SEEING BLINDNESS

PREAMBLE

Given the way in which the phenomenon of suffering extends across geographical space and historical time cutting across every person's life and psyche, it is extraordinary what little attention we pay to it. We hardly ever talk about the universality of suffering, even though each one of us experiences the same sense of separation and vulnerability, and feels the same ever present threat of a thousand possible disillusions, sorrows and mishaps, all crowned by an all too democratic death. We have grown accustomed to adversity, pain and tragedy. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that to be human is to permanently struggle against life and against one another to gain some measure of security and respectability.

In fact, we are generally so absorbed in trying to overcome feelings of fear and insecurity through the defense or procurement of some form of exclusive achievement, that the widespread injustice and violence in the world-as well as the specific physical and psychological suffering of others-are hardly even registered. We are so taken by the immediate personal and tribal effort to avoid pain and maximize pleasure, (both physically and psychologically), that we fail to see the intimate connection that exists between the social and the psychological manifestations of disorder and suffering. We are convinced that we exist in separation from others and the world as a whole, when in fact our particular brains and minds are nothing if not the result of the long and tragic experience of the species, capped by the more particular characteristics and circumstances of the immediate social and cultural environments and the biographical story with which we personally identify. And, what is the chaotic and disintegrating world we live in if not the product-the sum total-of the disorder in all human minds at any point in time?

Despite undeniable technical and scientific development and the persistent action of multiple religious faiths and countless political and cultural organizations and projects, humanity remains today utterly incapable of solving fundamental social and psychological problems. Problems such as chronic poverty and war, and the innumerable forms of conflictive relationships and mental disorders that have, for millennia, created unspeakable anguish and suffering for millions and millions of us, human beings.

Is it possible to be sensitive to the anguish and pain of others, to observe the suffering of humanity as a totality? -Is there a clear distinction that can be drawn between the quality of the minds of others and our own? -Are the confusion, fear and contradiction in your mind significantly different from the confusion, fear and contradiction in mine? -Are the intractable problems I experience in my interaction with others, all that different from those you experience in yours? -Do we not share the same chronic inability to put a definitive end to the anxiety and sorrow that stems from these realities? -Are we incapable of confessing to one another how little control we have over our own thoughts, emotions and actions, let alone over those of others or the overwhelming historical variables presently wreaking havoc with our families, communities, and the natural environment?

The human mind seems to have blinded itself to the enormous fact that our tribal and personal separation from one another, and our collective alienation from the world as a whole, is the very source of the conflict and suffering afflicting each and everyone of us. -Can this blindness see itself?

As a common reaction to an also common sense of insecurity, we have all sought refuge and particular identity in one or more of the multiple and contradictory forms of cultural consensus, both secular and religious. And now we find that we have built such thick material, cultural and psychological walls around ourselves that we cannot even talk to one another, even though we still suffer a common uncertainty and face the same ever worsening global threats. -Can we see this? And, if we do, are we capable of abandoning the fantasies and illusions of exclusive consensus, even if this implies losing the separate identity and sense of security they grant? -Has it finally dawned on us that the unity and sanity that we sorely need will never come through the imposition-by force or reason-of the half truths and pseudo solutions offered by any one particular religious, political, economic, or cultural force?

This book represents the willingness of one human being to see his own blindness, to understand his own suffering and be aware of his contribution to the suffering of others. And it is offered to those who are intent on seeing, also by themselves-that is, without the intermediation of traditional creeds and authorities-the truth of the human condition as exemplified by the character of their own minds and lives. This rejection of pre-established religious, political and psycho-therapeutic descriptions and solutions is not some rebellious iconoclastic pose, it stems rather from a simple acknowledgement of their now abundantly proven incapacity to significantly change the hearts and minds of human beings and, hence, alter the course of history. This negative approach is also amply justified by the reasonable suspicion that if there is a definitive solution to the problem of being human, it must come from an independent insight into the nature of the self, not as a generalized abstraction, a theory concocted by some master or expert, but as an actual reality; the actual reality of your self, my self.

A word now about the text and art that make up this book: If the central intent of this collection of brief essays is to facilitate the accurate and direct perception of the human psyche as conditioned by experience and knowledge, the accompanying images are intended to portray life as a realm utterly beyond experience and knowledge, but still showing within its unbroken flow the presence of the human form. Needless to say, the images intending to represent life as a whole are-like all other forms of art-mere pointers, at best only relatively clumsy metaphors barely indicative of their subject.

The writings collected in Seeing Blindness range from brief essays to single paragraphs, and can be accessed randomly. The persistent reader will come to see just a handful of fundamental and interconnected themes observed and, hopefully, illuminated from many different vantage points. However, it is important to be alerted from the very beginning that the text as a whole is intended only as a catalyst to the direct and immediate perception of actual psychological and social realities, and not as information to be learned and thought about. Mere conceptual understanding of the material presented here will prove to be useless. The subject at hand is not the relative merit or even the truthfulness of the text, but the nature of your mind. Therefore the failure to know yourself remains at all times your own, as the failure to know myself is mine alone.

The single most important recurrent theme in the book is that of psychological time as the process of personal continuity, and as such it may be the only one that merits some clarification in this preamble. When used to describe the nature and fundamental movement of the human mind, the word "time" has a very different meaning, although not an entirely unrelated one, to that of chronological time as measured by the clock or the calendar. The human psyche (personal identity and the dynamics of personal becoming) is presented as existing in an artificial time process constructed on the basis of three elements: Memory (the past remembered as "my" history); the predetermined reactions to actual intra-psychic and relational events and circumstances (the present interpreted and utilized by previous experience and knowledge-memory); and the goals which the same memory projects (the future imagined and desired/feared by memory as the continuation of a personal history). Thus, for example, while the aging process of the organism certainly occurs within the vector of what we know as chronological time, someone reacting to signs of aging in the body with feelings of shame or by joining a church promising eternal life is operating strictly within the psychological time that you will see repeatedly described in the pages of this book.

Have a good journey; may you find and lose yourself in seeing blindness.

We have a world economy that is destructive of the natural environment and does not adequately satisfy the fundamental physical needs of the greater number of human beings. Privileged minorities everywhere continue extracting extravagant financial and psychological profit from the land and its people, while the rest struggle mightily either to stay alive or to move a little closer to the top. This is one of the ways the human condition as a whole remains today what it was one hundred or ten thousand years ago. Perhaps the only truly significant difference between our present situation and the past is the access to lethal technology that proponents of belligerent ideologies have today. Never before in history was the extinction of the species as possible as it is today.

Ambition, conflict, insecurity and fear afflict and isolate our minds giving particular shape to our relationships, just as the sum total of our relationships creates and gives continuity to the tragic world we live in. And yet, most human beings live and die without ever questioning this demeaning, painful and absurdly dangerous state of psychological and social affairs. We are often content with defending who we think we are and whatever we may be doing (or leaving undone) by mechanically repeating the platitudes of traditional ideologies; ideologies functionally designed to also blind us to the state of dependency and irresponsibility that they engender. This is why to see things as they actually are is to decisively put aside everything we know and believe about ourselves, others, and the world human thought has created. (1)

What would happen to a man who possessed only the means necessary to live with dignity, and who no longer belonged to anything or anybody, a man who was, psychologically, next to nothing? Free of the usual commitments, excuses and cover-ups, would he not be able to see directly and totally the way humankind is fractured, each cultural fragment at odds with others? Would not such a person have to confront, in himself, as well as in society as a whole, all the brutality and all the sorrow of humankind?

No longer pretending to be other than what he actually is and, most of all, no longer imagining himself as in the process of becoming someone better, he would consequently be-in stark contrast with the rest of us, overachievers and pretenders-a man without either hope or regret and, as such, a man without a personal past, present and future. There would be nothing in him wanting to regress, progress or stay the same. He would live-mentally-in an impersonal and timeless present. How could he then fear, suffer or willingly hurt others? And what then could physical death possibly find in him to kill? (2)

The "I" is no different from the memory of past pains and pleasures with all their attendant and interconnected fears and desires. Memory is thus also the private road and the particular set of directions leading the "I" towards greater status and pleasure-the presumed antidotes to the possibility of insecurity and pain perhaps even greater than previously known. It is this mental establishment and its self-centered pursuits, that effectively blocks the brain's natural capacity for attention and adequate action. Attention can only operate in the present and is, thus, entirely unrelated to the mental time field created by memory and projected desire in which the "I" exists and re-acts. Having no time frame, attention does not have a central entity doing the attending. Having no continuity, that is, having neither personal memory nor future projection, impersonal attention operates discontinuously, from moment to moment. Now. Because of what it is, attention leaves no trace of experience in the mind, thus not issuing reverberations of regret, nostalgia, fear, ambition, guilt or hostility. Attention is selflessness, the absence of egocentric pursuits and their self-generated continuity. (3)

There are no great personal minds, and small minds are those that refuse to see themselves just as such. (4)

There is extraordinary depth and beauty in every instant of life, yet we generally miss it being as we are so caught up with worries, particular conflicts, interests and ambitions. Almost invariably the present is polluted with the debris of the past, obscured by fears, and wastefully utilized by desires interminably attempting to father déjà vu future outcomes. Is psychological emptiness possible? Is there a present lived with such intensity and depth that the division between subject and object disappears in a manner of experiencing which would be necessarily beyond "someone's" pleasure, boredom, pain and time? (5)

Is there an unformatted mind; a mind not conditioned by previous experience of physical and psychological pain and pleasure and, so, free of neurotic yearning and fixed, pre-determined, avoidance?

