Prefacio
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"La historia del hombre comienza mucho antes de su nacimiento". – Dan Levin, Espinoza |
My dear daughter:
I just received the guidelines I asked you to send me to start writing this book. It seems only right that you became a writer and editor, and that with your help I will be able to start this task. I welcome what you call "a few tips" to help me write the story.
I will begin with the basics, as you recommend, making the skeleton for the book with the traditional five W's (and one H) of journalism: Who? Where? What? When? Why? and How?
Who?
When as a young adult I gave you birth, my beloved daughter Alexiara, I felt an enormous sense of responsibility. That spurred my need to psychologize, to make sense of the madness we all witness in the world. Following in my mother's footsteps I became an artist, a surrealist painter. As an artist I began the exploration of my own psyche and its symbolic language, which is an expression of Universal Archetypes. I used the canvas to freeze the symbolic images that reached my consciousness in order to remember them and follow their thread wherever they led. With my work I entered the adventure of self-discovery, confronting in myself what is human (the lamb) and what is inhuman (the wolf) in all of us. To further my endeavor I applied the Jungian principle that the images that automatically flow into one's personal consciousness from the collective unconscious are telling a story. Thus, I began the process that Jung calls Individuation, integrating the unconscious into the conscious to activate the Transcendent faculty of the psyche. Psyche can help us walk towards Self, which corresponds to the mystical idea of the Spiritual Center.
I wanted to understand my feelings of alienation from the Catholic-feudal society to which I had been born. To escape that barrier, I emigrated with you and my younger sister Selene, from Bogota to New York. There I found myself just as alienated in the new capitalist-Protestant environment. I had to understand myself and why I didn't seem to fit in any where, in any society or in any group.
Who, is also you, my darling daughter. You are already a woman of twenty-seven, an accomplished editor and health writer in New York, but in my mind I embrace you with all the images recorded in my heart. I see the baby that they handed me in the hospital and that looked to me like the most beautiful being in all of creation. They didn't bring you to my side or put you in my arms. Instead they put you in the transparent plastic crib next to my bed in the recovery room while I recuperated from an easy labor (only two hours long despite the fact that it was my first). You arrived with a minimum of pain for me and your little face didn't show the normal trauma of birth. Your eyes were wide open as you looked at me through the crib. I will never forget those dark eyes, the enormous curiosity that emanated from them as they followed my every movement. I had been told children couldn't see when they were first born. "Not mine," I thought to myself, "She sees it all."
The nurses then asked me to breast feed you although only a yellow liquid would come out at first, because it is nutritious and only by suckling you would actual milk production begin. I laughed when I put you next to my breast because you got cross-eyed and started drinking with the impetus of a super healthy baby whose hunger was obviously as intense as her desire to see it all.
An instinct to protect the life I had been given took hold of me and the contrast between the tender little body I was hugging and the steel world into which I had brought you made me cry. I felt guilty without knowing why. You had been born in 1967, within a society that had greed as its greatest advisor. Since my birth in 1946, after the explosion of the first atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I had witnessed the insane arms race of the two super powers and the suicidal tendencies of it. I had understood the menace of all the industrial garbage and smoke, the acid rain and the radioactive waste contaminating every corner of the Earth. The ozone layer was being extinguished just as the Spirit is extinguished from a society that fixes its eyes strictly on material values. As always, those who held the power had exchanged the common good for their personal gain.
One of the nuns at the Catholic hospital where I gave you birth came into my room and found me crying.
"What is wrong my child?" she asked.
I couldn't answer. I only looked at you, your sweet little body, your mouth as red as a flower, your eyes closed as you slept peacefully, breathing with such tranquillity after eating your fill. In contrast, I saw the universe as an unmerciful machine, eating everything in existence, witnessing the misery and tragedy of history without compassion for its fragile beings. If I had previously felt the claws of man's inhumanity to man digging into my heart at the sight of so much misery, so much death and destruction, now in your presence I felt that I had to do something. I could not stay with my arms crossed waiting for a miracle to save us. We had to save ourselves and having you for my daughter inspired me to think about what our path to salvation might be.
