Chapter 3

Honor Individual

Authenticity

Authenticity

—Chris Saade

The first key is authenticity. Individual authenticity is crucial. Authenticity is tremendously important to allow love to flower and come to its full passionate expression of romance and engagement in the world. Every person has a unique, authentic nature. We have to respect it and support its flowering, and definitely not shame it or pathologize it.

Each person’s authenticity is sacred. It is the well-spring of their greatest ability to love. It is about affirming the authenticity of each person, their heart, their body, their mind, and their nature.

In this exploration of authenticity, I would like to cover four themes. The first is particularity, the particularity of each spirit. Second is depth, how spirit lives in our depth. Third is sacred vulnerability. And fourth is genuine respect for authenticity.

Let’s start with particularity. The spirit of every individual has an undeniable particularity and a specific authentic orientation. We all share in the spirit of the Divine. We all share in the spirit of life, but that spirit, embodied in us individually, has a unique particularity.

Particularity is extremely important because the unique particularity of your spirit, the idiosyncrasies of your spirit, are the source of the best genius of your spirit—the genius through which you can love others and love the world. Particularity is sacred. The authenticity of your spirit is where and how the incarnation of the Holy Spirit happens in you. It is vitally important to understand and respect the process of becoming who you are, because your (profound) authenticity is an incarnation of the Divine. Incarnation is happening through your unique way of being in the world. You incarnate the way the divine energy walks, talks, and acts, as uniquely you. So it is with your partner. This shifts the dialogue away from how can we change each other to how can we respect each other’s essential authenticity and hold it up as a gift of love and passion for the world.

The second point is depth. Authenticity cannot be discovered only at the surface of your being. It needs a deeper descent into the unique truth of who you are. Authenticity is much deeper than just the superficial layers of one’s being. An evolutionary love, an evolutionary relationship, will create a space for a lifelong exploration of the depth of the authentic spirit of each individual. In a sense, a relationship of love is a temple of authenticity; two people are in that temple and they look at each other as unique emanations of the Divine.

We cannot emphasize enough that the emanations of the Divine manifest in specific idiosyncratic spirits. When the temple of love and authenticity expands and a partner is an addition to that temple, and if children are to come into that temple, they too will be emanations of a particular aspect of the spirit of the Divine. All we can do is see our own authentic nature and our partner’s authentic nature as sacred, and stand in front of it in awe and reverence. This is a far cry from all the psychoanalyzing of each other that, unfortunately, couples do.

There is also, and very importantly, the global dimension of our authenticity. Our psyche is not a personalized fortress. We live in the world and the world lives in us. We inhabit the Earth and the Earth inhabits us. So in exploring the depths of authentic spirit in one another, we have to ask: “What is the suffering of the world that you and I carry in our spirits? Is it the children of war and poverty? Is it abused animals? Is it the oppression of women? Is it the exploitation of others because of race or culture? Is it the devastation of the environment? What collective longings, hopes and aspirations do we carry?” These collective pulls and memories are a very important and vital part of our humanity.

We all carry the whole suffering and hopes of the world in us, but our spirit will have a definite particular memory and a specific task to fulfill in the world. Andrew says our greatest heartbreak is where our greatest passion emerges. So we have to know our own particular heartbreaks. Then we get a sense of what our spirit is specifically about in the world.

Through the in-depth exploration of our authenticity we ask: “Who are the ancestors who are speaking through me?” My spirit was not born in an empty space; I am not a tabula rasa, a blank slate. My spirit came as a continuation of billions of years of history. Ancestors live in me; their dreams, their prayers, their longing, their aspirations, their heroic deeds for justice and peace live in my spirit. All that universal richness lives in my spirit and your spirit.

Then the question is: Who are these ancestors and what are they saying about loving the world, serving the world, transforming the world? Finding the answer requires that you turn your eyes and ears inward and really listen to your authentic spirit and let your spirit, in its own particular form, open up. What you will hear is your own authentic and unique destiny. The way you, as particularly you, serve love. When you do this, you unleash the incredible power of the ancestors, whose longing is in you. You unleash an incredible level of compassion and love. You become the spirit of love for your partner. And it all comes from the world that lives within you. When you awaken that inner world of love and compassion, it gives you the love and compassion to give to the outer world—to your grandchildren, to your beloved partner, to the animals, to all you meet, and to the Earth itself.

Only through our authenticity can we embody the love of the Divine. If we are not truthful about who we are, if we have not surrendered to our own nature and accepted our true self, the love of the Divine cannot embody in us. We block our authenticity, and thus we mitigate the divine soul-print in our personality—our real self.

I am not somebody else. I tremendously respect Andrew Harvey, and I have a great love for him, but I’m not him. I have to carry my own emanation of the Divine, so do you, and so does everybody else.

The third important point regarding authenticity is sacred vulnerability. The quest for authenticity involves the acknowledgment of what we lack, our weaknesses, and the shadows that we bring to a relationship. I know my spirit has great gifts. I also know that my spirit has great lacks—there are no gifts without lacks. There is a lot that I cannot bring to others. I have to be authentic about acknowledging my weaknesses as well as my strengths, because they stand in a paradoxical relationship.

I also have to be authentic about the shadows in me, the uncouth and discourteous behaviors of parts of me. Although these parts are very authentic to me, their expression might still be inelegant. I cannot fully rid myself of these shadows, but I can be conscious, open, and transparent about them. Great passion is never forged in perfection. The quest for perfection, outside of mechanics, is an obsession. Excellence on the other hand is very spiritual and involves mistakes and lacks. Passion develops in transparent vulnerability and the respect we have for our partner’s vulnerability, partners who are also attempting to unleash their love to the world and to us.

Vulnerability is part of greatness, part of genius, part of truthful authenticity, and therefore part of love. An authentic relationship is one that has sacred experiences of joy, ecstasy, as well as grief, and defeats, with nothing to hide. It is all part of the glorious journey of a love that is evolving and attempting to unfold.

This leads to the fourth point: the quest for respect. Respect is fundamental for the continuance of love and the feeding of passion. The authenticity of the spirit is sacred. An evolutionary relationship will uphold and support that authenticity of spirit. The old paradigm was: How can I change you (in this isolated, privatized relationship) so we can make it work? However, what we seek in an evolutionary relationship is the sharing of passionate love in service to the world and one another, not changing the authenticity of the other. We seek to support the other in embodying their unique authenticity and taking it to the edge of its creative truth, unique idiosyncrasy, and passion. Our quest becomes one for love and passion, based on respect, not an attempt to transform the other. It is crucial for all of us to learn to deeply respect what is very authentically different from us. We have to train our eyes to see the beauty in the authentic traits of our partner—and seeing that beauty, to respect it. Respect needs to be reconnected to the authentic rather than to the similar or to what we, in our own personal logic, consider correct. It is the authentic that is beautiful, and therefore that deserves our respect.