A wise woman once told me, "You can always trust a person to be himself."
BeachnutRU said:
How about herself !!!  
zippy8264 said:
Hmmmm....interesting, but at first I started to disagree...but after reading what I typed....it is true...the ones who are fakes and phonys and pretend to be something they aren't....they are being who they really are...fake and phony!!! Wow, how simple wisdom is sometimes huh??? Hope you had a great Monday... ~~ZIP 
Zippy, I think you might have fallen into the trap of catchy syntax. The infinitive verb "to be" really has no well defined meaning unless you give it context. Some examples:
* Each one of us present a different "face" to different people. I'm a very different person around my family than when I'm around someone I date. Am I myself around my family? Am I myself around my girlfriends? Am I myself on MatchDoctor? Am I myself at work?
* There are multiple contexts of "to be". Being one's self could mean that we understand ourselves and our limitations. For example, I will *not* take that class in astrodynamics. Although I feel like I may be interested in it now, I know I'll never complete the course". I know I shouldn't smoke; I intend to only have one cig, I have an addictive personality and even one can lead to trouble.
We can "be" differently in front of different people. I need to be very cold, very calculational, very precise at work. I can't afford to be anything that approximates a warm human being when I develop models. I need to have great "zeit-fleisch". However, I would never present this side to someone I'm dating. In NLP (taught to me by the wise woman making the statement), being is separated from doing and from getting. What you are describing here is different behaviors (doing) in different situations. Your behaviors proceed from who you are (being), and are the only way anyone can get an idea of who you are (being). Thus certain behavior when measured against other experiences of that behavior may cause someone to say, "He is cold, calculating and precise" while someone with a different set of experiences may say, "He is very businesslike while at work." The first person may not have experience of people having different behaviors while at work and off work while the second qualifies his opinion of who you are by the context of the behavior.
Suppose you come across a con artist. He cons you into thinking he loves you, and you're sure he's sincere. Before you find out otherwise, is he being himself? Yes, he is being a con artist. Can you trust him? To be a sincerely loving man? No, he was never that. To behave as a sincerely loving man, even a repentant one in order to continue to con? Definitely. Can you trust him after he showed you his true colours? You can trust him to be true to his colors. It is your interpretation of his behaviors which need adjusting. It is your expectations of him that need adjusting. How do you determine whether to trust a person as a sincerely loving man or as a con artist? You do it by gathering information and not trusting behaviors so readily. You recognize that your assessments are always guided by your experiences and your observations (biased by your own experiences) of others' experiences.
There's a question of mismatched temporal comparison and here. The notion of trust is time dependent with "fakes and phones", as you put it. They're perfectly trustworthy until they become untrustworthy, at which point they become untrustworthy. Same with the notion of being. I think my very favorite quote, ever, is one by Einstein (paraphrased): You should strive to make everything as simple as possible.
But no simpler. I think eight words on the question of being might be too simple. For me. I tend to be slow at times. Maybe I'm thinking about it incorrectly. 
Phones are trustworthy until they become untrustworthy. Then you should buy a new one.
Oddly, the same is often true for "phonies" as well. Most things are until they are not. Were you a little sleepy when you wrote this? When does a phone become untrustworthy? When it does not operate as expected. The same with phonies. In the case of a phone, usually what it is has changed. In the case of a phony what we know about him has changed. People can change, but for the most part are pretty resistant to change.
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