The nun continued to look at me, but I couldn't answer her. She hugged me and said, "This is normal my child. After giving birth many women get depressed, but you will see how much joy this beautiful baby will bring you."
I smiled, looked at you and told myself that instead of worrying I would do something so that you could inherit a better world. You had been born to a world in crisis and, out of love for you, I accepted the mission of all cold-war mothers: to save our children.
I think I just did what you told me not to do. I went off on a tangent. I will try to keep to the immediate task of outlining the skeleton for this book.
Who, would also be our immediate family, my sister Selene, my nephew Alexander, my little twin nieces, my mother and father and the Earthlings with whom we share the planet.
I saw that history is the process of freeing the Universal and Eternal in us from the personal and temporary in us. This book is about objectivity. Objects are not only things of the outside world. Objects are also things of the inner world. However, we cannot reach the inner objects through the sensory functions of the body, which have evolved only to perceive the material world around us. Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch cannot follow us into the inner world. We have no names for every ripple in its landscape. It lays bare its hills and valleys only through metaphors. What we can call our imagining spontaneity, which creates the images our subconscious sees, comes from our Higher Consciousness. This book is therefore also a glimpse into that Higher Consciousness.
At the right time in my search I found an old Jewish map, a graphic about the two spheres in which Consciousness moves: The outer and material, the inner and immaterial. At this point in time we are able to understand it because subatomic physics has taught us about energy processes and the young science of analytical psychology has given us a new scientific understanding of the meaning of myths, metaphors and symbols. It became obvious to me that now we can do with the inner world of the psyche, what the revolutionary thinkers and philosophers of the XVII and XVIII centuries did with the knowledge of the material world: Divesting it from centuries of misinterpretation and superstition.
It would have been very difficult for me to understand any of this without this map of Consciousness, which was provided to us by the Kabala masters centuries ago. It has been called the Tree of Life. Without its graphical depiction of the multilevels of Higher Consciousness and lower consciousness within each of us, mysticism would not have been able to deliver its wisdom to me. Each individual personality is literally made up of multiple levels of consciousness. There would be nothing wrong with lower levels of consciousness if they clearly mirrored the Higher levels but, due to the layers of dirt and grime left behind by our evolutionary process, they do not. To liberate the Eternal in us we need to clean out the false limitations of instinct and the wrong interpretations we have made through our long evolutionary journey. In that way we can clear the receptacle of our intellect and emotions so that they can transmit new liberated patterns to our personal and collective energy levels. I will try to explain how our Real Life is not in the transient body that serves that Life during the time of an incarnation, nor in the intellectual vessel that interprets experience, nor in the feeling vessel that expresses the inner images. Rather it resides in the Higher Reality of the Consciousness that inhabits matter, yet transcends matter, and which began its upward evolution towards the "Mountain Top" of Cosmic Consciousness millions of years ago.
The Tree of Life illustrates Cosmic Consciousness in its multilevel process towards materialization. That means that all these levels live within matter. However, only humankind has the potential to develop an awareness of them because only humankind has the gift to focus awareness.
The Tree of Life
The Tree is composed of Ten Sephirot, energy reservoirs represented in the map by the circles. Twenty-two paths unite them. These are the Twenty-Two Paths of Wisdom. True mystical theory and meditation enable the intellectual vessel (the mind) and the desire vessel (the emotions) to receive impressions from the realm of Spirit. It helps us recognize all the different levels as realities within us, as well as without. It also illuminates us as to the work of each. Meditation help us to conform the intellectual nature and the emotional nature to the Higher level of Spiritual awareness. Until now, intellect and emotion have been shaped predominantly by sense impressions, by rejecting what "feels" bad and desiring what "feels" good. This approach, a remnant of our evolutionary process, has caused the obstruction of the Light of Higher Consciousness in our own awareness.
The Tree of Life, being a Jewish invention, is read from left to right. This old map, understood with new eyes, gives a whole new meaning to the old question: Who am I?
The process that follows is one of separation. Oneness sacrifices itself into duality to bring the material universe into Being.
2 Chokman represents the Masculine side of the universe. The projective Energy level from which the level of Ideas comes. An Idea is a perfect model for the creative process. It can be compared to an architectural blue print.
