In the western corner of Wiltshire lies one of those tiny railway halts that somehow escaped Dr Beeching. Hardly a station, it's more like a stile on a footpath. You have to ask for the train to stop in advance but, if you do, you find yourself at a quirky spot where the railway, river and canal all cross each other at strange angles. It's a meeting of ley lines stretching back to the age of steam.
Go over the aquaduct, under the bridge and up a steep hill and you reach the home of Neil and Benedicte Crofts. They look out over a landscape that stretches to the White Horse at Westbury and beyond. It seems a good prospect from which to start searching for a more authentic future.
"Do we want to start a political party or a movement?"
That was almost the first thing Neil said to me when we met some months earlier. Not yet forty, his enthusiasm is infectious and ideas come tumbling out as he talks. He's charismatic and unpretentious, charming and smart, and clearly sincere about wanting to building a more sustainable future for our planet.
Neil is on a mission, and it seems to be going to plan. Thousands have signed up to his website www.authenticbusiness.co.uk and hundreds have participated in the events he's set up under the banner "Creating the World We Want". His past careers - racing cars and Head of Strategy at the .com icon Razorfish - combine glamour and branding for mass audiences. A perfect background from which to launch either a movement or a political party, in other words. But what about changing someone's life?
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Neil and Ben live in a village that belongs to my past. In the 1980s I lived here as a student and my housemate married the girl next door. I'm now a godparent to their son (despite making it clear that I'm an atheist). All that made my old home a natural starting point for a walk symbolising my past, my present, my future and my destiny. I had to listen and look to notice EVERYTHING, Neil told me. Through the ritual of 'coming out', every step I took, every sound I heard on the path and every smell I sensed in the air could hold clues to a newer, truer way of living.
We started by sitting in the small garden area that Neil and Ben have yet to make their own. Neil explained that the house, the village and the land around it would all be part of the exercise and it would be up to me to choose where in that domain we went over the course of the next two hours. And so we began.
Question: Where did I feel most represented my present, and why? Neil asked me to choose a place and explain why the things around me represented my current state of mind.
Working in a creative field, I'm used to thinking laterally, but I've got to confess that this had me a tad phased for a moment. My mind flashed back to the embarrassment of a school drama class during my teens, when a teacher whose role model was clearly Kate Bush (Wuthering Heights period) asked us all to stand and pretend to be trees.
I reassured myself that Neil was a friend, there was no-one around to laugh and my embarrassment was simply part of growing up and being British. So I simply dropped the barriers and started tripping off laterally. The garden was a work in progress, so perhaps it symbolised the unresolved balance between work and home in my life? As an enclosed space, maybe it symbolised the world I'd created for myself since moving out of London. And those two roses touching but not quite intertwined - did they speak volumes about some looming problem in my marriage?
Err - not quite.
Neil pulled me back from the brink with the advice that this wasn't a home-brew shrink-fest. But it was about taking my imagination down new pathways. It was all about using the physical cues I passed on a journey through a literal landscape to get in touch with how I really felt about where my life had gone up to now and where it could lead in the future.
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Authentic - adjective
Middle English autentik, from Old French autentique, from Late Latin authenticus, from Greek authentikos, from authents, author.
Synonyms: bona fide, genuine, real, true, undoubted, unquestionable
These adjectives mean not counterfeit or copied: genuine crabmeat; a real diamond; undoubted evidence; an unquestionable antique.
Antonyms: counterfeit
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Once I got over my initial unfamiliarity with the process, I was surprised how easy it became to find meaning in the objects around me. For the curious, here are the highlights: from the home where I used to live through the present of Neil's garden I decided my future lay in a beautiful burial ground and my destiny was to hover somewhere overhead, sharing what I saw with the world. Not everyone would feel comfortable seeing their future in a graveyard, Neil pointed out, but I have to say that the more I thought about it the greater a sense of peace it seemed to imply.
In case this is starting to sound religious, I'll repeat that I'm a confirmed atheist. I believe that people and our planet are very special and I don't see the need for a god to make things so. But that doesn't stop me asking from time: What can I do to be happy? Where am I going? Am I doing the right thing?
