You can try this for a couple of weeks, it's an extremely interesting exercise.
So watch for two weeks and see, make a rule that if you start to say something
and it makes you feel weak, shut up, if that happens, stop talking.
Now, 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 sixth sense,
it's sort of like a proprio centric perception,
and that's the perception that you have of
your body as it's reacting and localised in time and space.
And I've 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.
So 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, you know 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 disadvantaging that it's not exactly you.
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. 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 yourself 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 midsection, so I think it's an autonomic
phenomena and the subjective sense is of a falsehood.
It's like I've just stepped off the solid ground onto something that doesn't support me well.
And it feels like a self betrayal, so that's existential inauthenticity,
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. But the ancient Mesopotamian
had figured out 5000 years ago or so that the highest God in the hierarchy of Gods,
so sort of like the highest value or the thing that should be imitated
most carefully was a God that
whose head had eyes all the way around it and who spoke magic words,
so the words he spoke could make the sun rise and make the sun set very, very powerful speaker.
And the reason the Mesopotamian had figured this out
to the degree they had was because they realized that the capacity to pay attention,
which is the eyes, of course, because we really pay attention with their eyes,
and then the capacity to speak properly is in fact the highest virtue.
And so then you can check yourself, you can see all you have to do is listen,
like you would listen to someone else and you have to feel you think,
“do I actually believe that?” “Is that actually my thought?”
And really, I'll tell you what you'll find is 95 percent of what you say
has nothing to do with you. So it's quite shocking to do this because
you'll start to say something and you'll think, “Oh, that doesn't feel quite right,
like it doesn't make me feel solid when I say it”. “There's something about that,
I'm subordinating myself to something or hiding in some way”.
It's very difficult to figure out exactly what you're doing,
but you'll find out that people don't have ideas, ideas have people.
And that's something to really think about because then you want to watch and see what ideas
there are floating around in your head and start to figure out where they came from
because it's highly probable that they're controlling you just like
a marionette is controlled by the puppeteer. It's very, very similar.