If such a mind is not possible then all is lost, for any further expansion, reduction, or improvement of the pre-formatted self-centered psyche will merely land us back, forever and necessarily, on the well-known territory of pain, fear and death. (6)

Can it be seen that self-centered thought-images and ideas formed about the self, others and the world on the bases of extremely limited personal experience, belief and knowledge-is a form of blindness? And does a direct and complete perception of the inadequacy and inconsistency of thought not put an end to the process of self-centered thinking, thus also destroying the egotistical thinker at its core? Now, to take time to think about whether it does or not implies the continuity of thought and, therefore, not having seen the fact of thought as blindness, correct? So, is the incompetence of thought and the danger it poses evident now? (7)

Have you ever wondered why is it that we are so ready to squander the gift of life in the conflicted pursuit of pleasure and status? -Is it that we feel that pleasure and pleasure seeking constitute all (or the best) life has to offer? Or is it rather that, aware of the absurdity of attempting to justify (our) existence through the attainment of exclusive physical and psychological pleasure (especially, the experience of status and the exercise of power), we are still unable to see anything else that could replace it to advantage and, hence, frightened of the possibility of being left with nothing at all? Perhaps, it would be more accurate to suppose that we are frightened of what we think this nothingness might be and thus block ourselves from actually seeing it, being it?(8)

Totally meaningful, intelligent, caring action could not possibly be inscribed within the interminable series of willful reactions created by what one imagines oneself to be and what one might desire to become, and this is because we are ourselves, along with all our problems, the result of this rigid and limited progression. We are the mess we are as a result of countless previous reforms and conversions-both personal and socio-cultural-and it seems evident that any further effort along these lines, seemingly designed to help us escape from the actual facts of our psychosocial existence, merely provides cover for the endlessly "reformed" continuity of the same mess. So, how does one extricate oneself from fixed self-definitions, idealized self-projections, and the increasingly unbearable psychological and social circumstances they create?

This is an entirely wrong question because it rests on the presupposition that the one who would extricate herself is different from what is curtailing her freedom and her right to a higher level of self-realization. We all seem to have an extremely powerful sense that there is "in" there somewhere, a permanent and unique entity that emerges from and contains the past (the biological and biographical past, and perhaps also whatever the "divine" past might be), and that travels through the present to reach its realization (again either a historical or a super-natural realization) in the future. But, question whether this entity, yourself, is indeed unique and independent from its antecedents, present psychological and social circumstances and future ambitions? Who would either one of us possibly be without our remembered historical pasts and their fixed projections? Would we exist at all, psychologically? Are the liberation and the higher truth many of us want to attain ever possible if their definition and the means utilized for their attainment are shaped by our multiple and contradictory personal/cultural experience and knowledge?

What occurs when it becomes obvious that the human psyche is one, indivisible, conditioned by experience and, therefore, not subject to significant change, if this change continues to be generated by this limited and self-replicating experience? What occurs when there is the realization that the self, the ego, is not ever significantly different from what it experiences, knows and thinks; nor different either from the presumably desirable psychological or social characteristics that are anxiously projected onto the future?

Is not seeing the falseness of this entire process of pseudo being and becoming not its irreversible ending? And is not this perception then the only totally necessary action? To see that there is no such a thing as psychological evolution, that the progressive reformation or expansion of the egotistical self is an illusion, is to bring this whole illusion-the illusion of mental time-to a sudden and decisive end.
(9)

In the chaotic and violent world we have created, different groups interminably argue about what is the best way to put an end to suffering, each group of "chosen ones" assuring the rest that their way is "the way". Is the first step towards sanity not then one away from this never ending battle between different false representations of the truth fighting each other to attain supremacy? (10)

The fundamental, transpersonal human being lives underneath the multiple masks with which the surface self avoids both seeing himself as a whole and revealing himself to others. These masks are, essentially: education, gender, race, ethnicity, economic class, profession, religious persuasion, and a host of other cultural and psychological attributes or characteristics. Because of its near invisibility to the more superficial consciousness, the barbaric character of the quintessential human being is ever present-and goes undetected-in our common, everyday, acts of self-centered separation from everyone else. It reigns supreme beneath our equally common craving for exclusive status, security, and pleasure, and in the stress, conflict and overt or covert viciousness inherent in this craving. Thus, our fundamental problem lies not principally in what we are, but in our pretense of uniqueness and our investment in the illusory process of trying to become better, better than we actually are and better than others.

A good person is not a bad person trying to become better; such a person is just a hypocrite. A gradual process of permanent self-improvement is not the equivalent of goodness. Goodness is a state of being in which there is no division and no progression and, therefore, no pretense, no effort and no conflict. Goodness does not coexist with its opposite. Goodness can only possibly exist in the absence of everything other than goodness.(11)

Life is easier if the dishes are done and it is nearly perfect if no one else is manipulated or forced to do one's dishes. (12)

However futile or sporadic, there is an undeniable impulse to goodness, beauty, and truth in the hearts and minds of very many people. Is this impulse part of the conditioning of the brain, or does it have a different and more profound source? If the psyche is nothing but its memory content and the projection of modified versions of this content onto the future, then this impulse is not significant. Not unless it leads us to the realization that what humanity so desperately needs is something that thought (the movement of self-centered memory as fear and desire) cannot possibly conceive and much less realize.

The solution to human suffering may exist and might willingly manifest, but not unless our pursuit of it within the realm of the personally or culturally known comes to an end. The irruption of the infinite in the human psychic field may be possible, but never through the pursuit of the contradictory and merely symbolic representations made of it by our limited and disjointed thought/imagination/desire.

Is not the very belief in the separate existence of the partial and finite-the isolated, self-serving human being dreaming of liberation through his or her exclusive attainment of the infinite-what may be blocking the natural manifestation of the latter?(13)

One is no longer affiliated or committed to any particular country, creed, discipline, group, or cause. One is no longer seeking deliverance, salvation, or liberation. All hope has been abandoned as one finally confronts-in oneself- the quintessential human being. Free of pretense or delusion the total drama of humanity reveals itself in all its unmitigated horror. The physical world is still extraordinarily beautiful and mysterious-perhaps even more so now than before; now that it is seen as indifferently containing the many conflictive and wasteful endeavors of human beings.

The possibility of an entirely different way of being human is left open, but under the strict guard of the insight revealing that this undivided participation in being will never manifest as the fulfillment of a particular desire attained through progressive compliance with a particular method or the mediation of any of the multiple divinities or principles invented by different traditions for that deceitful purpose. The realization that only an unprecedented mutation of the brain/psyche can possibly put an end to our wasteful and destructive behavior implies that there is nothing one could possibly do to attain or merit this mutation. The revelation of the futility of any effort to control the self-centered process of thought is the ending of this process. (14)

Our senses and our intellect can touch only a very reduced portion of manifest existence, very little of the infinitely complex levels and forms of relationship in the universe, and practically nothing of what is formless, that is, what is existent but not manifest to us. This fact cannot change; more knowledge can be endlessly added to the knowledge already gathered without substantially decreasing the distance between what is known (in every sense of that separation) and what is. Awareness of the futility of intellectual accumulation, places sensory experience and cumulative cognitive knowledge about metaphysical, cosmic and psychological matters in its proper place and, consequently, most of one's energy is naturally re-routed to the consideration of the unfamiliar. First, to probe the immensity of our ignorance; then to realize, once and for all, that maps will never adequately represent, and much less become, the territory; and finally to deeply feel the age, extent, and depth of the sorrow that has come from the absurd clash of opposing ideologies and interests with their common and irreducible distance from the mystery of the living whole.

