Authenticity means being real, genuine, and honest. It means being who you really are. Then who are you? My experience of who I am is constantly changing. Who I am seems to be related to the circumstances and experiences that occur in my life. In the evening I rarely feel like the same person that woke up that morning!
Today we’re going to him unpack this concept of authenticity and look and what it is. I begin with a down-home story from my own childhood.
As a child I hated green beans. But one summer we purchased a basket of green beans that were fresh from the garden. I loved them! I couldn’t get enough of them.
I asked my mother why we didn’t have fresh beans all the time. She said that they were expensive and not always available. This was my introduction to food economics. I was told, that in order to transport and store certain foods it was necessary to can them, so they will not spoil. We were able to have some fruits and vegetables year-round because of this ability to can them. Taste and nutrition were traded off for more availability. (This was 1950, frozen foods were not readily available.)
Over much of my life I have spoken as a Dharma teacher, as a minister, as a professor. I noticed that some of my teachings seem like fresh vegetables, while others seem like they had been canned. I noticed something similar as I was listening to others speak. Sometimes I felt like I was being offered fresh vegetables and sometimes it felt like being offered canned vegetables.
From my own experience I noticed that my teachings seemed fresh and alive when I was teaching something that was connected to my heart; something that was interesting and exciting for me. I noticed that my teachings were fresh when I was aware and in the present moment.
When we have an experience, we unwittingly “store it in a can”. This “can” is a concept. The concept is usually in the form of language. From these stored concepts we create a memory bank much like canned beans stored on the grocery shelf. When we access our memories it’s like pulling cans off the shelf.
We believe that this is the way “the beans are”. We live without the freshness, the taste and nutrition of “fresh vegetables”.
All too often we live from these canned memories rather than the fresh experience of the present moment. And all too often we substitute the canned items for the real thing; then we wonder why life seems flat or boring. Even more problematic is when we substitute concepts for the real thing.
To exacerbate the problem, we typically “can the fresh vegetables” so quickly that we never really taste them at all. In other words, we live our life, not from tasting the vegetables and then canning them, but we can them before we ever even taste them! We don’t’ experience life as it is but we experience it through concepts rather than actual experience. The American philosopher William James states this quite eloquently:
Out of the aboriginal, sensible, muchness attention carves out objects which conception then names and identifies forever ---in the sky “constellations,” on the earth, “beach,” “sea,” “cliff,” “bushes.” Out of time we cut out “days,” and “nights,” “summers,” and “winters” …. And all of these abstracted “what’s” are merely concepts. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.[i]
In other words, our propensity to experience life conceptually rather than through direct experience separates from the aboriginal, sensible, muchness of life and causes us to live somewhat artificially, separating us from things as they are.
The concepts that shield us from experiencing life directly are usually formed when we are very young and were given to us by others. We don’t see the world as it is but rather as we are based upon the set of conceptual maps imprinted on our psyche when we were young. We don’t experience life as it is but as we were taught many years ago.
The goal of Dharma practice is to see things as they truly are; to see everything as it is--alive and vibrant. We do this through the practice of bare attention—not adding anything to our direct experience, The Buddha states this succinctly in a simple, clear and direct teaching to one of his students named Bahiya:
In the seen, there is only the seen,
in the heard, there is only the heard,
in the sensed, there is only the sensed,
in the cognized, there is only the cognized.[ii]
[i] Levy and Levy, Living in Balance, Conari Press, Berkeley, CA,133.
[ii] Bahiya Sutta