A Being in the World. Part I

Once upon a time, in a mysterious universe of interstellar explosions and quantized reality, there was a being who carried life.

This being was born into a cruel, predatory world, a jungle of fierce rains, atrocious deserts and hunger.

Nothing could he know, this being. Not where he came from nor where he is going, nor what he came into the world for. His one and entire experience was that he was here, and that his undeniable presence urged him to stay alive.

An inexperienced baby, he was received by entities of familiar shape, keepers of an inherited structure of established knowledge.

He, under the urgent impulse of individual survival, chose to open himself to un-knowing the world in order to draw near to the knowledge already laid down by these figures of ancestral lineage.

Society, he called it.

With the figures set upon the altar, he worshipped, primitively, the many gods of human knowledge.

He spoke the same language they did, and wrote the signs that stood for information, something necessary for a most momentous social and biological phenomenon to occur: understanding between humans.

And human, he believed himself to be.

The approximate knowledge of what a human being is comes from a predictable current of interactions among humans who, in order to live together in a common world, set up agreements defining the realities that humans walked through in the different stages of their lives.

One plus one is two. Though there is no real ground on which to rest this law, on it man rested mathematics whole, and the way the forms of everyday life gave form to the events of his present surroundings.

The depth of this learning, set against the empty innocence the being carried when he came naked into the world, compelled him to close off infinite possibilities of questioning what the world dictated reality to be.

So he took on prebuilt beliefs, and thoughts that laid down tautologies of truth about those very thoughts, self-sustaining.

The energetic loop this created in him stirred intense sensations of confusion. Not confusion, really, but a sensation of confusion so tangible that it defined the story of his life.

From trying so hard to defend the evidence his thoughts were trying to force about his story, something called mental illness unfolded before him.

It didn't seem that everyone around him had it, but if he measured his life against a clarity of mind idealized from within his own confusion, he realized he had taken that virus under his wing.

What was happening was that this illness seemed undetectable because, in truth, everyone around him had it, and it was considered normal. The illness was the foundation of society.

He called it the collective dream.

And the human being dreamed he was someone, that he had a first name and two last names, and that the condition of his life was bound by an ID card, a criminal record and a transaction history.

He dreamed that duties were imposed on him, forged by the hard insistence of stingy reward and cruel punishment, by a clumsy and predictably predatory animality that never stopped calling itself human.

He went to school, forced to compete and fight with the same rigidity with which the guilt of doing so was imposed on him.

Love, they told him — those who made war.

But he never knew how to love.

Love is this and that, his everyday world told him. Love like this, because any other way would contradict that love is this and that.

Imprisoned, though not fully aware that he was suffocating under his own inventions, he cried out.

His pain thundered deep in the jaws of the soul.

Life force was the seed for carrying out all his actions while honoring the terms of living alongside a world that was not to blame for shaping the present dream of his existence.

The pain of his samsara became the one factor working for his salvation, because it was a call to recognize once again the original innocence with which he came into the world.

Pain told him that everything he had believed in all his life was an empty shell of dream.

Reality was not caused by his surroundings, nor did it have anything to do with the structure of thoughts that suffocated him; rather, there was the possibility of seeing that, despite the sensation of suffocating, he could breathe freely.

A being in the world: confused, asleep, overwhelmed. What hope does he have?

A being holding infinite possibilities in the middle of a world that tries, from every one of its facets, to convince him he will die ignorant. What will be his fate?

Will this being win himself a happy ending?