Dying to See

There is little that is new about the fragmentation and constant infighting afflicting humanity today; we have lived for millennia in conflict with one another, at odds with ourselves, and increasingly alienated from our source in life. All that is new in our day is the immensely destructive power of the technology with which our habitual factional egotism has armed itself and the increasingly lethal consequences of our greedy disruption of the planet's ecology. Despite our much-vaunted progress and intelligence, we have continued to disregard all evidence pointing to the irrationality of our exclusive worldly and otherworldly aspirations, both personal and tribal.At the heart of this book pulsates an ordinary person's intense discontent with the culturally and biographically determined mindset responsible for this harrowing state of affairs. This far-reaching discontent is far from popular. However, there is a growing number of individuals who feel the same disgust with self and culture and are equally puzzled, nor to say distraught, by the fact that it sickens them and not others.The insensitivity and all-around mental dullness that comes with identification with particular forms of cultural tradition and personal experience is a collective phenomenon. No one is exempt. Thus, a revulsed awakening to its presence and consequences is not something that any "one" can claim personal merit for. For all we know, this undeserved insight into the dysfunctional nature of our mental and social reality may well be life's charitable last attempt to heal humanity's self-inflicted mental illness before it becomes entirely suicidal. The hundred and sixty-six brief and micro-essays that make up this collection are like narrow little roads leading in many different directions and presenting different angles of view and degrees of difficulty, but with the sole intention of helping different manifestations of the same conditioned and self-centered mental system gain independent awareness of the entire situation. What is essential is to be truly "dying to see" because the sight that beholds the whole cannot possibly stand in separation.