AUTHENTIC

with a Fearless Puppy organization introduction

One of my very favorite Fearless Puppy pieces is titled AUTHENTIC. It has been picked up by Heart &Thought Newsletter. It is the second piece in their 1/21 publication. There is a lot of great writing in H&T. I hope you enjoy it all.

By now you know that all the writing and production of “Fearless Puppy” material has been done by dogs and babies. I thought it about time to give the staff its props.

Doug “Ten” Rose (aka Tenzin Kharma Trinley) is merely the pen-holder and adult face of the group. He basically just sits around, smokes things, and stares at other things. He is pictured above with one of the several dozen dogs who actually make up the editing, proofreading, and production crews.

The writing braintrust consists of two-year-old Mr. Khyungtul (pictured with mom), his three-month-old sister Ms. Pema (in pink), and his drinking buddy, the less-than-a-month-old but already incredibly prolific Mr. Siddharth (in blue, taking one of his frequent naps), all pictured above. These are the brilliant folks with the real literary talent (also good at smiling, gurgling, eating, and pooping). This braintrust and their cohorts will probably save the world some day. For the time being they seem happy to produce literary masterpieces between snacks and naps, and to let some dense stoner take credit for their work.

The entire team sends love and best wishes from Boudha, Kathmandu. As Mr. Lennon said in 1967, “On behalf of the group and myself, I hope we pass the audition.” Be well.

p.s. If you want the entire FREE new 5* book, the link to it is www.fearlesspuppy.info/newbook My first two 5* books are available in hard copy or e-book at Amazon. They are not free.

AUTHENTIC

Dedicated with very large gratitude and respect to all those with the courage, perseverance, and common sense to continue to be themselves in the face of criticism, judgement, peer pressure, scrutiny, harsh sensationalism, and public ignorance—and to all those who refuse to allow anyone else’s or their own bullshit to prevent them from helping others or growing into themselves.

People spend a lot of their time talking about “the truth” as if it is a familiar old friend, but the relationship is a more often like that of a fan to a celebrity they have never met. When these same folks actually meet the raw truth it usually scares the hell out of them.

Outside the world of Nature itself, truth is rare and bullshit prevalent. It can sometimes take a while for the truth to triumph, but it will eventually percolate right through nonsense and rise above any pile of lies that it is trapped under.

This percolation is usually facilitated by people that are uniquely and authentically themselves. Folks fronting to accomplish various sorts of personal gain; those who are scared to stand out and would rather fit in; folks that act in pretentious, artificial ways in a quest for admiration, profit, or status cannot and will not get this job done.

Authentic does not mean perfect. Throughout our history, except for a few possible legendary exceptions, we have each been imperfect in reaching the peak of human potential. This includes our most accomplished, famous, and even our very wisest citizens. We live on a crowded rock amidst an unforgiving culture in fragile bodies attached to sensitive emotional mechanisms.

No one stays flawless while doing it.

“Even after you reach Enlightenment, you still have to do the laundry.” Old Zen Proverb

Most folks agree that making effort to overcome or at least sandpaper the edges off of the less agreeable behaviors and attitudes we have grown into is among life’s most essential jobs. Most folks also agree that this job is a lot easier to talk about than do.

Personal responsibility is always the engine of any effort. But a lot of our less desirable traits and our lack of progress in escaping them may have more to do with the way we’ve been programmed than it has to do with any basic character flaw or inability to achieve our direction. Spiritual/emotional progress has often been presented to us as being unattainable to “regular” folks. It is framed as an otherworldly process that only someone born with supernatural grace can accomplish.

Public relations men for churches, governments, and industries that stand to profit from misdirecting the public convince us that we need products and middlemen to negotiate our spiritual as well as our physical beauty and self-worth. If folks think they are incapable of reaching wisdom or happiness through their personal efforts; if we think that our ability to become better is limited or even impotent when we live as our authentic selves instead of monkeying commercially motivated and manufactured images, it puts us at the mercy of all the external forces that profit from pulling our strings.

This manufactured artificial distance between the folks we are and the faith in our ability to become the folks we want to be is a truly dangerous thing. It is too often used by the discouraged as an excuse to replace our personal responsibility with compliance, nihilism, apathy, cynicism, and lethargy.

