PREAMBLE

Ø     A human being generally knows herself as such through her identification with a given set of widely recognizable psychological and cultural determinants, themselves inscribed within a larger sense of shared humanity. These determinants of individuality include, very prominently, the particular historical and ideological traditions with which the person is identified and within which he or she thinks. Thus, if someone were to ask: Who is so and so; or, more directly, who are you? The answer would certainly include references to the natural and cultural groups to which the person belongs; groups such as historical time, gender, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, occupation, political party, social and economic class, religious faith, and so on. Because a person’s different and evolving sources of cultural affiliation, both secular and religious, shape much of her identity, they also have a huge influence on her action and relationships in the world. Additional mention of significant physical traits, personality characteristics, important events in her past life and future expectations, will further flesh out the general portrait that emerges in response to the question of anyone’s identity.

If spoken, someone’s psychological profile may sound something like this: “Oh, yes I know Blaise. His full name is Blaise Devunas Carpin. He is a black man from Senegal born in 1954 to middle class parents who were both teachers. He is himself middle-middle class and somewhat past middle age. He has been married to Michiko Sakamoto from Japan since he was very young. They have two grown children. Blaise went to the university in England and now works as an draftsman for an architectural firm in Ontario, Canada. He is a former Christian who converted to Buddhism (Tibetan tradition) while experiencing a mid-life crisis a few years ago. He has moderately liberal views in politics and is interested in theater and African folk music. Blaise lives in a fairly modest house and his life style could be described as austere, even though he has a weakness for expensive sports cars. He owns two of them. I have been told by a co-worker of his that Blaise has a taciturn temperament that may turn violent if crossed. All too often he is treated as a stranger on account of his race, religion and nationality, and he deeply resents it when it happens. He is presently looking into the possibility of earning a second degree because he would like to make a bit more money in the future. Increased foreign travel and gaining greater access to a larger and more interesting group of friends, are also very much in his mind. He tells me that he does have enough friends now (other than his wife, me and maybe one more person), and that he would like to share with others what he knows, believes and loves.”

This little caricature of an imaginary character is drawn, first of all, in order to elicit an early emergence of your own complex psychological profile which will be in high demand as you dive further into this book. It is also here to help introduce two extremely important features of the psychological reality of the human being that will appear again and again in the pages that follow. The first is that no one can possibly provide a clear notion of who she is intrinsically; that is, without reference to anything else. A human being only knows herself, and can only present herself to others, by referring to images and ideas about her past, present and future. And others can only see and get to know her through the images and ideas they themselves have formed about her based, to a great extent, on judgments issued by their own experience and knowledge. The fact is that we do not exist (psychologically) as anything other than images and ideas representing particular collections of memories, attachment and desires.
The other essential psychological feature that you will come to often while reading this book, is that the definition we make of ourselves on the basis of images and ideas, necessarily creates a hidden and restricted mental sanctuary with a thick defensive wall dividing life into two different and mutually exclusive fields: “Me” and “Not-Me.” I am who I am because I am not who you (and most others) are; and, conversely, others are who they are because they are not who “I” am. We are also generally conceive of ourselves as apart and different from everything else around us. Of course, we relate to certain people and certain things, but otherwise live our separate lives quite separately, all similarly locked in our own thoughts, feelings, projects, clans and tribes. And life itself ―the life that cradles all our particular lives― does not generally deserve much of our attention. For most of us the totality of life is, if anything, just the general stage where the all-important roles that describe and consume our personal lives get played.
It is because different subjective biographical memories and particular cultural associations and disassociations condition the mind and determine the actions of every human being, that we are unable to go beyond chronic problems of relationship. And this is also why humanity as a whole (humanity as the sum total of our relationships at any given point in time) has always been and still remains in such a disorderly and conflictive state. We are all born into this fractured and antagonistic psychological and cultural reality and we generally live, struggle and die within it without ever asking if there might be an entirely different way of being in the world.

It is quite common for us to conceive and implement gradual and partial remedial actions in reference to particular psychological or sociological problems. However, since they address particular symptoms and not the root of the problem, our secular or religious reactions to personal and social problems are never fully efficient or sufficient. The conflictive isolation intrinsic to our personal and tribal reality is so pervasive that, regardless of the disorder and suffering it generates, it is hardly ever detected, let alone questioned and decisively dealt with. The entire history of the species could be told as the chronic failure of different and often contradictory cultural solutions given to common human problems. Given that our presumed solutions are incapable of challenging the provincial insularity of the human heart and mind, it is through them that we condemn ourselves to lives of perennial pseudo-reform and just as perennial intrapsychic and relational conflict. We have become tragically habituated to the psychological and cultural distance that separates us from others, and are far too comfortable with the endemic antagonism and sorrow that interminably flows from it. In fact, we are each so identified with our particular mental and cultural reality that we generally do not ask whether or not the appalling quality of life and death this general mindset presupposes for every human being that may ever live, is the only possible mode of human existence.

There is a powerful taboo barring any challenge to the sense of isolated existential reality that is claimed on the basis of biographical memory and identification with particular fragments of an atomized human culture. And there is an even greater taboo blocking the initiative that, in response to this challenge, could be taken by individual human beings so as to somehow free themselves from such harmful psychological and cultural programming. And it is exactly these taboos that this collection of brief essays intends to expose and break.

To be sure, this radical questioning of the self is not in any way motivated by belief in a predetermined alternative reality that must be accepted on faith. Thus, you will find in these pages nothing in any way resembling the traditional notions of immortality through resurrection, reincarnation, or fame, illusions that are but different forms of the same general type of wishful thinking that conditions the human mind. The self is questioned not to find a worldly or otherworldly improvement of it, but rather because one can no longer continue taking for granted the generally accepted, though mostly hidden, premise that the sole possible ground of human existence is personal consciousness existing within the protective embrace of exclusive tribal traditions. And this unwillingness to go on unquestioningly complying with social and personal habits comes, in turn, from the simple fact that the suffering of humanity and our chronic incapacity to solve the problems that generate this suffering, can be readily traced to billions of largely isolated and conflictive instances of self-projective personal existence. Put simply, if everything that disturbs, afflicts and threatens humanity (personally and collectively) is the result of an alienated and self-serving human psyche based on exclusive memories, attachments and desires, why do we so doggedly insist in being who each one of us says we are, personally and tribally? There is obviously something terribly wrong with the whole thing.

Humanity has questioned its endemic division, conflict and suffering since the very beginning of history, but unfortunately the different interpretations and answers given at different points in space and time to the problem of being human, have all hardened into the psychological and ideological barriers still separating and antagonizing billions and billions of individual human beings today. The particularly critical situation we presently face and that results from the growing convergence of several extremely dangerous variables (demographic, technological, geopolitical, sociological, and ecological), makes more urgent than ever the need to launch radically independent and open inquiries into what is keeping each one of us trapped inside the tight and barren space of our own respective personal and tribal experience and knowledge. A keen awareness of their very reason for being forces these inquiries to begin by deliberately setting aside all sources of psychological and ideological identification creating our separation from one another and the division within our own minds. This abandonment of tradition at the very onset of the inquiry naturally implies not justifying the latter on the basis of new goals and methodologies meant to stimulate future psychological development and new instances of social reform or revolution. Things are as bad as they are in our own lives and in the world at large because we remain psychologically and tribally alienated and at odds with each other through the very process of independently struggling to improve ourselves and our circumstances. We begin, then, by rejecting out of hand the notion that a solution to all that is ailing us as individuals and as a species may ever come from further instances of exclusive and, therefore, necessarily superficial psychological development and social reform. If a total solution to the problem of being human exists at all, it must be one that breaks the self-centered continuity of human experience and, evidently, such a solution cannot possibly be one borne by thought.

This book was written in response to a deeply felt urge to independently investigate, in my own life and mind, the general causes for the loneliness, conflict and suffering I experience in myself and in my relationship with others. The same loneliness, conflict and suffering that I see also wrecking the minds and lives of untold millions of fellow human beings, near and far. Consequently, reading its pages will be especially useful to those who share the same sense of urgent responsibility and the same inclination to question themselves. It is really quite simple. Anyone who is at all aware of the strange fact of unyielding psychological and cultural alienation, will inevitably come to question the sense of separate being and becoming with which he himself helps sustain the phenomenon of conflictive human division that is at the source of all human sorrow.
The quickening suicidal impulse that seems to be increasingly gripping the species as a whole, is obviously related to this isolation that we all help sustain in one another with our absurdly selfish fears, hatreds, claims and ambitions, and with the provincial enmities and alliances that further consolidate our respective identities. And if regular people like you and I (equally minuscule cells in a desperately ill organism) do not do something radical about all this, who will?

