How to Live Authentically
Burn your books about authentic living.
Sit instead. Sit in your bedroom with the door closed. Sit until some strips of light come through the blinds, goldening the wooden floors with the sensation of being seen.
Then lay out your trinkets (these are your words, your adjectives of identification, all your figures of speech). Lay them out before the eyes of the light. Watch them. See how they slowly begin their drying into bloodless pits, their shriveling into microscopic specks. Soon they will begin to bounce and quiver like fleas over the massive body of the beast (the beast is reality, and it prowls always beneath).
The smallification of your words is something close to obliteration. You may feel shrill as the nearly-dead when they begin to feel their corpse-hood creep up from the toes (you toe that same line before the great white salt of disintegration). But you will persist. You will remember that your language-body has long been seized by rigor mortis and hung lifeless about your neck; you will remember how time seems to tick its seconds into your bones, how the sacred has been smothered into silence (until even the profane has lost its meaning).
If you persist for long enough, the space of your room will begin to expand, quiver, and curl. This is is the space which upholds your words, the river beneath narration, the core where burns the center of every living thing. This is where we take off our shoes and press a forehead to the holy earth.
You can stay here as long as you like. Or, you can leave. You can go to the kitchen and pour yourself a glass or milk or tea. You can drink as the light diminuendos in the west, as the day like a house collapses, as the night begins to snatch away our collective clothing, our superficial sleep.