In my efforts to communicate the essence of liberation - that the self does not exist - I have made the mistake of being inauthentic. I believed I could strip my personality from the message I was conveying so it wouldn't get in the way.

This didn't work. People can sense inauthentic communication, and do not tend to be well-disposed towards it. What was meant to be the sharing of a single idea became a battle in which I tried to convince others to do something (look to see if there was a self) while holding back information which might have made them more willing to listen to me.

That might work in the Ruthless Arena, where everyone involved knows that they are there for one specific purpose - to free themselves from the illusion of self - and knows that everything that is being said is intended to serve that purpose. It might work for other contexts where people are ready to evaluate ideas on their own merit, without ego getting in the way. But most of the time, people don't expect you to take yourself out of the equation, and they react badly when you do.

So what is authenticity, and how does one get it?

Real authenticity has two parts: being honest with yourself, and being honest with others. Both are huge, and can utterly transform your life depending on the extent to which you master them.

Being honest with yourself takes courage. What it means is to acknowledge whatever arises in your experience, and not try to pretend it away or mislabel it as something else. Even if what arises is truly horrible to you, such as thoughts of violent murder arising when you are angry, or inappropriate desires, or deep fears that you don't want to admit you have, being honest with yourself means acknowledging that those things are really there.

There are many reasons why this is a good thing. First off, you can't face and deal with something if you're too busy pretending it's not there. You can't treat a wound you don't see. If you're terrified of something, only by acknowledging that fear can you find ways of overcoming it, or of compensating for its existence in some way. If there's a part of yourself you want to change, you can't do it until you accept that it's there.

Secondly, your predictive abilities are greatly enhanced. You can predict how you will feel in a given situation, so you can make plans ahead of time as to what situations to seek and what to avoid, and how to cope with unwanted sides of yourself coming up. Without being honest with yourself, you will consistently be wrong in your predictions, and incur great amounts of unnecessary suffering and failure.

Thirdly, it helps you understand other people. For as long as you deny something in yourself, you won't be able to understand what it is like for another person to feel such a thing, so you will limit your ability to connect with them. You are the only person you can understand from the inside, so honesty about what that inside contains is the absolute prerequisite for true empathy.

Fourthly, when you look at things directly, they invariably turn out to be less bad than you thought. This is because the thoughts are an extra layer over the top of the actual experience, one which emphasises and reinforces it. When you look at the experience itself, you tend to realise that it's not actually as bad as your thoughts make it sound. Check this out next time you feel pain or a negative emotion. Is the feeling, in and of itself, actually as intense as your thoughts about it say it is?

Fifthly and most importantly, it lets you see life as it really is. Ask yourself this - "do I, the person looking at reality through these eyes, actually exist? Or does the looking happen without me?" Then be honest about what you see when you look for that "I". There is a vast freedom in this honesty which no-one who practises self-deception will ever be able to access, a liberation from an entire web of lies that covers up the truth of life.

That's all for now. Look forward to Part II another time.