Paradoxically, it is only in this complete act of negation that our eyes finally turn towards the truth. The truth being what is not reducible to the always limited knowledge and experience of a separate entity that defines itself (its past, its present, and its future) by what it knows, believes, imagines, and desires. When this happens, thought spontaneously limits itself to the areas and matters for which it is necessary and well suited, and no longer divides, contradicts, and torments itself seeking solutions to (or escapes from) the self's endless problems and innumerable questions. It is clear now that if there is a way out from the fragmentation and grief that thought has created, it cannot possibly be through the creation, now or in the future, of new insularities with their respective conflictive dogmas and contradictory methods. (15)

Some artists do have a privilege; they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that creativity has nothing to do with art. Art merely attempts-at best-to point to or somehow metaphorically imitate the obscure sense the artist may have of the unthinkable creativity of life, death, and what their common non-manifest ground may be. Honest artists, musicians and poets hone their peculiar abilities only to more clearly see their common limitation; the blindness of the conditioned human being. (16)

At the base of the human psyche lie mechanical, repetitive, deep-rooted instincts and habits. Some of them (and parts of them) are useful for survival but, in general, they are largely barren and often destructive remnants of previous animal and human experience. In contrast with the singularity of the submerged base, the tip of the psychic iceberg is plural. And this plurality of the self-reflective psyche is based on multiple memorialized experience including all the contradictory ideals proposing ways of cutting or transcending the vulgar roots chaining us all to the darkness stirring largely unacknowledged below self-centered sight. These conflictive ideals and our efforts to realize them over time manage to cover up and superficially modify, but never actually destroy, our basic instincts and tendencies, our hidden common ground.

In fact, our mental activities are, for the most part, mere refinements of what lies underneath; a convenient disguise of ancient fears and the often brutal opposite yearnings these fears conceive and pursue. Deep down we desire uninterrupted physical pleasures, and the joys of power attained through the physical or psychological domination of others; while more on the surface we may entertain ideas of godliness, justice, and peace. Don Quijote and Sancho Panza thus untiringly ride in and through each one of us, and their traumatic journey through life is the sad history of humankind as well as its certain future. This, unless the false promises of our conflicting ideologies and our seemingly untiring faith in them and their authorities are decisively put aside so that we may see with clarity who we really are.

Without freedom from the ideals of social and psychological reformation, the common base of the human psyche cannot be revealed for what it actually is. Conversely, to see ourselves just as we are, instantly obliterates the sense of separate being by revealing how the pre-personal and trans-personal extends into the psychological, and how this extension fuels our cruelly competitive process of acquiring and becoming. We all are insecurity, anger, fear and desire. The craving for exclusive privilege, power and the blatant or subtle escape from responsibility, are common to all of us. Thus, we simply deceive ourselves and lie to others when showing ourselves off as engaged in cultural, political, or spiritual projects destined to, at some point, liberate us from this fixed existential and behavioral prison that generates endless separation, antagonism, and suffering.

Attention to the movement of thought reveals its constant effort to disguise, change, transcend or escape who we are and how we actually live our lives. When the truth of our most immediate reality becomes evident, ideals are once and for all discarded as the dishonest illusions they truly are. To share with others this perception and its implications is also the first step in true relationship-the deepest of friendships-because the first step in truth is the demolition of the false walls of separation between us.

Beyond all that, this insight into the alienated and conditioned human psyche and its imprisonment in socio-cultural enclaves, may also be all that is necessary to trigger the manifestation of something entirely unrelated to the psychological experience of the individual and the social history of humanity as a whole: a fixed and suffering journey inexorably moving towards future extensions of itself. In this very melting away of the many layers of frozen memories and projections of the psychological iceberg, the direct, non-verbal perception of our common plight might open to an unprecedented sense of being. (17)

One cannot prove one's innocence by merely proving someone else's guilt and yet, that is what we seem to be doing all the time. The blaming of others must end if one is to know oneself and responsibly confront all that is happening in the world. However, this confrontation is not an over-dramatized, sentimental, and guilty altercation with oneself, but rather a passive verification of fact, free of moralistic emotion and knee-jerk reactions. No re-action is warranted to one's participation in the tragedy of humankind simply because there is no separation between the act of verification and the fact verified; no separation between the tragedy and the victim who is both cause and effect of the tragedy. What is simply is, without any one there to react to it in any way. Psychological conditioning is separation, violence and suffering; period. Can thought simply stay with that overarching fact allowing itself no further extension in escape and subterfuge? (18)

We seem to spend our lives yearning for something we do not have, and there is fear, anger, sadness, and the ruthlessness of ambition in this yearning. We endlessly delude ourselves by inventing illusory goals and false gods which then inevitably fail to deliver the healing and wholeness that our very (psychological) presence with its exclusive desires and fears negates.

We are obsessed with the desire for freedom, but are generally content with new forms of slavery which by virtue of their superficial difference from the slavery of others and one's own previous ones, manage to maintain our sense of separate being as well as the illusory promise of greater pleasure and status to be attained in an imagined future of ever improved exclusive "freedoms". (19)

To be human, as we know it, is to interminably yearn, believe and hope. The "me" who craves is no different from the mental neck it cranes, nor is it different from what it cranes it for. Thus, the "me" tends to (wittingly or unwittingly) re-create the mental and social limitations that he presumably wants to overcome. And since our hopes and ambitions are contradictory among themselves, as well as in conflict with those of others, efforts made for their realization inevitably produce confusion within as well as clashes with others attempting to do the same with theirs.

Regardless of how noble and laborious her particular intent may be, the hungrily hopeful individual cannot possibly bring about lasting peace and happiness. Only putting an irrevocable end to the pursuits of myopic tribal superiority and personal fulfillment, may bring about mental health and true relationship. In loosening the bonds of fear and de-fanging the imagined monster of personal death, this coming face to face with the absurdity of our egotism might even uncover the plenitude of life. (20)

"I" want to be happy, I want to be good; I want to have a little more, or a little less of this or that; a little more money, a little more influence, a little more love and respect. A little less fear and anxiety, a little less greed, a little less envy. What would not I do to remedy the mistakes I made in the past, and to avoid the ones I fear I will make in the future. "I" am not, in fact, anything but this unreasonable claim for a better tomorrow; an utterly absurd desire that can never come to pass given that it is just a mental construct existing in different and vastly incongruous versions in each unhappy, fearful and overreaching mind. (21)

The terrible things happening in the world are but the out-picturing of what is occurring in our own lives, and one would want to be able to do something about it all. Yet this desire to help is treacherous because it is not as if one were innocent or unaffected by the same ills and problems making others suffer. The source of conflict and sorrow is certainly psychological before it is social, and so the most urgent task is to see and assume responsibility for the disorder in one's own mind and life. Not to do so implies staying as a foot soldier among millions of other conscripts active in any one of the myriad self-righteous armies absurdly fighting for peace and truth.

One may consider oneself better off than others economically, culturally, physically, intellectually or spiritually, however, to assess human worth by way of such superficial and biased comparisons is just plain dumb. It is essential to perceive and deal with the root problem affecting all of humanity through each one of our limited, conditioned minds, and not be sidetracked gloating over loaded comparisons and the silly pretense of being someone else's panacea. It is essential to redirect all one's energy to ask why after so many centuries of presumed progress, we are still so primitive, psychologically as well as collectively. Why is it that we remain personally incapable of moving beyond violence, greed, and fear? Why is war and the abusive exploitation of others still our daily bread?

Only in ending this common habit of losing oneself in self-serving comparisons or in the gradual solution of a few (real or imagined) problems, does the door open to passively confronting one's responsible participation in the entire mess. And if existential separation and the resulting self-centeredness constitute the root problem, then the central issue is not that I/we have a problem, but rather that "I" am the problem. Humanity as a whole suffers from self-centeredness and ethnocentrism (cultural self-centeredness), thus I cannot possibly be the agent who will ever solve the problem of human suffering. Nor do I exist independently if I am, psychologically, fundamentally the same as everyone else.

But, where does this realization leave us then? -Terminal depression? What does one do after seeing that all possible action is merely a slightly modified reiteration of previous experience-kill oneself? Merely to pose this question of what to do reveals, however, the conditioned urge to act, to control, to fix, even when it may have become intellectually clear that that is precisely the wrong thing to do if what is necessary is a clean break with the past and its consistently impotent reactions to insecurity, pain and fear.

Life challenges continue, as do all of one's fixed drives and behaviors, but there is now something radically new: an observation of everything occurring within and outside the psyche that does not react in either a positive or a negative way. It is finally evident that past experience (knowledge) is useless beyond certain practical matters, and that the psychological future we plan for is merely a re-fried enactment of the same old beans. That much is clear, so there is no longer time now for further effort, conflict, and resistance. With ideals no longer an option, only the present remains. Only what is remains in oneself and as oneself: the ignorance; the loneliness; the endless pursuit of pleasure and distinction; the general cruelty and sorrow of humanity endlessly recreating themselves through the multiple hopes of individuals and separate groups trying to find exclusive escape from their particular experience of suffering.

