"We human beings, we're kind of
wired to be
admired.
We want to look good. We want people to think well of us. And so we
try to be authentic. We try to be real with each other because one of
the things that everybody knows is admired by others, is if you're
authentic - if you're kind of a phony, you know nobody's going to
admire you. So we want to be authentic. The beginning of all
authenticity is to be authentic about your inauthenticity. And that's
how you start to get an honest view of yourself."
This essay,
"Not A Bad-Looking Corpse": Anatomy Of Looking Good,
is the sequel to
Presence Of Self.
Werner coaching a woman he remarks is "not a bad-looking
corpse":
"You're kinda dead, Sweetheart. Now, you're not a
bad-looking corpse. But that's really fooling."
Let's
face
it: being present is attractive - that is to say the
presence of authentic
Self
is attractive.
Presence of Self
is that mercurial quality which makes us universally attractive.
It's that quality which, whenever we unleash it, makes us
attractive to others. It's that quality which, when unleashed by
others, makes them attractive to us. And look: the Self can be
fleeting - which means that when it's present, it may be either
naturally present (ie
masterfully
present) or it may be just present in the moment. Either
way, that's what makes attractive people attractive, not what we
look like (that is, not what we make our bodies look
like).
For human beings, being attractive / looking good is
attractive. We want to be loved and noticed. We're just wired that
way. We want to be attractive to others. We want to be elevated as
being good-looking. And given that for the most part, we have no
mastery
of
presence of Self,
we settle for trafficking in covert ways of being attractive /
looking good - like the way we dress (couture), the way we
style our hair (coiffure), the make-up we use
(maquillage), or simply by aspiring to sound intelligent.
And in
unrigorous
circles, it works.
Yet without authentic presence, try as we may, we're just fooling
ourselves and others by looking good. Trying to look good without
being present, has no authenticity. Look: subliminally, you can
easily sense it. Without
presence of Self,
we're dead (ie dead in being) even though we make "not
a bad-looking corpse".
I've confronted the inauthenticity of my own thrown-ness to look
good. I've asked myself "What drives it?". As I've
delved deeper and deeper into this question, I've gotten to see the
anatomy of my thrown-ness to look good. Wanting to be
attractive / wanting to look good, on the surface of it, seems to
spring from wanting to be loved and noticed. But it's really not
that. That may just be the way it occurred for me, the
way it was couched for me, the way it was subliminally disguised
for me. I've seen what's behind my thrown-ness to look good. It's
nothing more (and nothing less) than the Self's possibility of
being present. I get that now. Being attractive isn't an outcome of
doing anything to try to look good ie of making "not a bad-looking
corpse". It results when Self is present ie it results from
natural
Self-expression.
Be careful not to misconstrue that. The Self doesn't pursue the
possibility of being present in order to look good. The
Self's possibility of being present is (to the Self) the possibility
of being present - nothing more, and nothing less. The result
is that mercurial quality which is so universally attractive to us.
Presence of Self
is its own fulfillment. Over
presence of Self,
my thrown-ness to look good has no sway. Indeed, it's no longer
relevant or powerful. We could say:
in the face ofpresence of Self
(transformation), the pursuit of looking good doesn't
succeed (if you will) as such. Rather, it
disappears.
It transforms. It
recontextualizes
(I love that word).
For the courageous, it's a transformed inquiry ie a conversation for
transformation and possibility that allows us to examine /
gain
access
to where we're dead (ie dead in being), and the futility of the
faux solution of covering up being dead in being, with a
"not a bad-looking corpse", the solution
presencing Self
renders redundant.
