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BOOKS —  Beyond Ourselves

Beyond Ourselves is a book for the terminally discontent, the growing ranks of individuals who are increasingly aware of the species-wide phenomenon of identification with multiple and contradictory ideologies, both secular and religious, and the harrowing, mental, social, and environmental consequences of this persistent identification. 

Throughout history, the defense and expansion of tribal and personal forms of identity have fractured humanity and produced enormous conflict and suffering. In our day, however, our appetite for private security and contentment has come to threaten the species' very survival. We are all complicit in this ongoing state of social fragmentation and mental alienation, but some of us are ready to face this complicity, regardless of the social and psychological consequences, and find out whether it can end.

We can no longer accept that this endless battle among countless forms of cultural and biographic experience obsessively projecting themselves onto the future is all there is to the human presence in the cosmos. We suspect our common source, innermost essence, and natural meeting place is in the mystery of life, but suspicion is not enough; we have procrastinated long enough. There has to be a way to go beyond ourselves. Blind subjection to the limitations and absurd obligations imposed by identification with some cultural orthodoxy and an unfolding personal story is no longer an option, so even if still afraid of what may lie beyond the realm of the known and the knowable, one feels the urgent need to stop standing in the way of whatever the deepest truth might be. 

Along the ages, a handful of mystics have assured us that a full insight into the problem of mental conditioning and social atomization is possible, but not without the dissolution of the cultural and psychological underpinnings of the separate self. A veritable mutation in consciousness is absolutely necessary. 

This book is offered to help elucidate this challenge and to facilitate sharing it with other similarly concerned individuals. Both art and text are deployed to this end—seventy ink paintings intermingled with an essay divided into six sections.

Nothing exists in separation, and the perception of that fundamental fact is the end of tribal and psychological isolation with all its travails, frustrations, and sorrows. The greatest possible blessing is to awaken to our seamless presence in the unthinkably vital and all-encompassing mystery. A gift that, while still widely denied, is timelessly present.

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 Please contact me to order your copy; it will set you back $34.50 (NYS tax included) if you can come to the studio to pick it up or if I can deliver it. (It will be $38.50 if it has to be shipped within the contiguous USA). You can send me a check or credit my account directly using Pay Pal (for this, you just need my name —Fernando Llosa— and my e-mail address: f@unboundart.com)

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Immediately below, you can see some of the text and, after that, a sampling of the paintings included in the book. Thanks for your interest.

The preamble to BEYOND OURSELVES

“All languages, all forms of symbolic expression, are artifice. They are ingenious devices created to represent far more significant aspects or levels of reality and, as such, not actual, never the thing itself. However, since languages are all we have to communicate and, hopefully, commune with one another, we must persevere in their use, ever alert to their pitfalls and limitations. To this general caveat, I must add another word of caution. Given its central theme and the glaring poverty of its means, the communication intent of this particular book is ambitious to the point of folly. If I feel the risk of failure is justified, it is because of the importance of the matter at hand and the possibility—if this attempt manages to kindle your forbearance and receptivity—of us meeting one another in the actual, not conceptual, embrace of life. The embrace that, in granting itself equally to everyone, makes us one.

What blocks our perception of the stream of being is that it flows undivided and, therefore, beyond the reach of the human intellect, shaped, dimmed, and broken up as it is by the ideologies utilized by every cultural group and every separate individual to claim a distinct identity and a (false) sense of independent existence. So, why then even dream that the combination of an essay about the cultural and psychological fragmentation of the species and a crass caricature of the dynamic integrity of existence can help anyone see this ancient state of mental alienation, let alone break free of it? What motivates this effort is the realization that unless humanity finds a way to unify itself peacefully, the image and idea-based division and conflict that have already tormented the species for millennia will only continue wreaking havoc in the isolated lives and fractious relationships we presume to be “ours.”
In our own time, the destructive power of the prevailing mental distance between us — the rotten outcome of our joint alienation from the wholeness of life— has gone from being a source of ongoing affliction to a credible political, demographic, ecological, technological, and nuclear threat to the very survival of the species. Any attempt to make this danger evident is necessary and, therefore, not to be deterred by the limitations of language, the pressure to conform, and other difficulties.

