The following is an excerpt from the book The Sacred Yes: Letters from the Infinite Vol. 1 as revealed to Rev. Deborah L. Johnson Find Your Authentic Self You cannot learn about yourself if you are always staying within the safe confines and borders of the familiar. You must step into unknown worlds, which may feel unsettling. The very places where you hurt the most are the keys to your future, because these are the places where your authenticity lies. Understand what I just said. Your sense of self-preservation makes you protect the things that are the most precious in your life. For example, you automatically respond to a blow to your eye faster than to an attack on your leg. So also, you are quick to set up barriers to the penetration of the most vulnerable aspects of your self-perception, for these are where your true uniqueness and creativity lie. Consequently, your defense mechanisms that hide your authenticity from attack by others also hide your authenticity from yourselves. This defense pattern started so early that it is literally embedded in your DNA. You humans equate love with imitation. The way you know that someone loves you is that they act like you, enjoy the same things that you do, share the same attitudes, perspectives, and stimuli. This makes the thought of being different too onerous, because you associate it with loss. If you are different, then you will not be like everyone else. And if you are not like them, you will not receive their love. Your need for human love and companionship is so intense that it is the easiest thing by which you can be manipulated. This begins very early in the primary family unit. As children, you quickly learn what you need to do in order to receive support, and what will make you be estranged. No one tells you that your real job is to find your authenticity. You are merely socialized. Yet your being there is always a rumbling, a stirring, deep down within your being that tells you there is more to be expressed. Some of you try to stuff it, to drown it out with your responsibilities, obligations, and conformist attitudes. You reward each other on how much you meet each other's expectations of what a good worker, boss, parent, friend, son, daughter, etc., ought to be. Others of you feel the tug and try to pretend like you do not feel it. You get into self-destructive behaviors like addictions, adrenaline highs, and controlling manipulative behavior so that you are constantly distracted by outside things. In the first case, being distracted from the call by socially acceptable external activities is considered a virtue. In the second, you resent the very distractions you create and blame them for the gnawing sense of lack of fulfillment that you feel. Others of you play around in response to what you hear. You dibble and you dabble, try a little of this and a little of that, never enough to really upset anyone, though it may make some annoyed. However, you never go deep enough. Usually you do no more than explore what others who you are enamored with do. You try to find yourselves in the paths that others have found. You rely on their interpretations of their experience with me, and you live your authenticity vicariously. However, authenticity cannot be lived vicariously. Just because you hang out with Einstein doesn't mean that you understand the theory of relativity. Just because you hang out with the authentic ones does not mean that you, yourself, will experience your own authenticity. In fact, too much idol worship may lead you to feel inadequate by comparison. You must move beyond what others have done to find your own uniqueness. Yea, this may even contradict the ones whom you admire the most. No one will put it together quite the way you will, when you receive it from me. But you must empty your storage bins of the rubbish that you have been carrying around. You too often mistake your sentimentality, the memorabilia of where you have been, and the things that you have experienced for your identity. Too many of you hold a photograph instead of a mirror. I do not need you looking backwards; I need you present. You thought that I was going to say "I need you looking towards the future." No, that is as great a trap as looking backwards. Those of you who are constantly looking into the future become overachievers. You always have something to prove, even if it is only to yourself. You want things to be different for you, and rightly so. It is not your effort that is in question here but your deep intent. If you are merely trying to make something happen in order to prove something to yourself, or to someone else, you are missing the sweetness, the genuineness. That self is underneath your defenses. Your authenticity is a place of pure potential. Even you have no idea of all that you are capable of. And you will never find it out by clinging to the approval of others, or even of yourself. _________________________________________________________

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