Aproximaciones al modelado de las dependencias espacialesespaciales

The last one, the fourth truth, speaks about a glimpse of hope, a possibility of overcoming this state of suffering, the condition which keeps us in a state of perpetual stagnation. It’s the precept on which every apprentice might focus his work.

While the realization of the Four Truths happens in a moment, as a realization of our own condition, the

develop-ment during the practice of the Eightfold Path can only be gradual, proportional to the work one does on oneself. The practice begins with the development of an ethical conduct, the Right Speech, Right Action and Right Livelihood.

What does this mean? It means that the apprentice must take responsibility for what is he saying so that he does not offend or harm. So, a practice of gentleness and the aware-ness of what we say and what we speak about.

For the reason that speech is a result of what we are thinking, this first stage, when well -developed, brings us to a right way of thinking. Such as the thoughts which influence the content of our conversations, the tone and the cadence of the voice, even changing the way we speak makes changes in our way of thinking and, also, makes it easier to manage the contents of our mind. This is the meaning of the Buddhist say-ing “We are what we think”.

Then, the apprentice must learn to act without egois-tic purposes, without depending on the result of his actions, so, in Western words, without expectations. This produces a Right Effort and a Right Concentration to the further steps in the Eightfold Path.

The Right Livelihood implies to make a distance from extreme actions of every type, and also from greed and from actions with the purpose to harm.

After this first stage, what follows is the development and cultivation of a Right Effort, Right Thinking and Right Concentration. The Right Effort could be explained in this way: learn to administer our daily energies. As explained in previous posts on this Blog, we usually waste great amounts of energy in actions that are directed toward nothing: we think or, better said, we let our mind produce thousands and thou-sands of thoughts, speak in a compulsive way, let our body produce uncontrolled and useless movements, tensions, and stresses. What is suggested with this percept is to apply our

whole energies in order to develop more sober behaviours; such a habit arises from a right way of acting, the above mentioned Right Action, and it’s a fundamental supposition for devel-oping a conscious and focused will. This can’t be performed without Right Thinking, so a conscious way of administration of our mind, and this together brings us to the development for Right Concentration, a focussed attention which is able, in a second moment to unveil what really lies before our eyes.

It’s the beginning of a de-mechanization, a gradual desegregation of the old habits which keep us imprisoned be-tween the walls of our illusory way of living, feeling, perceiv-ing and seeperceiv-ing reality as it is.

A Right Thinking brings us out of the perpetual atti-tude to fall into various identifications with what happens around us and in us; the development of such a skill brings us to the Right Concentration, the improving of our attention to the degree that we can experience life in a lucid way, instead of that as sleepwalkers.

The last stage is the flowering of a Right View and a Right Intention. Right View means the realization and com-prehension of the Four Noble Truths, the situation in which almost all humans are imprisoned. A true understanding of the reason for a condition of suffering and of the relative va-cuity feeds the wish to overcome this situation, to become able to manage our illusions, with the support of Compassion to-wards all living beings, also involved in the same situation;

it’s the birth of a purpose, an intention- the Right Intention.

Even if the Eightfold Path is divided in stages, its practice is not linear, as seen above. There is an interaction of cause- effect between each phase. A linear approach to a teaching brings us to nothing; a sober learning is most similar to the flowing of a spiral, a vortex in which the proceeding of a phase brings us to a deeper understanding and the realization of another one.

What is needed, is a further and rare skill, the great-est one: having a “heart” (sensibility) able to dicipline our whole life, to integrate a theoretical study with the practice, and bring the results of this addition into the way of living and experiencing our daily life – moment by moment.

Fear and the apparent Feeling of Division

Fear is present in every human being, which incarcer-ates all of us as slaves. It has been present since the mists of time, so rooted in all of us that it seems to be engraved even in our DNA code. Trying to overcome it from the beginning is practically useless, because we must beforehand neutralize the effects it produces.

