How would you detect your own inauthenticity or your own incongruence?
Well, Rogers had this idea that he called
subception, which was maybe something that you might regard as a 6th sense.
It's sort of like propriocentric perception, and that's the perception
that you have of your body as it's reacting and localized in time and space.
And so it's sort of like touch, the feeling, but it's...
Your sense of how you're reacting internally and where you are.
And a lot of that is observed by the autonomic nervous system,
which is reporting to you about various states of being in your body.
Rogers believed that you could use the
information that's being provided to you from your body, sort of bottom-up, to
determine when you were being inauthentic or non-congruent.
And I thought about this for a long time
and tried to sort it out in a practical manner.
And what I've concluded is this,
you can try this for a couple of weeks.
It's an extremely interesting exercise.
You sort of have to detach yourself from your thoughts and what you say.
So you got to assume, you start by assuming
that what you say and what you think is not necessarily you.
And of course, that's just the case, because a lot of what you think, in fact,
most of what you think and most of what you say are the opinions of other people.
There are things you've read or things
people have told you that that's a benefit in some ways, because you get all those
thoughts that other people have spent a long time formulating.
But it's a disadvantage in that it's not exactly you.
Okay, so you detach yourself from that.
You're no longer your thoughts
or the things that you say, or maybe you're no longer all of them.
And now what you're going to try to find out is
which of your thoughts and things that you say are you?
And maybe so you cannot utilize the rest,
or maybe so that you can correct the rest,
because they're not representative of yourself as an integrated being.
They don't take everything into account.
My sense is being that you can tell
when you're saying something that's not authentic
by feeling out whether or not it makes you weak or strong.
Now, you know, sometimes when you're
conversing with people, you can say something that embarrasses yourself.
Now, Nietzsche said, for example, everyone has perjured themselves at least
once in the attempt to maintain their good name, something like that.
It's not an exact quote, but I've got the gist of it, right.
So maybe you're saying things to impress someone, or you're saying things to remain
part of your political group or your social group or whatever.
Or maybe you have attributes,
personal attributes that might be positive that you're ashamed of.
And so you're not going to speak about them.
So there's a falseness about your self representation.
Watch for two weeks and see,
make a rule that if you start to say something and it makes you feel weak,
it's hard to describe exactly what that means.
To me, what it means, is that I can feel things
coming apart, sort of in my mid section.
So I think it's an autonomic phenomena and the subjective sense of falsehood.
It's like I've just stepped off to solid ground and onto something that doesn't
support me well, and it it feels like a self betrayal.
So that's existentially an authenticity.
You can feel it right away.
And then the rule is, shut up.
If that happens, stop talking,
and then feel around and see if you can find some
words that you can say in that situation that don't produce that sensation.
And it's like you see this played out in different forms of drama.
So there's a scene in The Lord of the Rings, for example,
where Gollum and Frodo are going across this swamp.
And the swamp is, essentially full of dead souls,
and they have to step very carefully in order to not fall off the track.
And the stones are sort of hidden underneath the surface.
And the implication there is that in order to follow a trail properly,
you have to pick your ground very carefully, and you have to test it to see
if it's solid or you'll slip off into this, well,
essentially, what it is, is chaos.
You'll slip off into chaos,
and that's a dramatic representation of what I'm what I'm suggesting to you.
It's like all you have to do is notice, and you have to pay attention.
And so to some degree, what you're doing, in fact, is you're making your capacity
to pay attention superordinate to your capacity to think and to speak, because,
you know, you might ask yourself, well, exactly what are you?
Well, I said you can
identify yourself with your intellect, and that's very, very common.
It's sort of like the worst sin of intelligent people.
But that isn't all you are.
And there are lots of reasons for making the assumption that
attention is a higher-order function than intellect,
because attention is what teaches intellect.
So if you pay very, very careful attention to what you say
without having the automatic,
without bringing the automatic assumption that what you say is you to bear
on the conversation and then also to feel like
you have to defend it, once you say it,
you'll find very rapidly that very much of what
you think and say has absolutely nothing to do with you.
It's the dead souls that are in that little scene that I described
to you, sort of manifesting themselves in your head.
They're dead ideas that other people have created,
and some of them might be applicable to you.
You know, you might have the right
to them, so to speak, but lots of them won't.
And you're using the words as camouflage or self defense or as an attempt to attain
status in a status hierarchy or to make yourself look smarter than you are.
Or there's all sorts of reasons or to hide what you think from other people.
I see this in undergraduate essays all the time.
So, the essays are full of cliches.
And, you know, it's not all that obvious why a cliche is a bad thing.
But a cliche is a bad thing in the same
way that being possessed by the dead is a bad thing.
It's like a cliche, isn't you?
It's something else. It's like the crowd.
It's like the other.
It's not living.
It has nothing to do with you.
And part of the reason that students use
cliches is because it's easier than using your own genuine creative formulation.
So you can just default to cliche use.
But there's something more insidious than that is that
if you write an essay that's nothing but a string of cliches
and you get criticized, then you're not being criticized.
What's being criticized is the cliches, and you can hide behind that.
And the part of you that's wise but treacherous thinks,
well, the criticism doesn't really apply to me
because I didn't really say what I thought.
And then there's this kind of sense you
get that you've gotten away with something, which is a terrible thing.
So when I read undergraduate essays, what I see very frequently is especially
the first essay is just nothing but cliches.
It's awful. It's dull.
You can hardly stand reading it because
there's nothing in it that's gripping or alive.
And then maybe the second essay, you can see there's a layer of cliche.
And then now and then,
the person will be brave enough to poke up a thought of their own.
It'll just sort of poke up somewhere,
maybe in three pages in it's like this little green shoot that's barely alive.
And the person is brave enough to pop it up in the hope that, you know,
maybe it won't get wall uped down with a sledgehammer.
And so one of the things I try to do is to point that out.
It's like, look, you know, this is something there's a real thought here.
It's a real original thought.
It's something that you have the right
to because it's derived from your own experience and your own knowledge,
and you formulated it in an original and compelling way.
But the problem with that is that if you get criticized for that,
you're just gonna pull right back into your shell, because that hurts,
because it's actually part of you that you've exposed.
And that's a terrifying thing to expose yourself like that.
But it's it's an absolute prerequisite to genuine communication and thought.