The Power Of Authenticity: How To Communicate Your True Self And Build Meaningful Connections

What does it mean to be authentic? What is our true self? How do we improve our ability to connect with other people? Important questions. No simple answers. But in today’s episode, we lay the groundwork for how we might move in a productive direction - together.

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The Power Of Authenticity: How To Communicate Your True Self And Build Meaningful Connections

Our times have been called the Information Age, fueled by the invention of the microchip and its attendant technologies. With the advent of AI, we're entering a new chapter in societal evolution, one whose name is yet to be coined. At the risk of being overly cynical, we could call it the Artificial Age, and it isn't just artificial intelligence that leads me to the suggestion.

We currently call AI less intelligence and more a data management system combined with rationality enhancement. These are components of intelligence, but not intelligence in its entirety. We'll see how this is analogous to our discussion of authenticity in a bit. The point here is technology, as powerful and transformative as it is likely to become, remains that in the category of tools. The utility of tools is reliant on users to apply them skillfully and wisely.

Artifice is antithetical to wisdom, and there's an unhealthy prevalence of it in our current culture. This is perhaps a side effect of the material wealth created in the industrial age and multiplied and spread in the information age. During the past half-century, we've learned to take a lot for granted. Modern society has grown into a complex latticework.

Artifice is antithetical to wisdom, and there's an unhealthy prevalence of it in our current culture.

It's fueled through technological means and a resultant shrinking of the globe. The local has been pushed into the background as the global has been pushed to the forefront. This has many advantages, but like every change, it comes with disadvantages, too. One that pertains to our discussion is this. It's more and more difficult to remain tethered to the fundamental realities of life.

This lack of grounded understanding of why things are the way they are undermines an individual's ability to place notions in a robust orienting context. As a result, delusion grows. This evolution has been ill-served by much of the intellectual class, specifically the latest significant wave of philosophy postmodernism.

This way of thinking features a relativism that emphasizes historical and social context to understand the world and is dismissive of objective reality. While this does perhaps illuminate the places where divergent perspectives lead to diverse world views, it has simultaneously led the way to all manner of delusion t. Tied to deny the existence of universal, lasting truth is to condemn humanity to perpetual confusion along with attendant conflict and strife.

We are now living through these consequences brought in large part through the postmodernist influence thinking that currently dominates the world's institutions. Society is divided with true believers on either side who have greater enmity, distrust, resentment, and fear of the other side. It has ripped friend from friend and family member from a family member. It is widening racial and other demographic divides, not uniting them. It is fueling anxiety and expanding delusion.

Delusion is like a drain of power. Our personal agency leaks out through that drain. We all have some level of delusion. This is inevitable because we are beings of limited perceptive power. When we grow beyond the sinkhole of postmodernism, the emerging age may alter our limits, but as long as we are human. It won't completely close the drain. Delusion is dangerous and damaging. We are deluded about many things.

Authenticity: We all have some level of delusion. This is inevitable because we are beings of limited perceptive power.

For proof, look at some of the arguments in today's public square. People are having arguments about men having babies and competing with women in sports. Many see it as a good idea to sexualize kids under ten in public schools, introducing them to such inappropriate topics as cross-dressing and the mechanics of non-reproductive-based sexual practices. We're in the process of frightening our children that they will not have a world waiting for them when they grow up. We are teaching them that the Earth will be uninhabitable because of the cars we drive, the houses we live in, and the products we buy.

This is devastating to children, and we're seeing the effects. It's no picnic for adults, either. That's why this is such an important topic for us in the Eye of Power community. Many people struggle to simply connect in a real way with other human beings. People fear offending others, or they don't care if they do. Some of the ideas I shared may have induced in you an emotional charge. That is not accidental.

Delusion results in short-sighted, selfish, and costly governance of our institutions. In America, we've publicly spent trillions of dollars more than we have, and most people don't seem to have a problem with it so long as they get what they want. This is the fatal flaw of democracy, by the way. It's the reason democracies don't last. It's also the reason America was founded as a republic. Many of the best minds in the information age have lost sight and obscured that fact.

On a personal level, delusion costs us dearly, too. It cost us, in terms of the depth and breadth of our personal connections to each other. Delusion costs us authenticity. I must tell you I have a little problem with that word. The word authenticity is used so frequently in many ways. In most cases, it raises more questions than it answers.

