End Suffering on Disingenuousness

by Richard Wooldridge

     In The Power of Your Supermind, Vernon Howard writes, “The most helpful thing you can do for yourself is to be real. To be real is to be everything.” Most people are pretentious phonies. They say things only because it’s expected of them in certain circumstances/situations. Actually, they want something from you. They want you to believe they are considerate and nice or they want something in return, perhaps a favor. This situation can be expressed in the idiom, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” It could also be called insider trading.
     The real part of us can detect when someone is disingenuous, when they are saying something they don’t really mean. We can catch ourselves doing the same thing. It is very important that we see things as they actually are and not as we want them to be or the way we’re pressured by others to see them.
     Why would you want a substitute for the real thing? I remember tasting a garden-grown tomato once and it exploded with freshness, deliciousness, natural sweetness and other good things. It was very different from the tomatoes you buy in a grocery store. We have eaten store bought tomatoes for so long, we don’t know what the real thing tastes like. We are going to have to learn what reality tastes like, feels like. When you have a close encounter with another human being who is disingenuous, someone who gives the false appearance of being honest and sincere and you detect that insincerity, it leaves you with a sense of discomfort. It just doesn’t feel right.
     Have you ever had someone make a gesture toward you to try to make up for something they had done earlier to hurt you and you sensed it wasn’t genuine? They were simply trying to relieve the guilt they felt after the episode was over. You knew the behavior was not earnest or heartfelt.
     We must start observing the price we pay for not being real. A disingenuous state is very painful and obviously can cause friction with others. It may appear that everything went smoothly with that encounter on the surface but underneath, resentment and other negative reactions are left behind to cause uneasiness and distress.
     Unless we evolve spiritually both will experience the pain that is felt in the relationship over and over again until we rightly determine to work on ourselves to rise above the ordinary human level. If we truly want a different kind of life and work to discover what that is, Truth assures us we can have it.
     Only you as an individual can experience what that means. It can’t be any other way. Can someone else eat for you? Can someone else hit the golf ball for you? Only you can conquer and give up being deceitful in any way whatsoever. But we individually can experience the cosmic reward of discovering an entirely new way to live life without suffering from a disingenuous life.