Made in Authenticity

By Renee Shay, Harvesting Thought

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Human beings host the capacity to spend their lives craving something outside themselves to fill themselves up more than any other known organism ever to inhabit the planet Earth.  Even after their basic needs are met, they still crave more of anything one can imagine.  They will also go to great lengths to seek the opposite of craving something, which is to crave nothing.  Is it an innate hunger that is irrelevant in modern time?  A residual fragment of basic survival woven into our DNA which we are incapable of shutting off? 

What is this internal switch in our bodies which keeps us engaged sometimes just enough to fill our needs but more often than not, causes us to consume so much that we wastefully overflow, having no control of it, not wanting or knowing how to stop?  Some humans will even sacrifice one need over the other because the one need is a greater hunger to them than the other.  Addictions from wanting more can take hold to the point of insanity or death.  Humans are capable of destroying everything in their world, consuming beyond any rational need, just to ruin the very vessel they are seeking to fill, oneself. 

This quandary we humans find ourselves having to grapple with can be traced as far back through any oral or written stories archived throughout the history of mankind.  Societies were formed and religions were built by man, such as Roman Catholicism, with a feeble attempt to find answers that would help them control the want of man but to no end they have failed.  We appear to have no capacity to turn off this hunger to consume and no one has yet to give us the answer on how to turn it off. 

I find it fascinating that this great consumption leads us to other challenges and interesting phenomenon.  It is not enough to have something; we must have the “best” of whatever the something is we crave.  First, we have the want, then we must want for the best, then we go to great links to get it.  All the wars of the world have been fought due to quests for more and more.  As if that is not enough, we have these cravings for certain types of “more.”

We place value on goods and services depending upon the materials they were made from, on who made them and where they were made.  I understand that two things can have different quality depending upon the material used to create them but what about other things like, who made it, why, when and where?  Why do we put the greatest meaning, pay the highest price, based upon intrinsic value?  What if an item had no tag on it to describe these things? 

We do leave the big questions up to the anthropologists and archaeologists of the world through radiocarbon dating and other scientific means of determining an objects origin but during our everyday lives, should we not be doing the same thing?

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Just as the conundrum of human habituality can be traced back to the origins of man, so too can it be traced back to as far as one can recall.  Why did some of us care about whether we took a nap on a mat or rug in kindergarten, or how many crayons we had in our pack in second grade or what cartoon characters we had on our lunch boxes in fourth grade?  Why is it that we would spend our allowances as young adolescents on a certain type of shoe like Nike or a certain type of jeans like Guess or Levi’s?  Would I have wanted to wear Wrangler jeans in high school instead if I had grown up in Montana verses Wisconsin?  Does wearing Wranglers make you feel more like a cowboy than Levi’s?  The very association of a place with a piece of clothing and an assumption like being a cowboy because of it, that combination is exactly what I am talking about.  If you are from Montana, you must be a cowboy, right? 

We humans are unconsciously making judgements about a person because of what type of things each one consumes.  It is fascinating how the things in our lives we choose to want, to consume, transcend their face value to such a degree that we often do not stop to think about it.

From a young age I had a sense of adventure and want of rare discoveries just as many human beings seem to have.  Whether a novice explorer searching in her travels across the North American continent or a scientist from across the globe, we humans go to great lengths to discover things. 

Whether it is the anthropologist in us that wishes to be the first to discover an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon or an Egyptian Archeologist digging in the dirt on their hands and knees for years to be the one to discover the oldest artifacts of past civilizations, we humans are explorers.  I believe this is important to state, there should be limits to our search for that next great thing. 

I was recently Googling the latitude and longitude of pyramids wondering at what point in the Earth’s history did the tectonic plates of Africa and North America disconnect.  If our species existed at that time, did we have to decide which side to stay on or did we have no choice, we came afterward and arrived here in the America’s by way of sea or the Bering Land Bridge?  

I am curious about the past, but I do not believe we have to raid tombs in Egypt just to say we found something in a tomb.  Let the dead be dead, we have no right to disturb them.  There is a point where it no longer becomes a discovery and just becomes exploitation.  We have to have boundaries in our quests, desecrating burial sites is one of them for me.

Having been raised up with the dogma of Catholicism forced upon me, am I to just blame Adam and forget about it, go through my life not questioning why we humans desire more and often a specific kind, an authentic kind of more?  Is the very fact of chasing more knowledge about wanting more in itself lending to the victimization of the very thing I attempt to explain? 

What about that specific kind of more, the desire to accumulate certain original things, to possess authentic items, and the desire to place different values on things because of their origins?  Is one sarcophagus more valuable than another because of its material and age?  Is it not just a coffin for a dead human, why does it matter to some of us?

Adam, who desired something more after being warned by a serpent (snakes talked?) to not take more, the one who did not listen and took something out of curiosity verses need when he already had everything he needed, is he really to blame?  That religion who raised the questions about why a human would want more, then they answered with their biblical stories of Adam, believe that mankind is now punished for this original sin. 

Humans have even gone so far as to create a completely opposite solution for their predicament of craving beyond basic needs.  The religion of Buddhism is founded on the notion that desire is the true reason behind all our suffering, and if you rid yourself of desire, it will lead you to nirvana. 