Fear hinders every step on the path to a self realiza-tion, keeping us blindly and irrationally stuck in the animal realm. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that fear “kills”

the mind, and without a mind disciplined and controlled by a will, we lose our humanity as we understand it.

We can educate ourselves through becoming part of what frightens us, dropping the distances and the sense of strangeness. Closeness produces intimacy, and this dissipates every fear. Fear arises from a sense of separation. In fact, we fear others, always!

To better explain about what kind of distance we mean here, we’ll make an “elucidation”: being separated means both a physical distance and a difference in form, in-tended as body: “my body is separate from yours.”

Ok, that’s obvious. But, being divided, as we intend here, implies a further and deeper distance, which remains so in the course of physical proximity, “My mind can’t be unified with yours. We are and will always be inevitably two divided realities.”

Fear is related to this perception of division which makes us perceive others as strangers and potentially

danger-ous. Thus, we live in suspicion - the “others ” must prove to us that they are not dangerous. We don’t start from the consid-eration that people are generally similar to us (different con-cerning their needs and superficial fears, but equal in depth).

In fact, we do not consider ourselves as part of a “family”, but rather as isolated “entities” who need to be in constant protec-tion from the outside world.

The subjective feeling of each man is his solitude, a loneliness that in rare cases is temporarily mitigated. But even when this happens, the individual lives a sense of “com-munity” retaining his defensive barriers, for the reason he fear-and expects to be betrayed. Even the family, after early childhood, remains extraneous to our most intimate existence, and in most cases, we experience a constant sensation of “not being understood”.

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So, what is “outside” of ourselves is considered a po-tential “danger”. For this reason, since antiquity, man has or-ganized conglomerates and clans, fortified by a symbolic link of community, necessity, vital interests, an ideal or a feeling of similarity or “belonging”. Despite the “closeness” within these perimeters, humans remain suspicious. This “fictional” secu-rity brings at least the illusion of being protected from what lies outside the community. It is the root from which arises the idea of a “group- identity”, the nation, race and culture, which implies similarity and brings a type of better security.

Inside of this “circle”, each member feels protected from the external, the strange, the different, the alien, and the sense of loneliness and vulnerability decreases (even though it remains). Inside of this circle, men create further ties of close-ness (a family), which allow different forms of intimacy which further reduces, momentarily, the sense of fear.

Understanding that fear is connected to the sense of di-vision is fundamental; it could seem rationally obvious, but,

seen from a deeper and more sincere point of view, the ques-tion is still open.

Realizing and understanding the concepts of “sepa-ration” and “division” is fundamental to understanding the concept of fear: willy-nilly, this represents the “pillar” of hu-man life, and it’s related to the perception of what is alien and “outside” of us. Ignorance of “what is outside” covers dif-ferent levels of fear and preoccupations. When we ignore the nature of an environment, we are unable to know what can happen. Similarly, if we don’t understand the character of a person, we are unable to “predict” his reactions.

Fear is related to a lack of knowledge and a sense of strangeness, and also from what we well know: we are afraid of something we know may happen. In other words, we project outside our bigger fears.

We don’t know how a friend, a mate or some other will react to our words, but we have an idea of the abundance of its negative reaction. He might feel offended, becoming aggres-sive, insulting us; or, he could remain silent, behave falsely, preparing a sort of “revenge” or something worse…. this is FEAR!

For the reason he is a “stranger” to us, we are unable to predict what kind of reaction he will have, but our mind projects a series of situations that might develop: and that’s what we fear, even before something could happen. Imagina-tion wins over reality.

The fear, therefore, means imagining what could phys-ically or emotionally hurt us, even if we ignore the way and the moment this will happen (if it will happen). And this pro-duces insecurity, opening a neverending flow of imaginative activity concerning the possible risks and consequences of an action; the mind builds a series of possible scenarios which – proportionally to the anarchy of our thoughts – colors the emotions of fear or, worse than that, of pure terror.