Nothing we know, believe or want psychologically is of any help then. The arts, the sciences, the political and religious ideologies, the therapies, the governments, the armies, and the corporations, are all incapable of changing the human heart and of setting straight the disorder of the human mind. Out of the deepest darkness finally comes the dawn of understanding, but not for anyone in particular. It simply comes. (22)

Every isolated psyche is a permanent exercise in self-righteousness; each an elaborate alibi defending neurotic ambitions that co-exist with deep and relatively hidden feelings of fear, guilt and shame. Awareness of these histrionics is the final wiping of one's eyes; their ending, the emergence of simplicity and silence.

There is no sense in attempting to upset someone else's apple cart, when one's own is so precariously balanced or has already spilled all over the road. There is no sense either in convincing ourselves that ultimate good will eventually come from the added effect of our different brands of self-righteousness acting separately and contradictorily, because that will merely prolong what is already a long history of deceptive maneuvers of avoidance, denial and waste of energy. All that has to end, and that ending is silent, passive observation of one's own hypocrisy at work. Logically, moment-to-moment perception of oneself in relationship also opens one's eyes to the multiple subtle and not so subtle disguises of others, making it easier to deal with them without hidden resistance or open conflict. Should the rare opportunity of dialogue deep enough to reveal the fact and nature of our common psychological reality arise, then the proof of the pudding would be in the disappearance of hypocrisy. To talk just to talk is part of our habitual obfuscation and waste of energy. It only serves to re-enforce and refine defenses and pretenses. (23)

Attention implies not resisting or desiring anything so that everything may be completely and directly seen. To be attentive is to realize the truth of human reality and not for a second fall back into the time-bound realm of illusion in which a hypothetical, idealized "I" endlessly projects onto the future imaginarily improved versions of himself and the world. (24)

Before throwing oneself into a spiritual, search, it is good to inquire what motives and fears animate the search, which is but another way of asking who is it that is searching and what is the object of the search. It is advisable to carefully examine as well the validity and results of the spiritual journeys of others; especially those presenting themselves as role models, teachers, priests, ministers or gurus. The chaos in the world today is, after all, the net result of all the religious, political, cultural, and scientific attempts made by different individuals and groups to transcend human stupidity and the suffering it generates. There is never valid precedence for overcoming egotism and its inherent conflicts. This, not because enlightenment has never occurred to anyone, but rather because the possibility of psychological separation coming to an end is, for every person, always new. There is no knowledge that can deliver selflessness. Insight is not transferable from one person to another.

This is not meant to discourage anyone. All to the contrary, it is said to embolden anyone serious enough about these things to independently face the fact that none of the multiple and contradictory methodologies laid out by different religious traditions in order to satisfy our rather common desire for transcendence, can possibly deliver what may be truly sacred. Only direct perception of the futility of any possible effort to find personal salvation eliminates the mental disorder and noise generated by the desperate seeker and its absurd ambition to control or transcend itself. Thus, to see the absurdity and violence of the traditional religious search is to be alone and silent; not knowing and not caring whether or not in that silence something else may occur.

A mature person is certain that new variations of the noise we make as we grope for personal liberation or spiritual self enhancement are only that: noise, the shrill sound of ambition, confusion, conflict, fear and sorrow echoing down the dark halls of human history and endlessly projecting itself onto the only future-a terrible one-that a common secular and "spiritual" greed with multiple and opposing manifestations can create. (25)

Along with birth, death is, perhaps, the most important-undoubtedly the most mysterious-event in anyone's life. Why then, after millennia of human "evolution", vast numbers of people still want desperately to avoid coming to terms with the fact of death in any way possible? In other words: why is a keen natural interest in the mystery of life and death supplanted by rather irrelevant social and religious occupations, preoccupations and entertainments? Why are we generally so cut off from our own most immediate psychosomatic reality; the reality each one of us necessarily shares with all others?

Today, when the demise of the entire species is a real possibility, it is more urgent than ever to wake up to the possibility of looking, in a totally fresh manner, to what it means to be the only organism aware of its own death. To look at death as one of the central issues of life in an independent, direct, and holistic manner implies a total abandonment of pre-cooked religious pie-in-the-sky stories and their attendant methodologies for gradual self-development.

Why not look at our life and death free of prejudice and evasion, that is, why not look directly, completely and independently? And is it possible in this fearless observation of ourselves, to avoid interpreting whatever we may see in already known images and ideas begging for consensual corroboration and intent on corrective psychological action? To be awake, to be alive, to care, is to let this fresh and ever present look at everything around and within one permeate one's entire being without formulating ideas or reacting in any pre-conditioned way to what might be seen.

Death then is not sweet or bitter sleep ending the life of a physical organism ruled by an independent psychological entity. Death is, rather, life recreating itself at every instant. Death is the plenitude of wakefulness and creation at every instant of life. Death lives by walking silently at the very edge of time. (26)

There is no justice without equality, and it is plain to see that equality is not to be found-ever-in terms of beauty, intelligence, experience, property, or status. The common nature of human beings, our fundamental equality, cannot be revealed without profound compassion, and compassion is-paradoxically-the light to which only eyes able to perceive the superficiality of personal and cultural differences, open.

The problem is that our minds are so conditioned by psychological experience, (knowledge and belief), that we only see whatever that experience and its built-in expectations determine. We are permanently trying to see something beyond ourselves-something that by fulfilling our desires for personal realization might deliver us from isolation, fear and sorrow. This permanent effort to avoid suffering through the attainment of predetermined goals, necessarily blocks clear perception of who we are, how we actually relate to others, to things and ideas, and why we suffer. The permanent projection of an idealized self into the future, with all its attendant labors, conflicts and worries, is an escape from the shared-and largely unchanging-facts of our existence and, hence, necessarily an extension of its suffering.

Self-projection holds within itself all the seeds of injustice, because unless there is a radical change, right now, we shall be tomorrow what today might add to the collection of dead memories that constitutes our past. It is useless to take someone else's word for it, look at it yourself. Is the personal psyche anything but the accumulation of images and ideas representing previous instances of pleasure and pain, as well as the particular way in which this accumulation (thought as the "thinker") interprets the present and uses it to project and construct a future with the only intent of increasing the pleasure that has been know while decreasing the sorrow and fear that has also been known? The clashing co-existence of the memories, fears and violent material and spiritual ambitions of billions of "different" human beings, is the self-preserving source of all injustice. (27)

You are aware that you do not have access to it, but you love the truth nonetheless precisely because you suffer its absence, as you suffer the absence of the infinite. You know that what you know, believe and experience and all the other notions that the world trumpets with overwrought conviction and in a thousand vulgar tones, could not possibly be the truth. How can you love others then, when you know each of them, psychologically, as a particular manifestation of the manifold falseness we all commonly embody and help perpetuate? And who could love you?

Not having access to the truth directly, it is only rational to negate the value given to whatever is falsely claimed to be the truth. The sciences are not the truth; the arts are not the truth; nor are the truth the social or cultural movements said to embody or to be in process of attaining the truth. The many religions forever claiming to posses the truth are not the truth. What we see is not the truth; nor is what we think, believe or feel, the truth.

The truth is silent; the truth is absent. The only clues we have to find truth are, thus, negative ones. We do not know, nor will we ever know what the truth is, but we can have a pretty clear sense of what it is not. The truth is not what churns in our confused, contradictory minds or what aches and yearns in our poor hearts. Nor is the truth in whatever little we see and understand of matter and material processes; even though we may concede that the truth must encompasses all that.

Properly seen, the absence of the truth may illuminate our lives and our minds with its terrible darkness. This, the vision of our ignorance, erases the puerile differences we create to gain self-importance by telling ourselves apart from each other and from the world at large. To see the darkness in our egocentric longing for the realization of idealized future fantasies of ourselves, wrecks mental time by making clear that the truth abides neither in the remembered past, nor in the laborious present, or in the pre-imagined coveted or feared future. We have never had the truth, and if we remain separate and conditioned as we are, the truth will never manifest. What is left of one when there is nothing to go back to, nothing left to do now and nothing left to grasp or to become, tomorrow? And, is that that timeless emptiness, perhaps, the revelation of truth? (28)

It is interesting to reflect on how our multiple occupations and distractions-from the most puerile to the most refined-generally block out awareness of what is not within the realm of ordinary intra and extra-psychic perception. In other words, hyperactivity and overtaxing commitment flatly obscure the existence of what lies beyond our perception, knowledge or belief regarding ourselves, society and the realms of mind and matter. This shared provincialism makes us content to live in a rigidly pre-determined psychological, social and cultural world; the world of the known, the limited, familiar world we are born into and despairingly die to.

