Loving from Authenticity

A. Conformity is Not Authenticity ..............................................25

B. Spontaneity is Not Authenticity ............................................26

C. Growing from Original Existence toward Authentic Existence ......29

A. Embracing Our Existential Predicament ............................30

1. Camus—Rebelling Against the Absurd ....................31

2. Sartre—Inventing Our Own Meanings .......................33

3. Heidegger—Confronting Ontological Anxiety ........34

4. Kierkegaard
—Transcending Our Existential Predicament .............35

B. Choosing a Self ........................................................................36

IV. HOW AUTHENTICITY TRANSFORMS LOVE ..............................38

Germaine Greer & Sidney Jourard

    When two people in quest of Authenticity become open to each other,
discover that they understand and appreciate each other's life-meanings,
and begin to encourage and support each other in these projects-of-being,
they might develop a unique personal relationship.
That singular, emergent relationship is love based on Authenticity.
Such love is not a romantic response (based on emotional programming),
which creates internal feelings rather than a real relationship.

I. WHAT IS AUTHENTIC EXISTENCE?

    We were all initially creatures of culture,
but if we exercise our freedom,
we can reshape ourselves into the persons we want to be.

    Becoming more Authentic is a difficult and never-ending project,
requiring years of careful unlearning and reconstruction.
We all begin as complex, culturally-given personalities;
but starting with this random material, we can reconstruct ourselves.
It is like crossing a river with only enough lumber to build a dock.
At each stage in the process of growth toward greater Authenticity,
we must have a place to stand; we must be definite selves.
So we dismantle the dock at one end
and use the salvaged materials to build at the other
—changing ourselves first where we most clearly need to change.
In this process, each part of our selves will be shifted several times,
but at no time is the dock completely dismantled.
Our self-creating selves go thru many small alterations
as we build toward the other side of the river—Authenticity.

     To become more Authentic means to emerge from our original existence,
to become more focused, centered, integrated, and purposeful,
more self-directing and self-creating.
As we move toward greater Authenticity, we leave behind extrinsic rewards:
We are no longer controlled by approval, acceptance, status, or money.
Instead, we choose to center our lives around comprehensive projects
—purposes we consider intrinsically worth pursuing.

     But before we explore Authentic Existence any further,
let's look more carefully at two of its more familiar opposites:
conforming to a culture or sub-culture and living spontaneously.

        A. Conformity is Not Authenticity.

     On the side of the river where all of us were born,
many diverse human societies were already fully developed.
We grew up assuming the patterns of our given cultures.
These traditions, beliefs, and habits were useful for day-to-day living;
these social conventions helped us become stable, responsible citizens.
In America, we 'fell in love', got married, and had children.
We became loyal, efficient employees, successful entrepreneurs,
or skilled professionals in order to earn money to buy houses.
We became comfortable within ourselves and well-adjusted to our culture.
Our roles and identities were defined, settled, and secure.

     Every culture provides the patterns for mature adulthood.
In 'primitive' cultures, these patterns were very different from our own.
And when we naively accepted the relationship-patterns of our culture,
we regarded those particular ways of life as "normal" and "natural".
For instance, if we grew up in one of the Western cultures,
we probably accepted romance, marriage, and having children as inevitable.
Only after we began to awaken from our cultural slumbers were we
enabled to say of our former life-styles: "I used to be a conformist."
Once we become aware of the arbitrariness of all cultural patterns,
we notice when we give in to cultural pressures and expectations.
While we conformed, we followed such ways of life automatically.

     In short, each human culture helps its members to develop into
very real, genuine, and fully-mature human persons,
but becoming responsible adults is not yet Authentic Existence.

     As conformity is not Authenticity, neither is anti-conformity.
If we simply reject everything our culture supports—doing the opposite—
we are just as unfree as when we silently followed the general pattern.
Joining a rebellious sub-culture often creates new forms of conformity:
We develop the same patterns of dress, hair, music, food, speech, etc.
Conforming to a sub-culture is not Authentic Existence either.
Altho dropping out of a culture might be a step toward Authenticity,
it is still a long way from re-inventing ourselves.