Now, an approach to the human problem that begins by rejecting all sectarian (secular and religious) approaches, may appear to many as insufferably arrogant. Those who are strongly identified with different forms of ideological consensus, will be especially prone to take offense, or be confused by, a call to disregard the experience and knowledge that the species has accumulated over thousands and thousands of years. They may find especially galling the invitation to do so on behalf of an act of independent responsibility lacking a defined future goal. But if you find yourself disillusioned by traditional approaches and objectives and, therefore, intrigued by the possibility of seeing yourself and the world factually and through your own eyes, you may want to suspend judgment long enough to verify that the challenge issued by this book is not just an empty iconoclastic gesture. The intent is not to simply trash the beliefs and efforts of others, but rather to propose that only an a priori personal rejection of all possible sources of divisive psychological identification can possibly free the mind from its conditioning, and thus help bring an end to the suffering of humanity.
It is easy to see why someone who is, let us say, convinced that some god, principle or achievement will ultimately redeem his soul and heal his suffering in this life or a future one, would have little incentive to question personal identity; let alone see as an equal someone whose own sense of personal existence is buttressed by a different but equally divisive belief. It is only when all sources of past, present or future personal identification are clearly seen as creating the division and the conflict we all suffer from, that there is a chance that this process of self-centered thought may come to end, thus freeing the mind from the narrow-mindedness that creates, constitutes and sustains the self.
In this crucial matter of self-awareness there is no time lapse. The end is paradoxically at the beginning. And, so, what is called for is an extremely alert and eager mind willing to instantly negate all ideological identification and capable of immediately blocking any gradual process of exclusive ―and, therefore, illusory― personal transformation. The challenge before us implies seeing that there is no such a thing as a comparatively better source of personal identification and more or less efficient methods to go from misery to happiness or from egotism to selflessness. Our particular time-bound processes of personal improvement are just the way in which the species-wide stream of self-centered thought sustains itself, day after day and generation after generation. Separation, conflict and suffering will never come to an end through the attainment by the self of special knowledge and better experience, even if certified by the most truthful tradition and the most righteous authority. Are we condemned to embody to the bitter end the psychological entity that grants itself separate existence and a false sense of importance and security through what it remembers, knows and desires in opposition to others and to life itself? The only truly significant question we face is whether or not there is an unthinkably different mode of human existence.

Antidote to Self-Steam follows on the wake of Seeing Blindness, another collection of brief essays published in 2008 and similarly written to help both the reader and the writer question, on the basis of our respective personal and cultural reality, whether or not personal/tribal consciousness represents our only possible way of being in the world. The essays making up this collection are like narrow little roads coming from many different directions and presenting different degrees of difficulty, but leading to the same inescapable psychological and cultural territory. They were written more or less in the order in which they are presented and numbered. However, since there is no linear and cumulative way to see ourselves and the world factually and completely, it is up to the reader to proceed in whatever order she sees fit.
You will find in the text as a whole a certain amount of redundancy that can only be justified by taking into consideration the general resilience of our psychological defenses. A battering ram would betray its purpose if synchronized to the beat of a Chopin waltz. Some may find this reiteration of certain themes and perceptions useful in gaining some essential insight, while others may come to the same perception almost immediately without having had to look repeatedly or through all the different optics offered here. To be sure, the degree of redundancy and the variety of available lenses in this book only attests to the agility and thickness of the author’s defenses and the opacity of his own mind.

Section I

Ø     Those who are deeply discontent and, yet, no longer striving for contentment through multiple distractions and occupations (including religious disciplines promising otherworldly gains), are left alone to confront a very dismal picture. Not many seem to have the wide perspective or the inclination necessary to witness the increasingly rapid convergence of destructive psychological, cultural and ecological variables threatening, not just the relative well-being of those who are still living lives of relative ease and security, but the very survival of the human species as a whole. This dangerous global situation did not take shape overnight. A very long history of deep ideological division, social and economic injustice, ecological irresponsibility and the use of violent means of repression, has lead to our present global crisis. However it would be misleading to blame the sequence of historical events occurring in chronological time for the particular configuration of irresponsible cultural division, injustice and violence afflicting us today. The most destructive components of the human condition have their source, at every point in space and time, in each particular human mind conditioned by exclusive cultural sources of identity and unquestioningly satisfying its voracious appetite for personal fulfillment by complying with the methods and goals these exclusive identity sources prescribe. The long historical countenance of humanity and our personal responsibility for its ugly reality today (and its potential for a disastrous future tomorrow), cannot be accurately perceived, let alone be radically altered, if we insist on looking through the aberrant optics of personal and cultural preference. In other words, the dire circumstances in which our species presently finds itself, cannot be properly seen if we are still looking at ourselves and the world with the particular bias of a fully committed and stringently defended personal narrative ensconced within a larger cultural tall tale at odds with most others like it. Still more succinctly: accurate and complete perception of the human condition demands from every one of us a radical act of self-abnegation that necessarily begins by discarding all psychological and cultural blinders.
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In their attitude towards the plight of the species as a whole, human beings seem to cluster around a few points strung along a continuum capped at one end by total disregard for human suffering and total concern, at the other. There is, first, a huge group of people who in their lack of interest and/or lack of access to information about current global challenges, are simply unaware of the species as a whole, let alone of what may be presently threatening its well-being and its odds of survival. Then there is another very large group of people who do acknowledge the presence of endemic psycho-moral, social and environmental problems that threaten both individuals and entire societies, but who believe that such threat is not anything that their good gods and their dedicated religious or spiritual practices could not resolve in this life, or the next.
Still another group is made up by individuals informed about at least some of the challenges facing humanity or their particular societies, and also willing to do something to respond to them. But, this, strictly within the reform parameters determined by their respective cultures and their own personal inclinations, skill sets, needs and ambitions. They are both secular and religious people representing an enormous variety of professions, trades and degrees of activism, and generally working within a multitude of governmental and private organizational frameworks. They tackle different problems at different levels; are supplied with resources, methodologies and technologies of very different quality and quantity; and guided by very different and often contradictory, if not opposed, ideologies.
In a group apart fall the military types. They are the folks who rely on violence to straighten out disagreements emerging between different cultural tribes. They come armed with a whole array of deadly techniques and weapons, and are trained and ready to kill or be killed, “legally,” for the claims and principles of the nations, organizations and faiths that grant their identity and sponsor their participation in war, insurgence or revolution.
The thoughts, attitudes and behavior of the people who make up the groups crudely drawn above, are responsible for the general status quo of humanity. If willing to see beyond its obvious limitations, even this simplistic image of our species may help us see that unless individuals everywhere assume responsibility for breaking out of the rigid mentality presently determining our dysfunctional thought and behavior, the mental health and the quality of life of billions of human beings will continue to decline with consequences that are hard to imagine. Are common, well-meaning individuals willing and able to gain full awareness of the divisive conditioning of our minds, the absurdity of our lives and the poor quality of our relationship with others and with life as a whole? And, is this perception of who we are capable of undoing our personal identification with separate and antagonistic groups and ideologies so that a free, intelligent and caring human being may emerge as the only possible solution to everything that is ailing us?
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The entire history of our presence on this planet has been shaped by a sustained effort to both attain and resist cultural form. And the dangerous circumstances we live in today represent both, the culmination of this historical effort to take and endlessly improve separate and exclusive cultural forms, as well as the launching pad for its continuation in the future through our own personal thoughts, fears and projections. Whether operating through abrupt revolution or gradual reform, the capacity for change of the species as a whole, has never even come near the point at which no further reform would be necessary. That is, all the structural or organizational change we have been able to affect over the ages, has really not touched the deeper psychological causes underlying all our intractable personal and social problems and, especially, our conflictive separation from one another. Even though our general knowledge and technological prowess has increased dramatically in the last few centuries, the substance (if not the appearance) of our ancient psychological, interpersonal and social problematic has remained fundamentally the same. After thousands and thousands of years of presumed progress, humanity remains as fractured, antagonistic and destructive as it ever was; and this, essentially, because at the most intimately personal level we have also remained fundamentally the same. We have never stopped being mentally isolated, secretly egotistical and, therefore, confused, fearful, troubled and, overtly or covertly, violent. We have never gone beyond our dependency from particular cultural ideologies, their institutional structures, and the paths they prescribe and that we trust with eventually delivering, exclusively for “us,” what we all commonly desire. We have, instead, generally remained devoted to narrowly personal or tribal efforts through which we hope secure the happiness, “freedom” or salvation we feel we deserve. This, even when we realize that this hope and these efforts necessarily imply constant conflict with others who have chosen different and contradictory paths. And not just conflict with others, but also with ourselves as a result of the unsolvable tension between who we actually are and the demands of a theoretical future self realization. What we have effectively done is bar from our thoughts and conversations serious consideration of what, if anything, could actually terminate our conflictive separation from one another within a given group or society, as well as bridge the even larger distance separating “us” from people gathered within different consensual enclaves. Generally, we no longer feel there is anything that could ever bring harmony to our relationship with life as a whole, even though that harmony might well be the natural state of the human mind were it not broken up and conflicted by its irrational identification with personal and tribal experience.

We find it extremely hard to admit to the stupidity and danger of our robotic egotism and are hardly aware that it creates the fractious world we all live in. To see accurately and completely who we really are is upsetting. It may also disrupt familiar attachments and dissolve hypocritical alibis. Our usually proud commitment to the personal narrative with which we each identify and the very intensity of the dedication to our families, clans and tribes, serves to disable the mental acuity necessary to see the conflictive cultural fragmentation of the species that is created by the sum total of our exclusive personal commitments. And not to see the atomization of the species and our personal contribution to it, is to blind ourselves to the countless minds and lives crushed in the grind of human history endlessly lurching forward, fundamentally unchanged, from one generation to the next.

