I’m sitting on a ferry about to leave Stranraer, Scotland for a quick visit back to Northern Ireland. Here’s where my stream of consciousness is taking me today: the human need for authentication.
If something is authentic it’s the real deal, the genuine article. We humans yearn deep within for the reassurance that we’re OK, that we’re authentic persons. Authentic, empathic, unifying centres are necessary in for us sons and daughters of Adam to develop a true sense of self-worth.
Without such centres we carry much damaging baggage known asurvival sub-personalities into adulthood – the driven need to prove ourselves to others and more importantly to ourselves. Ideally our parents ought to have provided these authenticating empathic centres, but now and again they withdrew their empathy from us, replacing their unconditional love with a performance based acceptance.
Does the situation change when we have a spiritual encounter in later life? Not necessarily so – we can be ‘good’ Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus but still strive for acceptance from the newly discovered Divinity and our fellow ‘believers’.
We search for authentication and empathy down the lanes of our religious life and devotion. Saving the world becomes an attempt to authenticate our wounded persona. This is where we become prone to the influence of seemingly powerful empathic unifying centres – gifted teachers or gurus or perhaps abusive religious movements.
These desire centers appear to promise what we need – authentication through empathy. I believe that Yeshua was a genuinely authentic, yet freeing, unifying center for his disciples, claiming to be the very image of the Divine Father.
Before his predictable death He claimed that He wouldn’t leave the disciples bereaved or in an orphaned state; in other words without a parental empathic authenticator. The Divine Spirit would somehow come and console (authenticate by empathy) Peter and the distraught group after his execution.
Western Christian teaching has always interpreted the root of the relevant Greek word as meaning ‘to stand alongside in a court of law’ thus emphasising the legal nature of justification by faith. I prefer to see Spirit as the One who stands beside us with total empathy, the One who continually heals the damaged ‘selfhood’ within our wounded psyches.
We’ve now one beside, and amazingly within us to spark a new Self-authentication; a guide to reveal how precious and valued we are to Divine Source . Once that awakening occurs the need for external religious validation disappears; guilt will be a thing of the past and no longer will any ‘man of God’ be able to pull our pietistic puppet strings.
At least that’s been my experience.
Writer Dylan Morrison 
Brilliant & clearly enlightened thought, must be the sea air or is it going back to Ireland that inspired you. Seriously this is a great demonstration of the saying that a man with an experience will never be at the mercy of a man with just an arguement. Your reasoning is good but it is given so much steel by your walk into enlightenment & self awareness. Keep posting, its good to read!
Thanks Fatboy for your encouragement.It’s probably the coffee I had at Gretna Green before I set off. Ah Northern Ireland -the land of saints and scholars,infighting, religious judgement and political rivalry – great to be back!
Dylan, this is probably my favorite post from you. Thanks for sharing!
A pleasure Rhonda – the thoughts in this post came to me during my journey back to Ireland in February 2010. I knew that I’d be stepping back into the old desire matrix of my hometown for a few days where so many of my religious struggles took place. Zan and I intended to stay for a fortnight but changed our minds after 3 days – we felt the heavy cloud of conformity over Ballybrigg that had so shaped our previous life. Once back on the English mainland the heaviness lifted never to return!
Very nice and thought-provoking if you would please pardon that phrase.
-Portia
Hi Portia. Thanks for dropping by and commenting! Blessings ~ Dylan
Dylan that’s a lovely post and thanks for sharing it. I’m interested in the way it seems to me that Christ’s teaching of unconditional love for and empathy with everyone including the weak and vulnerable – and giving women a definite place in his world – was hijacked by Paul who comes along out of the blue and tramples all over the disciples whom Jesus had handpicked and taught – and introduced an altogether different set of ideas and values that seem to have so distorted the original Christ message. And I guess I’ve always struggled along those lines you describe so well.
Hi Eleanor, thanks for dropping by and your encouraging comment. I agree that something seems to have gone amiss quite early on within the early Jesus movement.Dispensationalists have their formulae to try and explain it but I’m not convinced by them. I believe that Paul was a gifted mystic who carried some cultural and social baggage that may have got mixed up in the instructions to his ‘churches’. I reckon that the early Church Father’s may have played a major role in transforming the Middle-Eastern spirituality of Yeshua into a philosophical system of belief that had more in common with Greece than Israel. You should have a wee look for a book called ‘The Jerome Conspiracy’ – it’s an eye opener into the theological fiddling that took place in the early centuries. The vulnerable nature of Yeshua’s message has been replaced by Empire and control, something learnt from the politically astute Constantine. The wind of Spirit moves in the broken hearted – this is where Yeshua walks in the affairs of man.