Quotes about Authenticity

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves. The very fact that so many religious people have to so vigorously prove and defend their salvation theories makes one seriously doubt whether they have experienced divine mirroring at any great depth.

You do not climb up to your True Self. You fall into it, so don't avoid all falling

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting.

eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while.

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?

Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real.

The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find "the pearl of great price" that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

The True Self always has something good to say. The False Self babbles on, largely about itself.

Any kind of authentic God experience will usually feel like love or suffering, or both. It will connect you to Full Reality at ever-new breadths, and depths "until God will be all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28).

Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously.

Jesus himself says, "Do not believe those who say 'Lord, Lord' " (Matthew 7:21, Luke 6:46, italics added). He says it is those who "do it right" that matter, not those who "say it right." Yet verbal orthodoxy has been Christianity's preoccupation, at times even allowing us to burn people at the stake for not "saying it right.

Walter Wink, a professor of biblical interpretation, calls it the mere "theological" worldview as opposed to the incarnational worldview, which is authentic Christianity.1 When all of you is there, you will know. When all of you is present, the banquet will begin.