Even when relatively aware of what goes on in our minds and lives and, by extension, in the world at large, many of us still avert our eyes from the real significance of our egotistic provincialism. To escape inescapable facts, avoid the threat of despair and the pain of social rejection, we look instead toward whatever form of vain hope may best suit our fears and ambitions. And in the false sanctuaries offered by activism in certain social and cultural causes, or in merely trusting that others better suited to the task will manage to guide the sinking ship into the imagined safety of some predictable harbor, we also lose sight of the fact that hope is multiple and contradictory, just like we are. The savagery, hidden or manifest, with which different countries, groups and individuals treat each other, feeds on the energy with which we all cling on to conflicted and conflictive identities and their attendant hopes.
Similarly, much of our mental morass and irresponsible procrastination is rooted in that while we may sincerely want to change in idealistic ways, we also want to continue being and doing who we actually are and are actually doing. This internal contradiction dulls our minds and zaps our energy. It is also a permanent source of conflict with and dependence on others. The lier who is actively trying to learn how to tell the truth, is merely lying to himself and continuing to lie to others. Future psychological goals mean nothing, they merely serve to continue dulling our minds and upsetting our lives with toxic behavior wrapped in deception and fantasy. Change is instantaneous and complete or it is no change at all. And in this context “instantaneous and complete” means that the change that is needed is not related to the quality or quantity of the accumulated and self-projective knowledge that constitutes personal consciousness and the particular cultural shelf on which the self stands. Only a definitive termination of the impetus for exclusive, gradual and therefore false reform with which this personal and tribal knowledge maintains itself, constitutes real change.
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What to do, then? What is an ordinary but decent person to do when faced with the fact that everything s/he is, stands for and does is, in fact, contributing to the general disorder of the human species and contributing to what may well be a suicidal
drive towards the impossible future created by everyone's projection of personal and tribal hopes for “more and better”?
Well, the first thing not to do is avoid the challenge or succumb to terminal depression. Both of these reactions merely guarantee a self-indulgent preservation of the same general mindset playing endless tricks in order to preserve itself. Self-centered thought will do just about anything to block the quality of impersonal and passive attention that is necessary to see everything that needs to be seen about the self and world. As mentioned before, whatever protects and sustains our personal sense of psychological and cultural uniqueness, impedes the possibility of seeing, in oneself, the consequences of the conditioned mentality of humanity. And, this, for the simple reason that such insight would blast away our petty certainties, pleasures and sorrows, and turn the mind's eye towards the mystery of the wholeness of life that lies well beyond what we each remember, know and covet.
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Our minds have in thought an extremely powerful tool to reason into and out of just about any practical problem. However, this extraordinary faculty to learn and to think without which we might not have survived early challenges to our presence on the planet, at some point assumed a particular personal identity that gradually came to see itself as a separate and relatively autonomous act of existence. In other words, the objective, impersonal, capacity to think and thus develop ingenious tools and systems capable of satisfying the fundamental needs of the organism, became self-reflective, and in that single event the natural human capacity to attend to the fundamental needs of the physical organism, extended itself into the unnatural desire to protect and expand the psychological claims of the separate self. Needless to say, the roots of the suffering of humanity and of every crisis we are currently confronted with, lies in the presumed separate existence of the self and its very real sense of psychological insecurity. There is nothing new about the problem of gradually self-reforming egotism living in the broken up world it endlessly creates and recreates with its fear, violence and greed. We have suffered it for thousands of years. Isolated and self projecting egotism is the source of all our mental and relational problems, and we have never found the way to yank it out of the soil of the mind because of the high cost involved. Given that we are the problem, its solution implies our demise.

Once existentially alienated from life and from one another by a particular identity based on exclusive knowledge and guided by its intrinsic anxiety and overcompensating ambition, much of the force of our expansive capacity to think was used for the protection and aggressive growth of our respective psyches ensconced within the self-validating cocoons of clan and tribe. These cultural forms that with their strength in numbers and smart division of labor offered initial protection against animal predators and other forces of nature, soon had to defend themselves against other similar forms, and not just in the struggle over scarce food and other material resources. From very early on human groups made distinct by their accumulated experience (their tradition), their material possessions, their cultural and “spiritual” claims and their power hungry chieftains and leaders, harassed, exploited and attacked one another. And, behold, we are still doing exactly the same. In a similar fashion, the self-reflective human being sought early on to buttress his psyche through protective inclusion within the fold of a larger and more powerful social and ideological enclosure. And, behold, we are still doing exactly the same. After thousands and thousands of years of presumed progress we remain hopelessly divided through our constant identification with particular sources of biographical and cultural knowledge and security. This knowledge and this false sense of exclusive security is all we have ever had, and it is all we have ever been. It divisiveness, its intrinsic limitation and its mechanical self-projection, is the source of our misery yesterday, today and tomorrow.

It is then absurd to go on struggling to improve ourselves and our groups of reference if the much deeper and general problem of conflictive psychological and cultural division remains untouched. And, yet, superficial and partial personal and social modifications are, generally, all we are ever willing to do. How can we bring our common psychological isolation and cultural division to an end? There is no how. The question of method is merely the request for yet another source of identity in exclusive consensual knowledge and false security; another dilatory detour that will allow the self-centered psyche to reconstitute itself along with other similarly minded psyches in eager transit from a worn-out identity and an uncomfortable consciousness to presumably better ones. The self is a species-wide phenomenon of ossified biographical and tribal experience projecting itself onto the future by means of false hopes and idealized images of itself. In its existential separation and through the on-going defense and attack maneuvers with which it maintains itself, the self is the source of the general tragedy of humanity. Thus, the end of the self-centered thought is the only possible end of suffering. That is what needs to be seen and all the necessary action is in the seeing. (1)

Ø     Any desire for fame, wealth, power, or moral/“spiritual” standing is fueled by an universally felt and impossible to overcome insufficiency that, if allowed into the light of day would demolish the illusion of personal uniqueness and nearly unlimited potential that we all claim for ourselves. Regardless of relative standing in the wild chase after success, privilege, liberation or salvation of one sort or another, the common emptiness at the source of our also common craving, provides irrefutable proof of the superficiality and ultimate irrelevance of our material, cultural and psychological distinctions and aspirations. For as long as we continue to struggle against one another attempting to prove and expand our personal and tribal sense of superiority or even just uniqueness, we also continue to blind ourselves to the fact that the artificiality of our psychological existence is, not only the root cause of our suffering, but an impassable wall barring the plenitude of life from charitably overwhelming ours. (2)

Ø     When it comes to personal change or development, choice is harmful not only because any such choice is necessarily still extracted from the same bag of limited experience and collected knowledge ―the observer judging himself and others and wanting to become better― but also because it presumes a real separation and substantial difference between the two, the observer and the observed, where there is none. And so we ask, can there be a non-judgmental observation of the images and ideas that flesh out personal consciousness and its gradually evolving relationship with other people and the world at large? Can there be an observation of the self as a whole without motive, without goal and, therefore, not biased and limited by predetermined images and ideas describing previous experience/knowledge and what the future ought to be? In other words, can the mind simply stay with itself, undivided and fully alert and, therefore, not attempting to congratulate, criticize, resist, change or improve what it is? Does the accumulation of energy and the unprecedented mental space and consequent silence implied in this extraordinary integration not already a radical revolution? And... who could tell? (3)

Ø     If the facts of personal conditioning and cultural fragmentation are directly, independently and completely seen, they make obvious to thought itself the absurdity of any remedial action coming—as is bound to do—from its own limited base of experience/knowledge or from that of others. There is no further escape or subterfuge then. The conditioned mind sees its impotence and that very perception ends its habitual self-projection chasing after worthless or illusory goals. It is clear now that any effort in the direction of self improvement will just be another instance of the same futile pattern of superficial psychological remodeling that sustains not just the biographic comedy of errors we all know as our selves, but the great tragedy of human history.
The definitive departure of thought from the realm of self improvement is silence, the psychological emptiness of a mind no longer defined and energized by ideas from the past interpreting and using the present to attain the realization of a predetermined idealization of the future self. (4)

Ø     If the truth is the totality, then it is unthinkable. Thought and whatever thought refers to, on the other hand, is always limited to what it has experienced and learned in the past, and what it surmises it may experience and learn in the future. Thus, given that personal and social realities are constructed, defended, expanded and continued by (and, on the basis of) our personal and cultural knowledge with all its divisions, limitations and contradictions, these gradually evolving realities are inescapably the negation of the truth.