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Authentic - adjective
1. Having a genuine original or authority, in opposition to that which is false, fictitious, or apocryphal; being what it purports to be; genuine; not of doubtful origin; real.
2. Trustworthy, as resting on unquestionable authority or evidence; as, an authentic history; an authentic report of facts.
Usage: A genuine book is that which was written by the person whose name it bears, as the author of it. An authentic book is that which relates matters of fact as they really happened. A book may be genuine without being, authentic, and a book may be authentic without being genuine.
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I have yet to read Neil's book, but even without having done so I reckon he's plugged into something quite powerful. 'Authentic' is one of those words that we all recognise and yearn for - even if we can't quite say what it is. It sparks with the same biblical energy as words like 'Good' and 'Evil'. Standing up and saying you know how to be 'authentic' is rather like George W Bush proclaiming he stands for 'freedom'. You can't really argue against it. Who would want to be 'inauthentic'?
The ambiguity of 'authenticity' also makes it universal - a perfect contemporary brand, in other words. Put authenticity in a bottle (or a book) and you could sell a whole range of products and services. You could create an ethically and commercially sustainable force for positive change in the world.
Armed with such a great opportunity, I see a potential pitfall for Neil. Our senses are dulled by a million marketing messages and the promoters of this new bible might be tempted to promise more than it can deliver, just to attract the attention it deserves. I do hope this won't happen. Knowing Neil well, I am absolutely sure his book is written with complete integrity and he surely deserves better.
I'm also struck by an irony: both Neil and Benedicte are themselves refugees from marketing, a tool often used to puff up that which is not real. Today they have turned their back on all that, found a path which feels authentic and now sincerely wish to share their insight.
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So what is 'authentic'? And what might a business built around 'authenticity' be? I'm still not entirely sure, but several weeks after my 'coming out' ritual I can look back with more objectivity.
I've come to realise that, for me at least, the quest for 'authenticity' is really a new spin on an age-old quest to find meaning and do the right thing. It's a journey not a destination, a process not an answer. Where others might find solace in a legend or an after-life, many people in our secular age are looking for something that grounds them. Neil's 'coming out ritual' gave me the feeling that I'd done that for a while. It wasn't ecstatic, it wasn't evangelical and it didn't in itself change my life, but it was very worthwhile.
It seems to me that a common thread in many faiths is a requirement for followers to believe that objects around them can be charged with sacred power. Christians see that charge in the wine and the bread of the communion. For animists it's the spirit in the trees. For followers of crystal healing, sacred power lies in a mineral. The snag for atheists is that many of us are also hardcore materialists and rationalists. We've lost touch with this powerful technique for seeing beyond the here and now. We've cut ourselves off from something that clearly goes deep back into our evolutionary past. By giving me permission and a structure within which to re-connect with a long disused part of my imagination, Neil helped me look at the world in a different way.
So what does Neil seek to do with his power? Start a political party? Found a movement? Become some kind of self-help humanist eco-guru?
I have a hunch that The Mission could take him down any of these paths. My advice is that he'd be best to steer clear of anyone who sets him up as a guru because they'd also be setting him up for a fall. The risk is just to great of something his one time marketing colleagues would call 'Post Purchase Dissonance' - that nagging disappointment when you get home from the shop, open the box and realise that you expected more than a product or service could ever deliver. The promise and the spin doesn't chime with reality. Faced with that dischord, the natural reaction is to blame the brand-owner for over-promising, rather than your own naivety for over-believing. And therein lies one of the truths I've learned about authenticity.
Our generation doesn't like thinking about abstract or difficult ideas. We prefer them personalised, embodied in heroes or villains. Einstein or Hitler are much more concrete than relativity and the uncomfortable human process that created national socialism. But I don't think that looking for a guru will help anyone to lead an authentic life. The ambiguity is the truth. For me the positive potential of 'authenticity' is the call it makes to individuals to look inwards rather than outwards. And then to change their lives and the planet for the better.
Hugh Mason lives in Bath. hugh.mason@pembridge.net
Click here for more information on doing a coming out session with Neil
Acknowledgement: Dictionary definitions from www.dictionary.com