What does authenticity mean?

[Boris]

On the other hand there is solitude of authentic man:

Sensuous objects are the cause of calamity, excrescence, danger, disease, a dart and a fear to me. Observing this danger resulting from sensuous objects, let one live alone like a unicorn horn. (Sn.v 51)

Detachment, loneliness, separation, seclusion, scission, aloofness – viveka has two main divisions. Kayaviveka is the initial environmental and physical condition, the physical (bodily) separation from sensuous objects; it is the abiding at ease in condition suited to growth in the Dhamma – if no one is found in front or behind me, it is very pleasant for one dwelling alone in the wood. (Theragata, v 537)

Cittaviveka is that very growth in the Dhamma, the inner, mental detachment from sensuous things.

Herein, Elder, whatsoever is past, that is abandoned, whatever is yet-to-come, that is relinquish, and the desire-and-lust for the present modes of personality is well under control. It is thus, Elder, that lone-dwelling becomes fulfilled in all details. (S II, 282)

This solitude is not loneliness of lack (tanha), the craving of the crowd, it is abiding in strength and ease, independent and aloof. This solitude becomes the path and the goal to the one with clear vision who apprehends samsara, and his own being as samsaric, who thus develops estrangement (nibbida) – pushed to the extreme, this feeling (estrangement) becomes even at times not only the resort but also the goal of philosophy: to exile (Grenier).

One seeks solitude because one seeks truth, and the crowd is untruth: “But the thing is simple enough: this thing of loving one's neighbor is self-denial, that of loving the crowd, or pretending to love it, of making it the authority in matters of truth, is the way to temporal and earthly advantages of all sort – at the same time it is the untruth, for crowd is untruth. (Kierkegaard).

And this is very important for the way of the crowd is the way of samsara, and cultural, political, social constructions of society can never lead from samsara, for samsara is their origin, their meaning and goal. Cultures are particular to time and space, there are “Buddhist” cultures but these are not Dhamma, though inspired by, for culture is within time – the residue of the historic process – the Dhamma is akaliko, not involving time. One does not obtain sila (the ethical) let alone Dhamma, from the historical process, from majority opinions. The Dhamma is approachable by the wise (pandita) and each for himself (paccatam), separately, individually, that is in solitude).

Therefore the Dhamma is not “progressive” within the historical process, within the mass of human kind. Real progress (of the individual) is linear, but samsara is a revolving about a repetition, the wheel of birth and death, that merely reflects the inner revolving (vatta) – the centripetal vortex of name-and-form (namarupa) about consciousness (vinniana).

The Dhamma is not involved in the illusory “progress” of samsara – the politico-economic ideals of linear advancement within samsara, there is no progress in samsara, this straight line of “progress” is a result of myopia, a viewing to closely a particular section of curvature of the historical cycle. Real progress is against the centripetal attraction of samsara – against the stream – a tangent directed away from enveloping vortex into calm and this is kayaviveka.

Cittaviveka is that gradual journey from the samsara within that fules the outher – the revolving about of namarupa (feeling, perception, intention, contact, attention, and matter) with vinniana (consciousness) – the progress through nibbida (estrangement) to nibbana. These two vortices are two tangles within and tangles without (antojata, bahijata) SI, 13, the solution and unraveling of what is the Buddha's teaching and the two tools for this progress are kaya and cittaviveka.

This progress is only to the individual in his subjective solitude cut of from the crowd and the process of history – for between the historic process and the ideal of social progress the individual is dissipated and confused. Only by solitude, a cut of, an estrangement , can one truly approach the Dhamma in its immediacy as having meaning only to the individual.

Who has become subjective – and thus aware of anguish (dukkha) as personal, an existential and the problem of existence as an individualization of the process of tanha (lack/need). Only within this subjective solitude does one recognizing the problem and start toward ultimate solitude – Nibbana, cutting of all factors of existence.