What we know, believe and crave after is what we are at every moment in time, but regardless of the form our identities may take and whatever projections they may conjure up, personal consciousness is never the truth. The truth is unrelated to the words, images and ideas with which the conditioned brain records and projects the experience and knowledge that then constitutes the personal entities that consider themselves unique, separate... and capable of possessing the truth. The real truth, being actual and whole is not subject to our sensory experience and cannot be reduced to the categories of knowledge. Nor can it be shaped into an object of desire. And since we have decided to base our very sense of being and becoming in exclusive memory and desire we also have, by the same token, cut ourselves off from the truth.
It is as foolish as it is dangerous to affirm that what we know and may get to know in the future is all there is, because in doing so we reduce life to the provincial scale and paltry reach of our conditioned minds. Now, if our common process of thought and the particular forms of personal knowledge with which each one of us is so closely identified will not ever solve our most fundamental problems, let alone take us to the truth, is it not wise and urgent to inquire what could? (5)

Ø     Imagine life or truth as an infinitely large and profound current of water. Now imagine a little patch of foam made up of six and a half billion tiny bubbles of self-centered thought floating somewhere on the surface of that flowing immensity. Peculiar bubbles, these, because they are all float suspended over infinity convinced of their own separate existence based on what they each know, want, fear and suffer.
If these bubbles were to suddenly realize the false buoyancy granted them by what each imagines to be their particular past, present and future reality and if, as a result, they would awaken to the immensity on which they float, would this shock not puncture and turn them inside out, as it were, so that they may sink one by one into the unthinkable river of life? (6)

Ø     You may not know anything more than anybody else regarding life, but your discontent with the countless interpretations and recommendations offered by different groups and ideologies, may be significant and quite disruptive. Discontent in this context does not mean rebelling against the world and offering resistance to personal circumstances, but rather a quiet reluctance to accept any of the descriptions, explanations and pseudo solutions given by different traditions regarding life. For some reason you cannot really fathom, you have a powerful sense that human life and life in general could not possibly be as splintered and ultimately as absurd and shallow as it so often feels. Nor could life be the reductive caricature that different and contradictory secular and religious ideologies (science included) make it out to be. You simply refuse to reduce life to the categories of knowledge and belief, and much less accept that it may be nothing more than the claustrophobic, anxious, arrogant, conflictive and ultimately self-destructive reality of the individual human mind.

It seems to you that there is always something extraordinary hiding just beyond what you experience, think, and imagine and, so, you also have a growing sense of the personal implications of such a possibility. The foolishness and danger of projecting any new illusions about yourself and the world is first among these implications. You live, therefore, in a sort of existential impasse; the seemingly impossible circumstance in which further action in the direction of psychological, social or “spiritual” development has been discarded. You are who you are and know the absurdity of struggling to reach further modified extensions of that same reality. This passive (non self-projective) stance may appear to some as the worse possible form of paralysis, but in reality an irreversible disregard of psychological knowledge, quiets down and opens up the psychic field to an unprecedented space that is radically new. It is only when the mind moves beyond exclusive knowledge and desire and is, therefore, passive and quiet, that the full horror of human suffering and its roots in the separate and conflictive processes of becoming of personal and tribal entities, becomes fully evident.
The paradox of this deadly breakthrough into a first light, lies in that it is not the result of an ultra focused effort oriented towards a predetermined sense of what the truth might be. It comes rather through the instantaneous realization of what is illusory and false. All striving for further self-assertion and self-fulfillment in any direction is futile, because it will never get anyone anywhere. Directed effort will only tighten the self's exclusive bondage within the strictures of knowledge, thought, fear and desire defining its separate and sorrowful existence. (7)

Ø     From a psychological point of view, all we know is our different personal narratives and their built-in fantasies of self-fulfillment or catastrophe, altogether defining who we think we are and who we want (or fear) to become within the parameters determined by particular cultural schemes. This general frame of mind is so dominant and its particular characteristics so exclusive, that whoever awakens to his own provincial and personal limitations, is suddenly overtaken by the indecipherable immensity of life as a whole. It seems fairly obvious that the central undertaking of all the different forms of human culture throughout historical time, is that of shielding individual human beings from the unthinkable mystery that is the real ground not just of their particular lives and deaths, but of all being, all becoming and all non-being. Cultural obfuscation is so tight and efficient in its exclusive multiplicity, and it has embedded itself so deeply in the very physiology and chemistry of the brain, that it now seems impossible to opt out of the insane drive to keep inventing and reinventing oneself on the basis of general cultural blueprints and under the unbearable pressure of personal experience projecting itself through fear and desire.
We generally think that our lives would be utterly meaningless without the competitive effort implicit in the urge to better ourselves and improve our circumstances, getting ahead of others in the process. In fact, most people seem to believe that goodness and virtue and anything else thought worth anything, comes strictly from one's degree of allegiance to, and compliance with, predetermined ideas, ideals and ambitions. Beyond impersonal and practical functions, thought —especially thought characterized and sustained by a particularly evolving personal identity— is inconceivable without a commitment to a cause or principle greater than oneself; a commitment prescribing a long sequence of incremental steps presumably leading to a given form of predetermined secular or religious self-realization. However, this built-in drive to find particular fulfillment within specifically determined cultural boundaries, does not just give particular shape and help sustain the self's sense of existential separation, it is also the very source of all conflict, violence and suffering in the world. And that is why full awareness of this extraordinary phenomenon of self-projective psychological isolation and cultural fragmentation with all its appalling consequences, instantly unveils self-centered thought as the mental process that through the very pretense of defending and improving itself, maintains the tragic reality in which we all live.
The fully attentive mind is one that because it is not defending a particular identity or attempting to justify its continuity through the pursuit of any form of worldly or otherworldly status, is not in conflict with itself or with others. And because it is not wasting energy in conflict and not caught in grieving self-pity, the awakened mind is able to look beyond the known and the knowable. (8)

Ø     Freedom is not license to do as we want. It is rather the abrupt end of the drive for self-fulfillment with all its attendant illusions. Liberation from intrapsychic and interpersonal conflict marks the end of the self. (9)

Ø     We seem to spend our days simultaneously asserting and resisting who we (and the world) actually are. Although there is no ground for it, we generally cling to the hope of becoming in the future someone significantly different, psychologically, from who we are now? And while caught in this illusion it is nearly impossible to see that one is, at every point in time, really one with one’s peculiar cultural and biographical conditioning, as well as one with the fundamental mental profile of the species as a whole. In other words, we generally do not see that our presumed changes are only small modifications of a general psychological profile that stays basically the same till we die. Perhaps more importantly, we fail to see that we are not at all that different from everyone else, at least not in that hugely significant respect. How does anyone face the fact that particular psychological existence is an illusion, and that the desire to develop oneself is merely the extension of this dangerous illusion; an illusion that flies in the face of our deeper and universally shared reality?

It does not mean anything to affirm verbally, theoretically, that the self does not have any intrinsic reality of its own; that it is, just like any other self, only a particular old bag full of images and ideas pursuing more and better images and ideas. Many drunks are said to routinely and without much consequence confess to their insignificance. If what the words above convey is not directly perceived and if this perception does not cause the actual loss of the sense of owning a unique identity and a relatively open option to a proprietary destiny, then the fact has not been perceived and the words used to convey it will quickly fade away.
Does the equality of all human beings not reside in the fact that we are all ineluctable cause and effect of the same tragic mindset? And if this humble perception of equality is the first fundamental truth, it is also the essence of freedom; freedom from conflict between the actual and the ideal within oneself and, hence, also freedom from pretense and from conflict with others still engaged in the futile effort to be and become something unique and special; something they are not.

But before we venture into notions of truth and freedom that, for all you know, could easily be mere speculation, it may be good to ask if yielding to the perception of the fundamental equality and, therefore, common psychological insignificance of human beings, does not just amount to being forever stuck, alone, in the unmitigated presence of all the hypocrisy, violence and suffering of humanity, aware also that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it within the realm of human consciousness?
Let us first take a look at what is the source of most of our pain and sorrow. To believe that one is “someone” and to permanently crave becoming someone better and happier in any of many possible and contradictory ways, carries the seeds of inevitable struggle, abuse, failure and eventual guaranteed disaster. And this, not just for the one who is striving, but to others who, caught in the same struggle or not, may get crushed by the brutal right of way claimed by those exercising their power with superior ruthlessness and efficiency. One's capacity to cut off from the pain and sorrow of the human race in order to procure as much power and privilege as might be possible, does not in any way diminish the certainty of failure, suffering and death. At least not for very long. Besides, the dulling of the senses and of the mind required to ignore actual facts and avoid responsibility, is already a form of tragic corruption, a clear manifestation apparent in even in “the best and the brightest,” of the same general disease of the species. It really should not be that difficult to figure out that the different and conflicting ways in which we all strive to maximize our physical and psychological pleasures while minimizing our losses and pains, is the fundamental causes of the mental, relational and social disorder from which we all suffer and which we are all equally incapable of setting straight. Psychological and ethnocentric being and becoming endlessly create and recreate the hell of the human condition in mental and chronological time. Hell is billions of us everywhere in the planet striving simultaneously to assert and improve ourselves and our worldly and otherworldly circumstances in different and contradictory ways. And this labor-intensive Hades is our only reality, the only human life possible, barring a fundamental change in the physiology and psychology of the brain.
At this point, it is crucial to understand that it is useless to form any idea of what it would mean to live outside this messy egocentric and ethnocentric reality, because we are intrinsically barred from anything else. Given that each one of us embodies the same fearful cravings and is caught in the same agonizing struggle to attain the exclusive goals of self fulfillment, to imagine a state of future selflessness as a new personal goal, is merely to create an extension of the anxious striving and unavoidable sorrow that is (and has always been) our basic problem in the first place.

