Being authentic is being completely yourself in every situation, with all the courage and vulnerability you need. And yet because a person is an association of parts that often disagree and sometimes at war with each other, being authentic is not a promise to be a paragon of unity, predictable and completely consistent – something impossible for that is the price of our complex consciousness – but a promise to own all your parts, even those that challenge your favorite image and tell yourself who you are.
There is a peace that comes from this, as solid as a rock and as soft as an owl on the ground, that makes life truer and more alive. Such authenticity of life, such faithfulness to the wholeness of one's being, may be the essence of what we call “the good life.”
That's what a pioneering psychologist is Carl R. Rogers (January 8, 1902–February 4, 1987) explores in his classic 1961 chapter. Being Human (public library), rooted in his insistence that “man's basic nature, when free to act, is constructive and reliable” – boldly defying the religious model of original sin and the cornerstone of the entire field of human psychology that Rogers pioneered, full of insight into the essence of personal growth and creativity.
Drawing on a lifetime of working with patients – the work of guiding people on a path from suffering to prosperity – he writes:
A good life… the process of going where one's body chooses when it is free from within to go in any direction, and the general qualities of this chosen direction seem to have a certain universality.
He identifies three pillars of this plan:
First, this process seems to involve an increasing openness to hearing… the opposite of defensiveness. Self defense [is] the response of an organism to what is seen or expected as threatening, which does not match the existing human image of him, or his relationship with the world. These frightening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by a distortion of awareness, or a denial of awareness. I can't actually see, precisely, those experiences, feelings, reactions to myself that are so different from my image that I already have.
The necessary scams that Oliver Sacks writes about are a form of that defense – they help us bear the disappointment that is hard to bear: that we are untouchable, immortal, consistent with our self-image – and yet it gives us hostages to our dream, free to live the reality of our difficulties. Rogers writes:
If a person can be fully open to their experience, however, all stimuli – whether from the body or the environment – can be freely transmitted through the nervous system without being distorted by any protective mechanism. There will be no need for a “self-conscious” approach when the body is forewarned of any threatening experience. On the contrary, whether the stimulus was the effect of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the nerves, or a trace of memory from the past, or a visceral feeling of fear or joy or disgust, the person would be “living” in it, he would find it completely in awareness.
The reward for this determination is to fully realize deep self-confidence:
A person is able to listen to himself, to hear what is happening inside him. He is very open about his feelings of fear and disappointment and pain. And he is very open to his feelings of courage, kindness, and fear. He is free to live his feelings submissively, as they exist for him, and he is free to recognize these feelings. He is fully able to live the experience of his body rather than shutting it out of consciousness.
From this “moving from the pole of defense to the pole of openness to experience” comes the second aspect of a good life: “the increasing tendency to live fully in each moment” and find a kind of experience in the process of experiencing life rather than in your predictive models, which are always based on the past. When you are fully open to your experience, Rogers notes, each moment is completely new – a “complex adjustment of internal and external stimuli” that has never existed and will never exist again in that way, which means that who you will be in the next moment will also be completely new and cannot be predicted by you or anyone else – that lovely freedom to break the mold of your prison. Rogers writes:
Another way of expressing the fluidity that exists in such an existence is to say that the self and personality emerge from experience, rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit your preconceived structure. It means that the individual becomes a participant and observer of the ongoing process of biological experience, rather than being in control.
Such a life in the present means the absence of solidity, of strict order, of structure in knowledge. It means that instead of maximum flexibility, the availability of structure in the middle experience, the flowing, changing organization of self and personality.
[…]
Most of us, on the other hand, bring a pre-constructed structure and evaluation to our experience and we never let it go, but focus and twist the information to fit our ideas, annoyed by the fluid qualities that make it unmanageable in fitting our carefully constructed cavities.
By gaining knowledge about the process of living it, we arrive at the third part of the good life – the growing ability to trust oneself to find the right course of action in any situation. Many of us, Rogers notes, consciously or unconsciously rely on external guidelines to navigate life – a code of conduct imposed by our culture, our parents, our peers, our past choices. You write:
A person who is fully open to his experience will have access to all available data in the situation, where he will support his behavior; the demands of society, his complex and possibly conflicting needs, his memories of similar situations, his perception of the uniqueness of this situation, etc., etc. Data can be very complex indeed. But he could allow his whole body, his consciousness to participate, to consider each motive, need, and need, intensity and relative importance, and in this complex weighing and balancing, find that course of action that would come closest to satisfying all his needs in the situation.
What makes this process so prone to error is our continuing tendency to view the present from the past:
The mistakes that make most of us make this process unreliable is the information input that makes it not they are subject to this current situation, or to be left without information it does. It is when past memories and learning are factored into the calculation as if this were true, not memories and learning, that erroneous behavioral responses arise.
Rogers paints a picture of a man who has tied these three threads of good life:
A person who is mentally free… is more able to live fully and with all his feelings and reactions. He increasingly uses all of his being to feel, as accurately as possible, the situation that exists inside and outside. He uses all the information his nervous system can provide in that way, using it consciously, but realizing that the rest of his body may be smarter, and often, smarter than he knows. He is able to allow his whole body to work freely in all its strangeness in choosing, in the abundance of possibilities, that behavior which will be most satisfying in this moment of time. He is able to place his trust more in his body in this performance, not because it is infallible, but because he can be fully open to the results of each of his actions and correct them if they seem less than satisfactory.
He is more able to feel all his feelings, and he is not afraid of any of his feelings; he is his own filter of evidence, and is very open to evidence from all sources; he is completely involved in the process of becoming and becoming himself.
Being Human it is a revelation that is read as a whole. Complete this piece with EE Cummings, writing from a completely different yet complementary point of view, daring to be yourself and Fernando Pessoa in giving yourself who you really are.
