Authenticate:

• Prove to be true or genuine
• Validate
• Verify

In the quest for survival we strive to prove, validate and verify that we are. All my atoms have miraculously gathered themselves into the solid mass of a walking, talking, conscious being. I think I’ve come together quite nicely, incidentally. What additional proof do they need that I AM? Regardless of how nicely or not nicely we’ve been constructed, humans should all be classified as sacred geometry and therefore exempt from the humiliating additions and subtractions of worth assigned to us by the ruling class-meticians. You are missing X and must therefore subtract a living wage, affordable housing, equal opportunities, basic safety, dignity and comfort from the equation of your less than life. Faaaak! But Y? Susie, your watermelons are assholes.

I’m told I spend too much time in my head. Given the current pandemic this seems like a safe bet. Excessive research and hyper-attention to detail are two of my many survival superpowers. I think, therefore I’m still alive. My husband had his peritoneal catheter surgery last week after plummeting into kidney failure just ten weeks after our dog had his right leg amputated. We knew the kidney failure was on the horizon but our dog’s bone cancer diagnosis was a massive curve ball. None of it, however, was predicted to go down during a global pandemic. These are the the kinds of events google can’t explain and so, I’ve gone in, where, according to the gurus, my god-consciousness lives, to seek the truth.

Dear me, who?

Who gets to self-actualize, be free to be!, not wake up to an alarm, manifest their best life or whatever? My research indicates that authentic lives are reserved for wealthy sons with unlimited career options and trust funds, who quit their corporate jobs, open meditation centers and get interviewed by Oprah OR very beautiful women in Europe who have YouTube channels selling luxury lifestyle products to women who can’t afford them. (I follow them all!) Are my calculations close?

Dear me, what?

What are the requirements, ingredients, or dimensions of an authentic life; one that is 100% freely chosen, as opposed to a collection of objects and experiences we’ve desperately grasped and clung to in the typhoon of existence? I would like to request an additional 500 square feet; mostly in our kitchen as currently, the fridge door opens and touches the counter. Kyle would also like a garage.

Dear me, where?

Where can these elements be found? (I think it’s Pottery Barn. That’s where my dream couch lives.)

Dear me, how?

How, on earth, does one accomplish this seemingly elusive but clearly essential task of becoming something other than a disposable, non-existent cog in this concrete machine called capitalism?

Dear me, why?

If I’m not real (aka: authentic), why does seemingly very real shit keep happening? Also, since I don’t exist, can I stop paying bills, cleaning, showering and like, showing up to work?

Dear me, when?

Is there a particular moment, birthday, milestone or other indicator that appears to declare when one has made the transition from fake to real? Do we get more or less hair? Does our body odor change? Will we question our gender? Get the urge to masturbate in strange places? Is it like spiritual puberty? There was that puppet who, after a bad night of gambling, was visited by a blue fairy and magically, his strings fell off and he was declared a ‘real boy’. What happens to girl puppets? While there are no strings on me, I can’t deny being controlled by invisible hands which have dictated my words and actions against my will despite surviving the belly of many, many whales.

Lies are tiny death sentences. Most of us, as we’re cattle prodded along the plank, plunged into lesson after lesson, would not call our actions ‘brave’. We are declared brave by our gruesome, sometimes stylish, and well-housed oppressors, so we’ll continue doing their bidding. I don’t have the strength or time to address the pandemic, other than to say, all those sappy commercials are insulting propaganda akin to the draft. The last thing essential workers need is patronizing pity. PPE. Hazard pay. Rent freezes. Leadership that aren’t bloated bags of explosive, golfing, pathology. All that would be massively preferable to gag-inducing sap and blanket denial of an unfathomable mountain of death. How’s that for real?

Is it just me, or does it feel like there’s a memory of centuries of climbing to the highest point, yelling, waving, screaming WE ARE HERE! living in our blood and yet, no matter how much we do or try, we never count? We never count. I still count on my fingers, a good night’s sleep and Love.

Deepak says the end of all human suffering is found in the discovery and expression of our authentic self.

Better hurry and get one of those! The discovery and expression of an authentic self can not be found on Amazon Prime. I looked but the reviews said they were all fakes. Bummer. So instead, I watched Deepak’s three hour talk on Neuroscience and Enlightenment. Check it out:

It was honestly fascinating. Allow me to save you two hours and fifty minutes. Basically, modern humans are about 200,000 years old (cosmic babies). Before that, we were humanoid animals hitting, raping, hoarding and otherwise clawing at each other for safety while a bunch of jocks and preppies established this exclusive club called capitalism. They even made each other matching jackets by some guy named Armondi? This resulted in several million years of trauma history which caused our modern human brains to be plagued with limbic dysregulation, or what shrinks call mental illness; a grossly insufficient term used to shame a spectrum of perfectly natural survival responses.

Enlightenment, or authentication, is the practice of aligning with God or unity consciousness and nonjudgmentally observing our human experience. Watch the last ten minutes of the talk for the low key, down low.

What Deepak doesn’t explain, and what many talks and texts like this fail to address is, the neuroscience of trauma healing (the neurobiology of ego strength is my latest research rabbit hole). No one with a big voice is talking about the contents of the bridge between our wounded, animal selves, our limbic dysregulation, our addictions, our concrete obstacles and our true nature, which is God, which is Love.

Where is the how-to for real people? Yes, yoga, kale, meditation. Duh! But what do mere, roughed up mortals, trapped in human-construct chains, need to make the quantum leap from an attachment to Coke Zero to absolute liberation?

Early retirement and four million dollars would be a fantastic start.

xo

Am I real yet?

I don’t know the name of this pose but Ratchet said I was doing it wrong.

Writing this post in the yoga pants quarantine made me buy. They feel like butter. #happyplace Oh my ghee! Butter is the path to enlightenment. YAS!!!!