Quotes About Authenticity

How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe.

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.

Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives.

I guess prophets are those who do not care whether you are ready to hear their message. They say it because it has to be said and because it is true.

Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

When you say you love God, you are saying you love everything. Immature religion becomes an excuse for not loving a whole bunch of things and reveals that you have not had an authentic God experience yet. Rigid religion and compulsive religiosity, all unloving religion, is a rather clear sign that you have not met God! Once you have had a unitive experience with God, reality, or even yourself, your life invariably shows two things: quiet confidence and joyous gratitude.

Perfection, rather, is the ability to incorporate imperfection! There's no other way to live: You either incorporate imperfection, or you fall into denial. That's how the Spirit moves in or out of our lives. —from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously. Your False Self is just who you think you are—but thinking doesn't make it so.

Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature

Jesus' story of the two sons, one who said all the right words, but never acted on these words, and the other who said the wrong words, but in fact "went to work in the vineyard." Jesus said that the person who finally acts and engages "does the Father's will," even if he is a tax collector or she a prostitute and does not have the right "belief system" (Matthew 21:28–32).

there is an early stage "holiness" that looks like the real thing, but it isn't.

We mend and renew the world by strengthening inside ourselves what we seek outside ourselves, and not by demanding it of others or trying to force it on others.

Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure.

As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our "survival dance," but we never get to our actual "sacred dance.

Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, "If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted."7

Allow yourself to be fully known, and you will know what you need to know.

Without an inner life, our outer prayer will soon become superficial, ego-centered, and even counterproductive on the spiritual path.

God's greatest ally is reality itself. God's greatest revelation is what is (see Romans 1:20)—not what we want it to be, and not even what it should be—not abstract theories but concrete encounters.

true biblical faith leaves you very vulnerable to reality, because now there is no place to hide. No wonder we prefer abstractions over the actual! We can hide behind abstractions, but Incarnation leaves you both utterly exposed and constantly invited.   incorporation

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves. The very fact that so many religious people have to so vigorously prove and defend their salvation theories makes one seriously doubt whether they have experienced divine mirroring at any great depth.

You do not climb up to your True Self. You fall into it, so don't avoid all falling

eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while.

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?