Pretense. authenticity. the zig-zag path to yourself

  • don't wish it was easier“Don’t wish it were easier: wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenge wish for more wisdom” said Jim Rohn
  • I want to be loved just the way I am… say most people.
  • You are already perfect…
  • The marriage of these three differing points of view is the state of humanity right now: rampant pretense… and utter misery.

The pretense prevents most everyone from becoming better. From building skills. From attaining wisdom.

The pretense is like a 2 feet by 4 feet jail cell… tight, restrictive, unpleasant.

People say: just be yourself… and they probably think they said something easy to do…

But, if you really look, you don’t know how to be yourself, because, probably, you haven’t been yourself since you came out of the womb… In fact you are so far from yourself that you have no idea what that would be like… let alone being that.

Almost every turn where you met resistance, or where you met success, small or big, you made up some way to be, and that means: to unravel the person you really are will take a lot of twists and turns.

To unravel the person you really are will take a lot of twists and turns.
One thing I promise: you’ll like the person who you will find. You made up the personas, the behaviors, the identities you are right now, all so that you can be liked… and what makes you unlikable is exactly what you made up.

A persona (plural personae or personas), in the word’s everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask.

If you look around you: everyone has done the same thing… And did you notice that people are not likable? Not even the people you are closest… spouses, parents, children. Ugh…

As a teacher, I love the people I teach. Liking them? No, I don’t like them.

And you know what? They don’t know that they are not real. In fact, I bet, a lot of people who are reading this article now think that they are genuine, authentic, and I am must be talking about other people, but surely not them.

But I am talking about you, I am talking about them.

You sold a bill of goods to yourself… and you bought it… and now you are trapped. And you have a severe dislike of yourself… maybe disgust… maybe hate… and only to the degree you like yourself is that you actually love your life. This includes narcissistic people as well.

The more layers of pretense you have piled on yourself, depending on the number of situations where you didn’t feel like you were a match to life, the more you dislike yourself and your life.

In the Playground I teach this, have been for 31 years now.

But in previous incarnations of the course this issue landed like the tree that feel in the forest where there was no one to hear it: it didn’t make a sound. No impact happened.

This time around

This time around I insisted on having a spiritual capacity activated BEFORE I taught anything about this SYSTEM OF PRETENSE… A spiritual capacity that enables you to see the causal connected between the pretense and your dislike of yourself, the pretense and your dislike of your life.

Underneath, hiding in plain sight is the idea that some things are wrong. And they need to be fixed, or if they cannot be fixed, then they need to concealed, hidden, covered up, like an angry pimple threatening your beauty.

Connecting wrong

Connecting wrong with who you decided to become, connecting the “persona” you decided to become with misery, with how you get your “strokes”, with racket, with your inefficient, unhappy day to day, with the emotions you feel and the emotions that you hide… all this connecting needed this new capacity, that I have been opening and opening and opening… because in the normal course of events this capacity only opens up for people whose vibration is at least 800… and at this time in history there is only one person who is there, in fact, if my muscletesting is any indication, there are only two people whose vibration is at or above 500…

But, I hope, keeping this capacity alive in people for as long as it takes for them to unravel the not-self and the Self… so they can see who is the real Self, and then keep turning it on maybe a little longer, so they can practice being themselves and see that life actually works that way, and works better than it did with the pretense self…

So I have, on my calendar, a reminder, every three days, to activate and activate and activate.

One could say: Sophie, you are leading an inexpensive course… but truth is, that the course is just the vehicle. I am leading an experiment… an experiment that proves or disproves that current humans, homo sapiens, from all walks of life, from all educational levels, all ethnicities, can be lead to the strait and narrow… where life is OK, where you are OK, where you are, you feel at home.

Being at home

Being at home is my way of expressing that deep peace of living, fully, with permission to be myself.

Will this pull people up, vibrationally, to the level of 800 vibration? I have no idea. Will they all find themselves at home, being free to be themselves? I don’t know.

But the initial signs are very encouraging: people are starting to deal with what is relevant, and I can hear grief, regret, disgust, moments of clarity in their voices. Seeing reason…

In their Partner calls

In some eerie way their conversations remind me of movies I have seen on multiple personality sufferers, where in order to find out what happened, you needed to talk to each of those personalities… scary, fascinating, and very healing.

Whatever it takes, right?

My courses

My courses are not for the faint of heart, not for people who won’t be willing to get vulnerable for the sake of a future that won’t happen unless they are.

I am right there with them… some of their conversations have touched my hidden “stuff”… so I have a chance to air my wounds, my shame, my embarrassment there myself.

The Starting Point Measurements

The measure most indicative of the gap between the real self and the made up composite self is #18. Do you have a bridge between your precious I and your actual I? What is your level of delusion. The higher the number the more fake selves you have to hide the real Self: the more work you need to do to unravel it.

What was the motivation to hide the real self to begin with? Some bad experience. Some failure. Failure to be loved, failure to be heard, failure to do something well… failure to fit in, failure to be appreciated, acknowledged, be significant… some failure.

You said, then, in the past, that failing that way is bad…

and that you are going to fix it… And invented some way, some ineffective way to not fail that way again. And, of course, all of your inventions backfired… and you have been failing ever since.

  • The little girl who at age 2 decided to not need diapers again to help her mother failed to get love for that. She failed to have permission to be a child who can pee when they want to pee… whether it is in the bed or on the toilet. So she settled for a consolation prize of being the one who heroically saves the day.
  • Or the little boy who went fishing in the creek to save his mother and his little brother from being hungry, but got grief for it, and got duty for it: now he has to do it… no more freedom, no more appreciation. No permission to be a child, none.
  • The begging for attention little girl, who unless she did something off-color, she got no attention…
  • Or the girl who was allowed some respite only with animals… humans always wanted her to be different, want what she didn’t want… an thousand different ways.
  • The little boy who bravely stood in the doorway of his drunk parents and their friends, hoping to get them to pay attention… completely failing at it… and sentencing him to a life of hiding, and self-recrimination, unless this “Seeing Reason” capacity and the work we do in the partner calls can help him unravel the many facets of his made up persona.
  • Or the kid who grew up in ethnic cleansing environment where free speech gets you jailed… or killed… and he failed to understand… and adjust.
The foundation, the cornerstone of a life where you feel at home in your skin is living with permission to be yourself. Not easy.

Especially if you have no idea what that is… And just like David was already inside the big block of marble that Michelangelo worked to liberate, you are in that big block of crap… that unless you can see what is not you, you’ll never go home, you’ll never feel good about yourself.

So, as always, the road to home, the strait and narrow, is to see, clearly, what is not you, appreciate it, allow it to be, embrace it, and let it fall away. What remains is more of you… None of it is wrong… Neither the crap, nor “David.”

The more not-you you can remove, the more you become who you are… yourself. A beautiful person.

Who you are now is not your Self… you put yourself together… for the camera, for the effect. You, and everyone else.

Authenticity, and authentic person if very rare… one in a million. And it can be you.


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Author: Sophie Benshitta Maven

True empath, award winning architect, magazine publisher, transformational and spiritual coach and teacher, self declared Avatar