Authenticity is the means to breaking free

Circumstances don’t make the man, they only reveal him to himself.

Epictetus

The sages tell us, ‘You are That’, and they are right on one level, but from a different perspective this statement is incredibly naïve. How does it help me to know that I am ‘That’ if I can’t experience this blessed state here and now?

When our ego mind is entangled with people, events and places we first have to find a way to disentangle ourselves. When our thoughts are disconnected from our feelings, and if our feelings themselves are all over the place dependent on the circumstances that we are facing, we first have to find a way to find the root cause for the inner disquietude. 

Celebrate life for bringing all the stuff that needs to be sorted out to the surface. There is no ‘good’ nor ‘bad’. There is no ‘useful’ nor ‘not so useful’, there is only ‘That’ or ‘something ain’t adding up’.

Relationships, feelings, understanding and life’s never ceasing circumstances help us to break free from our notion of self altogether. We rightly spend a lot of time in the spiritual community stressing the importance of being authentic. Yet striving for authenticity is merely the means to breaking free. We have to disentangle the complex web of feelings and conditioning until we find the place where only love resides. We can only get there if we are honest with ourselves and others.

There is no ‘I’ we can break away from. Celebrate life’s circumstances as an opportunity to realize that ‘you are That’ or discover the illusion. Reaching authenticity is an elusive goal, being ‘no self’ is all that we need to concern ourselves with. Life’s circumstances are designed to help us break free at this blessed moment.