3 Binah represents the Mother, the Feminine side of the universe. She is the matrix that creates the mold in which the Idea can become patterned. It can be compared to a three-dimensional model of the blue print.
The workings of Chokman and Binah represent the Causal Plane. All Causation must be attributed to these two planes--the Spiritual and the causal--just as all children born must be attributed to a mother and a father.
5 Geburah represents the Spiritual Will or Action that activates the Will to Good in the universe.
The interactive workings of Chesed and Geburah form the Superior Mental Plane.
6 Tiphareth represents the Eternal Son or Spiritual Consciousness. Spiritual Imagination. This is the True Human Spirit. This is the Force that begins the humanization of the animal, once the animal level is perfected enough to receive it into its bosom. This is the Plane of Consciousness. Tiphareth could be called the Middle Energy Reservoir. We are not defining the paths that unite the Sephirot, but this Consciousness is continuously united to Kether--The Crown of Creation--through the Central path of the "Virgin Waters" that emanate from Kether.
These two Triangles are universal and Cosmic in Nature. If you combine the Triangle of Supraconsciousness and the Triangle of Consciousness, you will see the Star of David (or the Seal of Salomon), which represents the union of the Heavenly Forces. The Star is Heaven.
At this point the map leaves the universal to enter into the personal. What happens here is that the Universal molds of Heaven are going to be differentiated into particular forms. These forms will still be abstract and not yet materialized.
8 Hod represents the intellectual nature. It is our capacity to focus awareness. We can focus on the inner level of Spirit and psyche or on the outer level of matter. The intellect will always be serving the desire nature, looking for ways to satisfy it, but it is the intellect that can become receptive to the Heavenly level of memory in Chesed, once Netzac begins to focus desire beyond the material reality. The intellect can transmit to Netzac higher Ideals.
Netzac and Hod form the inferior mental plane.
9 Yesod is the lower energy reservoir. It is through this reservoir that the Higher Energy levels should take shape in the lower (material) planes. However, our mineral, plant and animal evolution has clouded the Image of Divinity in which we were created, so the impressions received by these levels are distorted. Our work at this point in our evolutionary path is to reshape them according to the Heavenly Star. The triangle formed by Netzac, Hod and Yesod is subconscious to Consciousness. Their union is symbolized by the marriage of the Sun and the Moon.
According to mysticism, our physical bodies first keep the laws and processes involved in the mineral kingdom. Our second etheric body keeps the generative life processes of the vegetable evolution. Our third vital body keeps the desire impulses, the likes and dislikes, the pleasure and pain of the animal kingdom, which is at the bottom of our basic psychic nature. Our physical body and its mineral processes are relative to Earth; our etheric body (the generative processes) to air; and our psychic body to water. The fire is implanted by the Conscious Human Spirit, which endeavors, after incarnating into the animal level, to redeem the physical, etheric and vital bodies from exclusive dependence of the physical senses (the material level). It endeavors to turn the attention of the levels below Tipharet away from the material to the Spiritual.
Unicellular life, with its protoplasm as the basic brick of life, first learned to fight for survival over 2,000,000,000 years ago. A mere 40,000 years ago, the modern Homo Sapiens achieved the apex of his biological evolution. Fifty trillion cells compose a Homo Sapient. Fifty trillion cells whose protoplasm is still ingrained with the instincts of sexual reproduction, survival and immediate gratification inherited from our animal evolutionary process. That animal instinct, combined with our self-awareness and our mental ability to search for ways to satisfy our senses, makes man a beast more dangerous than any animal.
Since prehistoric times, men and women have concluded that we are weak in relation to the surrounding world of nature. Everything seemed to be an enemy that we had to flee from or fight. This is why we have needed our warrior hero. Our own feeling of weakness led to the glorification of the heroic warrior and later to the vilification of the Spiritual Hero, who taught us that there is nothing to fear because the Universe is One with Spirit.
