Richard Rohr starts one of his books talking about the spheres of life and how we normally live our lives traversing the surfaces of these spheres but never actually venturing in.
This is a profound and excellent metaphor for how the superficial mind works. Language gives us a map of the world. It is the surface of the spheres. It is what can be seen, known and taught of a thing. Famously in India they say I can tell you all about a tiger, but it will never quite prepare you for the actual encounter.
When we actually encounter we start to move into the sphere and see it with our own eyes. But we rarely stay long because we are habituated to recording and knowing and talking about things. We are habituated to living between things, comparing them, moving from one to the other continuously on a journey but never settling and making our home.
Now obviously becoming settled can also be attachment and grasping where we deny the essence of change in things and set ourselves up for suffering when things turn out to be different from what we have been expecting. So not settling in this grasping sense, but just going into the sphere out of the realm of known fixed reality to develop a fluid and personal relationship that has no sign posts or points of real reference. It's an uncertain time, and we must navigate for ourselves as we go into a sphere no longer being able to use books and what we have been taught and learned. It is the Terra Incognita of old mariners as they sailed off maps to chart a new world. Our lives are a New World always entering uncharted water if we want to. If we want to embrace the boundless possibility that is available to us each day if we want to start navigating for ourselves and move into the centre of the orderly spheres, routines and habits that we have built up around our lives.
This is authentic living.
Now this relates very much to the self. I was very fortunate to have a chance encounter with some spiritual healers who pointed me to some Dissociation. That is to say "I" had formed a sphere out of myself and more of less I lived within that sphere. I'm not that authentic most of my life is lived on the surface of that sphere I call myself.
But they drew my attention to parts of myself that lay outside that sphere. Parts that I had forgotten, of had pushed away. In fact the one I encountered when opened my mind to it was a self that I had abandoned when I was a teenager. There was no special trauma involved but for whatever reason I felt I was better off without this part of myself. So I closed my sphere around the rest of myself and have lived on the surface of that new construction.
Obviously with what has been said living on the surface of any constriction is inauthentic in itself, but doing so also enables us to divide the self and become dissociated from parts of it. That may indeed be the intention like when we distance ourselves from a old friend we have grown apart from. But to put these barriers up also becomes a cage that stops us moving freely through ourselves.
They said once you become aware of that shadowy self make friends with it and welcome it back into you. And that is almost a physical acceptance into you in space. It is exactly the Prodigal Son parable from Jesus. Just as God will accept us back when we repent, so we can accept parts of our self back when we stop the fight against ourselves and open up again.
And what is an integrated self then? It is part of an authentic self and life where we are free to move through the spheres that our mind creates of the world. We no longer just look to confirm what we know and believe. That is just ego. Look I am right. Instead we start navigating freely without fixed reference to what other people say or what we know, perhaps in a trivial way we don't wear the same clothes today*. Just s small way in which we experience things in a new way. For a moment we run off the surface of a sphere. It is like meeting the tiger and finding that it is quite different from what we were told. we probably expect to see a fearsome predator with eyes glowing with ferocity in the shadows. But perhaps we see a mother and we see her nurturing her cubs. Or perhaps the tiger is sleeping. Or perhaps we don't see a tiger at all and go home disappointed. What we actually experience in side that sphere will be quite different from what we have painted on the outside.
Probably once we come home we will leave that sphere and spend the rest of our lives recalling the story of the day we saw a tiger and traverse the inauthentic surface of a sphere we construct around that day. But sometime lying in bed we may cast our mind to where that tigress is right now. What is she really up to. Perhaps we will examine the encounter from a different angle. We can enter the sphere of the story we tell and perhaps own up to being frightened. On the outside of the sphere we do not mention that we were frightened. But re-examining the inside we find that we were not so brave, and we welcome that timid self that we have rejected and face the fact that it was quite an intimidating encounter where we did not feel so comfortable in the presence of a creature that could crush out skull with a single bite. we welcome that self back and we go into the sphere of our encounter with the tiger in a fresh way. That is authenticity.
Authenticity is like the water of a mountain stream on a hot day. It is cool. It fills our whole being. It is slightly melancholy, like a cool breeze that comes in through an open window blowing away the sultry heat of ego and stale living. Its a moment to pause and rest with something peacefully instead of racing around trying to pick up speed to catch something we feel has gone or we have lost. With true authenticity we want for nothing. There are no sphere anymore to want, or be near or be far away from. We travel through a single joined up space perhaps inside this sphere or perhaps passing into another sphere it is no longer so important what sphere we are in. we will catch other people labelling our sphere in conversation and that is of some interest but its not so important. we learn to navigate from within with our own being at ease.
* of course thinking that what you wear is important is also inauthentic. Once a style of clothing becomes "me" then it is just another sphere we travel on. But a change of clothing, especially if we are afraid to do it, or it challenges our existing spheres may we quite revealing. The problem with makeovers, or indeed any changes we make to our life in order to shake it up, is that soon enough they become fossilised spheres that fix us just as much as the life we are seeking to shake up. Soon enough we will need a makeover of shakeup from the new version of me and so it goes on forever. It is better to learn to navigate away from the surface of spheres. Jumping from one to another, leaving the old one behind like a house and entering a new one does not solve the problem of inauthenticity. Explore what you have deeply is the better approach, turn inwards from the fixed surface and what you think you know and start to live it freely without thinking "I am this" "I am that" "my life is this" "my life is that" all these are just paintings on the surface of the sphere. They may have some truth to them but they are paper thin and not very important. Just covers to the book. It is best to open the book and start to read ones life.
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