This is the third chapter of my book “The Way of Wild Things”

The path to the authentic self is the path of heart, of soul and the path to That Which Has Always Been Called God within us. I say, “That Which Has Always Been Called God,” because “God” presumes “The God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus,” and stands before us draped with the theology, doctrines, dogmas and creeds of the Christian religion, and we cannot get to That Which Has Always Been Called God with the God of Christianity standing in the way.

To find our way to That Which Has Always Been Called God, we have to lay aside theology, doctrine, dogma and creeds, and step into our life as those who would experience our experience, see what we look at, hear what is being said (Including what we are saying as well as what is being said to us, around us), know what’s what including what we know intuitively), trust ourselves to live out of our own authority, and to have what we need to find what we need to do what needs to be done in each situation as it arises.

The way to this way of living is the path to The Authentic Self. As we find our way there, we find our way to the self we are born to be and to That Which Has Always Been Called God, and live from the heart in ways that make wherever we are a better place to be. Walking this path is the spiritual journey, which is also The Hero’s Journey, and constitutes the high adventure of being alive.

Everyone is born with two questions to answer correctly before they die: Who are you? What are you about? These are the questions of identity and purpose. No one can answer them for us. No one knows who we are but us. No one knows what is ours to do but us. But. The world is filled with people who try to tell us who we are and what we are about.

From birth on we are told who we are and what we are to be about. And we are uncertain and confused all our life long because what we are told conflicts with who we know ourselves to be, and we have to swim against the current of public opinion if we are to go with the flow (the Tao) of our own true life.

Alice Miller, in The Drama of the Gifted Child, wrote that as children grow older they face a choice between being authentic and honest or being loved. If they choose authenticity and wholeness–integrity–they are abandoned by their parents anda significant others in their lives. If they dhoose to be loved, they abandon their true selves.

Reflecting on Miller’s observations, Mary Phipher in Reviving Ophelia, said that parents are not responsible for the “loss of self” in childhood–it is the natural outcome of the process of being acclimated to one’s culture that replaces “the true self” we are born being with “the false self” we are expected to be.

Phipher argued that authenticity requires us to be aware of the process that separates us from ourselves and to embrace the work of “owning” all of our experience.

Jon Kabat Zinn’s work with Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction offers a method for this kind of “ownership of experience,” by suggesting that we learn to “hold everything in our awareness” without judgement, or even opinion–just knowing that there as a part of our life experience, and watching as we integrate/incorporate the “opposites” into our life without trying to, but by allowing it to “just happen” in its own way.

Joseph Campbell spoke of “the Primary Mask” and “the Antithetical Mask,” with the Primary Mask being who we are expected to be by culture and society and the Antithetical Mask being who we recognize/ discover/know ourselves to be “just as we are,” as “one thus come.” Campbell said “The Antithetical Mask opens us to the realness of ourselvs. When we put it on, we find our own zeal. We find our own life and live it.”

Galen Rowell, reflecting on his path to becoming a professional photographer, said in his book Mountain Light, that learning to see is a matter of recognizing and trusting our own sense of where to stand, where to place the tripod, how to compose the image, in the right kind of light, and when to press the shutter button. He said that the heart of photography is the seardh for that which expresses our inner-most self, to incarnate and exhibit the truth of who we also are, by doing the work that springs from the heart of what we know to be right when we see it, feel it. No one knows what is right for us but us.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, writing in Wind, Sand and Stars, said, “Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer tht possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”

If we are to find our way to an authentic self-hood and an authentic spirituality, we are going to have to
“grasp ourselves by the shoulder while there is still time” and give ourselves permission to follow our heart’s desire for our lives, regardless of how absurd that might appear to our peers or the culture at large.

The path to That Which Has Always Been Called God winds through each of us. We cannot hope to know that is so without being true to what is deepest, truest and best about us–without being true to what is being asked of us–in each situation as it arises moment-by-moment. Knowing and being true to the heart of who we are and serving it as Jesus did in Gethsemane, by being faithful to ourselves, no matter what, is the essence of our calling to be who we are throughout the time left for living.