To sort through the concept, we must dive into deep psychological water. It's not a place people usually wish to go, but if we're to maximize our personal power and our agency, the plunge is not optional. What are we talking about with this concept of authenticity? If you're not acting as yourself, who are you acting as?

To answer this, I'd like to call upon the genius of one of psychology's greatest lights, Carl Jung. Explaining the full extent of Jung's view of the human mind is beyond the scope of a single Eye of Power episode. For our purposes now, we'll look at a few broad brush strokes to illuminate the concept of authenticity. Jung viewed the human mind as comprised of two kinds of thoughts or energies, conscious and unconscious.

Though controversial and not universally accepted in the precise way he conceived things. His view of the unconscious was perhaps his greatest contribution to our understanding of our psychological workings. He distinguished elements outside of our conscious minds into two categories, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.

It was this notion of a shared universal ancestral unconscious that moved our understanding forward. Nothing universally true is ever new. Wisdom traditions from all over the world recognize this topology. Jung refined those ideas and placed them in the sphere of actionable psychological work. Jung saw in the space of the collective unconscious elements of ourselves he called archetypes. Though there are many and theoretically unlimited archetypes, he focused on four main ones that are pertinent to our topic.

Authenticity: Nothing universally true is ever new.

He called them the Persona, the Shadow, the Anima or Animus, and the Self. These archetypes function as bridges between and among the parts of our psyche and the outside world. They serve different purposes and are both necessary and hidden from sight. The degree to which these are integrated into a coherent whole is the degree to which we're able to function with congruence and integrity.

This is the state we're discussing when we use the word authenticity. Reaching full authenticity is like reaching our full power and potential. It's aspirational because no matter how far we've come, there's always more road ahead, but there are relative levels at which abilities emerge. One example is the ability to keep one's word. We say we’ll attend a function, follow up with a task, or change a habit, then we fail to do it.

That's an indicator that we're not fully integrated. In many cases, our persona, which is Jung's bridge between our conscious and the collective conscious and takes the forms of the various roles we assume in life, behaves along one line of values. Meanwhile, another part of ourselves, let's say the duality of the anima animus, is the bridge between our unconscious self and the collective unconscious.

It does not function well with language, expectation, and rationality. It may have other ideas. We mean it when we agreed to do whatever it is we committed to do, but we didn't realize or did they acknowledge that we weren't fully aligned in that decision. We let ourselves and others down. We don't know why we did it. We can only be authentic with others to the degree we are internally integrated.

One common way our integration is slowed or prevented is by mistakenly believing our persona is the same thing as the entirety of our psyche. In this case, the persona is no longer our servant. It becomes our master, and we have some work to do. I don't have quick tips like the top ten things you can do to be more integrated so you can communicate your true self. Solutions in this domain aren't quick. They aren't easy. They take courage, honesty, and willpower.

As if integration wasn't enough, the task of meaningful connection is doubly difficult because communication is not only up to us. The reader has a role to play, too. If the reader has a level where they are not integrated, where one or more of their archetypical components is aligned or over or undersized, their ability to hear can be impaired. This is why communicating over ideological divides is so difficult. Ideology is a form of possession. We give up a portion of authenticity when we believe in ideology rather than the mechanisms of our own cognition and experience.

Ideology is a form of possession. We give up a portion of authenticity when we believe in ideology rather than the mechanisms of our own cognition and experience.

Now that we're all feeling down in the dumps about how difficult it is to connect with others in a meaningful way, I want to leave you with some hope. The key to success in the realm of building meaningful connections is to realize that our life journey is a process. Wherever we are, we simply need to take one step forward, big or small. The moment we do so, a polarity switches. In the extreme, we go from hopeless to hopeful.

We go from feeling stuck in a self-made prison to the freedom of a new day, one where we can feel our power grow. In the Eye of Power community, this is the thing that connects us. We are here to take those steps. We are here to help each other take those steps. Yes, it's difficult. Yes, there is much in our way, but that's what makes it beautiful because when we become more aware of the real treasures within us, we grow more, and we can give them expression. We gain the power to serve others in ways only we can. We can hear and respond in a unique way. We become irreplaceable and invaluable. That's where many of the blessings of life are. Let’s go.