Only by carefully exposing and subsequently negating all the factors that keep us in a permanent state of contradiction and alienation can life’s undivided and infinitely complex dynamism (and our ever-undecipherable presence in it) be approached. The essay that precedes the artwork embodies this negative approach, critically examining, in different ways and repeatedly, how the accumulated record of particular experience (the knowledge) gathered by every human organism generates a false sense of separate and self-projecting existence that externalizes and misrepresents everything with which it comes in contact.

The art component is a far less reasonable effort to present the solution to the problem of the division and alienation of humanity through a direct, positive representation of the wholeness of life and the human presence within it. Again, a piecemeal and static pictorial visualization is inappropriate for unmasking and undoing the falseness and danger of cultural and psychological separation. My only hope is that this crude artistic maneuver may help you endeavor to see yourself not as a particular instance of the general phenomenon of mental conditioning but as life itself.

We have been forced to accept that our existence emanates from ongoing identification with different and exclusive types of secular and religious knowledge and that to live weighted down by the isolating limitations and absurd obligations imposed by this identification is normal. However, the truth is the ground of our being lies way beyond the meager realm of knowledge and self-centered thought. None of us has ever been, is, or will ever be, anything other than keenly conscious manifestations of a vital mystery that is our common source, our innermost essence, and, therefore, our natural, most intimate, and beautiful meeting place.

The book’s title, Beyond Ourselves/Life Indivisible, Our Only Common Ground, suggests that much. Life is not a collection of interacting things and, therefore, not reducible to contradictory, if not outright opposed, forms of symbolic representation incapable of solving the increasingly difficult personal, interpersonal, regional, and global problems besetting us. Life is all there is, and the perception of that fundamental fact is the end of thought-based separation with all its travails, frustrations, and sorrows. To awaken to our seamless presence in the vital mystery holding us and everything else together is the greatest blessing, one that is timelessly present. A word about the artwork and a suggestion for viewer participation Ingredients: The nothingness of ink and water. Procedure: When these ingredients are dragged or pushed about with different tools or the bare hand, their chaotic combination yields an infinity of form, some recognizable to the conditioned intellect, some not. The resulting art is the trace of what happened during this process on paper or board.

My participation in the creation of this artwork: Besides the procurement of the necessary tools and materials and the implementation of the painting process, my involvement is, at best, minimal. The miracle of a pure painting occurs when my participation is reduced to remaining fully present in its inception. Gratitude for the uncanny is all that is necessary, then. However, some cleaning up or further manipulation is often required to bring out some form already present in the trace initially left by the mixture of pigment and medium flowing over the substrate. This enhancement is procured using a brush, pencil, pen, or scraper. At worst, the intellect’s compulsion to impose its knowledge or realize its expectations wins out. When this happens, a not-very-interesting original painting becomes the base for a more personal creation that one can only hope is coherent with the general appearance and intent of the rest of the work.

Your participation: There are two valuable ways to approach this art collection. The most direct one is quickly finding and losing yourself in its metaphorical depiction of the indivisible and, therefore, ever-unknowable stream of existence. The other is to use it to come in touch with your particular sense of existential isolation and, once there, question its veracity until your (and everyone else’s) seamless inclusion in the mysterious embrace of life becomes evident.” V/2023

From Section I

“Like many children, perhaps all children, I, too, experienced several instances of physical and emotional trauma. And, as I am sure is also the case with practically everyone else, while still very young, I was indoctrinated thoroughly with only a slightly modified version of the cultural programming with which my elders and teachers had been brainwashed when very young themselves. This self-accumulating and projecting mental program goes, of course, on top of the instinctual animal drives —fear, territoriality, sexuality, power, pleasure-seeking, etc.—that come standard with the human brain, itself the product of millions of years of co-evolution.

