Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Your use of language gives away your inauthenticity
The English language used to be quite precise in its tenses, but the language has been destroyed by the powers that be.
I learned English from teachers in another country, teachers who still remembered that your words express, or at least attempt at approximating accurately reality or our intention.
So you lay the table but you sit down or lie down. Not lay down. The meadow lies between the river and the woods, not lays…
Today not anyone uses those two words properly. my guess is:
lying is a practice, but lying about it is also a practice: a must.
As if the words could taint your mouth. So lying is a dirty word, and your mother threatened you to wash your mouth with soap and whatever…
Indicating: it is not you, it is your mouth that is dirty. Ugh. Teaching no responsibility from an early age. Teaching, no TRAINING inauthenticity: a clean mouth, never mind dirty mind.
The more inauthentic you are the bigger the space between who you are in your intentions, and your public behavior.
The more you pretend, the more you lie.
Eventually every single word you say, every single action, attitude will be a lie.
You cover up your love of comfort, laziness with feverish show of eagerness. Your idle mind, your stupidity with a show of useless ‘knowledge’…
Not caring with syrupy sweetness. Misery with a smile that shows your teeth. Looking like a go-getter never doing anything worth doing.
And your unwillingness with words that sound good but the words don’t mean what they seem to mean to other inauthentic, uneducated, not discerning, stupid people who you like to surround yourself with.
If you are lucky you have someone in your life who is not stupid, who is not duped by your fake persona, but they love you for you, not for what you pretend, even if they use your pretenses for their own benefit.
Here are a few examples of the kind of speaking that triggered this article:
I am intending
I am deciding
and I am wanting
expressing clearly for those who know ENGLISH… that the words are only for the purposes of duping.
or ‘I have committed‘. same thing here.
Commitment is a moment to moment phenomenon. A line of demarcation. A line you won’t cross. Won’t. No wishy-washiness, no maybe, no ‘occasionally’, no.
The only way to ACTUALLY commit is to say: I commit. Taking a stand. Non-negotiable.
Commitment is like pregnant. You either commit or you don’t. No half way, no past tense, no future tense. Are you committed?
But to say: ‘I commit’ is too darn clear for our lying, cheating, pretending humanity. Must take off the edge, so it’s negotiable.
Like money, it is non-negotiable. It either buys you what the number on the paper says, or it doesn’t…
And when everything is negotiable, then watch out. That is the apocalypse, the end of the world.
And when you look at your life, you’ll see that reality cannot be faked.
You cause what you can cause: your actions, your attitude, your speaking, and you do have the consequences. In spades.
Werner Erhard says that you, meaning a human, is always inauthentic. The only authenticity that is available to humans is being authentic about their inauthenticity.
Aha! But what he doesn’t say is that being authentic about your inauthenticity requires the kind of speaking that is truthful. Accurate. Calls a spade a spade.
And unless you are committed to telling the truth: you can’t. You suppress the truth because it’s not pretty, or it is inconvenient, and you need to suppress everything. Every darn thing, including aliveness. Including love. Including hate.
For about a decade I struggled against telling lies that made me look better than I was. Or more interesting. Or to get sympathy. I did. I am human after all.
Also: this is important! I didn’t work on stopping lying.
I worked to become authentic about lying. So whenever I lied, and in the beginning it was a lot of the time, I said: ‘Oops, I just lied.‘ And then told the truth.
Lying is so justified that even catching it needs more awareness than I had at the time. So the very first stage of becoming authentic about my inauthenticity was to catch the lies.
The very first unconscious lie I caught was ‘No matter what I do, nobody said yes‘. I was reporting about inviting guests to a Landmark Education event.
As I was saying that, I felt the muscles connecting to my neck tighten up. They tighten up now as I am writing it. And I suddenly saw the truth: I was lying.
The truth was that I asked one person, and that person said ‘no’. I didn’t ask anyone else.
So I said: ‘Oops, I was lying. I only asked one person.‘
In my ‘challenges’ your job is to tell the truth. In the Reality Challenge you tell your lies: you should do something and you don’t.
Unless you get that you are lying, lying to yourself, lying to me, you are wasting your precious time and money: you won’t come out on the other side as a happier person. which would be the result if you did tell the truth.