We have no idea of what is it to live at the edge of time. We have no idea, because no idea can be had of what might be to ride the crest of the ever breaking wave of the present moment; being nothing and becoming (wanting) nothing. Is not the only possible liberation from conflictive and conflicted self-centeredness a blasting away of the mental confines of a fixed linear past, an angst-ridden and exhausting utilitarian present, and a pre-imagined future? Is not the definitive end of separation ―the mental distance between us and them, between you and I― also the end of fear and antagonism; of ambition and frustration; of anger and violence. In other words, is the end of psychological suffering not the end of the self? But, again, as far as you are concerned this may be just vain speculation. The complete and instantaneous perception of the actual falseness of separate existence is all that matters. Anything else is just part of the old, familiar trickery of self-centered thought sustaining itself through idealized self-projections. (10)

Ø     In a million different ways and for thousands of years we have tried to change our mind and our behavior, and have never achieved anything of significance. I know well that many would instantly contest this assertion by bringing up the social, political and technological achievements most salient in their minds, but that sorely misses the point. In spite of all the different (and often contradictory) examples of “progress” that different people would interject as proof of significant human change, the fact remains that individual human beings and, consequently the species as a whole, remain incapable of solving fundamental psychological problems from which all kinds of mental disorders and social disasters continue to ensue. Hatred and violence, fear and greed, confusion and habit, have never stopped sowing their destructive seeds in the soil of the human mind and, as a result, individual human beings have never stopped reaping the same harvests of separation, desolation and grief.

Throughout the history of human culture, different proposals for thought and behavior modification succeeding one another have been predicated on the assumption of a gradual transit from the actuality of the “bad” individual to the idealized manifestation of a “good” individual living in an improved future of which there is already a memory: Nirvana; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the kingdom of heaven; and the ownership society, all equally fit the carrot-on-a-stick fantasy of gradual change. This general belief in the feasibility of psychological transformation stand on two severely mistaken presuppositions: The first one is that the individual psyche has a unique existence in relative isolation from everything else. And the second, that the “me” ―the “managing” center of the personal mind― can acquire or develop adequate knowledge regarding the weaknesses and failings of the peripheral psyche, determine its most desirable future state of being, and then design and implement the sequence of steps needed to implement the indicated correction. Although most if not all available and possible secular and religious theories of psychological change stand on these same erroneous premises, they do so in ways not trivially different from one another which, in turn, determines their separation from and consequent opposition to others. Worse yet, all the different ideologies of personal change equally condemn their adherents to a mind torn by contradictory desires. This, because while the psychological modification they propose and urge is only a projected ideal (an illusory mental construct), the inadequate thought and behavior patterns they intend to change are real and actual as well as indistinguishable from their presumed agent of change.
As mentioned before, the liar who thinks he is practicing today how to tell the truth in the future, continues to be a liar in the present. And since the present is all there actually is, he can well remain a liar till the day he dies without having ever resolved the tension between the actual fact of his lying and the absurd ideal of eventually becoming an honest man. It not hard to see that there is no middle ground between honesty and deceit; that goodness has no opposite; and that a fervent belief in either salvation or reincarnation is merely a convenient excuse for avoiding the radical and instantaneous change that facts demand.
There is no such a thing as gradual and partial psychological change. From the very beginning we have been caught in a self-sustaining process of superficial evolution from one form to another within the same realm of mental and relational dysfunction. Conflictive cultural fragmentation and self-centeredness manage to remain constant throughout this process of false personal development. And this is why awareness of this fact inevitably leads to a sudden break in the continuity of self-centered thought. The whole structure of falsely evolving psycho-cultural attachment itself is brought down by the weight of its own falseness (except, as we have shall keep on repeating, in practical, objective matters in which thought forms are effective and necessary). A sudden undoing of the programing that determines existential alienation and sustains the process of self-centered becoming in a particular brain, implies the release of this brain from the general field of mental disorder and, consequently, a perhaps imperceptible, but nevertheless hugely relevant change in the human mind as a whole. (11)

Ø     A mind isolated, shaped and guided by fixed images and ideas about the past, the present and the future, cannot possibly be aware of the reality of the human condition. Nor can it be fully attentive to what is actually occurring at every moment both within itself and in its immediate surroundings. Consequently, its action can never be either complete or intelligent. Self concern expressed in the constant preoccupation and occupation of fear, resistance and ambition obviously dulls the mind while also wasting enormous energy. Which suggest that a mind unburdened by psychological experience and never engaged in any effort to defend or alter itself, must be extraordinarily alert. Is such a time-less mind possible? Can we even conceive of a mind in which past experience (memory) does not interpret and react to present (psychological) experience intent on attaining a predetermined version of future experience?
Could thought restrict itself to practical matters requiring the type of prerecorded knowledge that is capable of assessing practical problems and of formulating desirable future outcomes and the sets of successive steps most suitable to their realization? And if thought did find its right place and stopped impersonating an illusory instance of isolated psychological existence craving predetermined fulfillment, would the mind ever again be in contradiction with itself or in conflict with others? Would it ever be trapped again in habit, depression, anxiety or hate? (12)

Ø     When on the basis of a rather meaningless comparison with other countries we declare ours to be superior, we may feel psychologically more secure and important in our peculiar patriotic fantasy but, by the same token, unable to see that every form of arrogant isolation, even the seemingly most innocuous, equally stokes the potential for misperception, error and blow-back aggression. All forms of violence stretching from indifference to outright physical aggression, have their roots in the isolation of the self-projective narrative that is the ground of the self and that generally exists in alignment with collective forms of isolation living within the geographical boundaries of nation states and the fancy arc of their historical narratives. Given that our personal identity depends greatly on attachment to particular groups and the traditions and ideologies that prop up their own particular existence, it is with our most basic form of psychological being that we contribute to the division of humanity and the actual and potential suffering that results from extremely competitive and outright hostile inter-tribal relations. One would think that the citizens of the (in some ways) more developed nations would, at some point, stop contributing to the violence and misery of the world, but exactly the opposite is generally true. And, on this basis alone, it could be argued that they bear a greater share of the responsibility for human suffering. However, divisiveness, insensitivity to others and violence, are constant and universal psychological variables, and so they are present in every single group regardless of the nature and validity of its claim to greatness from which its individual members derive a particular sense of identity and security. The foolishness of bellicose chauvinism is by no means exclusive to the wealthiest and most powerful countries of the world, as the idiocy of spiritual self-righteousness is not just the privilege of the major religions of the world.

For human beings living at any time and at any place, difficult or unacceptable is always what is not familiar; what has not been inherited, experienced, learned, planned for and expected. And since we generally insist on fixed psychological identification with the type of experience prescribed and tolerated by our particular groups of reference and jostle brutally with one another in the defense and expansion of whatever we each consider to represent “us” and “me,” most of our thoughts and actions sustain a general field of experience in which isolation, trauma and suffering are ultimately unavoidable for all. Those who are the poorest and more ignorant suffer enormously, but so do the wealthy, the “educated” and the powerful who have so much more to defend, fret about, lose and regret having lost.
All this said to highlight once again the simple fact that no one can reasonably expect exception from suffering when it is our cultural and psychological separation —our particular form of ethnocentric egotism— that gives shape at any given point in time to a permanently broken and violent world in which human beings live alienating and, therefore, tormenting one another.
To see the human condition in this light may seem at first horrifying, but only this perception of the effects of self isolation and cultural fragmentation if complete and intense enough, is able to bring about human beings free of cultural or personal identification and, therefore, not ever inclined to aggressively defend and expand their life over and against the life of others. To see oneself and the world as they really are and to see, further, how they generate one another, is to see one's causal immersion in the uninterrupted suffering of the world. And, again, only this perception has the power to instantaneously end one's self-blinding participation in a general mental environment that feeds on inter-personal and inter-tribal conflict and that has produced and continues to produce incalculable pain and sorrow. (13)

Ø     The very definition of ourselves as significantly different from others and as distinct from the world at large creates a profound sense of vulnerability, which we then inadvertently extend almost limitlessly into the future through the contradictory developmental and redemptive schemes paradoxically adopted to try to escape from this very isolation and insecurity common to all of us. Simply put, we create suffering by attempting to fix or transcend in different and contradictory ways the vulnerability inherent in separate being. And to see this fact directly and completely cuts one's roots buried deep inside the fantasy of an exclusive past, while simultaneously blocking any further self projection onto an equally exclusive future designed to avoid or transcend suffering.
But is the existential isolation of the human being real? And, is there suffering when the psyche is no longer bent on identification with something greater than itself; when it is no longer dividing and conflicting itself in the wrongheaded attempt to escape from pain and sorrow by moving towards an idealized future version of itself? Is there a victim of suffering, a sufferer, when the mind is unconditioned and, therefore, undivided and quiet with nothing to which it feels compelled to regress or progress to? And could a mind without a sufferer intent on attaining status, power and pleasure, be a willing source of pain and sorrow for anyone else? (14)

Ø     The fundamental barrier to human unity is the conditioned psyche; self-isolating, fearful, ambitious and conflictive even within the relatively closed behavioral frames created by the tribal cocoons granting much of its sense of identity. Are those who happen to subscribe to the same general consensus, not often in conflict with one another? It is practically a rule that any given consensus will eventually be disrupted by some of its members on behalf of something promising them a better future? Even within the fundamental union of every couple, the separative reality of the self massively informed by its own experience and driven by the desires coherent with that experience, often plants its seeds of dissension and conflict. Faced with these disturbing facts we do not know what to say or do; they are incontrovertible and they are not external nor do they easily yield to eviction notices. These facts are us.
Forever thinking of ourselves as great problem solvers, this definitely rubs us the wrong way. But in this case the very nature of the problem confronting us blocks our propensity to reactive ameliorative action. We may be highly allergic to it, but it is precisely the forced immobility of a mind aware that there is nothing it can do itself about the hostile and suffering alienation of the self, that constitutes radical change. This non-action is radical because it destroys the separate egotism of the self, ending its conflictive relationship with itself and others and, thus, also its ongoing contribution to the gradually evolving reality of a permanently chaotic world. (15)

