authenticity
masen, 11 August 2012
“If we want authenticity, we must initiate it.”
– Travis Rice
Society - A set of social norms, behaviors, beliefs, and culture held in common by individuals. From the enlightenment idea of the Social Contract, it is assumed that with society comes mutual benefit, protection, and safety. Civilization vs. savagery, justice vs. power. It's a great promise and an evolutionary step in the human experience to organize ourselves in and subscribe to these auspicious thought structures.
At the core, the social contract is nothing but an agreement on arbitrary conventions. All of our ills, known and unknown have been created -- they are not a consequence of capitolism, government policy, or the welfare state. In fact, these things are a consequence of our arbitrary decisions. Our undying faith in society has created problems for us which do not necessarily exist; it's our faith which has convinced the members of society that things can't change, that they wont. Our minds cling to the thought structures, our fear prevents them from changing.
But what happens when we don't explicity agree to the conventions, but are born-in to the madness that persists? What happens when the ideas of corporate leaders and bankers become core tenants of our supposed faith?
Look around.
We get money -- created on fancy paper with the faith that it can be exchanged for goods and services, but controlled by powerful bankers, withheld from our fellow human beings, and used as the justification for theft, deceit, inequality, and death.
We get jobs -- glorious time-sucking toils where we spend most of our lives doing things we admittedly do not want to do in order to "get by" in this world that we've created. Our lives consumed by the fear of losing our despised livelihood, which is the extrapolation of the fear of not getting what we want.
We get growth -- preferably unchecked and exponentially increasing, to reduce our planet to a hot ball of carbon exhaust, and make very few people very very rich.
Obviously the huddled masses have spoken, and yielded their lives and happiness in exchange for someone's steamboat fairy tale of the American Dream. But there's more to life. Much more in fact. It's always been there and it doesn't cost any money (we made that up, remember); beneath the arbitary social conventions and mental structures that we've built up to filter the world into good and bad, there exists a subtle feeling, a connection, a true unbiased perception of the world. *Beneath it all is where Authenticity lays.
Authenticity is always there, one can't go out and simply find authenticity and then stop. It's a matter of noticing it within yourself, others, and in interactions. The first step is to strip away everything that doesn't matter (thoughts, emotions, impulses) and become aware of what is left. Those thoughts, those emotions, much like society are not 'real'. Our minds have created them, for better or worse. When they are purged from your conscious flow, what is left is Authentic.
When members of society can disidentify with their faith in arbitrary conventions, fear will subside. When those individuals realize that we created money and regardless of how much any one person has, they are still the SAME, that society will be markedly Authentic.