To understand how to go beyond the Homo Sapiens' wrong opinions, I had to recognize and unlearn my basic animal instinct and desire for sense gratification (recognizing them is only the first step; working to see past them is an even more difficult endeavor). History had pushed me and all my contemporaries to the brink. I felt mankind had to find the means to mediate its power with Spiritual understanding. That was the only way we could use it for our betterment instead of our destruction. I saw that the race following the warrior hero archetype is walking a path without an exit. Historically, we as Homo Sapiens have been able to survive our instinct because we did not have as many scientific and technological capabilities. But after the industrial revolution, and mainly in this century, we have become a menace to ourselves. With our bestial head and our extended bionic body, we are destroying the ecosystem that gives us life and nourishes us. We are poisoning the waters, destroying the ozone layer and escalating the genocide of our brothers and sisters with new and improved war toys.
I felt that the only solution was an individual change on a mass level. This is why I saw the need to reinvent myself and also why I saw that this approach required a completely new perspective. I had to enter dimensions more real than the temporal, navigate the cosmos nude and alone, caress the nebula, go up stairs of atoms, escape unending and unbearable labyrinths. I yearned to find the answers to the age-old questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? Why does evil happen?
Through my search I came to the realization that Ideas do not originate in people, but are expressed through people; through anyone willing to ask a question. I understood that the problem of the world in relation to society is the few numbers of thinking individuals in each generation. Not many people ask questions because certainty is more comfortable than doubt. Asking a question opens you to new possibilities--the very process of thinking. By thinking we become a part of the Eternal meditation of the universe. To reach Eternal meditation, we must ask a question.
The formulation of Ideas that clearly arrive to consciousness have been expressed through different languages. The languages of Reason are: Philosophy, mathematics and geometry. The language of emotion is the arts: literature, poetry, painting, sculpture and music. There is also Mysticism, the language of wisdom that unites Reason and emotion. Therefore, our common history has a lot to teach us if we extract the essence of what is Truth and timeless in it. Individuals in each generation have sifted these kernels of truth from the erroneous conceptions of the time. History consists of these truths threaded together like a pearl necklace. I realized this was the thread that could bring us out of the labyrinth. I also saw that our history has been clearly divided into Three Acts in the drama of life: Blind Faith, Doubt and Enlightened Faith. We are just beginning the third act.
Visualizing that thread, reminded me of the Greek mythology I had learned from my father as a child. My own name came from the Greek myth of the Labyrinth. The Minotaur was born to the queen of Crete after she mated with a sacred bull. To hide his shame, the King had a Labyrinth constructed to hide the monster. He then forced the Athenians to send fourteen young men and women as annual tribute to be locked in the Labyrinth for the Minotaur to eat. To stop the slaughter, the hero Theseus volunteered to enter the Labyrinth and fight the monster. On the advice of the king's own daughter, Ariadne, Theseus brought a ball of thread, which he unwound as he went through. He found the Minotaur, killed it, and then used the thread to find his way out of the maze.
Through that myth I understood that I was here to live consciously the adventure of self-discovery. In the myth Ariadne was a virgin, symbolizing how we must purify our emotions. She must help Theseus, or her intellect, to come out of the labyrinth of form where the Minotaur lives. The labyrinth symbolizes how easy it is to get lost amidst our many erroneous opinions. The Minotaur represents the false consciousness of mankind, which appears monstrous because our senses fool us into being afraid. Just as we once believed the Earth was flat and the Sun revolved around it, we continue to hold erroneous believes based on what we see or feel with our senses and our animal instincts. Still, we feel more comfortable continuing to believe in things as we know them, rather than trying to expand our knowledge. That is why Moses, Socrates, Galileo and Marx were persecuted for bringing us radical changes with new knowledge. In the same way, our reactions of today, are not very different from our prehistoric reactions to life. We have a series of comfortable believes, or taboos, that only a minority in each generation dare to challenge. This is why the emphasis in my life has not been on my persona, but on the Ideas that come to me by the magnet of the questions I ask. Ideas that helped me realize that we are not what we think we are. We are not the limitations of our body, or our intellect, or our emotions. The way we have interpreted who we are is wrong, as wrong as how we once perceived the nature of the Earth and the universe to be.