Ø     There was a time when people thought that the sun revolved around the Earth. Now we know that it is the Earth that revolves around the sun, but somehow still think that life itself revolves around the self. Perhaps a time is dawning in which it will become apparent to all that the psychological distinctions and social hierarchies spawned by thought are irrational and harmful, and that the self does not exist as anything other than a particular bunch of stackable and self-modifying images and ideas largely unrelated to life and therefore toxic to the organism and other living things. (16)

Ø    It is a glorious Spring afternoon as I ride the bus into town where I am meeting a friend. Against the backdrop of the fields and woods exploding with life, our human affairs remain the calamitous mess they have always been. Absurdly, we continue to hope that things will improve as the result of new installments in the same old serial novel documenting the clashes between the many contradictory cultural domains to which multitudes of confused, frightened and, yet, surprisingly hopeful human beings, surrender themselves.
Something absolutely extraordinary has to occur if we are to ever find sanity; a way of coexistence free of separation, injustice, fear and conflict. Sanity is not a more or less improved version of our present madness, but rather a complete and instantaneous abandonment of exclusive personal and tribal identification with particular things, images and ideas. What is abandoned externally in terms of commitment to divisive associations and mind killing habits, is also let go internally in terms of fixed ideas, beliefs and desires; and vice-versa. Everything finds its proper order when the mind is no longer burdened by meaningless conclusions and duties, and exhausted by internal and interpersonal conflict. Intelligence is freedom from the memories and projections that create the illusion of the separate and evolving self. Only an empty, quiet, mind is sane. (17)

Ø     At this stage of human history, there seems to be only one fundamental question, and that is whether or not a mutation of the human brain/mind is possible. The use of the word “mutation” is no mere histrionic gesture in this context. It responds to the final rejection of any hope that the chronic and interrelated problems we face may be “eventually” resolved by further reliance on further modifications to established social structures and the consequent or independent, but equally insignificant, development of the personal psyche. One has simply come to see that since all psychological and social problems have their source in the limited confines of self-centered and provincial thought and the confused and reactive volatility of its presumed thinker, their solution can hardly be expected to come from the same source. And, yet, even though one may have great interest in the possibility of a mutation that transcends the conditioned limitations of self-centered thought, this very interest seems to immediately trigger a deep and automatic rejection of the implication that this possibility is automatically nullified if the self seeks any participation in its realization. In other words, even though one may come to see the absolute necessity of the disappearance of the self, any positive action taken in this regard is, by definition, the wrong way to proceed. The correct approach implies an a-priori rejection of all preconceptions about the nature of the problem of being human and, especially, a rejection of any predetermined solution coming either from within the psyche or from external cultural sources. Is not the self essentially a particular version of the conditioned human mind eternally attempting to improve its conditioned personal act?

How does one seriously inquire, then, into the possibility of an unthinkably different mode of existence? Such inquiry demands, first of all, a lucid, honest and complete observation of the self (oneself) and the world this self generates. And, second, it demands an outright rejection of all the secular and religious descriptions and solutions that have been given and might be given to the problem of existential isolation, suffering and death. But is it not foolish and irresponsible to negate the value of everything humanity has concluded about its general condition and how best to deal with it? No, it is not, and for the simple reason that a great part of what conditions the mind is the different and contradictory descriptions and prescriptions put forth by particular traditions so that we may all have an exclusive and gradually evolving source of identification as well as the capacity to “fix” the mental insecurity that stems from a universally felt sense of existential isolation and vulnerability. In other words, instead of helping us see and reconcile ourselves with the central fact of existential insecurity, cultural ideologies grant a false sense of particular identity amplified and extended in time through built in goals of status and self-fulfillment. The fear, violence and suffering with which we live are just the natural consequence of a permanent struggle for a sense of psychological security and cultural superiority that do not exist. Once the particular brain/psyche finds particular footing in an illusion of existential separation and expandable meaning endorsed by a particular cultural enclave, the only possibility is almost permanent disorder and sorrow occasionally broken by ephemeral and largely irrelevant pleasures.

Once the contradictory cultural delusions product of thought have been put resolutely aside, a serious concern about the chronic persistence of conflict and suffering proceeds by inquiring if the reason for this might not lie in a nearly universal misperception of the nature of life, in general, and of the place and significance of the human presence within it, in particular. Do we not suffer, fundamentally, because we think ourselves unique and separate from life?
We suffer, first of all, because, we are not who we say we are. And we also suffer because the multiple contradictory ideologies that we use to defend and extend our presumed existential separation by means of neurotic claims and false hopes, merely guarantee that the conflict and sorrow intrinsic to what is divisive, limited and false in the present will give form to the future as well. Once there is a simple willingness to transgress deeply embedded sanctions that protect the claims to truth of different secular and religious traditions, it becomes obvious that far from being sources of righteous lives and certain salvation, these traditions are in fact blinding billions of people to their irrational participation in a common act of “evolving” separation from life that is in itself the root of everything we suffer from. It is the arrogant fantasy of psychological and cultural uniqueness with its endless attempt to escape from pain and sorrow at any cost, that suffers and creates suffering for others. Therefore, it is the individual self (each one of us) who is called to question a sense of separate identity that is not grounded in any substantial intrinsic quality, but in the false virtues of phoney agreement and disagreement prescribed by collective secular and religious traditions. Who will end war, the exploitation of the poor and weak, and the agony of personal failure, if not minds free of the personal blinders and forced duties acquired through association with the beliefs and goals of certain groups and antagonistic dis-association from those distinguishing other groups?

It may be helpful to reiterate this same argument from a different angle. Self-centered thought creates mental and social disorder through the conflictive separation implicit in its myriad personal and tribal incarnations. And, contrary to its own logic, rather than endeavoring to find security in intelligent unity, thought sustains its conflictive personal and tribal diversity through the false pretext of attempting to find a solution for its myriad problems through the formulation of new projects and new methods. Needless to say, within this corrupt mental realm all “new” developmental initiatives are limited and contradictory. They emerge as a reaction to (and are enacted by) the different groups and individuals who remain sconced within exclusive traditions, ideologies and biographies and as blindly dedicated as ever to their invariably conflictive and, therefore, unwise goals. Do we not generally feel that were only this or that to happen or be achieved, then ―regardless of the consequences to others or their unpredictable reactions― “I” (we), would be in a much better “place” psychologically, socially and, perhaps, also spiritually? Do the largest majority of individuals not attribute their conflict and suffering to their inability to procure, in competition or outright battle with others, the particular measure of certainty, power, pleasure and general self-fulfillment they feel they need and deserve? Even when we somehow manage our lives and the lives of certain others well enough to procure for ourselves a measure of the security and happiness intended, this achievement is never lasting. Nor is it ever enough to blot out the pain of estrangement from life and the fear of aging and death. Which is just another way of saying that our very efforts to overcome suffering strengthen the very psychological and tribal definitions and claims that are at the very source of the whole problem, simply because they undergird and maintain our separation from one another and from life.
For eyes that are able and willing to see, it is obvious than none of the contradictory secular and religious plans of worldly success and otherworldly salvation or reincarnation concocted by the human mind, can ever deliver the steady fulfillment they promise. Ideological constructs have never managed to free individuals, let alone the species as a whole, from divisiveness, conflict and fear. And they will never be able to do so in the future for the simple reason that they are, just like our personal psyches, multiple, contradictory, conflicted and conflictive. And it is only acute perception of this fact that may free the mind by blocking self-centered thought from preserving and carrying out further installments of the tribal and personal self's pursuit of manifest destiny.

Do not take my word for any of this. The pertinent and actual details that will give specificity and real life to the general picture presented here, can only be found in the way you actually live and relate with others and the world at every moment. (18)

Ø    The possibility of a mind and a life free of sorrow is not within the reach of self-centered thought for the simple reason that the very sense of exclusive and perfectible existence that characterizes the self implies continuous separation from life itself. Why do we refuse to see this otherwise glaring fact? Why do we opt over and over again to identify with anything? And, why do we endlessly struggle to improve on these self identifications when it is evident that no effort will ever grant us the psychological security that we desperately crave, but simply does not exist? Is it because seeing the impotence of thought implies the terrifying prospect of the thinker (yourself, myself) coming to an end?
It is a tremendous shock to realize that thought is not a tool there for the self to use and manipulate on the path to its own fulfillment. The overwhelming insight that the human being cannot think its way out of sorrow and into some form of exclusive and sustained happiness, implies the collapse of self-centered thought. But since this collapse cannot possibly be conceived and implemented by thought, any idea regarding its nature or consequences is clearly absurd. A radical distrust of the pessimistic or optimistic projections of thought in this regard is, therefore, already an unprecedented action; an action unrelated to the fixed content of memory and, therefore, outside the time frame of self-centered thought on which the self lays its narrow track and runs its irrelevant course. (19)

Ø     It is because we are so deeply invested in commitments presumed capable of delivering security, respectability and the consequent experience of greater pleasure, that a radically different form of approaching the problem of conflict, fear and sorrow appears absurd or even insane. Even though the desires of different people seem to vary widely, essentially we all want the same, which is to be secure, important in some way or another and with plenty access to whatever we may each consider to be most pleasurable and reputable. Unsurprisingly, any event or circumstance perceived as putting our sense of identity and our idealized self-projection in jeopardy, is likely to produce mental suffering and trigger inadequate or outright violent behavior. Regardless of how high and thick the walls of material security and social status built by the self may grow, they are seldom perceived as protective enough, and rightly so. Because to be human (as we know our humanity) is to be almost permanently dissatisfied with one’s relative position in the general social pyramid and, perhaps, also in the perceived “spiritual” pecking order and, therefore, to be permanently at odds with oneself and in conflict with others. And this everlasting state of wanting to become something we are essentially not, with its built-in hyperactivity, its mental distress and interpersonal acrimony, draws and redraws day after day the horrendous caricature we continue to make of life. Does any sustained effort to change one’s position relative to an idealized image constructed of oneself not bring about a permanent state of mental tension and instability? And does this state not necessarily distort perception and generate inappropriate and aggressive behavior leading to more and more of the same isolation, ambition, disillusion and pain that motivated the previous instance of psychological becoming?