Within specific psychological, clannish and tribal boundaries, we grow and defend the prescribed skills, traditions, habits, and affections granting a sense of self and a measure of largely illusory security away from the immensity and mystery of life and death as the unknown and the unknowable. Thus, the possible irruption of "not me" into our petty psychological and cultural domains is either denied or thought of as terrifyingly dangerous. Dangerous in its capacity to wash away our tight identification with what we have already experienced, what we have learned, what we own, and what we are working so hard to become in the future. Within the realm of the personally and tribally known everyone is somebody; outside of it our precious individualities are nothing, drops in the ocean. Oh, but the ocean... (29)

There is first the realization that worldly fulfillment will not come, and that can be devastating. But coming on the heels of that chilling disillusion, is an even more difficult realization: that even if there is anything sacred, one will never come in touch with it simply because the very presence of the separate self indicates the absence of the sacred. There is nothing then for one to stand on but, paradoxically, this very shrinking of the self might be, paradoxically, the only portal through which the sacred may irrupt into the now impersonal brain. (30)

After millennia of evolution and so many centuries of scientific, social and religious "progress", why is the world as conflicted and sorrowful as it is? Even though blatantly obvious, this is a question seldom asked because the answer leaves everyone baffled, not knowing what to say. Human society is what it is because there are now more than six and a half billion of us trying to own, experience, and become whatever we imagine we deserve to own, experience, and become. This blind and violent drive for self-fulfillment is the very source of an ancient pool of suffering that has endlessly emptied the present to make of the future only a slight modification of the past. (31)

- Financially, things had gotten so good that the well off no longer even heard of the poor with their increasing numbers and worsening plight. This was a great relief for they still had to deal with the grief that boredom, frustration, envy and fear brought to them. No matter how hard they tried and how much they worked and connived, fulfillment was still like sand running through their fingers; an impossibly beautiful bird that would let itself be caught momentarily to then disappear in a flash leaving behind only the incurable desire for its beauty and grace: the endlessly developing appetite of a sadistic hunter, of a hardened addict. (32)

If you have discovered how insignificant and unoriginal you really are, don't make a big deal of it. If you do, you haven't. (33)

To see that the psyche conditioned by biological, social and personal experience is a permanent movement of self-centered thought going from the imprinted past to the desired future, is also to see that there can be no truly relevant change within the fixed parameters of that same movement. This perception ends, therefore, the desire to improve the self and its social circumstances. And when this happens, the natural energy of the psyche-before wasted in the conflict between the actual and the ideal-gathers without a pre-determined purpose.

Since all alternative and mutually exclusive commitments are now perceived as irrelevant in terms of a radical transformation of the human being, possible comparisons (positive and negative) between oneself and other individuals advocating different commitments are also immediately rejected. Self-projection, with its inherent contradictions and labors, ceases and as it does the unity of humanity is finally seen rising like the morning sun behind the heavy and opaque psycho-social tapestry that millions and millions of separate and contradictory identities, claims and ambitions stubbornly continue to weave. (34)

The only virtue has been to stay close to the fundamental issues of life. Death is no longer seen as a far away event, not because every organism comes to an irreversible end at any given and always unknown moment, but rather because everything is interconnected and therefore no "thing" exists in and by itself. One can live with death in every breath and see it as an integral part of life. How else to see the whole? How else would the terrible beauty of everything manifest? How else could the insufficiency of knowledge and the barrenness of ambition and vanity be seen and easily discarded? (35)

A great friend is diagnosed a terminal cancer. There is no time for small talk; what is important comes up immediately and into sharp focus. She is pained by the suffering her absence will create in others, but laughs merrily at the absurdity of having to console them about the consequences of her own death.

In many of the long conversations that articulated our friendship, we had often theoretically questioned our submission to the culturally determined obligation of justifying our existence through the competitive pursuit of excellence and other equally absurd forms of self-assertion. But now as we talk perhaps for the last time about her dire circumstances, there is actually nothing left to prove, achieve or justify. There is no longer then anything either one of us can attain or regret. All that is left is this miraculous, fleeting fact of our presence within the mystery of life and death. No longer encumbered by any sense of the past or the future, there is now between us an extraordinary sense of affection that is not threatened by sorrow simply because it will not yield to a desire for continuity that is blatantly opposed to the facts at hand.

It seems extraordinary that we do not normally feel fully alive like this, filled with the intense awareness of death in every breath we take, in every word said or left unsaid. The impulse for continuous self-fulfillment with all its attendant labors and endless side trips is the self-enclosing and self-protective rejection of love. (36)

Why is it that we are permanently dissatisfied? Why the absurdity of yearning for permanent, pre-designed pleasure and power? Can fantasy and ambition be abandoned forever, so that we might stay at every moment with the unthinkable reality of who we are and where we are? (37)

Since everyone is equally shaped by circumstance and experience, both personal and tribal, it is only reasonable to abandon any idea of social hierarchy. Do we not share the same basic mindset? Are we all not equally trapped in the same labyrinth of alienated self-centeredness and competitive social disorder. To continue focusing on our superficial differences and continue acting out all the consequent jealousies, frustrations, hostilities, and ambitions, is tantamount to insisting on blindness, if not madness. Sanity comes from the shock of seeing the fact of our essential psychological commonality, and the ensuing surrender of all sense of personal identity and status.

We are who we are and there is nothing we can do directly to change that, and the chaotic world we suffer is to the greatest extent the outcome of not allowing ourselves to see just that and, consequently, of condemning ourselves to endlessly trying to make ourselves and the world better in an entirely erroneous way. When there is no moving away from these basic facts, the mental time created for personal becoming does come to an end, self-centered thought stops. (38)

What I think makes me unique describes quite precisely the contours of the psychological separation I suffer. The same is true of everyone else. Nothing done to improve one's sense of originality and status in comparison with that of others, can ever supersede or transcend the alienation from everyone and everything else necessarily built into the claim of a separate identity. Our drive for self-fulfillment is an illusion responsible for untold deception and cruelty. (39)

One may see quite clearly the futility of attempting to realize oneself, how foolish and dangerous it is to try and reach for self-fulfillment through fame or any form of transcendence, and yet the anxious craving continues unabated. It continues because one is this desire to become someone better; someone more accomplished, better regarded; someone bound to survive even the death of the physical organism. Self-centered mental energy seems incapable of not investing itself in one thing or another, even when such investment can be seen as unwise or utterly insufficient. Yet, a still deeper look into this very robotic proclivity of the conditioned mind and its connection with the separate identity and sense of importance of the self, does put an end to the egotistical momentum of thought. To be free to look is to be nothing. To be nothing implies fearlessness and, therefore, lucid freedom.(40)

Is there any doubt that the reason we all seem so intent in achieving some form of importance-be it meaning, fame, or saintliness-is that we are inherently insignificant? We are so limited in space and time, we see and feel so little of what there is that, avoiding at any cost the rather obvious fact of our lack of intrinsic importance, we spend our lives chasing after one inflated dream or another. What a paradox that insignificance should deceive itself with illusory status and endless ambition. The fundamental facts of our humanity are not awful; the deception is. (41)

- If suffering could be depersonalized, that is, if each one of us could feel-well beyond mere self pity-the total sorrow of humanity across time and space, then perhaps the species could start acting intelligently and effect its own redemption. But we seem still intent in protecting the particular forms of dullness and insensitivity that, while characterizing us as particular individuals (and particular cultural groups), make intelligent and caring action impossible for the same reason.

We are who we are by virtue of the particular trick of identification we each use to avoid a full perception of the human condition as a single, uninterrupted process of self inflicted separation and suffering. We are so busy blaming others while simultaneously promoting and whitewashing ourselves, that we render ourselves incapable of seeing directly the immediate facts of our day-to-day existence and, in and through them, the totality of human pain and cruelty. (42)

The current world crisis generally perceived as beginning with the events of September 11, 2001 in the United States, is not an isolated occurrence, but rather the last of a very long series probably stretching all the way back to our appearance on the surface of the planet.

Violence has always been with us. The self-reflective human mind, which is so extraordinarily capable in certain respects and in which we take so much pride, is particularly violent; infinitely more violent than the worse animal predator because its insecurity is bottomless and its concomitant greed, endless. We think of ourselves as rational, even intelligent, yet after millennia of "progress" we are still incapable of freeing ourselves from inter-personal and inter-tribal antagonisms and frequent brutalities. The suicide attack against the World Trade Center buildings in New York City was only the most recent flare up of hostilities between two large human tribes that have been at odds with each other for many centuries.