Flee society as a heavy burden, seek solitude above all! (M3)

Bhikkhu Saddhajiva

ESTRANGEMENT: the Pali noun nibbida and its verb nibbindati are made up of the prefix nir in its negative sense of "out," and the root vid (to find, to feel, to know intimately). Nibbada is thus a finding out. What is thus found out is the intimate hidden contradictoriness in any kind of self-identification based in any way on these things (and there is no way of determining self-identification apart from them — ). Elsewhere the Buddha says:


Whatever there is there of form, feeling, perception, determinations, or consciousness, such ideas he sees as impermanent, as subject to pain, as a sickness, as a tumor, as a barb, as a calamity, as an affliction, as an alienation, as a disintegration, as a void, as not-self. He averts his heart from those ideas, and for the most peaceful, the supreme goal, he turns his heart to the deathless element, that is to say, the stilling of all determinations, the relinquishment of all substance, the exhaustion of craving, the fading of passion, cessation, extinction.
— MN 64

The "stuff" of life can also be seen thus. Normally the discovery of a contradiction is for the unliberated mind a disagreeable one. Several courses are then open. It can refuse to face it, pretending to itself to the point of full persuasion and belief that no contradiction is there; or one side of the contradiction may be unilaterally affirmed and the other repressed and forgotten; or a temporary compromise may be found (all of which expedients are haunted by insecurity); or else the contradiction may be faced in its truth and made the basis for a movement towards liberation. So too, on finding estrangement thus, two main courses are open: either the search, leaving "craving for self-identification" intact, can be continued for sops to allay the symptoms of the sickness; or else a movement can be started in the direction of a cure for the underlying sickness of craving, and liberation from the everlasting hunt for palliatives, whether for oneself or others. In this sense alone, "Self protection is the protection of others, and protection of others self-protection" (Satipatthana Samyutta).
Nanamoli Bhikkhu

[convivium]

you can't have authenticity without inauthenticity. you can't be a human without inauthenticity. the idea is to allow rare authentic moments; rare authentic things and practices to shine through. the danger is to become entirely shut off in the inauthentic from the authentic; the idea is to keep the inauthentic within it's proper boundaries. to connect with something outside fixed rational, instrumental thinking and experiencing.

[fig tree]

I run into the issue of authenticity when attempting to practice the dhamma mainly when I'm annoyed or experiencing some other unskillful mental state, and trying to curb it. Before I became a Buddhist I was exposed to some Western psychological ideas, which made me aware of how I sometimes would try to cope with disappointment or annoyance by maintaining a kind of false self, one perhaps that better fit my parents' expectations or my own sense of pride at the kind of person I wanted to consider myself to be. I have a way of pretending to be satisfied that has caused me trouble for a long time. I had tended to think of this using this terminology of a false self versus a true self.

I made a step forward as a young person, still not much acquainted with Buddhism, by understanding ambivalent mixes of feelings as often being actually there. I had had the idea of one feeling being more authentic than another, with the second feeling serving as a kind of mask for the first. Perhaps one is genuinely angry but stifles that and is left with just a kind of depressed sadness. Perhaps one is genuinely hopeful, but generates a sense of frustration at the obstacles in one's way in order to preserve them as possible excuses for not proceeding in a hopeful way. I had erred though; I would sometimes disqualify feelings by regarding them as less authentic than others, when really both sets of feelings were there.

Buddhism helped me by putting into question the terminology of true self versus false self. I still don't consider myself to have completely reconciled my older ways of understanding these processes with my newer ways. It seems to me that there is an important element of truth in what psychologists and philosophers have been saying in the West about having an authentic self, but I don't think that I can continue to see it in quite the same way.

Much of the point seems to be captured by mindfulness. Being mindfully aware of thoughts and feelings does for me most of the job that would previously have been done by my looking for my true (authentic) self. I think that ultimately seeing things as they truly are without being colored with connotations of "self" or "other" does the whole job, but I'm not there yet. When I do sitting meditation, my process of dealing with unskillful states still seems to be exposed to the temptation to squelch them in an inauthentic manner, to attempt to force a calmer state to arise. I still feel the need to supplement my recognizably Buddhist practices with some of my previous practices that are more like Western psychotherapy. When I do, I'm reflecting more on the thoughts and feelings that I recognize as unskillful rather than noting them and letting them go. I try more to see what the pattern is. It seems to me that in the future I probably will integrate Buddhist practice better with this currently somewhat separate self-analysis.

