now how would you detect your own inauthenticity or you in your own in congruence well Rogers had this idea that he called sub ception which was maybe something that you might regard as a sixth sense it's sort of like proprio centric perception and that's the perception that you have of your body as its reacting and localized in time and space and so it's sort of like touch the feeling but it's it's it's your sense of how you're reacting internally and where you are a lot of that is observed by the autonomic nervous system which is
reporting to you about various states of being in your body Rogers believed that you could use the information that's being provided to you from your body sort of bought them up to determine when you were being inauthentic or no incongruent and I've thought about this for a long time and tried to sort it out in a practical manner and what I've concluded is this you could try this for a couple of weeks it's an extremely interesting exercise so you sort of have to detach yourself from your thoughts and your and and what you say so
you got to assume you start by assuming that what you say in what you think is not necessarily you and of course that's just the case because a lot of what you think in fact most of what you think and most of what you say are the opinions of other people there are things you've read or things people have told you and you know that that's a benefit in some ways because you get all those thoughts that other people have spent a long time formulating but it's a disadvantage in that it's not exactly you okay
so you detach yourself from that you're no longer your thoughts or or or the things that you say or maybe you're no longer all of them and now what you're gonna try to find out is which of your thoughts and things that you say are you and maybe so you cannot utilize the rest or maybe so that you can correct the rest because they're not representative of yourself as a as an integrated being they don't take everything into account my sense has been that you can tell when you're saying something that's not authentic by feeling
out whether or not it makes you weak or strong now you know sometimes when you're conversing with people you can say something that embarrasses yourself now Nietzsche said for example everyone has perjured themselves at least once in the attempt to maintain their good name something like that it's not an exact quote but I've got the gist of it right so maybe you're saying things to impress someone or you're saying things to remain part of your political group or your social group or whatever or maybe you have attributes personal attributes that might be positive that you're
ashamed of and so you're not going to speak about them so there's a falseness about your self representation watch for two weeks and see make a rule that if you start to say something and it makes you feel weak it's hard to describe exactly what that means to to me what it means is that I can feel things coming apart sort of in my midsection so I think it's an autonomic phenomena and the the subjective sense is of a falsehood it's like I've just stepped off the solid ground and onto something that it doesn't support
me well and it it feels like a self betrayal so that's existential inauthenticity you can feel it right away and then the rule is shut up if that happens stop talking and then feel around and see if you can find some words that you can say in that situation that don't produce that sensation and it's like you see this played out in different forms of drama so there's there's a scene in The Lord of the Rings for example where I believe it's Gollum and Bilbo say it's the Lord of the Rings it's yeah it's Bilbo
it's Lord of the Rings not The Hobbit because the hobbits Frodo right so it's Bilbo there I forgot it wrong it's the other way around okay so Gollum and Frodo yes are going across this swamp and the swamp is full of essentially full of dead souls and they have to step very carefully in order to not fall off the track and the stones are sort of hidden underneath surface and the implication there is that in order to follow a trail properly you have to pick your your ground very carefully and you have to test it
to see if it's solid or you'll slip off into this well essentially what it is is chaos you'll slip off into chaos and that's a dramatic representation of what I'm what I'm suggesting to you it's like all you have to do is notice but and you have to pay attention and so to some degree what you're doing in fact is you're making your capacity to pay attention super ordinate to your capacity to think and to speak because you know you might ask yourself well exactly what are you well I said you can identify yourself with
your intellect and that's very very common it's sort of like the worst sin of intelligent people but that isn't all you are and there are lots of reasons for making the assumption that attention is a higher order function than intellect because attention is what teaches intellect so if by if you pay very very careful attention to what you say without having the automatic without bringing the automatic assumption that what you say is you to bear on the conversation and then also to feel like you have to defend it once you say it you'll find very
rapidly that very much of what you think and say has absolutely nothing to do with you it's just it's the dead souls that are in that little scene that I described to you sort of manifesting themselves in your head they're dead ideas that other people have created and some of them might be applicable to you you know you might have the right to them so to speak but lots of them won't and you're using the words as camouflage or self-defense or as an attempt to attain status in the status hierarchy or can make yourself look
smarter than you are or there's all sorts of reasons or to hide what you think from other people I see this in undergraduate essays all the time so because the essays are full of cliches and you know it's not all that obvious why a cliche is a bad thing but a cliche is a bad thing in the same way that being possessed by the dead is a bad thing it's like a cliche isn't you it's something else it's like the crowd it's like the other it's it's not living it has nothing to do with you
and part of the that students use cliches is because it's easier than than using your own genuine creative formulation so you can just default to cliche use but there's something more insidious than that is that if you write an essay that's nothing but a string of cliches and you get criticized then you're not being criticized what's being criticized is the cliches and you can hide behind that and the part of you that's wise but but but treacherous thinks well the criticism doesn't really apply to me because you know I didn't really say what I thought
and then there's this kind of sense you get that you've gotten away with something which is a terrible thing so when I read undergraduate essays what I see very frequently is especially the first essay it's just nothing but cliches it's awful it's it's dull you can hardly stand reading it because there's nothing in it that's gripping or alive and then maybe the second essay you can see there's a layer of cliche and then now and then the person will be brave enough to poke up a thought of their own it'll just sort of poke up
somewhere maybe in three pages in it's like this little green chute that's barely alive and the person is brave enough to pop it up in the hope that you know maybe it won't get walloped down with a sledge hammer and so one of the things I try to do is to point that out it's like look you know this is something there's a real thought here it's a real original thought it's something that you have the right to because it's derived from your own experience and your own knowledge and you've formulated it in an original
and compelling way but the problem with that is that if you get criticized for that you're just gonna pull right back into your shell right because that hurts because it's actually part of you that you've exposed and that's a terrifying thing to expose yourself like that but it's it's it's an absolute prerequisite to genuine communication and thought
