Who are You? Who is the Self that Would be Authentic?

 

How would you reply, were I to ask you, “Who are you?” Actually, take a moment to consider who you are. Really! Who are you? Perhaps you might pause a moment, and say out loud who you think you are. Someone might reply to me, “My name is Sarah, I am a 41-year-old architect. I am divorced, and the single mom of two children. Between driving my daughter to karate, my son to soccer, minding a house, and keeping my career, I’m exhausted!” I might reply, “Sarah, I understand your exhaustion. Yet how can this be you? There was a time when you hadn’t children. A time when you were in love with your fiance. A time when you were a college student, not an architect. Wasn’t that you back then too? ”

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Looking for Direction in All the Wrong Places

 

I work with many intelligent persons. Despite their intelligence, often they are stymied by dilemmas with which they have struggled in thought – often for a very long time. Occasionally I may remark, “With your obvious intelligence and with all your thinking about this, if you haven’t yet arrived at answer, perhaps it might be because you’ve been searching for your answer in the wrong place.”

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Some Psychological Skills which Enable Authentic Living

 

Persons who live authentically seem to share certain common skills and attributes. Like breathing in and breathing out, those skills resemble an ongoing pulsation of sensing within and acting without. They could be described as skills of self-discovery and self-expression.

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On Authenticity:

Each man had only one genuine vocation–to find the way to himself…. His task was to discover his own destiny–not an arbitrary one–and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness. — by Herman Hesse (1877-1962),, in “Demian”

About …

The Personal Authenticity Project is a blog authored by Michael Nagel MA. The Project explores the practice of personal authenticity. Your comments help to clarify the meaning, practice, and relevance of personal authenticity.