There are two general ways in which we may approach the problem of inter-cultural hostility: we either see it as a social issue or as a psychological one. If the general problem is cultural, then the struggle between the Judeo-Christian, techno-capitalist, nominally "democratic" world and the Islamic, fundamentalist, nominally "theocratic" world, yields a plethora of interpretations and solutions that are, themselves, at odds with each other. In this approach every single religious, political, economic, and cultural sub-group on either side of the larger divide, comes up with its own elucidation of the conflict and issues the operational prescription most coherent with its analysis and its own projected interests. Furthermore, within these sub-groups, every single person reacts to the mounting violence on the basis of his or her own knowledge and experience and whatever sense of the future may be imagined as the result of the degree of fear and anger felt.

Thus, from each side of the conflict emerges a whole continuum of responses going from the most bellicose and militaristic at one end, to the most pacifist and "non-violent" at the other extreme. Unfortunately, those who are quick to rush to the comfort of guns and the pleasures of revenge have a much easier task than those who would want to bring about their own particular visions of peace and justice. Consensus seems a better friend of the desire to kill than of the desire to heal. For it is generally the doves who splinter and argue bitterly about authority and the goals and tactics of the many possible forms of reform, while the more consensual hawks are already dropping their clever bombs or murderously blowing themselves up, thus sowing the Earth (and pre-empting the future) with new death, new terror, and fresh hate. However, as it should be abundantly clear after millennia of war, neither the hawks nor the doves of different cultural groups have ever managed to bring peace to the hearts and minds of the individuals who inhabit this troubled Earth.

On the other hand, if we could recognize that our minds and the world our minds create and re-create every day, is the result of thousands of previous wars, reforms, and revolutions, and that new manifestations of the same thinking and the same type of actions are not likely to free us from violence and sorrow in the future, then we could possibly come to see the current crisis in a radically different way. We would see the present conflict between the so-called Western civilization and (radical) Islam, not as a particular social and cultural problem largely disconnected from history as a whole, but rather as a particular manifestation of an ancient and all-pervasive psychological problem.

If the cause of all discord and suffering is essentially psychological, it does not make any sense to continue externalizing the problem and blaming others for the violent disorder in the world and the disruptions and crises in our own lives. In other words: if the root of the problem of human conflict and sorrow is planted in the alienation, disorder and lack of sensitivity of the psyche, then each and every one of us is eminently responsible for the violence presently ravaging particular countries and regions of the world.

Hypocritical pointing fingers automatically retract the very moment this difficult but otherwise glaring fact explodes in the mind destroying the hypocritical personal and cultural alibis created by a common desire for security, power and respectability. It is then finally clear why despite its presumed intelligence and interminable "development", humanity has never solved fundamental social problems such as collective delusion, war and the exploitation and consequent misery of millions and millions of people.

This realization that one is nothing if not a particular manifestation of the general mental chaos that extends throughout geographic space and historical time, instantly destroys all commitment to particular causes, ideologies, organizations and traditions. And this severing of exclusive commitment brings about, in turn, a sense of aloneness. Aloneness, not as isolation from others stemming from feeling culturally, psychologically or "spiritually" different and superior, but rather as the outcome of having freed oneself from the nearly instinctive urge to gain safety by identifying with an exclusive and presumably higher moral, intellectual, or religious cultural ground. One is now alone simply because identification with any self-righteous and warring tribe is no longer tolerable. And this immediate act of impersonal and intelligent insight, naturally and easily erases all possibility of hatred and aggression.

Once free of habitual tribal associations with their pre-masticated analyses and oversimplified, under-contextualized, inherently inadequate solutions and knee-jerk reactions, it is finally clear that there is no significant difference between human beings; that each and every one of us embodies the irrationality and the destructiveness that constitutes the tragedy of the whole species. No longer caught in the habit of biased and evasive comparison (it had always been so easy to feel better by simply finding, or creating, someone worse than oneself), the mechanical patterns of thought and emotion that typify the violent human psyche, come sharply into focus and in that very act of undivided attention, dissolve.

"I" -and the first person pronoun goes here between quotation marks to underline a shared sense of being separate and independent entities-"I" am anger, fear, the desire for power and status, the jealousy, the depression and all other psychological attributes and tendencies constitutive of everyone else. "I" am the endless and petty celebration of particular talents and other personal characteristics; "I" am the blind follower of authority and willing slave of habit and tradition. "I" am the constant and often aggressive search for privilege and pleasure. "I" am also the occasional joy that never really manages to fully eradicate this terrible sense of insecurity and insufficiency burning in my heart with all its over-reactions. Being all that, it is hardly surprising that the "I" is forever aching for unity with some source of absolute meaning. Nor is it surprising that because that ideal transcendental unity never seems to come into being, it is routinely substituted by whatever seems to grant some measure of exclusive security, pleasure and status-even if it also implies isolation, deceit, confusion and violence.

Seeing the tribes endlessly preparing for war while whitewashing their murderous intentions with heavy coats of religious nonsense, it becomes clear that none of the versions of the sacred offered by each of the many splinters of the major and minor religious traditions, are whatever the real, actual (not the ideological or the imagined) sacred might be-if there is such a thing at all. The same goes for political traditions and their particular goals and methods. Behind all the different sheep's coats, hides the same wolf with different plans to realize its "manifest destiny" regardless what the cost to others and even to itself might be.

In this general context, particular attention must be paid to the powerful lure offered today by scientific and technological development and, while easily acknowledging that science has a fundamental role in the survival of the species (as one of the few realms in which the process of thought is generally accurate, reasonable), discount with the same ease the often arrogant and empty promises of science and technology in so far as the future of humanity and the profound well-being of the individual is concerned. Not only is there absolutely no evidence that scientists or technocrats are in any way significantly more reasonable, sensitive, or intelligent than anyone else in their personal relationships or in their willingness and capacity to save humanity from its own savagery, but much of what we all need saving from is the result of science and technology irresponsibly putting themselves at the service of particular instances of all too human greed and rage. Just like traditional religiosity and politics, science and technology are incapable of dealing with the core problem of humankind: the fact that the psyche is in itself alienated, divided, endlessly egotistical, fearful, conflicted and conflictive, conditioned by its experience, and condemned to interminably suffer by mechanically projecting into the future equally barren reformulations of its tribal and psychological self.

The on-going hostilities gradually building up to a global crisis, presents concerned human beings everywhere with an enhanced opportunity to walk resolutely away from the futility of traditional cultural affiliations and the partial and biased solutions they habitually propose. To take an independent and sustained look at the nature and extent of the entire human predicament, not as an abstraction, but as it is actually incarnated in our own minds and lives, is to finally assume total, independent, and passive responsibility for the whole mess.

Why passive? Simply because the negative action of ending attachment to anything presumably greater than oneself has already occurred, being one with the insight into the real nature of the ethnocentrically conditioned human being and its proclivity for violence. That instantaneous and irreversible action is all that is necessary because, if it is real, it ends participation in the violence of what individuals hiding out in groups conditioned by particular experiences and egotistical interests do to defend their interests and to feel secure and superior to others and, thus, justified in brutalizing them.

This resolute stepping away from the complex web of subterfuge that underlies personal and cultural identity, is the only way to terminally dispel the naïve notion that any particular ideological "solution"-be it Christian post-modern capitalist democracy, Judaism or Islam-will ever be capable of ending the irrational psycho-cultural separation and consequent antagonism and violence prevalent at every point in human history. Since the differentially conditioned human being is both cause and effect of the division, hostility and sorrow in the world, the only possible caring action lies in the ending of oneself as the blurry eyed, hypocritical and overtly or covertly violent member of any warring tribe.(43)

The intensity with which most people generally resist the notion that intelligent and efficient action cannot possibly come from a culturally and psychologically pre-determined mind, provides convincing evidence of how rigidly our brains are wired. When confronted with any problem, the pre-personal and the personal content of memory irresistibly lounges ahead through the projection of solutions that are but reformulations of previous ones that did not quite work. War is, perhaps, the best example of this, for while generally presented as a means of creating peace or of extending some particular brand of remanufactured "goodness" or another, it continues to be but the brutal means whereby fundamentalisms of every stripe attempt to prove their superiority.

