It starts when we’re small children, about the time we first develop self-awareness. Society steps in – first in the form of our parents, then out teachers, then the media, or bosses at work, our peers – and tries to tell us ‘who we are’. That’s when we begin creating the false self, the self that is a response to the demands of the society around us. We begin managing other people’s impressions of us, we begin to lie, we begin to act like a reflection of what we think the world expects us to be. Before too long we can no longer see ourselves in the mirror – we have stepped through the looking-glass. We forget that the false self is an artifice, and we begin to believe our own BS – we begin to believe that the false self is the real self, and thus submerge our real selves inside the tomb that we have created to encase it. Indeed, social conditioning is the most powerful of all mind-altering drugs.
But what happens if you suddenly wake up and remember who you are? What happens if you try to reclaim your real self? You will find yourself besieged on all sides, surrounded by a society full of other false selves who are utterly hostile to what you are doing. A counterfeit HATES the presence of the genuine article because it reveals his own ‘counterfeitness’ by comparison. Above all, it is the people closest to you – your family and your closest friends – who will oppose you the most vigorously, because they are the ones who have made the heaviest investment in thinking of you as you have always seemed to be. And once your true self comes out they will not recognize you, thus proving that they never knew you in the first place. They will, ironically, accuse you of having become phony because you won’t think what they tell you to think anymore or say what they tell you to say. And they will do anything, ANYTHING, to beat you back into your tomb. For most people, complete authenticity is ‘crazy’. But what is ‘crazy’, really? My personal definition is” “any way of being or thinking that is inconsistent with the prevailing 21st century insanity; i.e., being ‘normal’.
I thank God I’m crazy. If I wasn’t, I’d probably go insane.
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