Personal Website of Philip Goddard

Do you want to be 'appropriate'? ...Or authentic?

If there is any basic 'message' underlying this and my other websites, it is about the tremendous advantages and benefits of being truly authentic as distinct from merely 'appropriate' in your outlook and lifestyle. The vast majority of people are to varying extents actually programmed to shy away from authenticity and take refuge in 'appropriateness'.

So, what do I mean here by these terms?

• Authenticity is being truly and deeply yourself. In other words your outlook and lifestyle and behaviour are determined by your deeper nature, which is thus allowed to 'flow' and become manifest. You could say that a person who is being authentic is 'genuine'. Such a person has no agendas apart from being 'naturally him/herself'. That deeper nature is naturally 'dynamically relaxed', vibrantly and deeply aware, positive, energetic, alert, loving, secure, happy and creative, and gives rise to a vivid and abundant life experience. A natural powerfulness flows from that deeper nature, which has nothing to do with ego-based personal status or power / control agendas.
  

  To dispel any possible misunderstanding here, it's necessary for me to point out that a truly authentic person, being deeply aware and also flexible in their outlook and behaviour, does NOT go around like a bull in a china shop, just 'doing his own thing' and upsetting everyone everywhere (s)he goes. No, such a person is much more genuinely considerate to other people than anyone who is locked into the 'appropriateness' model. A truly authentic person learns quickly where, when and how to avoid "pushing people's buttons" in unhelpful ways, even if sometimes this may require the temporary concealing of their own 'truth' in order not to set up needless barriers.
  

  That doesn't mean that a truly authentic person seeks to be unchallenging all the time. Far from it. Rather, such a person is flexible in his / her approach and makes sensible and practical choices in order to maintain a healthy balance of fearless direct challenge and harmonious parallel existence.

• 'Appropriateness' is trying to be how you want people to see you - which is usually what you believe people around you expect or want of you. It is not real appropriateness, which is why I'm putting it in quotes every time, because really the most appropriate thing is always to be genuine and authentic - but the vast majority of people have by certain means been programmed not to understand this very simple logic and to live false, ersatz lives which are not truly their own but are to varying extents set up to conform to other people's perceived expectations of them.
  

  The programming therefore tends to steer people into conventions and traditions. People set up close relationships and even get married, and procreate, with no idea of whether all or indeed any of that would actually be for their own deepest and ultimate good. Likewise, they choose their clothes, buy their consumer products and their entertainments without reference to what would truly and deeply benefit them or truly reflects their deepest nature or true identity.

  'Appropriateness' always limits people's life experience, greatly narrowing their awareness and their life options. Because all the time it involves personal agendas of status and power / control issues, it leads to all manner of conflicts, negativities and indeed all the troublesome things we see going on in the world.
  

  'Appropriateness' is pattern based and thus rigid in nature. It has no concept of maintaining a flexible balance, and will always tend to put pressure on non-conformers to conform. Unsolicited advice such as "You should do xxxx." and "Why don't you do xxxx?" are typical control measures of people's 'appropriateness' outlooks. They do not see the true human being at all and instead see only another focus for exerting control.
  

Always at the risk of being accused by members of the 'Appropriateness' Brigade of brazenly flaunting a super-big ego (indeed on occasions they not only accuse me but abuse too!), on my websites I point to what true authenticity can be like, for I myself have always been dedicated to my own authenticity and am nowadays doing what I can, within the bounds of maintaining reasonable balance in my own life, to stimulate and catalyze the cultivation and growth of authenticity in others.

The process of cultivating your own authenticity - making yourself increasingly a manifestation of your own, perfect, deepest nature - is what I mean by the term self realization, and on my Self Realization site you get a whole and very challenging perspective on how you can progressively become fully authentic yourself, free from all hindering and obstructive influences, whether those are from other people, emotional issues which you are carrying, or from troublesome non-physical sources (particularly interferences from astral entities).

Through being authentic rather than 'appropriate', I have at various times in my life caused bewilderment among people who knew me because I would get deeply into some particular interest or activity and then, after a while, I would move on and take up something else. It was amazing how seemingly highly intelligent people would berate me for suddenly not conforming to one or another stereotype which they had placed upon me and which I had suddenly broken for them. Some wanted me to be a stereotype 'gay' to comfort them in their own sexuality issues which they were not doing anything to resolve. Others wanted me to be a devoted entomologist with no significant other interests. Others wanted me to remain just a poet, or just a writer of novels and short stories, or just a nature photographer, or just a composer of major musical works, or just a healer or 'spiritual teacher'. They were all seeing and to varying extents attaching to limited images of me, rather than actually the authentic me!

For the same reason, quite a few people get edgy and uptight about me on the basis of what is on my websites, because they find my own expansiveness of outlook and life experience to be alien to their 'appropriateness'-related restrictedness of outlook. You can see the odd examples of that sort of thing in my Visitors' Book, and I get the occasional personal communications of a similar nature. The words 'ego' and occasionally 'arrogant' get thrown at me like mud pies. But what those people are communicating is fear. Their particular 'programming' makes them react out of fear when they countenance a person being as authentic as can be and demonstrating a true abundance of life experience, because their more limited view born in their own 'appropriateness' is then being implicitly challenged, and it is fear which is the distorted 'energy' which holds their 'appropriateness' programming in place.

A particularly common distorted 'appropriateness'-sourced opinion that is put to me is that anyone who is seen to be some sort of 'spiritual teacher' should be very modest, quietly spoken and humble, and should have no abundance in their lives, and should not publicly mention any special achievements, abilities or 'gifts' of theirs, including such things as their being enlightened*. That, dear friends, is the sick distortion of supposedly enlightened living which comes from certain religious traditions - notably most Buddhist traditions - and actually is among the things which demonstrate the harmfulness of those traditions through their permeation with control agenda (albeit sometimes quite subtle). On my Self Realization site I explain the source of such distortions**, and how all religions, without any exception that I know of, and indeed all so-called spiritual paths, are leading people in a direction which would horrify most people if they came to understand what is really going on.

* For more about that issue, please see Modesty and Humility - Cutting through the Confusion.
** Please see Astral Entities - Interference and Attacks from 'The Dark Side'.

Are you really so sure you want to be 'normal'?