Separate, insecure and fearful, on one hand and, on the other, everlastingly craving some exclusive form of self-realization and some sense of equanimity and peace, we endlessly create and recreate separate psyches attached to and identified with particular histories, ideologies, affects, goals and methods over the supremacy of which we then fight and destroy one another. (44)

Just as one is not really mentally separate from humanity as a whole, one is also-within oneself-not separate from the structure, contents and movement of memory. Thus, just as there is no particular human being or particular cultural group capable of bringing peace and reason to the world, there is no independent entity-no "I"-capable of significantly altering the contents of the rest of the psyche in order to radically change or transcend the destructive, egotistical behavior we all suffer from. The unity of the psyche is, however, even more difficult to see than the macro picture of humankind fractured along the fault lines of tradition, ideology and particular interest, and this difficulty in accurately and completely seeing ourselves explains in great measure why we remain at war with ourselves and others.

Let us take a deeper look at this. There is no separation between what we call "my" self and what the "I" (myself) has experienced in the past, not just personally, but also as a brain conditioned by the totality of human experience, animal experience, and beyond. Nor is there, consequently, any separation between "myself" and what I project as a desirable or feared future experience. What I want and fear from the imagined future is strictly related to the psychological past conditioning the brain. Therefore, if there is a radical solution to the problem of being human, it cannot possibly lay in future projections fed by previous experience.

What is one to do then? If there is no conclusive right action open to someone who truly wants to eradicate sorrow from the face of the Earth and from her own life, what is she to think or do? Much energy is wasted in inter-personal (and intercultural) resistance and open conflict. But even more is wasted in the intra-psychic conflict inherent in the defense and enhanced projection of a particular sense of personal existence. All human beings live in a permanent battle waged between what we actually are and the idealized image of who we would like to become. We do not generally know what would happen to our minds were this enormous waste of energy to end. We do not know what would occur if-as a result of seeing all this-one never again participates in another futile crusade to change oneself, someone else, or the world at large. We do not know what would result from all the energy of the brain gathering from simply staying quietly with the facts of our separate, conditioned, and suffering existence, without hope, without ambition-in fact, without any sense of a predetermined personal future and, therefore, having ended all the psychological conflict intrinsic to the urge to become something that we are not.

We do not know what might happen if mental conflict and resistance were to come to an end, yet when presented with this possibility many people react by immediately assuming that the nullification of the controlling action of the "I" (nullification inherent in the realization of the indivisibility of the conditioned psyche) would implicitly give free reign to the human animal's worst instincts and most destructive tendencies. But that is a totally erroneous interpretation of what is being said, simply because it takes for granted that that which the "I" has (presumably) kept in check will still be there and out of control when there is no longer an "I" present.

In other words, aside from the fact that such interpretation is merely a theoretical reaction and not the actual seeing that the "I" is not different from the contents of the psyche, it unjustifiably assumes an even more dangerous continuity itself based in the deeply ingrained fear that the only possible outcome of the integration of the psyche through the disappearance of the "I", is a Pandora's box scenario.

In this matter, perhaps more than in any other, it is essential to stay simple and stick to the point to thus avoid rushing to unwarranted conclusions unrelated to the actual perception of what is being presented. If it has become apparent that the solutions that self-centered thought formulates in response to our psychological and social problems are not only ineffective but also counterproductive, then it is only rational to immediately and irrevocably put an end to them. This either happens or it does not happen. If one is unwilling to confront facts and the abyss of radical unfamiliarity that these facts represent, then there is absolutely no point in speculating what the outcome of the plunge might be. The obvious function of this type of idle doomsday conjecture is to avoid taking the challenge, thereby securing the continuity of self-centered memory reacting through desire/fear/thought. (45)

Instincts, emotions, language, suffering, historical and cultural background, are all impersonal or transpersonal traits. That is, everybody has them. However, when seen from the ideological point of view of any given group, these traits appear to its members as exclusive cultural attributes inextricably intertwined with their identity and radically different from those of others. The tribal angle of view is too narrow to see the universality of these basic traits.

Despite all the confusion, antagonism and sorrow that stems from our attachment to a particular sense of personal and cultural uniqueness, we are still extraordinarily reluctant to see the absurdity and danger of cultural and psychological separation and therefore unwilling to let go of it. Why is it that we remain so unwilling to question our false sense of separation (privileged or not) and the enormously painful consequences it has in our lives and the lives of others? Why do we insist in attaining a false sense of exclusive security at the expense of creating real insecurity for everyone? (46)

Thought is limited and fragmented. Limited in that it operates by adopting or creating representations related to previously established categories and nomenclatures that cannot ever possibly map out the flow of existence and much less detect whatever lies beyond the manifest. Furthermore, even though it is fairly obvious that words and ideas are not what they intend to represent, we tend to act as if they were, thus giving more importance to knowledge and belief (thought) than to what is real, what is actually happening. This predominance of memory, thought and desire, in turn, inevitably creates distance from everything, as well as dissention among individuals identified with different and contradictory constellations of knowledge and belief. It also creates the sense of a mental time deemed necessary to complete the understanding of anything, so that appropriate action might take place, also gradually, in time.

At every moment, the psyche-conditioned by what it has already experienced, by what it knows and believes-turns old what is entirely new by relating or comparing what is actually happening with old representations of dead experience. In other words, thinking, specially self-centered and self-serving thinking, invariably involves selective and otherwise limited perception and then translation of the raw sensory data plucked out of the unthinkable and flowing whole, into familiar and fairly communicable symbols and categories. Needless to say, the only possible future of thought is one that thought itself can imagine, desire and construct utilizing its own symbols and categories. It is this process of mentally filtering and reacting to everything through a net of necessarily limited and biased knowledge, that gives birth to the self, defends its identity, and maintains its sense of continuity.

It is of course true that certain areas of human life are well served by this process of fragmented, comparative and cumulative thinking. For example, knowing the laws of aerodynamics does make building and flying airplanes possible. But when present as the internal dialogue between two presumably different layers or aspects of the same psyche, or when extended to the realm of relationship between individuals, the operation of memory-based, comparative thought inevitably creates division, contradiction and conflict. Is it not fairly obvious that for as long as each individual identifies with a particular and permanently changing set of images or ideas representative of exclusive memories and exclusive future claims correct perception and intelligent cooperation will remain impossible? Thus, and to push the previous example much further, the constructive, rational observation and thinking involved in the discovery of scientific laws and the creation of related technologies that make something like air travel possible, is subsequently routinely employed in the irrational destruction by bombing the towns and cities of people defending different traditions, upholding different values, and struggling to reach different or the same, contested, goals.

The self is identified with thought in several important ways: first, in the sense of cogito ergo sum, for thought and its close sibling, emotion, are all we know and what we know is what we are. (I think, therefore I am... I am what I think and I think it cannot possibly be otherwise.) Then, also in its identification with particular theories and beliefs opposed to those serving the particular identity of others. And, finally, in the sense of "thinking of itself" as an exclusive history of previous experiences that extends itself back into the past and forward into the future as relatively fixed expectations: desired or feared outcomes. Because this multi-layered identification of the self with the process of thought is upheld by psychological experience, physical sensation, and jealously defended by collective tradition, the individual is usually incapable or unwilling to question its validity (the validity of thought) in the realm of basic mental health and human interaction.

It may be interesting to contrast here thought as employed in scientific investigation with the same thought employed in the personal life of people who work as scientists. In the scientific study of matter the research scientist is greatly helped by the fact that some distance can be taken from objects of observation that are relatively stable. This relative degree of scientific objectivity is further enhanced by making the results of any study or experiment routinely subject to critical peer review. Yet, not infrequently, scientists tempted by the allure of fame or material gain (thought operating in the field of relationship and self projection), break with the scientific method and its implicit code of intellectual rigor and ethical sense, often with disastrous consequences for themselves and others.

Habit, tradition and experience itself force us into the straight-jacket of thought and in that bind we generally say: "Thought is all we know, thought is all we have; it is only through the good or the improved use of thought that we shall be able to solve our problems and perhaps, sometime in the future, even eradicate separation and conflict from the face of the earth". To question the validity of thought, (except, as explained above, in certain practical areas), appears to most as only the prerogative of the certifiably insane, because such questioning implicitly challenges the very existence of the thinker whom we all embody and hold in such high esteem.

Whoever manages to move away from this traditional point of view enough to challenge the validity of thought in areas other than basic logistics and science, is confronted with this fundamental question: Does this daring confrontation of the self-based operation of thought not imply the continued presence of the "thinker" still intent on improving future outcomes based on past experience and knowledge? Even more to the point-if the thinker is not an independent entity in charge of the operation of thought and is, therefore, incapable of significantly altering, or transcending it, is there any sense in talking about radical psychological change?