Later on, my innocent respect for the authority of my mentors and, increasingly, the force of my own learned ambition saw me through some eighteen years of formal education, much of it of the indoctrinating variety. However, at some point in my university studies, I started to doubt the trustworthiness of secular and religious experts who seemed bent on determining the objects of my attention and affection and filling my mind with the limited and biased knowledge someone else had crammed into theirs. This questioning attitude resulted partly from independent reading and a growing awareness of the awful state of global affairs perceived as only the latest installment of a millenary history of division, unequal progress, injustice, and violence. Later on, this critical stance was further intensified by detecting the reciprocal causal link between the permanent disorder in human affairs and the restricted and restrictive identity of billions of individuals highly prone to insensitivity, erroneous thinking, and unwise behavior. The state of the world was indeed the out-picturing of the state of the human mind and vice-versa.

As I moved through various phases of adult experience, I grew increasingly perplexed by the confusion, conflict, and suffering I saw in me and all around me; again, a bewilderment that I can tell is experienced by many. The mental isolation, fear, antagonism, and grief I suffered alerted me to slightly different versions of the same afflictions tormenting everyone else. I also started to see more clearly how the mental mark left by past miseries and pleasures, achievements, and failures influences perception and thought at every moment of every individual’s life. Memory generates the images of a highly deceptive, worldly, or otherworldly future in which a better self appears, enjoying more secure and pleasant mental and social circumstances than previous or present ones. Slowly and quite painfully, I learned that while everyone hopes for a better tomorrow and a happier new year when the idealized representation of the future comes into the present, it inevitably turns out to be nothing more than a somewhat different version of the divisiveness, ephemeral pleasure, and far more lasting mental disarray, disappointment, and strife everyone of a certain age already knows all-too-well.

The claims I had heard and internalized about the greatness of human civilization and the inexorability of its anticipated development turned out to be vastly overstated in real life. A single example may suffice to illustrate this point. War, any war, is monstrous, period. No degree or quality of economic, organizational, philosophical, artistic, scientific, and technical progress has ever mitigated significantly, let alone ended humanity’s built-in tendency to engage in massive, legalized murder. Progress has, in fact, only made the addiction to war more insidious and lethal. Armed combat continues to be considered a moral action, as is the utilization of periods of "peace" to enhance the jingoistic mentality of both winners and losers and to improve the lethality of the tools and strategies they will likely employ in future blood-letting. The wealthiest and most powerful nations willingly support sophisticated scientific and industrial entities that exist solely to profit from the creation, production, and merchandising of “conventional and non-conventional” means of destruction and murder. No national or international institutions exist whose sole purpose is to establish justice and peace as the proper state of a species that presumes itself to be rational and caring.

My steady perplexity at how the actual mental condition and relational circumstances of individuals in every society contradicted claims of the superior goodness and intelligence of the human mind facilitated shedding certain layers of early cultural conditioning, but others remained undetected and, therefore, active. As a result, by my early forties, I had already experienced the sadly common trauma of a mid-life crisis that included a highly destructive failed marriage. The seed of skepticism that had been previously planted somehow survived this devastating event and bloomed again in the form of a mind no longer entirely grounded on the record of experience and specific ethnic, national, political, religious, and professional realities. What had been experienced as a nearly lethal physical and mental breakdown slowly led to a new and entirely unexpected life stage unfolding in a different country. I was now a migrant, an unknown entity learning to survive amid people who did not care much about who I had previously been, experienced, and done. Eventually, new relationships and an incipient and fragile professional occupation emerged. The loss of institutional employment I had suffered turned out to be permanent and more of a blessing than a loss, at least in some crucial ways.

