Illusions

In my view, by far the greatest illusion that affects men from industrial and information societies is the illusion of separateness. For instance we tend to minimize our cultural inheritance. There are few people I know of that are aware that they think what others think. That the patterns of thought that are in our minds are distributed from one another over generations. These sentences I am writing are like clashes of things I've read about, things like «memes», Plato's dialogues, Osho's tirades, friends and relatives comments and many interesting conversations. All that, boiled up in my brain, gave origin to this text. If I had been born in a farm, if my days were passed looking at fruits and vegetables, I would probably be thinking if aunt Ginnie was feeling ok, or if that batch of tomatoes was ready to be cropped, or about the weather, or if my mother really liked me, and stuff like that.

Books and classes changed my thought direction, they imprinted doubts, strange ideas, mirabolant questions. Through language I entered in the minds of others, I lived parts of other peoples lives. Reading Hermann Hesse, Goethe and Süskind I lived the passions and emotional barrages of people other than me. It's like they imparted part of their lives on me. As if I had lived part of their lives. As if I had become what they were. Like amoebas never die for they divide, so people transmit to others part of what they are, of how they see the world, how they deal with things. We are a collection of past people, an amalgamate, some of which we chose, some we stumbled upon, some which were imposed on us, some that we thirst for until we found them.

We are not only recreation of past people their experiences and ways of living, we are also the pairs of many current people with which brains our own brains fuse through language, symbolic and non-symbolic, and it is these pairs that function well. Today I did many things with and because of people. If it wasn't for all these people who would I be, would I be even «one»? Probably not, «one» of us is only one because it is connected with many people, we gain identities, we establish ourselves, our personalities in this game of: I am this, you are that, I like this club, you prefer the other, I like breasts, and I know there are others like me, kissing them gives me great pleasure. We learn how to be by being with others, by relating to others. We are fruit of our society. If I had been born in another country, or even in another town or family, I would have certainly became a very different people, the same with Einstein and any given Pope. Any person you might think of would be no more intelligent and would have no more manners than a cat or dog if he/she were raised from childwood in the mist of cats and dogs. This applies to Popes and Presidents and Nobel Prizes, and me and you and everyone. We are the product of our society.

But it is not only this communal nature that seems to escape many of us. More dangerously, we have forgotten that we are animals. That, like other gregarious animals, we desire to bread, cuddle, have friends, play with others, feel support of the community, enact socially important roles, and so on. And also that, like other hunter animals, we feel pleasure in destruction (it is important for hunters), we are able to put our life at risk quite easily, our aggressive nature can easily show out, etc. And also like other preyed animals we are easily scared and run away even from things that can do us no arm (like rats and spiders). Like mammals we have a very limited degree of intelligence. Each of us, if raised alone, would be probably not much smarter than a dolphin or some other kinds of primates. What truly distinguishes us is not so much our greater cognitive ability but our millenarian culture. It was this culture that allowed us to create agriculture, to put some kinds of animals to our services, and to colonize a great part of the planet. It is not our intelligence. Our intelligence has not grown a lot in the last hundred thousand years. We have the same kinds of brains that our predecessors that inhabit the savanna. It is not our brain but what goes inside that really gives our power. And that was inherited, that is our most important inheritance: knowledge is indeed the root of power.

What would happen to a man that discovers that he is not alone in the world, that he is the continuation of a large set of beings, displaced in space and time and running and perfecting programs, ideas, ways of seeing the world?

If he was a typical man I think he would at first be shocked, for we learn that man is different from nature, that we are somehow "better" than nature, and we believe this with such candor that for us it is even an insult to put us on a par with animals. After all, animals are eaten, animals are sold and bought and killed and their carcasses are opened up for a small fee so that I have a taste of their meat on every meal. They are there *to be used*, even to be abused. So when you compare me to an animal, you are perhaps doing me the greatest insult possible, it would even be better to call me a lunatic, for at least he has a possibility of returning to "normality", to "humanity", while an animal can at most be a pet.

This is our current program, and it is doing us much harm. First of all it does not allow us to see the immense beauty that surrounds us. By not seeing how nature has created so many diverse ways of living, and how so many of these ways of living are in many ways better than our own, we have a much more difficult time in improving our life standards. For instance dolphins have a style of life based on pleasure and acceptance of one another. They don't kill each other working, they are not jealous, they simply play, they make love, they swim and are happy. that is the typical life of a dolphin. It has advantages and disadvantages, but it is not clear that, if there was such a thing as a soul, seeing the life of a human and of a dolphin, it would prefer that of a human.

On the other hand by breaking the link with other animals we are also breaking the link that makes possible our understanding of ourselves. Much of the things we do, we hate and like have parallels with other species. If we studied other species more we could understand better the effects that these ways of living have in societies and individuals.

But the greatest problem is that this illusion according to which man is somehow superior to other parts of nature, gives rise to many other illusions, Gods and deities, magical explanations that leave us in a limbo from where it is hard to get out of.

(to be continued...)