I am writing to you, my daughter, to show you a way to emancipate yourself from our erroneous interpretations. I was helped in my quest by the golden thread of humanist thinkers who have told us time and time again that our problem lies in our exclusive identification with what we can see and touch. I have tried to follow the idealistic radical thought that began with the Egyptian Hermetic movement that came out of Egypt with Moses and which, century after century, has tried to change our erroneous interpretations for correct ones. It recounts those things we must know to be able to separate the gold of history from the fool's gold of our misconceptions; the humanist ideas from the inhuman opinions; the Spiritual in us from the untamed animal automatism that still rules our psyche.
History represents the task of reversing all the misinterpretations of prehistory. Through science we have already achieved the reversal of the misconceptions of the material world. We know the Earth is round, not flat; we know the volcano that explodes is not an angry god we must appease; we know microscopic organisms cause disease, not bad blood that has to be "bled." We now need to do the same with those of the subjective world. First, we must clear our psyche. Kabala, Alchemy and Yoga know that the psyche consists of three levels: intellect, feelings and energy. We must clear them from all wrong opinions and feeling to liberate the energy encased in those wrong molds. Only in this way can our brains become more receptive to Spirit, establishing a permanent connection between the individual and Spirit. This task cannot be realized by one individual in one life time. It can only be accomplished by the race as it enters the phase of conscious evolution.
Those of my generation born after the Second World War, grew up in atomic shock, between an iron wall and a sword, facing the greatest emergency in history: the threat of nuclear suicide and the menace of ecological disaster. Did my generation need to unleash the energy of the atom, reversing the creative force of Spirit, and witness the agony of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before we could turn our power towards constructive goals? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the wake-up call for all of those in my generation who wanted to save ourselves from imminent destruction. The past, with its inhumane precedent, cannot give us the creative power we need to imagine a new man and a new society. Our common history was bathed in blood. We do not have to look too far back to conclude, as many philosophers had, that we do not have to ask what the source of evil is, for it is in us. We can easily see that we have not taken the first step towards real Love or the Resurrection of the Human Spirit.
What my life quest has taught me is to distinguish between the actions and opinions born our of our wrong beliefs from the Ideas that belong to the Human Spirit in all of us. The whole of our evolutionary process and history continues to affect us today. We have not yet won the struggle between the will of Spirit and the will of the elite's to usurp the power of Spirit for their own material gain. Blind masses follow blind leaders because both have the same fears that leads them to seek safety in material possessions.
I hope my experiences and conclusions help you, my daughter, as well as those who are trying to find their way out of the labyrinth, out of the confusion in our psyche and our society. The Homo Sapiens is the missing link between the animal and the human. The human is the link between the Homo Sapiens and the Homo Spiritus, who represents our evolutionary destiny.
Mankind's contradictory nature has brought us to this pivotal moment in time. Part of mankind has striven for Truth, but for the majority of us, our wrong opinions keep us in the shadows of our misconceptions, greed and fear. We can clearly trace how the progressive Ideas of Truth manage to inch their way forward despite always being blocked by the prehistoric taboos that live in us all. The triumph of the Human Spirit can bring us out of the labyrinth of confusion, making us able to embrace wholeness.
Most theories, be they philosophical, scientific, psychological or historical, are limited in scope and incomplete by themselves. We have innumerable great theories that wait in the libraries of the world, each waiting to fulfill its true purpose by helping to fill out the larger picture and make a comprehensible whole. Even the wonders of invention become valueless as we use them detached from a true understanding of their place within the whole picture. There is an essential unity behind the apparent separation of things. Our minds and bodies are inextricably bound to the total activity of the world around us, including all of mankind, the cycles of seasons, the ecology of the planet, our solar system, our Milky Way, and the Cosmic Universe. We have to be loving and respectful to all spiritual traditions in the world, all cultures, all science. We have to unite the languages of culture: mysticism, philosophy, science, literature and the fine arts. We have to recognize them all as the whole expression of the Human Spirit. In that way, a holistic view of history will emerge because the different disciplines are expressions of the race yearning to become whole. This way history will finally feed us its honey instead of poisoning us with its bitterness. Then we can begin the stage of Conscious Evolution: Beyond the Homo Sapiens.