If the answer to this question is an absolute and resounding no, then we should gather our stuff, turn off the lights and go home to watch a movie or to cry in despair. But if the answer is that the incapacity to affect relevant psychological change from within the psyche may not necessarily mean its impossibility, then our conversation can proceed by asking a new and extremely vital question: What is the quality of a mind that will not move away from the fact that nothing significant can ever come through what it knows and what it wants? (47)

An accurate, non-traditional understanding of the self and the social world in which we live seems to come from just a few inter-related perceptions:

1. The human psyche-any human psyche-is conditioned by the totality of human experience and, more superficially and specifically, by cultural and biographical experience. Thus, mental conditioning as a general phenomenon implies not only a common physical brain, but also a brain characterized by cultural fragmentation, personal alienation and lack of freedom. Since we are all pre-programmed and consequently suffer the exact same lack of freedom, our sense of separate and autonomous individuality is illusory. This, in turn, implies that each one of us is the seemingly external social world, since it is the deeply common conditioning of our perception, cognition and resulting behavior that determines the most important present characteristics of human society, as well as its past and future history.

2. There is no self or ego separate and independent from the conditioned contents of consciousness. Therefore, any attempt to radically transform or to entirely transcend what the self may consider as negative attributes of the personality or the psyche-or of society at large-is not only futile, but a reinforcement of the separateness of the psyche and a further source of internal and interpersonal alienation and strife.

Since the "me" is in itself the illusion of mastery of the psyche and of the world, there seems to be no end to his stubborn attempts to control thought, feeling and action in himself as well as in others. The social manifestation of this inherently unquiet mind with its on-going intra-psychic struggle is, of course, a permanent battle of contradictory ideas, fears and desires resulting in the atomized and chaotic world we all know so well.

3. The sustained presence of psychological and tribal territoriality and the fundamental instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain, make evident that the deeper attributes of the conditioned human mind have their roots in its animal past. And yet this predetermined or instinctive animal conditioning present and active in every brain, is disguised when a "higher" level of being known as the individual self is superimposed on it. Which means that the psychic field of the human organism divides to give room and the illusion of control to a presumably separate and independent thinking entity that-just as any animal does-mechanically seeks pleasure and the avoidance of pain, but in this case not necessarily in response to survival needs, but rather mostly to willfully pursue predetermined psychological goals, (that is, personal goals determined by an exclusive set of memories and executed by means of their concomitant desires). In this intra-psychic division and the ensuing mental process, we all "forget" our fundamental equality squarely rooted in common and rather humble origins.

Thus, the relatively fixed general conditioning that in an animal species serves the purposes of adaptation and physical survival for the whole species in dynamic harmony with the totality of, at least, its immediate environment becomes, in the human being, an instrument for the exclusive psychological fulfillment of individuals operating within particular tribes, tribes that are themselves permanently striving for power and domination over other tribes.

Needless to say, the fairly inflexible demand for the satisfaction of the exclusive and, therefore, ultimately irrational desires of self and tribe, can only result in conflict and this conflict inevitably harms the well-being or the very survival of other individuals, other groups, and other species. And at this point of our sorry history as a species, the unchallenged continuity of this process of conflictive fragmentation and environmental destruction is clearly threatening survival as a whole.

If these are your observations-and not just a set of verbal handles used to theoretically grab and perhaps remember the expression of someone else's observations-then you may have a direct and holistic sense of the fundamental human problem and why it cannot be approached directly as if it were a technical challenge. Seeing that the psychological and cultural knowledge conditioning our psyches, is not-and will never be-the means to free ourselves, let alone humankind, from the bind of cultural fragmentation and intra-psychic division, the question of what we are to do about our plight never comes up again simply because there is nothing that can be done. This total perception of the conditioning frees the mind from the ossified accumulation of unnecessary past, present and future knowledge and is the fundamental quality of a truly religious mind. (48)

Most of us profit from the bad habit of sanctimoniously blaming others for the ills of humanity. Were the great villains of the world to somehow stop being villainous and thus deprive us of the whitewash they conveniently provide, we would be horrified to see ourselves, and each other, as we really are. It is such a relief-such a pleasure, really-to comparatively perceive others as looking so much worse than ourselves, for then it is easy to disregard our own responsibility for the problems of the world and the half hidden messes in our own lives.

What freedom and what mental integrity and peace would reward abandoning all the usual posturing and pretense! But we generally opt instead to do whatever it takes to avoid having our precious identities and important social positions vanish, along with our presumed innocence, as the mirages they are. (49)

It is the most common practice to lay claim to some particular attribute, skill, or some material, intellectual or spiritual property and then spend enormous energy attempting to convince others that this claim-that is by now part and parcel of our psychological identity-merits special reward and respect. Does it seem too naive to say that life seems to require the many different gifts that appear in different individuals, not just to assure the survival of all, but so that in our willingness to work cooperatively we may live happily caring for one another in this wondrous Earth of ours?

There is no problem in the multiplicity or in the relative exclusiveness of talent and practical abilities that can be seen in any given population. There is, however, a huge problem in attaching a personal, psychological, value to these skills and attributes, and on that basis claiming-and often forcing-extravagant social privilege and unjust economic retribution. To claim any form of psychological superiority fragments and conflicts society, filling just about everyone's life with insensitivity, fear, ruthless competition and frequent aggression. (50)

Whenever it is sought from the platform of the self, the truth invariably hides. On the other hand, to embrace the possibility of its unsolicited irruption in our lives, necessarily presumes resolutely moving away from whatever falseness and illusion might be contributing to our sense of independent existence and psychological security. It may well be that the natural manifestation of the truth is blocked by what we take to be personal uniqueness and our supreme right to expand and extend that exceptionality into the future. Could the truth lie in the collapse of duality, that is, in the disappearance of the separate self?

Now, the very instant it becomes apparent that it is the self itself what might be obstructing the manifestation of the truth, is also the instant in which, by necessity, all further search for a way out of a painful sense of personal or collective insufficiency, comes to an end. And this annihilation of the urge to go after whatever is imagined as further prolonging and enhancing psychological security in status, is in itself the ending of the self.

It is remarkable to see those who preach humility distinguishing themselves with special titles and flamboyant vestments and ornaments, thus flashing their phony claim of embodying the very essence or at least special access to different versions of a "higher power". They know full well that ostentatious signs of status and power immediately gain the attention of the ignorant, the weak and the needy, for these too are invariably seeking status and power, even if merely by association with those who present themselves as their authorities. (51)

Spring is here. It has come despite the endless deception and cruelty feeding the current wars. Liberation through murder; torture to soften resistance to democracy; ethnic cleansing, to make life easier for wealthy motorists; terror to usher in the fantasy of a kingdom of god or some other foolish idea of paradise. Regardless of what may be keeping us occupied and distracted, Spring always comes in due time. It is indifferent to the affairs of humankind and, indeed, these affairs of ours often make us indifferent to the ever-unprecedented beauty and strength of Spring.

The horror of the new killing fields are demanding much of my attention and daily taking a great emotional toll, but I'm trying not to let that obfuscate my observation of the explosion of vitality all around me. Spring flows from winter and largely unobserved mysteriously vivifies the landscape. Meanwhile we continue to lie, maim and kill making ourselves more and more callous and insane with every atrocity. (52)

It is only through directly knowing oneself that the actual truth of human existence in this confused and confusing world/reality of our creation becomes apparent. Because you have directly seen it in yourself, it is finally clear that, in the fragmented time process of thought, what has been is condemned to repeat itself through the endless struggle to bring about whatever each one of us thinks should be. The fixed pattern of personal (and tribal) becoming perceived as the only form of being human, ties everyone to the reiteration of pseudo solutions within the irrational and therefore futile matrix of biographical and historical mental time.

For those in whom the process of delusional, self-projection has been extinguished, all that remains is an immense and impersonal problem: the equal opportunity tragedy of human suffering and the unavoidable fact that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to solve it or make it significantly better within the given constraints of fragmented and conflictive thought. Because we are the source of all our problems, our misguided efforts to solve these problems merely constitute their ever-worsening continuity. So, there is only one significant and immediate challenge: How to get through our thick heads that there is no such a thing as psychological progress.

If the hopelessness of particular and exclusive hope has not yet become apparent, one remains caught in delusion and its hard labor. If one has not yet seen that "my" hope, "your" hope and "their" hope are all different but equally exclusive and therefore limited and contradictory mental projections, then one continues to be involved in the foolish task of bringing about slightly modified versions of the same separation and conflict that have been our only reality for thousands of years. But if one has seen the absurdity and danger of remaining caught in this pattern and, therefore, been freed of personal and cultural dreams and ambitions, then the seed for a truly holistic mind has been planted and might have already begun to germinate. (53)