Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Refections continued

"People will be together only in a common wretchedness as long as each isolated being refuses to understand that a gesture of liberation, however weak and clumsy it may be, always bears an authentic communication, an adequate personal message." Raoul Vanetgem

Recently I have been thinking about a number of things that open up the question of isolation of people from each other. See this clip from a movie called Waking Life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDWEkzaBULQ Recently I also saw the movie, You, be and Everyone we know. All discuss the process by which we cannot fully connect with the other people around us. Yesterday, I suggested that it might be out of fear which is the mechanism by which this communication is thwarted. But what are its effects on the human potential? That is the question that seems to show up in the praxis of everyday life.

Without others surrounding us and being able to fully connect with us, how can we build any life that is centered on meaning. New Age religion and philosophy may suggest that we look within ourselves to find our own authenticity. Likewise, other philosophers suggests that we look completely out into the world to find our authenticity; however this leads the problem of letting a completely materialistic and false economic system consume the very person we wish to become. The market sees us as a consumer, a simplistic machine that only exists to produce and consume with the intentions of only reproducing again. If we want the real answer for how we find authenticity and break free of the isolation that a post-modern benevolent world creates, I truly think that the only way in which we can find this is simultaneously looking inside and searching ourselves, while also completely immersing ourselves in the people to which the world has to offer.

Without the presence of both of these existences, this understanding crumbles under its own weight. So if we truly want to be human, you know as far as our own striving toward the maximum of human potential we must recognize and endorse the creative acts of all individuals no matter how insignificant they may seem. Things that show the truest forms of complete human identity. We must embrace these acts to truly understand. So much of the time we are asleep, and these acts don't make sense in the context of our narrowly understood roles and situations to which we form our identity. However, if we open our minds to these things. Maybe something beautiful may come out and true community (the one we have been looking for the whole time will arise).

Don't mean to sound like a pessimist, because I am certainly by no means one, but instead. I am optimistic at the reaches that the human potential has in store. When we reach this spot maybe we can be truly happy with ourselves.

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