Seeing the general contours of this particular impasse, it seems natural to ask if it is possible to discover a way to change or get rid of those psychological attributes most responsible for our almost permanent state of stress and distress. But any answer to this question would inevitably lead us astray because it falsely assumes that there is such a thing as a particular self separate from what it suffers from and, therefore, able to act on it. The fact is that, regardless of powerful and actual feelings that seem to prove the self's separation from pain and sorrow and everything else that may be relegated to what appears to be the outer fringe of the psyche, this sense of intrapsychic division is based on images and ideas related to either past or future experience and, therefore, not actual. Now, given that the self (any and every self) is an artificial mental construct in no way different from all the others, and that it is with culturally determined images and ideas that every present moment is perceived, evaluated and utilized as a bridge to a future already partially foreseen with the same material, it is correct to say that each human psyche is fundamentally a largely undifferentiated fragment of a much larger and single dynamic memory. In other words, since all human brains are equally conditioned by experience, it is fair to say that there really are no individual human psyches. What there is, is a universal phenomenon of conscious and unconscious recollection of pre-personal, cultural and biographical experience mechanically projecting itself onto the imagined future with an also common and fixed intention of avoiding pain and procuring pleasure conceived (the feared pains and the desired pleasures) in as many different ways as there are differentially conditioned individual human brains.

It is then our persistent unwillingness to see the illusory (non-actual) phenomenon of separate human identity permanently engaged in a common process of egotistical becoming, that condemns us all to a life of unending isolation, conflict and pain both mental and interpersonal. The general illusion of a separate identity engaged in a process of open ended perfectibility, relies for its continuity on profoundly biased psychological comparisons of oneself with idealized self-images constructed on the basis of superficial psychological and physiological difference and imagined potential gain. In its very buttressing of the self's illusory sense of separate existence and possible progress, psychological comparison practically guarantees unrelenting anxiety, struggle, conflict, disillusion and suffering. And this is why the formidable problem of chronic conflict, fear and sorrow may only disappear when a human being stops comparing herself with projected self idealizations stemming from her own memory bank or from the example provided by others; ending, in this manner, the sense of being anyone in particular as well as the reflex compulsion to become someone better. (20)

Ø     If all of us are nothing but slightly different forms of fundamentally the same memory pool, and if each of our imagined personal future is but a lightly modified re-edition of superficially different versions of this same fragmented storehouse of recorded experience, then no action taken by anyone intending to improve, reform or transcend the mental and interpersonal disorder that this mental setup generates, has any meaning. Needless to say, if the ability to change oneself in any significant way is illusory, then the attempt to change someone else (their memory and its self-projection) is nothing short of preposterous.
The realization that self-enclosed memory cannot ever gradually change itself in any significant quantitative and qualitative way, leaves only one question remaining, and that is whether or not the mind may be purged of all its psychological and unnecessary cultural content, but not from an act of personal will or faith guided by a preordained goal.
Let us carefully consider this strange challenge. Freedom from subjective memory must also be freedom from the weighty demands of psychological desire, for it is memory that under the pretense of attempting to provide the self with an improved state of mind, projects a preordained modification of itself onto the future. No one can desire what is not already known and so, regardless of the possible nobility of one's efforts and desires, personal existence is forever confined to the petty and infertile realm of the known.
Put differently, the huge importance given to the version of self-fulfillment that the particular mind can conceptualize and therefore desire at any point in time, chains the human being to a shallow and ultimately cruel process of gradual psychological change and social modification that will never adequately deal with the fundamental issue of internal and interpersonal conflict and alienation from life. Attempts at self-modification and organizational and social reform, no matter how earnest, are never complete and so they never end. Any given reform simply follows and precedes another. All the self-centered and conditioned mind knows is to incessantly struggle in the attempt to move from less pleasure to more pleasure; from less power and status to more; and from too much pain and humiliation to less or none. Thus, for an immense majority of human beings, to live is be incessantly tormented by conflicting desires and by the inherent conflict of desire itself and, therefore, to be permanently deprived of freedom and ease, never able to relate to others, to the world and life as a whole in a truly loving and intelligent manner.

If all of this is seen not just as a theory, but as actual fact, one is left with the burning question of whether radical change can come in the only way it could, that is, through an unpremeditated and instantaneous emptying of psychological memory and a concomitant deactivation of the habitual desire for status and unnecessary wealth. How can such revolution of the brain/psyche occur without one being its central agent? Well, simply because what we all call “me” is but part of what needs to be emptied out, terminated. But if there is nothing one can do about the problem of conflict and mental suffering, is not all this talk of the self coming to an end just frustrating gibberish? Does a complete insight into the human condition, merely imply that the tragedy of life will just continue unchanged and unchallenged, forever? Or is the sudden destruction of the self's psychological roots in memory and of its mechanical projection onto the future, that this insight implies, the natural blossoming of an entirely different mental reality; the only one capable of creating a truly new and sane human society? (21)

Ø     One suffers because one cannot change the world so that it may be more compliant with one’s selfish or unselfish wishes; and also because one generally does not mange to convince others to change their thought and behavior patterns in a manner pleasing to one's views and desires. And one may also suffer from the inability to change oneself in order to fulfill whatever noble or ignoble fantasy prescribes what one ought to become, accomplish and own. To realize the absurdity of this craving and the frustration and sorrow it generates, is to stop attempting to move away from things as they are; to stop resisting the world and oneself by cutting off and by creating illusions of what they ought to become. Bluntly put, an accurate perception of the absurdity of separate existence and the harmful consequences of the process of psychological becoming, puts an end to both. A single, mind-boggling glance ushers the collapse of self-reflective thought.

Now, how are we, how are you and I, going to find out if this ending is possible without doing something stupid like committing suicide or ending up in the loony bin? Who is going to show us that only in the absence of self-centered thought, only in the collapse of the mental time created to approximate self-fulfillment, is there an end to fear, hatred, ambition, frustration and all other forms of psychological vexation and pain we commonly endure? And if there is no authority who will tell us what to do to stop driving ourselves insane and endangering the very survival of the species; if there is no tried and true methodological path gradually leading to this profoundly reasonable ending of ourselves, how is it going to come about ―and not tomorrow or in ten years, but right now? (22)

Ø     It is not an exaggeration to say that the self is conflict. And, this, not only because it is practically impossible to define oneself as a separate psychological entity without having others to compare oneself with in negative terms. The self is conflict, fundamentally, because since the reactive movement of particular knowledge based on experience (the process of personalized thought) is intrinsically limited and isolated, it is forever struggling against itself and others to reach whatever may be considered as less limited or imagined as entirely beyond limitation: god or any other such fantasy. Both, the fearful/hostile resistance inherent in separation and the on-going conflict between who we really are and whomever we think we ought to be or would rather be, distort and dull down the perceptual capacity of the organism, wear down the brain, and damage relationships, often beyond repair. The sense of self emerges and fights to sustain and expand itself, in relation to the level to which there is resistance, disregard or rejection of anything within or around the psychic field. If the mind is anything other than impersonal and full attention operating from moment to moment, then there is the self mechanically resisting its own reality, the reality of others and that of the world at large. How could the old familiar self be attentive if it is forever bent on taking the same old conflictive and painful journey that burns up the precious present in order to go from the remembered past to the foreseen future. (23)

Ø     Psychological becoming moves strictly within the field of knowledge because one can only desire to achieve or avoid something that is already known. As is the case with any form of practical knowledge, the personal psyche can forever add (or subtract) information to itself without ever reaching completion (fulfillment, in the case of the self). Seeing the futility of this mechanical accumulation of psychological knowledge and the painful persistence of its voracious craving, the conditioned, “knowing” self might want to deprogram itself but, of course, it is incapable of actually doing so. Once programmed by experience, the self-centered and conditioned brain/mind is only capable of the type of minor reforms and adjustment to itself and its cultural environment that it has been inventing and implementing throughout history without ever managing to solve any of its fundamental psychological and social problems. While going around and around on this carousel of superficial change (the countless inventions, therapies, conversions, reforms and revolutions that flesh out our sorry personal and social history), we remain fundamentally unchanged and, therefore, still in conflict and sorrow even after millenary “progress.” On the surface, we are all separately attempting to become greater, better and happier in one way or another, but way down below we remain the same. Despite the grandiose stories we tell ourselves we continue being what we have always been: fundamentally similar organisms seamlessly embedded within the general matrix of life; and, yet, lonely, insecure, fearful, frustrated and clannishly dependent manifestations of a single phenomenon of isolated and conditioned mind trapped in an endless and futile struggle for irrelevant distinction, pleasure and power.
All of which leads inevitably to this essential but unanswerable question: If our preprogrammed and reactive thinking is incapable of freeing us from the problems and the sorrows we have created for ourselves, what will? It is difficult to simply stay quietly with this vital but utterly unfamiliar question and the lack of knowledge and consequent inaction it presupposes. It is part of our conditioning to avoid uncertainty and rush instead to whatever pseudo-solution or diversion may seem most convenient. This, just to avoid the abyss we assume to be waiting at the end of self-centered thought, with the self forever lost and dissolved in the ever unpredictable embrace of life and death. (24)

