Johnstone: Authenticity

To Be An Authentic Person Is To Stare Deeply Into The Face Of Uncomfortable Truths. Caitlin Johnstone. Sep 22, 2024.

To be an authentic person is to stare deeply into the face of uncomfortable truths.

It’s to experience all the footage of shredded bodies in Gaza with a visceral understanding that these are real things happening to real people whose lives mattered just as much as your own.

To come to terms with the reality that the power structure you were raised to trust and the political party you were raised to side with are responsible for some of the worst things that have ever happened in our world, and that their depravity must be fought tooth and claw.

To stare unblinking into the very real possibility that the madness of our rulers could cause total human extinction by nuclear war or environmental destruction within your own lifetime.

To admit that your previous understanding of an issue was a misguided perception caused by propaganda, and to be fully open to the possibility that this is also true of your current understanding of other issues as well.

To deeply recognize the ways your own delusion and dysfunction have played a role in the delusion and dysfunction of humanity as a whole, and to cease viewing yourself as separate or separable from the self-destructive patterning of our species.

To be honest with yourself about the circumstances of your birth and the ways in which you have it better than other people in different circumstances and in other parts of the world — often at the expense of those very populations.

To be honest with yourself about the ways in which your actions harm others, and take any steps necessary to rectify this wherever you can.

To be honest with yourself about the ways in which you have been harmed — your traumas and wounded self-beliefs and your maladaptive coping mechanisms ensuing therefrom — and do the work necessary to heal them.

To be honest with yourself about how little you really know about this boundless mystery called life, and to be humble in your position as a clueless member of a young species in a universe that none of us understand.

To explore with sincere curiosity the possibility that all our assumptions about the reality we are experiencing have been wrong this whole time, right down to our beliefs about things as fundamental as thought, perception, and the existence of a self or a separate outer world.

To be an authentic person is to constantly plunge headlong into the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unknown and the unpredictable, even when doing so feels like a kind of death, for no other reason than because that’s where the truth is.

It’s to always welcome the truth with open arms, even when it is unpleasant, embarrassing, inconvenient or downright terrifying, come what may.