No
one would deny being alive, but very few are content with just that. For most of us, to be alive is to be defined by a particular story held by memory and sustained by self-centered thought. We generally see ourselves as particular entities living a relatively autonomous and enduring separate existence, even though
the stream of life as a whole is nothing if not integrated movement, change, death, and regeneration. Yes, we admit that things change, that the circumstances and even the
attributes of the self evolve and change, but we are generally convinced that the “I” remains fundamentally separate and unchanged through time. "I" am who I was, who I am right now, and what I will become in the future.
Regardless of how common this belief in personal identity and autonomy is, if closely observed it becomes clear that there is something deeply irrational about an on-going private life that is largely unrelated to the whole of life. In our proud personas and all-important social roles, the infinite actuality of life has been reduced to particular images and ideas, memories and desires, and that encapsulation is clearly insane. No one needs further proof of this insanity than what an unbiased look at the chaos of the world at large reveals, a world that is but the outpicturing of the egotism, fear, and conflict in the lives and relations of seven billion human beings. Defined, isolated, and ordered around as we are by the cultural imperatives of particular tribes and our own conflicting memories and desires, we generate and sustain the insecurity, ambition, and violence that we suffer and makes others suffer.
In relinquishing full participation in life, we have condemned ourselves to the impossible enterprise of fulfilling the petty ambitions of self, clan, and tribe. Despite undeniable scientific and technical development and endless sequential attempts to reform our institutions and improve ourselves morally and intellectually, we remain incapable of freeing ourselves from the same social and psychological problems human beings have already suffered for millennia. The persistence of this cruel primitivism clearly resides in the alienated and fragmented quality of the human mind. Why should all our efforts to improve the quality of human life ultimately fail, if not because they leave untouched the deep root from which they spring? This being so, our only intelligent and caring option is to confront in ourselves the general fact of a mind conditioned and isolated by experience, and in this mind, the root of all that ails humanity. We need to see that we are made dull and insensitive by the imprint in our minds of the entire journey of the species through time, as well as by the intrinsic limitation of our biographical experience and learning.
Put differently, the insecurity and grief produced by the alienation of the whole species from life, has generated over time countless different responses seeking even a small measure of security and certainty. These responses have at every point in time splintered the species by assuming particular personal and cultural identities. Separate and equally fearful and ambitious individuals organized in different and competing societies, groups, and institutions, cannot but produce strife and sorrow, and this mode of existence cannot be significantly improved, let alone transcended -ever- through superficial modifications that leave its fundamental alienation and divisiveness intact.
The impotence of our actions in the past, in the present, and in a future conceived on the bases of previous actions and failures, clearly indicates the absolute necessity of an irreversible dissolution of the artificial boundaries of self and tribe that separate us from one another and alienates the species as a whole from life. There is no other solution. All other attempts to change are just a projection of the same nightmarish play of sectarian dogmatism and personal egotism we have been enacting over and over since we first appeared on the face of the Earth and started thinking we were original and very smart.
To wake up from the nightmare of self-centered thought is to suddenly realize that the only sane and sensitive human being is one who is not identified with any particular ideology, and lives free of association with any given group or institution. To survive, he or she may perform a given function related to the satisfaction of the fundamental needs of other individuals, but is in no way psychologically identified with this function. In a mind free of the strictures of self and tribe, the doing is not the being. The being is only life, and life is one and anonymous, it has no place or need for particular identity.
Regardless of how common this belief in personal identity and autonomy is, if closely observed it becomes clear that there is something deeply irrational about an on-going private life that is largely unrelated to the whole of life. In our proud personas and all-important social roles, the infinite actuality of life has been reduced to particular images and ideas, memories and desires, and that encapsulation is clearly insane. No one needs further proof of this insanity than what an unbiased look at the chaos of the world at large reveals, a world that is but the outpicturing of the egotism, fear, and conflict in the lives and relations of seven billion human beings. Defined, isolated, and ordered around as we are by the cultural imperatives of particular tribes and our own conflicting memories and desires, we generate and sustain the insecurity, ambition, and violence that we suffer and makes others suffer.
In relinquishing full participation in life, we have condemned ourselves to the impossible enterprise of fulfilling the petty ambitions of self, clan, and tribe. Despite undeniable scientific and technical development and endless sequential attempts to reform our institutions and improve ourselves morally and intellectually, we remain incapable of freeing ourselves from the same social and psychological problems human beings have already suffered for millennia. The persistence of this cruel primitivism clearly resides in the alienated and fragmented quality of the human mind. Why should all our efforts to improve the quality of human life ultimately fail, if not because they leave untouched the deep root from which they spring? This being so, our only intelligent and caring option is to confront in ourselves the general fact of a mind conditioned and isolated by experience, and in this mind, the root of all that ails humanity. We need to see that we are made dull and insensitive by the imprint in our minds of the entire journey of the species through time, as well as by the intrinsic limitation of our biographical experience and learning.
Put differently, the insecurity and grief produced by the alienation of the whole species from life, has generated over time countless different responses seeking even a small measure of security and certainty. These responses have at every point in time splintered the species by assuming particular personal and cultural identities. Separate and equally fearful and ambitious individuals organized in different and competing societies, groups, and institutions, cannot but produce strife and sorrow, and this mode of existence cannot be significantly improved, let alone transcended -ever- through superficial modifications that leave its fundamental alienation and divisiveness intact.
The impotence of our actions in the past, in the present, and in a future conceived on the bases of previous actions and failures, clearly indicates the absolute necessity of an irreversible dissolution of the artificial boundaries of self and tribe that separate us from one another and alienates the species as a whole from life. There is no other solution. All other attempts to change are just a projection of the same nightmarish play of sectarian dogmatism and personal egotism we have been enacting over and over since we first appeared on the face of the Earth and started thinking we were original and very smart.
To wake up from the nightmare of self-centered thought is to suddenly realize that the only sane and sensitive human being is one who is not identified with any particular ideology, and lives free of association with any given group or institution. To survive, he or she may perform a given function related to the satisfaction of the fundamental needs of other individuals, but is in no way psychologically identified with this function. In a mind free of the strictures of self and tribe, the doing is not the being. The being is only life, and life is one and anonymous, it has no place or need for particular identity.
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