As a somewhat different matter, I sometimes have trouble distinguishing between having feelings but refraining from acting on them (which is authentic) and presenting to others a fictional image of what I'm feeling (which is inauthentic). This comes up sometimes with smiling. There's a popular suggestion for people experiencing low-grade depression to try smiling more to help generate positive feelings. I think there is some value in that, but for me it comes close to merely pretending to be happier than I am, which can be a kind of lie. Traditional Buddhist notions of right speech seem to put much greater emphasis on abstaining from what Westerners seem often to regard as necessary degrees of venting your feelings, and in some ways I still haven't arrived at an understanding of this that I'm comfortable with.

Fig Tree

[Viscid]

I don't understand how death contextualizes life.
chownah

Most people don't think about the fact they're going to die when they go about their lives day-to-day.. they operate as if there was no possibility that tomorrow something tragic could occur, as if there was no urgency to living, that everything one wishes to do can be indefinitely postponed to be accomplished at a later time. When one deeply recognizes the existential threat that death imposes, a tremendous anxiety emerges. The only way to confront that anxiety directly is with courageous self-affirmation in the present. Death truly looms, always, and if we do not acknowledge its presence, our thoughts and actions will be wrongly predicated upon the mirage of our indefinite existence. Every moment, every action, should then become imbued with the recognition that it may be the very last of all. When we do this, our lives obtain an authenticity and vibrancy they hadn't before.

[Kim OHara]

I don't understand how death contextualizes life.
chownah

Most people don't think about the fact they're going to die when they go about their lives day-to-day.. they operate as if there was no possibility that tomorrow something tragic could occur, as if there was no urgency to living, that everything one wishes to do can be indefinitely postponed to be accomplished at a later time. When one deeply recognizes the existential threat that death imposes, a tremendous anxiety emerges. The only way to confront that anxiety directly is with courageous self-affirmation in the present. Death truly looms, always, and if we do not acknowledge its presence, our thoughts and actions will be wrongly predicated upon the mirage of our indefinite existence. Every moment, every action, should then become imbued with the recognition that it may be the very last of all. When we do this, our lives obtain an authenticity and vibrancy they hadn't before.

I wouldn't say a "tremendous anxiety" necessarily emerges but yes, it certainly does sharpen the perspective.
There are different ways of putting the idea in different traditions. One from Marcus Aurelius goes something like, "Imagine you were fated to die yesterday. Therefore, live the rest of your life as if it were a gift from the gods."
This may resonate, too:

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain

I found it on http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/death just now, when I was looking for another one.


Kim

[convivium]

...The time remains destitute not only because God is dead, but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality. Mortals have not yet come into ownership of their own nature. Death withdraws into the enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains veiled. Love has not been learned. But the mortals are. They are, in that there is language. Song still lingers over their destitute land. The singer's word still keeps to the trace of the holy. The song in the Sonnets to Orpheus (Part I, 19) says it:

Though swiftly the world converts,
like cloud-shapes' upheaval,
everything perfect reverts
to the primeval.
Over the change abounding farther and freer
your preluding song keeps sounding
God with the lyre.
Suffering is not discerned,
neither has love been learned,
and what removes us in death,
nothing unveils.
Only the song's high breath
hallows and hails.

Meanwhile, even the trace of the holy has become unrecognizable. It remains undecided whether we still experience the holy as the track leading to the godhead of the divine, or whether we now encounter no more than a trace of the holy. It remains unclear what the track leading to the trace might be. It remains in question how such a track might show itself to us.
The time is destitute because it lacks the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death, and love. This destitution is itself destitute because that realm of being withdraws within which pain and death and love belong together. Concealedness exists inasmuch as the realm in which they belong together is the abyss of Being. But the song still remains which names the land over which it sings... (Heidegger, Poetry Language and Thought pp94-95)