The Final Post from Liberation from the Lie: The Authentic Revolution

[contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"] We start to bring about this world when we commence the inward exploration of the radiant spirit and find out who we truly are. There is where we discover the love and creation that binds us all to it. We are that creation. You are that creation. The sky, the oceans, the mountains, the vast plains and you find your source in that great truth.

What we must begin alone, that same journey ends with us together. That is the circle of life itself. The solo life blends with the collective and we are a tribe once again, in love with life and life in love with us.

Do you remember taking the college SAT. Each test had several questions that required the student to provide the best title for a very short story. I remember being stumped at the answer possibilities that the test provided. I could make a decent case for any one of them, but I knew that there was only one right answer.

I evaluated each of the four possibilities (A.B.C. or D) and I suspect that any story title that I preferred would probably be the wrong answer. So I had to “psyche” the test and try to figure out what the test wanted me to say. I could either be true to myself and probably get the question wrong or I could try to figure out the mind of the authorities that designed the test and hope to get the question right.

This is exactly the predicament that each of us face in our daily living. So often we can either be true to ourselves and fail at life or we can try to figure out what the authorities want from us and, at the same time, betray our own selves. In fact, we do this so often, that it becomes an ingrained part of our personalities. Over time, we loose touch with who we are and spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out what these same authorities expect from us in a million different situations.

SAT scores are mailed to each test-taker. So you can never find out what questions you got right or wrong. So I was never able to find out if I answered those confusing questions correctly. And that’s also my point. We never can really know if we’re getting it all right. Yet life, in its way, gives us a score. And thus we stumble through life, our footing never especially secure or enduring.

Even very little children face the same dilemma. At a very early age we realize that if we stay true to our selves we risk getting punished by our parents and teachers. If we’re going to succeed at all in this life, we need to figure out how to please our authorities. It turns out that the price for success is very high indeed.

Little children learn the one terrible lesson that will stay with them the whole of their lives; that they are only as good as their last accomplishment. And even more to the point, they learn that love is something that they must earn time and again and was never was a birthright.

What does all of this have to with global revolution?

The moment we become compelled to win affection, validation, and meaning from exclusively external sources because you have come to realize that as you are, you are not adequate, from that point forward we become disowned from who we actually are. We become, in effect, slaves to the needs attached to a false persona.

We take on a series of masks exquisitely design to counter the primary underlying fear. The remainder of our lives becomes dedicated to a ceaseless drive to please others (so that they will validate us), manipulate others (because as we are we are not worthy of effortless dignity and respect), to impress others with our brilliance (because inwardly we feel that we need to prove ourselves time and again that we are more than we think we are), to control others by force (because people are naturally shitty and need someone to control their baser desires) and on and on it goes.

We are always struggling to psych out an external authority. We never leave that testing room where we were required to calculate what “the other” wanted from us. It is absolutely no different from the empty promises of some enlightenment teachings. We look for salvation in all the wrong places.

The journey back to the self begins and ends with the self.

The authentic revolution happens when we discover our shared, individual, and collective personhood. It is recognition that we are not only connected with everyone on earth, but with everything else as well. As the Buddha pointed out centuries ago, we do not exist independently from everything else.

The authentic revolution is an individual experience. It is not a mass movement. It does not have the sweeping drama of history. It does not seek to solve great social issues.

Rather it is about you and me. While we can meditate in groups, the journey is always solo. Only you can discover your own Wound, the great vat of pre-verbal traumatic experience that became covered by many layers of compensating psychological process that I have called Fear-Selves in Liberation from the Lie.

The moment we cease needing to please everyone, because we are so desperate for their approval, to control our lives, because we are so tormented by insecurity, to use our bodies and appearance to obtain power and admiration, because we know that if we don’t look superficially beautiful people won’t be drawn to us, to force people to do what we demand they do, because we know that only force works and we are always right, on that day our world is transformed.

The abyss of lack knows know limits. Until we completely and utterly disidentify with the person we believe ourselves to be, founded on the core thought of inadequacy, our search can only embitter us further. No amount of external validation can come close to filling this vast abyss. You will continue seeking the right amount of security, power, spirituality, and love and never, ever find it. The beautiful person can never be beautiful enough. The spiritual person can never obtain the enlightenment he desperately seeks. The Tough Guy will only face an ever-diminishing amount of force and vitality. The Expert will bore his audience. And the Pleaser will live in a universe of tenuous support, but ever-present resentment. This is the way the game of inadequacy is played.

We all have been played thanks to our original invalidation. There is simply no escape from that … except this: the Authentic Revolution. Can you be an Authentic Revolutionary to yourself?

Nearly all the acrimony, substance abuse, violence, and inequality we observe in the world is a direct outcome of our underlying identification with inadequacy. This is why the Authentic Revolution must address the root process first. We have already seen how this root process is what nearly all the ills of our world have in common.

The Authentic Revolution is a return. It is a return from the Exile. The Exile is represented by our lives spent in the psychological realms of lack and want. It is finding out who we truly are now and forever. It is not about setting up the newest worker’s commune or leading the Wall Street executives to a great communal guillotine where the angry hordes can cheer as their heads are lopped off.

The world of lack awards cunning, calculated intelligence. It is the ugly world of Ayn Rand where every man is, ultimately, out for himself.

In contrast, the world of the Authentic Revolution is one of wisdom, as opposed to smarts. The key to wisdom is the living recognition of our endless connections; that when I exploit the earth for my own advantage, I despoil it for everyone and everything else. In this way, everything is changed in the world of the Authentic Revolution. We return to our natural selves. We enjoy the good and fresh air, delicious food, meaningful work, music, dance, and art, as well as scientific inquiry. We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Civilization has produced so much of value. This is, rather, civilization contextualized within the whole world as one, self-organizing being.

We start to bring about this world when we commence the inward exploration of the radiant spirit and find out who we truly are. There is where we discover the love and creation that binds us all to it.

What we begin alone, that same journey ends with us together. That is the circle of life itself. The solo life blends with the collective and we are a tribe once again, in love with life and life in love with us.

Thank You – Now My Swan Song

I know that I’ve said this before, but this truly is my final post at this site. I’ve said everything I can say, especially in how it is connected to my book Liberation from the Lie.

While I will stop writing posts, I will continue answering email and participating in talks. Currently I am planning a course in Navajo Peacemaking at New York’s Learning Annex. Part of this will be a web course and if you are interested in learning more about Navajo Peacemaking, please send my your email and I will make sure that I keep you informed of developments. If you live in the NY area you will be welcome to attend this great opportunity to learn what it means to use conflict as a gift.

I loved writing for this blog. There are thousands of pages here, nearly all of the written from a place of passion, commitment, honesty, and, more than anything else, love. Some posts are better than others, but I think the quality has been rather good.

I will keep the site up until my current contract expires with my web hosting service. I’m guessing that it’s about another six months or so and then it’s over and it will be gone.

Please accept my sincere and humble thanks for spending your valuable time here together. I am so grateful that we could take this journey together.

I intend to continue supporting my new site trustliberation.org that is designed to supplement my new book, Trust in Liberation. An invitation is extended to all of you to continue the exploration there. This books stands on its own, but it is especially valuable to those who have enjoyed this site. I have demanded a low price for it so that everyone can afford a copy.

I should tell you that I don’t intend to make regular posts to that site, but there will be occasional contributions.

Thank you again … a thousand times over.

 

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The The Final Post from Liberation from the Lie: The Authentic Revolution by , unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.