The dilemma, what is an authentic lived experience, resolves itself when the meaning of being is meaning. Be patient! The issue of neurosis generally and the troubling neurotic behaviors that present themselves as an unhappiness searching for quiet in particular, could well be a rewarding manifestation of Will. There again, if Arthur Schopenhauer is correct, Will is a "blind, restless, metaphysical force that is the inner essence, or the thing-in-itself." This blind, aimless, sub-rational force that throws seamstresses down stairs is very different from Martin Heidegger's Dasein, his specific Human form of Being, existential and reflective which asks the questions of being. Here the meaning of being is meaning, means no more than a blind and unattached individual Dasein finding itself thrust into the world asking and answering those questions of being as it gains both the use of language and experience of the world and as a result makes meaning. For Heidegger, Authentic would be an untroubled lived experience, and neurosis would be an expression of a troubled lived experience that's in the process of making new meaning. So when you ask: "What is an authentic lived experience?" One answer is: "It depends on whether you interpret the World as a Representation of an overarching metaphysical Will, whether that Will has been troubled by reason and design, or whether it remains an undifferentiated blind and irrational source of suffering, and as a result of either one or other of these interpretations you begin to see yourself as a part of the universe? Or, whether you cleave to the notion of Dasein, and see yourself as an individual, a unique and very special living being equipped with a capacity to negotiate a path through a wider process." The next question, which is probably one of those questions Kant suggested our species will never be able to accurately answer is: "which of the above three basic narratives suits our species best?" A lot can be learned from a philosopher and traveller who went by the name John 'Walking' Stewart who was born in the February of 1747 and died in the February of 1822 at the age of 75. He's a big subject and both Baxter and I are much daunted by his mysterious genius, his difficult writing style, his bamboozling use of the double "f" as in the philoffopher mufft bow down to the microffcope, we nonetheless both refuse to call him an eccentric, instead we think of him as a giant, an untrammeled by any formal education independent spirit with a face to match, who met William Wordsworth - of Daffodils while wandering lonely as a Cloud fame - when both men were in Paris during the French Revolution. Worth noting that Walking Steward is a hero in a somewhat rambling, possibly turgid and disjointed, but never schlocky book called the Rabbit of Usk.
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