Self-Portrait II; Auto-Retrato II

Assuming that you and I have looked at ourselves deeply enough to see that our minds are utterly conditioned by the experience of the species as well as our particular cultural and psychological (biographical) experience, it is only natural that we would then ask: “What are we going to do to free ourselves from the strictures and dangers implicit in this rigid predetermination of thought and behavior?”

This question mistakenly assumes a division in the psyche between “me”, a presumably independent executive entity, and the limitations, divisions and conflicts of "my" thought (memory, knowledge and belief). It also errs in assuming a further division between "me" and the atomized general culture that this conditioned thought has imposed on the species as a whole. The question of what to do about the conditioned mind is really asked of externalizing the problem, thus sparing ourselves the shock of realizing, not only that further thinking cannot possibly ever solve the problem of thought, but much more intimately than mere impotence, that there is not such a thing as a personal self standing over and above humanity and the rest of the psyche and capable of significantly changing either one.

The truth is that conditioned thought is all there is. The idea of a separate and independent self is just that, an idea because the self does not exist outside of thought as a general function of the brain. It is then incorrect to say that “I think”, when in reality the “I” is a product of thought in each and everyone of us. In fact, thought guarantees its continuity through the self's illusion of separate existence and its fixed mission to go on forever reforming itself and the world even if nothing but improved forms of sorrow and irrationality result from it.

There are many and profound implications of this shocking perception that there is no distinction that can be made between oneself and a mind/brain bent on reproducing itself through the endless creation of slightly modified versions of fundamentally the same predetermined and cyclical experience of fragmentation, conflict, suffering and false hope. Perhaps the most important of these implications is that there is no more room or time for further thought and further action based on that thought, when it is clear that the disintegrating personal and social reality we live in is the only possible result of a rigidly pre-programmed, self-centered and self-projecting mind, .

A strange question seems to silently pose itself at this point in which the projection of idealized new versions of the self and the world (thought) comes to an end: If thought cannot do anything to solve the psychological, social and ecological problems it has itself created, is there anything else that will? Evidently, any conceptual answer that might emerge would be necessarily based on experience and articulated by thought and, therefore, false. But, again, it is the very perception of the source and intent of thought that acts to gently but firmly eliminate all the contradictory religious, political and scientific alternatives of the past and the present, as well as those that may emerge in the future. The mind that is not attached to anything, the mind that does not know and does not want, hope or strive for anything is a silent and timeless mind, and that mind is already outside the tragic reality forever created and recreated by the violent illusions of egotistical and tribal thought. Now, is that silence truth? Is that timeless emptiness sacred? Is the only possibility for human survival dependent on the ending of the illusion of separate being and becoming? And who could be the one who might tell you?