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the past is unarguably authentic (kind of)

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=================  “Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century. And what is authentic? Anything that is not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that is not controlled by corporations. Anything that exists for its own sake, that assumes its own shape. But of course nothing in the modern world is allowed to assume its own shape. The modern world is the corporate equivalent of a formal garden, where everything is planted and arranged for effect. Where nothing is untouched, where nothing is authentic.  “Where, then, will people turn for the rare and desirable experience of authenticity? They will turn to the past. “The past is unarguably authentic. The past is a world that already existed before all the other shapers of the present day shaped today’s world. The past was here before they were. The past rose and fell before their intrusion and molding and selling. The past is real. It’s authentic. And this will make the past unbelievably attractive.” Michael Crichton ====================== Well. I am not a past guy and I believe “authentic” is one of those words that is currently being abused in a variety of definition-type ways, but, I would offer a reminder to everyone that if you want something authentic it is actually the past <I will expound on that in a minute>. Let’s just say that it always surprises me a little when people start bitching about the other people who seem to be yearning for the past. While I am certainly not a past-yearner lets’ see what a past yearner sees: Everything is uncertain in today’s world. You have no idea who to trust. There is a struggle to trust anything. Facts seem to no longer be black & white Truth now has an alternative version. Common sense doesn’t seem common. Opinions look much like facts & facts get confused with opinions. Simple, or simplification, doesn’t seem that simple anymore. Add in that all of those things are occurring in a world in which we are increasingly encouraging people to think of everything as “all or nothing” <a zero-sum world>. This all drives a lot of people to find any fucking semi-solid lily pad to stand on that they can find. And what seems solid, seems certain, and seems authentic, well, is the past. Ok. That said. On to my ‘expounding’ comment. No. We may not remember the past well or correctly. In fact <research> we typically do not remember it correctly <choosing to remember the things we like & discarding the things we don’t want to remember>. Yet, in our minds, how we do remember it is as certain as anything can be in this world. *** note: Daniel Kahneman discusses this in “the riddle of experience versus memory.” And, yeah, aspects of this can be skewed into a generational/age thing if you wanted. In a world of increasing uncertainty the young, who have less to hold on to with ragged claws & look forward to ditching a lot of the existing shit so they can develop their own shit, leave the past behind <sometimes flippantly> . In a world of increasing uncertainty the old, well, they hang on with ragged claws to the only thing they know to be true, certain & authentic. i.e., the past. But, suffice it to say, how we view the past goes beyond age <although age can exacerbate the issue>. There is seeing and … well … seeing. And there is a vast difference between the two. Frederick Franck in “Zen Seeing/Zen Drawing” argues: “The glaring contrast between seeing and looking-at the world around us is immense; it is fateful. Everything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing. We have become addicted to merely looking-at things and beings. The more we regress from seeing to looking at the world — through the ever-more-perfected machinery of viewfinders, TV tubes, VCRs, microscopes, spectroscopes — the less we see. The less we see, the more numbed we become to the joy and the pain of being alive, and the further estranged we become from ourselves and all others.” Well. That is a discouraging thought. He is basically suggesting that once we get on the slippery slope of ‘not seeing’ we very quickly enter, and stay, in this miserable abyss of blindness. He may be right. But I would rather believe he is not. I would prefer to believe seeing, really seeing, is a discriminating decision made by you and not the world around you. I would like to believe if we chose we could see the past with open eyes, open mind, open heart, with open to unapologetic attention. This is about not really looking for something in particular just being ready and receptive to whatever happens around you and in front of you. And by not seeking anything in particular <because that inhibits true seeing> you end up, as someone wrote somewhere ‘… by your own eyes you will see, and there will be a conclusion.’ What that means is you don’t see based on your own ideas <or belief system>, but rather you see based on … well … what you see. Hey. I am not suggesting this is easy. I am simply suggesting that you can do it if you elect to. If it helps, we partially have evolution to blame on why I can say what I am saying to you: …. evolution’s problem-solving left us modern humans with two kinds of attention: vigilance, which allows us to have a quick and life-saving fight-or-flight response to an immediate threat, be it a leaping lion or a deranged boss, and selective attention, which unconsciously curates the few stimuli to attend to amidst the flurry bombarding us, enabling us to block out everything except what we’re interested in ingesting. (Selective attention, of course, can mutate to dangerous degrees, producing such cultural atrocities as the filter bubble.) Ah. The ‘filter bubble.’ the filter bubble — by definition, it’s populated [...]

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