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    What's It Like Being You?: Living Life as Your True Self!
    What's It Like Being You?: Living Life as Your True Self!
    What's It Like Being You?: Living Life as Your True Self!
    Ebook151 pages1 hour

    What's It Like Being You?: Living Life as Your True Self!

    By DSS John-Roger and Paul Kaye

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Practical and profound, this guide to discovering a true self behind the "parts" played in everyday life presents the information and inspiration necessary to achieve fulfillment. Often taking a humorous perspective, this work is centered on a belief that the tools we use to deceive ourselves and others are the same tools we need to know ourselves
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMandeville Press
    Release dateNov 1, 2004
    ISBN9781893020580
    What's It Like Being You?: Living Life as Your True Self!

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      Book preview

      What's It Like Being You? - DSS John-Roger

      INTRODUCTION

      We all play many parts in life: daughter or son, sister or brother, parent, boss, employee, leader, assistant, friend. We also play many different characters, sometimes in a single day: we can be a hero at work and an average Joe at home, or vice versa. But what if beyond all those parts and characters, there is a more fundamental role you can play—your true self, the you who is uniquely you? What if you were so familiar with this role that you were completely comfortable with yourself and at ease in all circumstances?

      There’s a wonderful story about a rabbi who dies and goes to heaven. He has led a devoted life, following as closely as he could in the footsteps of the prophets and sages, and so, naturally, he expects God to greet him with praise. But when the rabbi arrives at the pearly gates, God just looks at him and says, I made you uniquely you. Why did you spend your life trying to be someone else?

      This book is a guide to being yourself. The reflections, practices, and inspirational quotations are designed to assist you in becoming who you really are. Only you can answer the question posed in the title: What’s it like being you? But in these pages, you can explore a variety of approaches to help you connect with your true self.

      First and foremost, this book is practical, aimed at giving you the experience of living in your true self as both a spiritual practice and an antidote to the stress of modern life. We now have conclusive evidence that stress has serious health consequences, weakening the immune system, damaging the heart, and affecting memory cells in the brain—just for starters. In a recent New York Times article, neuroscientist Bruce S. McEwen of Rockefeller University pointed out:

      We’re now living in a world where our systems are not allowed a chance to rest, to go back to base line. They’re being driven by excess calories, by inadequate sleep, by lack of exercise, by smoking, by isolation, or frenzied competition.

      But there is truly no rush to go anywhere. Nobody is leaving this earth alive. The true self waits patiently for us to come to it. So why not slow down and enjoy the path of self-discovery?

      Lao Tsu, the ancient Chinese philosopher, said: In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired, and in the pursuit of spirit, every day something is dropped. It is my hope that in addition to gaining something from reading this book, you will also come away feeling lighter and freer from having let something go. The false self (everything that is not truly you) is what you surrender in the process of becoming who you are. When you strip away the opinions and postures and addictions of the ego-driven personality, what remains is the role of a lifetime—playing yourself. You can start anytime. Why not right now? As you move away from the self-defeating patterns of the false self, you move closer to the source of nourishment and renewal. Here in the true self— the Soul—we find Spirit, and we come alive.

      Please Note:

      The following words are used interchangeably throughout the book:

      False self, personality, ego

      True self, Soul

      God, Spirit

      The John-Roger quotations on the left-hand pages are designed to assist you in attuning to the true self.

      The Soul has no concern about time or space.

      In the midst of personal travails, the Soul is laughing.

      When you are concerned that someone

      doesn’t love you or might reject you or that you’ll be fired,

      the Soul is saying,

      Wow! New excitement, new adventure!

      You’re afraid you’ll starve, and the Soul is saying,

      This is wonderful; we might lose some weight.

      You’re distraught that you might not

      be able to make your car payments,

      and the Soul is saying, "We’ll ride a bicycle or walk,

      and get to see things at a more peaceful pace."

      You think this is an idiotic philosophy,

      but the Soul says, This is the divine.’

      1

      WHO ARE YOU?

      Socrates said, Know thyself. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius cautions, To thine own self be true. But which self are we getting to know? To what self should we be true? Where is the self located anyway? Come to think of it, which self is reading these words?

      These are questions that playwrights, philosophers, and other serious thinkers have been pondering since time immemorial. If the answers could be worked out through mathematical calculations or experimental measures, mathematicians and scientists would be the most enlightened people on the planet. But the self continues to elude even the greatest thinkers of our age.

      We cannot reduce it to a formula, view it with high-tech, brain-imaging machinery, or define it conclusively in words. The self can only be lived and experienced from within. When we ask the age-old questions Who am I? and Why am I here?, we are joining thousands of generations of seekers who have set out to solve the mystery of incarnation, the riddle of human existence.

      The nature of the Soul is joyful.

      To participate consciously in Soul awareness,

      you must come into harmony with its joyful nature.

      Cultivate joyfulness in yourself and everything you do.

      Joyfulness is more real than your problems.

      Where we differ from those who have gone before us is not in the questions we ask but in the way we ask them. In less than a century, our world has changed so radically that we no longer have the appetite or opportunity for contemplation that our ancestors enjoyed. We seem to have lost the ability to slow down, to take time for ourselves. That’s no surprise, for we are more rushed than ever. We have more information coming at us and less time to absorb it, as well as a lot more to do. Our continually rising expectations of what our lives should be like ensure that our days are overflowing with activity. The more conveniences we have, the more time we spend using and maintaining them. The more choices we have, the less we have to choose. Years ago, when there were just four television channels in the United States, it took only a moment to see that there was nothing we wanted to watch. Now, we have several hundred channels, and it can take us an hour to find out that there is nothing that really holds our interest.

      Today our lives are filled with so many alternatives and oftentimes competing options that although the idea of simplifying our lives may sound like a good idea in theory, in reality it is nearly impossible to do. Yes, it’s nice to stop and smell the roses, but then we have to add shop for roses to our to-do list. It’s small wonder that a grassroots effort called the Slow Food Movement is spreading worldwide, as more and more of us look for ways to get back to what really matters. Carlo Petrini, the movement’s founder, has this to say about what we face today:

      If I live with the anxiety to go fast, I will not live well. My addiction to speed will make me sick. The art of living is to give time to each and every thing...Ultimately, slow means to take time to reflect. It means to take time to think. With calm, you arrive everywhere.

      The Soul, which is your greatest reality, is perfect.

      You are already perfect in who you are and what you are.

      The ability to engage in self-reflection is uniquely human. If we lose that, do we lose our humanity? A few years ago, there was a movie, AI (short for artificial intelligence), about a highly intelligent robotic youth. When the robot realizes that he isn’t human, he develops a deep and unrelenting yearning to become a flesh-and-blood boy. We tend to take our human experience for granted. An essential part of being human is having a physical body. The robot in AI had a physical body, albeit a mechanical one, but he lacked the crucial animating factor—the capacity for thought, emotion, and imagination.

      Imagination is the source of creativity and innovation. With imagination comes choice: we can imagine negativity and harm, or what is helpful and positive. We can even use imagination to assist in our own healing: science has demonstrated that our mental imagery can change the way the brain and other body systems function.

      Human beings also have emotions. We can love, hate, feel fear or joy. Sometimes we don’t feel good, but at least we’re feeling, something that’s impossible for a robot. Emotions give dimension and

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