In the Reframing Challenge,
you come to a more difficult angle of telling the truth: you realize that you judge things from a self-righteous point of view. You have the opportunity to tell the truth, and look differently. Did you miss it? You gave up your chance to become more productive, happier, healthier person.
In the Completion Challenge
I ask you to use a list of things to look through, one by one and: all lies, all pretenses, all weighing you down, making you sick, making you stupid.
And your job is to use language to tell the truth and make them no longer a lie, no longer a pretense, no longer a burden.
Comes the Skill Building Challenge, another telling the truth challenge, and you have a chance to find out that you are just a floating around turd pretending to care, pretending to be up to something. and it is painful to keep pretending.
Yeah, all four challenges sound innocent and easy. And if we add the two previous challenges, the Validation Challenge and the Water Energizing Challenge, nothing tells the truth about you more than being in a challenge that is DESIGNED to drive up the lies, drive up the inauthenticity.
Each challenge drives up a slightly different aspect of the inauthentic ways you have been living.
I didn’t grow up in this country, thank heaven for that, I wouldn’t be able to teach had I learned to be like you.
So I don’t know what bag of lies you were sold that tell you that you can be happy, healthy, rich, and fulfilled if you just lie your way through.
Of course I am also not religious. I grew up in the decade following the Holocaust where my parents lost nearly everyone in their families. My mother was left an aunt and an uncle. My father a great grand aunt, and two second cousins, both were fighting in the resistance and emigrated to Israel right after the war.
So no, religion wasn’t on my parents’ minds…
I grew up in a mostly Catholic country. And Christianity is a ‘the best pretenders win’ kind of religion. But I didn’t get that with mother’s milk. I didn’t even see it until I saw it here, in the United States of America.
Where? Interestingly, in Landmark Education.
There they distinguish between learning and getting something, accurately.
But saying you got something that you didn’t is a lie. And it became one of the things est-holes, the early participants in the est-training were called.
‘You got it? I got it!‘ while they didn’t…
I probably wouldn’t have seen it as clearly as I saw it without first seeing the movie Semi-Tough.
The est training and subsequently Landmark Education asks students to be authentic. But in vain. The participants who are most successful in Landmark, not in the world, are volunteers, introduction leaders, seminar leaders, course leaders, etc. And the inauthenticity is, to me, being a true empath, is killing them.
The rate of cancer among the introduction leaders and seminar leaders is double of the rate of cancer of ‘just participating’.
Participants who continue participating after their first program: have double the rate of cancer, compared to the general population.
Why? Because they mostly FAKE BEING something they aren’t.
You can’t fake being. You either are or you aren’t. And faking is a lie and a pretense.
Being the way you really are takes courage, and the willingness to be ugly, stupid, selfish, whatever you are trying to hide.
As long as you are hiding it, you can’t get rid of it.
When I caught that I was lying, just saying: ‘oops, I just lied‘ allowed me, little by little, the desire to want to be different than I was. Normal, ordinary, in my case.
I think we all try to hide that we are normal and ordinary. what else would we be?
So you pretend that you are special. That you are talented. That you are a superwoman.
And as long as that is important to you, you’ll die a painful death, I predict.
Some of you don’t pretend, but you don’t tell the truth either. You can’t grow, because for that you’d have to tell the truth about where you are, but otherwise you are happier than the pretenders.
Anyway, as painful as it is, and it is painful, telling the truth is the gateway through which you can become all you can become.
We call telling the truth ‘responsibility’. It is as simple as that. Telling the truth.
Just like me, you won’t likely see the whole truth about yourself, yet. For a while. but you’ll catch glimpses. That is the job.
It’s a process, but it’s a process worth going through, with your eyes open, and with courage.
Tackling telling the truth more like a wall of porridge, than a wall of solid rock…
You’ll eat a bowlful at a time. You need a spoon, not a jackhammer. No noise either. Big benefit. It can happen between you and me…
In the challenges.
Start with the Reality Challenge, or alternatively with the Skill Building Challenge. and start telling the truth, one ‘should’ at a time.
Start your journey with a challenge
