Christianity & The Authentic Self

The speaker discusses the relationship between Christianity and the concept of the authentic self. They believe that Christianity calls us to give our life to God, which is the same as living our full authentic self. They explain that everything in the world is a duality, including our inner self, and we have the choice between our ego and our authentic self. They argue that God's will is for us to become our authentic selves. They also suggest that the language and concepts of Christianity can be difficult to grasp, and that understanding the authentic self can help unlock the message of Christianity. They believe that combining non-Christian knowledge, such as psychology and science, with Christianity can strengthen the message. I wanted to talk a little bit about Christianity and how it relates to the spiritual concept of the authentic self and transcending our ego to become who we truly are. Look I think the ultimate, so much of Christianity and while I've been drawn to the message of Jesus Christ is just the brilliance of it and the realness of it with it being based on actual experience and the radical nature of its message in the context of today's modern life. The idea that you have to give up your life to truly live it. I think that the fundamental thing that Christianity calls us toward which is to give our life to God and to understand God we look to Jesus and this giving up life to God I actually think it's one and the same as living your full authentic self, they are the same thing. I covered this a little bit in a talk about comparing the authentic self to God's will. What it is, if you imagine, if you understand that everything in this human world, this universe is a duality. There's light and dark, there's love and hate. As people we can't experience things until we've experienced not having those things. We can't experience love and know how wonderful it is unless we've been in a state of not love. It's a dual world and our inner self is no different. We have the choice between our ego and the broadest sense of the word being anything that's not our authentic self and the authentic self that's the choice we have to grow into the beauty and love of our authentic self or to not. So if we are a duality then what is God's will? Well it's very clear. If there's only two choices it's the ego or it's our authentic self. I feel that God's will is just for us to come truly into who we are and I gave the example in the speech about the God's will where somebody leaves their job and goes to Africa and I talked about how you could really look at that from another angle where it's just them truly being their authentic self. And they're one and the same thing that the sign, but this is my whole point about Christianity in that when you look at, my own personal experience is that I have faith in Jesus and believe in the Christian message but have found it very hard to truly experience that to be quite honest over the 7 or 8 years I've been involved. Found it very hard and it's only when I've really come out and explored this concept of the authentic self that all the pieces of the puzzle have come together. And I think that's so interesting where I've come from and I think the reason is that when you think about God and these very deep spiritual concepts, they're really energy, they're emotions in a way, they're beyond us. So it's always going to be difficult to communicate the enormity of that message to human beings. So God did an extraordinary thing and something nobody ever would have guessed in that he sent down somebody in human form. And that was extraordinary and powerful. The problem is that ever since Jesus left us, it's been human beings running the show. So firstly the message was converted to words and those words weren't in English and they're also in the context of a very different society. Then those words were converted to English and then the concepts were further developed over tens to hundreds in the last couple of thousand years. So we're left with phrasings and ideas that can be very difficult to dig into. The other thing that's happened is we now have a very, very good understanding of psychology, human psychology. We have advances in science and we have also advances in the understanding of the human brain. In fact it's even been identified where the ego sits in the brain, the left part of the brain where the language is. We can't get rid of it unfortunately. So my point is that, for me, my personal experience of this is that I knocked on the door of Christianity and had a lot of insight, a lot of meaning, but never really had the experience in all humility. I couldn't get there with the words and the way the concepts were written. I couldn't fully get there. It's only when I added this layer of understanding of the authentic self that it's all the pieces of the puzzle have come together. And look, from a personal perspective, I say that in all humility, this by no means guarantees anything for me. It doesn't mean I'm going to have a successful life. It doesn't mean I'm not going to suffer. I've still got an extraordinary journey ahead of me and I don't know where it's going to go on. I'm in the same boat as every other person, from the king down to the starving child in Africa. So the point is that there's different ways to understand truth. And for me personally, this understanding of the authentic self and the ego and how they interact has unlocked everything. It just explains everything I could not grasp, could not quite understand about life and humanity. So I have this insight now and I'll go from there. But the talk is that I think the two are consistent. It's just that in a way Christianity is still being locked up with some of the terminologies and phrasings and wordings that don't really explore the human psyche and science and the physiology of humanity, which is information we now have available to us. So I think this is a really exciting area in how we explore this non-Christian knowledge and how we can apply it to Christianity to unlock the message and strengthen the message.