There are some among us that devote their entire lives to the pursuit of mastering nothingness.  If it was so normal to want nothing, why then do you have to be a monk sequestered in the mountains of Tibet, making a conscious choice to fulfill only your basic needs to survive, hidden away from temptation derived from societal interaction with other humans for an entire lifetime in order to achieve peace or a higher state of being a human? 

Although I do have a fondness for the simplicity of Buddhism and what it has to offer oneself, I do not believe I will find the answers to my questions in the opposite direction of the religion I was raised into, then what?

In religious man-made stories of Adam and Eve, humans’ quest for knowledge may have been innocent enough in the beginning, but the result that we are still left with thousands of years later has continued to be used to keep society and any desires that may deviate from what they perceive as acceptable, under their control.  They actually were devious enough to blame their own caricature of man, molded from clay in the likeness of their God, for their own failings. 

As a result of them stopping their quest for knowing why humans crave things more than they need and archived their believes in a book they call the Bible as if they were penned by the hand of their God, because of that, we in modern time still suffer from their theological incompetence.

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It is true that we place value on people, places and things based on where they had originated from.  We will pay exorbitant amounts of money, even value things so valuable that there is no price high enough to be paid for that resource, so worthy that it is not worth any amount of gold, fiat, or cryptocurrency to have it in our possession.  It has such a high intrinsic value to us that it is undeserving of a human’s monetary yardstick. 

The slave-labored Chinese people create affordable things for the world under a Communist regime.  We consume these products made from slaves so that we can afford to surround ourselves with luxuries beyond what we would need to live happy and free here in America.  Who are we to buy into and say that something from China should have less value than something with a label that says Made in Italy or more ironically, Made in America? 

If we stop consuming in protest for the treatment of the Chinese people, then do we make it even harder for them to exist?  Do we just take the label off and forget where it came from?  We are politically, culturally, spiritually and socially manipulated by norms we ourselves do not even take the time to understand.  Remember, it starts happening before infants are even able to speak.  They know the difference between the arms of their mother than that of a stranger. 

How does a blanket get any warmer if a sheep wool and a cotton’s thread was used to weave it but just because of what the label says on it, we purchase and will pay more for one over the other thinking it is better?  How does a ceramic cup that is incapable of holding more water than its capacity, if made from Earth’s clay in India be more or less valuable than if made from Chinese soil?  How does the toil of one woman’s hand become more valuable than the toil of a man-made machine when a man’s hand made the machine? 

Man is not separate from nature, man is nature.  How does a label on a product communicate to us that we should place a certain value on it, depending upon its origin?  What assumptions do we find ourselves making to suggest that China’s wool, clay and water are inferior to that of another country?  Is not wool, sheared from a sheep, just wool?  Is not clay, just clay?  Is not water that has risen from Mother Earth or delivered here by some celestial being, just water?

This is mine, not yours, that is yours not mine, that is his, not theirs, that is hers not his, mines better than yours, his is better than hers.  Competition for each other, for resources, are themes as old as nature itself, that run through the course of our lives, not only humans, but all of nature, from the origin of the universe, its infancy thread through each step and breath of our lives and taken to our graves and beyond.  It is as expansive as the Big Bang, creating and consuming galaxies, anything that stands in its way.  If it is built into our DNA to seek more, then what, can we escape it? 

Would a monk be a monk if not for already having their four basic needs, air, water, food, and sleep taken care of?   We are born hungry.  We seek air, water, food and sleep from our first breath, destined to spend the rest of our lives breathing in and out, seeking these basic elements of survival and more, misguidedly searching for more.  Just as a child seeks the comfort and safety of their mother’s bosom, so too do we thirst for nurture from people, and search for meaning in the places and things we seek to consume. 

A human being born in Tikal, Guatemala, or Lima, Peru, were born in the Americas, those are facts that no man-made border can dispute.  What we all make on this land in our modern time is as worthy as something that was made by an ancestral aboriginal human whose family happened to arrive year tens of thousands of years before mine did. 

A quilt my God Mother Aunt Ruth Ann gave me, which she had made with her own two hands and that of another to help finish it, is so deeply cherished by me I could never put a monetary value on it.  Understanding why she took the time to make it for me is the most important thing I need to know about the quilt, that is the value of it.

A dreamcatcher made from the hands of a Native American has a great cultural significance but what about one made from just an American, am I too not native to this land I was born on?  I fall victim to seeing the difference as I was taught to, but should I?  I have an entrenched spiritual connection to the ethnicity of Native American’s, I mean no offense but I must believe each humans artistic expression can hold value beyond the materials used to create something and the race of the person who made it.

We have lost nothing in our life here on Earth if we realize that in our pursuit for things beyond our basic needs to survive, we will gain all the riches of the world if we seek to understand why we want or need something.  Value is derived from the understanding that all things a human being creates are natural, even machine-made things, even though they did not grow on a tree like an apple, we made them with materials from the Earth, they are natural, we are nature. 

Seeking the intrinsic value of a thing, not the monetary value we or someone else places on it, is so much more valuable to us if we take the time to look past the label and truly understand what was at the heart of the human who created it.  We may very well be saving someone’s life if we choose to purchase something from another country or another culture, then if we purchase something from our own.  We should seek to understand the difference, we should seek to understand authenticity.

Photo credit – Renee Shay [Dreamcatcher by Otana]