An Invitation

By Ray Bratcher

This is the problem:

Most people don’t know this. They don’t know they have lost touch with their own authenticity. They just have a vague feeling that something is wrong, a generalized feeling of anxiety and dissatisfaction.

There are usually two typical responses. One is to try to fix it by buying something. People try to buy the something that is lacking, but that never works because you can’t buy your own authenticity–you can only sell it.

The second typical response is self-sedation: using alcohol or pharmaceuticals to numb the dissatisfaction. Or sex. Or food. Or a flurry of activity, even yoga or surfing or mountain climbing.
That doesn’t work either.

Occasionally a person might become conscious enough to give up on these two dead-ends and try religion or spirituality. Since the “person” is still inauthentic, still wearing a mask, their religious/spiritual method is marred by an immature cultish desire for someone to give them all the answers. That “someone” can be anyone from God as big daddy in the sky, to Guru, to religious leader, etc. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. They just want someone to tell them what to think and feel and do to make the pain go away, and to do it in a way that makes sense to the mind. Of course, for the inauthentic individual, what “makes sense” to the mind must necessarily comfort the mind. The very same mind which created the mask in the first place!

Such people tend to spend great mental effort in “figuring it all out”. They want to know the Absolute Truth. They want to define and understand God. They want a perfect philosophy of life and a perfect theology of “God, the Universe, and Everything”. That doesn’t work either:

At this point, things can go any number of ways. Some stay faithful to whatever cultic group they first try. Some go beebopping from group to group. Some eventually reject their immature God in adolescent rebellion against the father figure who let them down, who disappointed them. You understand, these are phases of psychospiritual development I am talking about here. They don’t necessarily correlate to chronological age. You can be sixty years old and still worshipping like a child, or sixty years old and rejecting all worship in adolescent rebellion. But in every case, you are still trying to use your mind to figure it all out. Which means, you are doomed to failure.

The mind is the source of the mask, the reason for the box you are in. You cannot buy your way out of that box, you cannot sedate your way out of that box, no childish cultic God, Guru, or religious leader can get you out of that box, you cannot get yourself out of that box by rejecting its existence, you cannot argue or debate or analyze your way out of that box because no mere verbal construction will solve your situation since words are the tool of the mind:

In order to reach beyond the mind, you must enter the realm of the heart. In order to reclaim your authenticity and your ability to feel, you must give up pretense and enter Presence.