to a stimulus.

But not all brain matter changes are good. Numerous research studies now report that internet usage actually alters your brain matter in ways which result in a decreased ability to think deeply, to comprehend reading matter, to form long-term memory, and… to sustain focus or attention (just what is required for the practice of presence).

Yes, the internet does have some favorable impacts on brain matter: it enhances visual acuity and eye-hand coordination. While that’s a questionable plus for the advance of civilization, joystick operators of military drone aircraft and their victims may benefit from less civilian “collateral damage”. Additionally governments who benefit from unthinking populaces will be pleased also.

If you wonder why you’re not reading as many books as you used to or you wonder why you find it difficult to read long internet articles, perhaps the net has zapped your brain (and this is reversible). Of course, not just the internet, but all media and sources of distraction augment our increasing inability to sustain attention. If you are interested in learning more about the impact of the internet, read “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” Nicholas Carr (2011).

Of course the internet offers genuine benefits which we will want to balance with our concern for presence. If you wonder how to enhance your practice of presence, perhaps a practical start might be to curb your exposure to distractions by limiting the amount of time you spend surfing the internet and limiting the number of times a day you download email.

~ Swami Nikhilananda (1895-1973),
Hindu Swami,
commenting on The Bhagavad Gita

Often we hear the phrase, “be true to yourself.” Persons interested in living authentically naturally favor the idea. Yet rather than be content with parroting the phrase, let’s take a closer look at what it might mean and how we might be so true.

Let’s begin by imagining a cat and a dog. The qualities of cats differs significantly from those of dogs. These qualities are innate; they express differences in the very nature of these two species. There’s just something about the nature of cats and dogs which make it hard to mistake one for the other.

So it is with persons. Imagine now several different friends of yours. Each friend expresses a different, innate “characteristic quality”. Were that quality to be expressed in sound, it might be a unique tone. Were it expressed in color, it might be a distinct hue. It seems as if Being plays at exploring its infinite variety by endowing each with a unique characteristic quality.

If given freedom to express, that unique, characteristic quality expresses an inner nature whose different endowments, inclinations, and idiosyncrasies will seek realization through a path which also is unique. But life can get in the way. While the uniqueness of your inborn nature is a given at birth, its realization is not.

Friends and family members who are unsettled by our differences may pressure you to conform. “You can’t make a living doing that! Why not just settle for a 9-5 job like everyone else?”

Persons of presumed power may try to coerce you to comply with their wishes. “Let me just suggest that if you don’t do X, there may be some unpleasant consequences for you.”

Sometimes the way forward through decision-making simply is unclear. At other times you may face distasteful decisions or decisions whose outcome might result in your being in conflict with others.

How do you thread your way through these and other possible impediments to the realization of your own nature? Shakespeare reminds us, “To thine own self be true.” Of course, if there is truth to Shakespeare’s dictum, then certainly others also have apprehended that truth, and spoken of it in ways which may shed a different and possibly deeper light. And so, I recall the plight of Arjuna and the importance of “following the law of your own Being”.

Arjuna is known to the 900 million Hindus as one of the two main personages of The Bhagavad Gita, which could be thought of as the bible of Hinduism. The other main personage is Krishna, Arjuna’s charioteer and avatar or god incarnate. The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue between between Arjuna and Krishna which takes place in the middle of a battlefield between two great armies just prior to the start of a great war. Both armies consist of Arjuna’s kinsmen.

Recognizing the great carnage which is to ensue to his own loved ones, Arjuna lays down his weapons, and refuses to fight for fear of sinning. But Krishna replies, “He who does the duty ordained by his own nature incurs no sin,” and given it is Arjuna’s nature to be a warrior, Krishna advises Arjuna to fight.

To “do the duty of one’s own nature”, to “follow the dharma or law of one’s nature”, is to “be true to oneSelf”. Each phrase expresses a basic relation of the ego to the Self wherein the personality serves the Self, irrespective of pressures to conform, comply, avoid conflict, etc. That relationship of personality to the Self is one of fealty whereby the promise of the unique expression of Being which is your innate nature may be realized (see “Love of Truth: A Skill of Authenticity” for extraordinary examples of this relationship).

Naturally we might wonder how can we apprehend the will of the Self? Quite often we will turn to the mind and to thought, looking there for insight. Yes, sometimes we can find direction by thinking. Yet more often we can ascertain direction by listening to and giving verbal definition to the inarticulate tones or essential qualities given off by the Heart (see “Looking for Direction in All the Wrong Places”).