Ø      The operation of the senses, which can only occur in the present moment, is habitually overridden and eventually damaged by the self ceaselessly conniving and emoting on the basis of images and ideas anchored in the past. There is a nearly permanent conversation that goes on within everyone’s head: it is the self talking with himself mostly about himself, but also about the immense and immensely disconcerting universe of not-me. This persistent chatter is a great part of self-centeredness and it makes the mind insensitive, incapable of hearing or seeing anyone or anything accurately and completely.
The mind has so filled itself with images and verbal conclusions about the self, others and the world at large, that it is now generally incapable of paying proper attention to what is actually going on at any given moment and even within or in close proximity to the physical organism. Thus, the self, any and every self, is but a particular manifestation of this species-wide phenomenon of inattentiveness grounded on the selective and symbolic recording of exclusive past experience and the expectations for the future that are dictated by that same limited experience.
Attention is, on the other hand, impersonal and a moment-by-moment affair. It is in itself quiet and empty and, therefore, acutely sensitive; passively perceptive of everything that might be going on at every moment without reference to previously recorded self-referential knowledge, and without motive or intent regarding future experience or further knowledge. Its presence determines the absence of the particular constellation of likes and dislikes, fears, prejudices and fixed ambitions that gives the self its fraudulent existence, its particular identity and its largely insensitive continuity in time. (25)

Ø     “The more it changes the more it remains the same,” rightly declares the French adage. Change itself becomes an ossified tradition to those who conceive, advocate and implement its near infinite manifestations; a tradition that blinds us to the fact that our personal and social changes are generally so partial and superficial as to be undeserving of the name. This statement will no doubt sound like heresy to the self-satisfied and all those who let the idea of the progress of the human being and of humanity itself, hide the fact that beyond obvious (though far from universal) scientific and technological advance, the human mind and, as a result, the species as a whole remain as primitive, cruel and grief-stricken as they ever were. The arrogant notion of human progress does not survive basic awareness of the chronic scourge of war and the intimately related environmental and social ills afflicting both the under-developed societies and their dominant, over-developed, siblings. Nor does belief in the piecemeal and step by step perfectibility of the human being fare well when confronted with the easily verifiable persistence everywhere of inter-personal conflict and mental suffering experienced within lives of quiet or screaming desperation.
Would real progress not imply a harmonious world inhabited by caring, intelligent and happy human beings incapable of harming one another and naturally unwilling to destroy other aspects of the matrix of life from which we are all inseparable? Why is it that this simple question does not seem to ever come up in serious conversation? Why is it that we seem to be so set in our particular ideological conceits and our equally exclusive psychological claims that the question of total mental health does not even occur to us? It is because we are not really paying attention to the whole; is it not? In a general context of fragmented and, therefore, insensitive and uncaring human existence, complete attention is what is missing even though it is the only real solution to all that is ailing us.
Attention is, contrary to self-centered thought, free of self-pity and predetermined choice and, therefore, ever new and all-encompassing. Attention has no previous record or future agenda; it is impersonal perception of what is actually happening and, thus, exists untainted by any form of antagonistic resistance or collusive acceptance. Attention implies the sudden irruption of impersonal clarity and silence into the mind. With this lucid and quiet space everything is possible; without it we only have the red herring of partial, gradual and ineffective modification of the same hell we have always lived in and stubbornly helped sustain in our particular social context and our own minds. (26)

Ø    The words “Israel” or “Sudan” mean nothing to me. The inviolability of human flesh does. “The United States of America”; Argentina”; “The United Kingdom” “Japan”; “Malaysia” and “France”, mean nothing to me. The natural intelligence of cooperation among caring and independent human beings, does. All the different, contradictory and conflicting forms of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam and any other existent or potential forms of tribal religiosity, mean nothing to me. The possibility of a religious mind, a mind free of the provincial egotism of the self and its multiple tribes, is all that matters. It matters in itself and not just to who is writing these lines. Without the advent of a religious mind, humanity will either cease to exist in a catastrophe of its own making, or it will continue to degrade, indefinitely continuing to suffer the unavoidable violence of its cultural fragmentation and the fearful and irrational egotism of the alienated and conditioned mind that underpins it. (27)

Ø     If the conflict and sorrow we live in is created by our mental separation from one another and our joint alienation from life itself, then the only relevant question is: Can this suffering and self-sustaining phenomenon of psychological isolation come to an end?
Feeling separate as we do, it is foolish to adopt and then aggressively assert a particular set of preexisting ideological convictions hoping that they will eventually remake everyone else according to “our” own image and likeness. To create or find a new and hopefully growing source of unity would be similarly futile, for that too would surely and soon enough become just another source of conflicting separation from those not included within it, as well as an unavoidable source of eventual dissension and division for those who are. Exclusive psychological and cultural knowledge and belief, and the dependence, fear and ambition that inevitably go with them are both cause and effect of conflict and violence. Can a human being who is aware of this fact be, by virtue of this very awareness, instantly free of any past, present or future form of identity and, thus, no longer isolated by the cultural and psychological structure of the self?

There is no longer anything to want (psychologically speaking) at the very instant in which the mind sees that there cannot possibly be an object of psychological desire projected by thought that if attained would terminate the fear and torment of insatiable craving. Since experience and the knowledge that is derived from experience are always limited, and since desire is inevitably informed and fueled by them, even when its goals are reached and held, there is still no security, no unity and no peace. The self, any self, is a particular embodiment of a general experience of isolated uncertainty and insecurity, and while myriad different and contradictory identities and ideologies are created with the deliberate aim of providing an escape from this experience, they merely prolong it into the future. Thus, when the desire for psychological security ends, it is the self that ends. (28)

Ø     Have you noticed how much we all want to be loved, admired and respected, and for what vastly different and mostly contradictory reasons? And, have you seen how often the psyche suffers the push and pull of contradictory desire; wanting two or more different and perhaps incompatible things simultaneously and with the same urgency? If you have, you probably have also noticed the most intimate and pernicious of all conflicting desires: wanting to be who we actually are, while simultaneously wanting to become someone else, someone better. This nearly permanent war between the actual and the ideal self wastes an enormous amount of energy and is the source of much confusion, insensitivity and bad relationship. It is also the source of our common sense of psychological time. Psychological time as the mental space created by the attempt to move from what we think we are to what we think we ought to be. Not being fully related to anything actual, personal time is but a workshop where old illusions are permanently revamped to become slight modifications of the same confusion, frustration, acrimony and grief we humans have always known.

Can a human mind use the mental time frame and natural ability of thought to satisfy the needs of the organism, but never again yield to absurd desires for the contradictory pleasures and false certainties of social, economic and “spiritual” status? And if it can, is there anything else beyond the self-centered process of thought? There is no one inside or outside your skull who can answer this question. Thus, its very posing indicates not having yet seen the absurdity of the separate self and its fraudulent and ever frustrated effort to become something other than what it actually is. (29)

Ø     It is maddening to be at odds with oneself. Yet, it is practically a daily experience for everyone to have one layer of the psyche reprimanding another layer for doing or thinking what it may have been doing and thinking a second before in a manner perceived as improper or not conducive to the achievement of previously established future goals. There is only one psyche as there is only one brain, therefore, no particular aspect or part of the psyche could convincingly tell the rest how to better perform. Now, if this that has just been said is true, then who is there to receive the message and subsequently act on it?
In other words, awareness of the singularity of the human psyche is, in itself, the end of the self as the discrete entity presumably existing in a mental time frame created and embodied by thought and deemed necessary to move from what the “me” actually is and onto what it feels it ought to become in the future. Because it occurs without reference to memory and its projections, this perception instantly negates the division within the psyche, thus bringing down the self-conscious self; the isolated, conflicted, confused and hostile self that reproaches and tries to correct other aspects of itself. (30)

Ø     The artist, the poet, the musician, the philosopher, the politician, the reformer, the guru, the scientist and the revolutionary, all aim to have others receive, celebrate and sustain through time whatever meaning and value they put forth. But since there is wide discrepancy among their proposals, in the end they generally only manage to sustain the fragmentation and dissension that have characterized the history of humanity all along.

For the honest human being who also happens to work as an artist, this poses the question of whether art can adequately convey this very thing that is being said here. Can there be an art that is not the proclamation of particular meaning, nor a call for congregation and tribal self-projection around this meaning, but rather the direct and succinct illustration that none of the fundamental problems of human existence will ever be solved by any particular expression of thought, because thought itself is at the root of all problems and art is but a fragment of thought? (31)