Individual growth and planetary evolution retard under the influence of this market motivated frustration. Personal initiative often gives up to empty promises and baseless blind hope. Empty promises and baseless blind hope direct us to emotionally worthless material goods, prescription drugs, salvation by the dollar, and a vast collection of distractions, toys, and gimmicks that have been made readily available to replace our painfully raped confidence and authenticity.

Status quo knows that when important goals are made to seem unobtainable, many folks will relinquish partial control of their lives to forces that claim the ability to carry them toward those goals. Hollow religion, repressive governments, industry that is motivated by greed, and all the jackals that feed on scraps from these institutions then cash in on public insecurity while the wise wait patiently for the rest of us to figure out that all we need to do is cash in our own chips.

It is ironic as hell that most of our heroes, teachers, and even gods placed all the responsibility in the world on singular humans in nearly all of their rhetoric! Most of them advised us to get to work. They did not advise us to find a politician, televangelist, or other form of middleman to do our negotiating for us.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
“The kingdom of heaven is within you.”
“Seek and ye shall find.”

This whole process of becoming the cultural image of a self instead of being our own selves shows up way too blatantly in many women that compare themselves to magazine fashion models. These “regular” women may be intelligent, good-hearted, beautiful in demeanor, and physically cute. They are most likely all-around much better people to be with than the sleek models

with the glorified bodies. Nonetheless, many doors are closed to them that are left open for the slinky genetic celebrities in lingerie, alcohol, and perfume ads.

Sadly, some of the lovely women that society has labeled ordinary, regular, plain, too short, tall, thin, fat, narrow-lipped, big/small breasted, or in other ways physically imperfect will drive themselves to bizarre and at times expensive and unhealthy lengths while striving for shallow goals that are genetically impossible to reach. “I should be like that model but it is not possible for me. I am an undesirable failure,” is a widespread and tragic side effect of images that commercial advertising has convinced us to define as physical perfection. Many naturally beautiful people have lost their self-respect surrendering to unnatural standards of beauty.

The fashion model photos and the spiritual model propaganda have both been airbrushed, but differences between the spiritual and fashion model scenarios are much more important than the similarities. The most important difference is that people can’t get taller or change their bone structure but anyone can make giant strides in the direction of their spiritual role models. Becoming happier and of more benefit to those around us is always possible wherever a human mind has a serious intention to do so. Few people can become a fashion model but anyone can become a happier camper, a nicer human, and a smarter person if they exercise

their own authenticity in a positive direction with diligence and determination.

All humans have ability for great accomplishment. Most of our famous wise folk never denied that they themselves were everyday people like you and me. They worked hard to develop expanded awareness, at times used a bit more courage than sense, and earned some enhanced perception—but they were born the same start-from-scratch babies as everyone else. They each had a bit of not-all-the-way-there-yet in them, just like we do.

We may consider a neighbor or work mate or our selves to be too stupid, smart-assed, fat, thin, sloppy, compulsively clean, oversexed, undersexed, straight, gay, loud, mousy, weird and unfocused, or just plain too damn lazy to accomplish any benefit for themselves or the world. Haven’t there been many saints with similar qualities? Shantideva was considered so lazy that he was called “Eat, Shit, Sleep” by other monks. He wrote some of the most revered texts in Buddhism. Saint Francis and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche were very, very wild people by any culture’s standards. JFK and MLK were unapologetic sex addicts. Many of our greatest musicians, artists, and authors made no secret of the fact that they were consistently intoxicated. Many of our greatest modern wisdom teachers initiated their spiritual advancement with LSD and other drugs.

None of these questionable actions and qualities negate the contributions that these people made. Being authentically, honestly human (while maintaining the all-important do-no-harm base station) doesn’t disturb anyone’s ability to grow personally or make meaningful contributions to the world. It facilitates both.

The courage to face our own inadequacies and our own potential with an equal and non-judgmental clarity is the base station of honest introspection. This honest introspection is the base station of spiritual and emotional progress. This spiritual and emotional progress is the root system of evolution.

Being authentic is a good part of what makes wise people wise. It helps them stay aware of what pieces are still missing in their goal to be whole, as well as what trash needs to be dumped. It keeps them aware of what things need to be exercised and what things need to be exorcised.

Do you know anyone that has sacrificed being who they really are in order to fit into an externally manufactured and induced image of whom they “are supposed to be?” If so, you have a friend, as well as a planet, that is in trouble.

The popular expression “Keep It Real” may become the calling card of the 21st century.

www.fearlesspuppy.info