Everything had changed, and yet, fundamentally, nothing had. My new occupation (art and writing) turned out to be no less insufficient and frustrating than the previous one and a lot more of a competitive, banal, and dog-eat-dog racket. After a few years, I found myself again a prisoner of the desire to succeed professionally and, therefore, maddingly dependent on pleasing others for the validation and financial security I craved. The dramatic break from the past I had experienced and the effort of personal reconstruction and social re-engagement that followed had only led to a slightly different experience of the old, insanely conditioned cultural and mental insularity and its toxic mix of pleasure, conflict, and sorrow. I was again torn, as in times past, between the need to survive by conforming to prevalent cultural norms and values and the strongly felt need to question social reality and myself to the ultimate consequences.

A powerful sense of the insufficiency of traditional personal and relational transformations has been calling me to order and cutting me down to size for some time now. It is more evident to me now than ever that what is necessary is something entirely different, something unprecedented to the point of excluding anyone’s mediation, including my own. This book (along with three other recent publications) attempts to gain (and perhaps share) an independent and thorough perception of things as they are and the determination to allow that perception to do what it will.

I am well aware of the paucity of the means at my disposal for this task. The writing is as complex as the unusual challenge it presents. It is also intentionally reiterative in its effort to provide multiple paths of understanding (at the risk of appearing annoying to some). An added liability is the foreign accent that the alert anglophone reader has probably already detected, and not just an accent but the presence of another language, Spanish, significantly prancing in the shadows. As already admitted in the preamble, the art is entirely inadequate for the impossible illustrative task it takes on. Its monochromatic character and random (stochastic) generation may be an added source of disappointment to some. I offer no apology for any of these drawbacks; they reveal the character and limitations of the author’s particular case of mental conditioning.

The only aim of this book is to announce not just the possibility but the necessity of the emergence of a mind unencumbered by tradition and an unfolding and self-determined personal story. There is nothing I, or anyone else, could do utilizing symbolic representation —words and images—to prove that an unthinkably different mode of being human is possible and necessary. Individuals seriously interested in this matter have to go beyond themselves, that is, beyond any form of representation, to see directly whether the species-wide presumption of the self’s unique identity, separate existence, and benign action in the world is true or false. So, if the contents of this book do not inspire the confidence that a well-founded claim to authority would grant, it may be a sign that they are on the mark, that they are an adequate sign of (and pointing to) freedom from cultural and biographic predetermination.

I do not claim to be a writer and an artist; I am not what I do. I do not know what I am beyond an insignificant manifestation of a catastrophic general state of tribal self-centeredness. And, yet, just this much awareness makes plain that egocentric knowledge cannot possibly be the ground of being; life is. The multiple and contradictory forms of knowledge and thought that has been confounding the mind and tearing humanity apart for millennia are, in fact, the sustained negation of the indivisible vital energy of life, which is entirely and timelessly beyond their purview. Again, this verbal assertion is worthless except as an invitation to directly and independently corroborate whether what it merely points to is true or false.”

From Section VI

“The last section ended with the assertion that the chronic disorder (intra-psychic, interpersonal, and intercultural) that has forever afflicted humanity demands nothing short of a mutation in consciousness. Every traditional effort to bring unity and harmony to the world has failed. Yet, ethnic groups, nations, religions, political creeds, corporations, academia, the arts and sciences, and the rest of the more or less organized expressions of culture continue attempting to bring some form of order to the chaotic, broken-up world they generate themselves. Their constitutional aversion to anything that would radically question or outright disregard their idealistic claim to superior pedigree justifies and propels forward the everlastingly barren competition among them. Thus, all the multiple and contradictory forms of exclusive consensus that comprise and simultaneously segment humanity coalesce in blocking the holistic perception that would reveal their contribution to the specie’s everlasting division, enmity, and sorrow, eliminating the most injurious and putting the rest in their proper place.

Given that all human beings grow up profoundly identified with particular groups and societies, their ideologies, their languages, and the record of necessarily meager biographical experience, each of us is equally reluctant to confront our active role in sustaining the species’ chronic malaise. The necessity of an ever-fresh and wide-open vision of reality might never cross our permanently swamped or distracted minds. And, if it does, it is instantly batted away by the fear of what we may imagine are the possible psychological and social consequences of such an unprecedented departure from norm and habit. The nearly universal and deeply ingrained belief that the essence of our existence lies in what we know, what we think, and desire makes looking at the world and ourselves free of the interference of pre-established, boundary-setting images and ideas appear as terribly dangerous and, therefore, to be avoided at all costs.

The phenomenon of mental conditioning and cultural fragmentation is old, prevalent, and well-defended but, fortunately, not unassailable. No matter how deeply predetermined by tradition and psychological experience a given brain/mind might be, it can still dispassionately observe this intra-psychic and social situation and its dire consequences. Once activated, this capacity can rapidly disarticulate and dispose of the particular hoard of knowledge on which the self and its specific reference groups depend for their mutually reinforcing and almost entirely false sense of separate existence. Alternatively stated, despite its chronic and seemingly ironclad reliance on specific social structures and cultural traditions, the individual mind/brain can bypass the habitual circuits of memory/thought and fear/ desire to observe, directly and independently, the division and general plight of the species, and the self’s active participation in their generation and continuity. The conditioned operation of the psyche and its false claim to a separate and evolving existence cannot survive the overwhelming force of this insight.

It is easy to underestimate the difficulty of grasping, not just the possibility, but the necessity of freedom from mental predetermination. So, let us take another crack at elucidating this baffling proposition. The existence of every socio-cultural form depends on the collusion of all the individual organisms that identify with them. Conversely, no individual mind based on a particular constellation of images and ideas is conceivable outside a given cultural consensus and historical context.

The mutually reinforcing bond between self and culture is ancient and enormously tight. Nevertheless, this interdependence can be seen provided it is perceived in its entirety and not as something external to the self, this last still posing as an independent, perceiving subject. The intromission of any pre-established assessment of this unprecedented revelation's potential value or downside would indicate that the subject-object separation is still diminishing and distorting the perception of the whole. Put differently, what is necessary is an insight into culture, history, thought, and the self as an indivisible phenomenon stemming from a far deeper (impersonal) capacity or intelligence. Only this unprecedented and complete vision of humanity's pre-programmed and alienated mental state as the source of its conflictive division and sorrow can end its mechanical extension onto the future in a given psyche. When this occurs, the living energy of the organism no longer serves the demands of a set of petty symbolic representations responsible for all kinds of mischief, past, present, and future. The simultaneous discovery and demolition of the particular compilation of images and ideas traditionally utilized to know, defend, and expand a false sense of separate and constantly evolving personal existence. Sanity lies in this ending.

The fact that this hyper-aware termination of the self-propelled fantasy of existential separation can only occur in each particular brain/mind and not in entire organized groups may seem to some an event too small to be relevant. However, such a dismissive interpretation can also be perceived as yet another knee-jerk reaction triggered to protect the old and false belief that humanity is a collection of disparate groups constituted by distinct psycho-somatic entities separate from each other, proprietors of their own lives. The human mind is fundamentally one; thus, the emergence of an all-embracing caring intelligence in any particular organism is of enormous significance to the entire species.

I have chosen to close this essay with a personal letter because it is the best way to share the necessity of ending our ongoing contribution to the cumulative mess we have made of our miraculous participation in life. The intent is not to utilize this most intimate form of communication to romanticize or otherwise juice up this complex and crucial matter. A letter just happens to be the best way to speak about the love of life pulsating in this mind/heart, and I suspect in yours as well, given that you have come with me this far. Even though I probably do not know you in person, it seems only true to affection, and therefore to reason, that we attend together to the problem of being human with all the strength granted by the life we share. The fantasy of evolving existential separation must end, and this quality of shared attention enables the dissolution of what self-centered thought might still be holding onto for dear life.”