As seen in the first part of this post, fear is deeply relat-ed to a sense of division and it is movrelat-ed through the activation of associative thoughts (imagination), who feed on personal past experiences or past experiences common to all mankind.

When we reach the capacity to remain detached from what happens in our emotional and mental field, we become able to analyze and foresee the possible risks which could arise from a situation. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of what we commonly call fear; indeed, this could be seen as a “dysfunc-tion” of the human machine- the intellectual center (mind) and the emotional center (emotions) drain “energy” from each other. This is not a rare situation, indeed, this is what usually happens, and it should be superfluous to say that this is neither positive or productive.

This is the situation that most human beings have to face every day.

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One of the most “ancient enemies” of every human be-ing is surely the dark, such as Nature, when it expresses itself in its full potential. Such as thousands of years ago, humans feared entering a forest at night. Today a person feels similar (probably the same) reactions before walking through a dark street because the mind tends to create an image of the pos-sible “dangers” which it could face there. This image could be illusory, a myth, or real and concrete, but the result is always the same: humans face the demons of their fears before facing the reality.

The dark is the symbolic representation of a space in which we are unable to see, and where all the possible dangers could be hidden. Such loss of light, represents also a loss of knowing. If I’m unable to see what is in front of me, I don’t know what I could expect and, consequently, how to act. If I don’t know, I’m unable to manage any phenomenon. On one hand, this is not a negative thing, because if knowing gives

me a feeling of safety, this drives me to know, and compels me to dive into the “unknown”. But, on the other hand, this pro-duces also fear, because, I can fear only what I know- in the case of the dark street, the infinite and fantastic agglomerate of all the possible situations which my associative, automatic thoughts are able to produce. This is not a mere speculation, but a crucial point to understand and overcome fear in all its forms. What we commonly know is the result of what the past has revealed to us. It doesn’t matter if this is our own experi-ence or what we have heard about an experiexperi-ence of someone else. “Knowing” is not projected into the future- it is always a result of the past.

Thus, when a thought is focused on a future event, it does it so through a more or less complex projection - a previ-sion based on the elaboration of data we have acquired in the past.

So, quite opposite of what most say, knowing alone is not enough to win over fear, because, if on one side it gives us the “tools” to face situations, on the other it allows the mind to create an image (or more images) of possible dangers. It’s a constant balance between prevision and worries of not being able to bear an unforeseen event.

Knowing can erase the fear only when related to spe-cific situations, not to life in general. For example, if I don’t know how to drive a car, I have an obvious “fear” of driving, because I could create an incident. But once I have learned to drive a car, I have acquired the necessary “knowing” to man-age this vehicle and this fear disappears. But we can’t learn and experience in advance every aspect of life. There are also some aspects where learning never stops, such as when it’s re-lated to the emotional field: feeling, happiness, anxiety…. or some unconscious anguish whose roots are unknowable, and probably will be never known. So, to resume in a few words what we wish to express here- even if knowing and experienc-ing can help one to feel more safe in some fields of his life ,they

are not enough to overcome Fear in its totality, thus so in ev-ery field of our life. Mind generates safeness and, soon after, doubts.

This means that fear can’t be faced only in details, but in more large and “philosophical” terms. Surely, the fear of some specific possible dangers exists, but the main problem is the crystallization in human nature of fear as fear, namely as an instinctive manifestation of perceiving ourselves divided from others and the world.

There are many modern methods which allow us to overcome some specific fears (fear of flying, of swimming, etc…), and they are taught in some formation courses, psycho-logical therapy, etc.. . but they are focused on the superficial aspects (the reactions) and not on the primary causes.

At the opposite, a genuine inner research is focused on the roots of the problem, to resolve fear in its totality. It’s a long path, but it’s also final and resolutive.

In the moment that our mind becomes filled with imaginary fears concerning our life, we stop to be free; we don’t put attention on what our eyes objectively see and what our hands touch, but for what could happen. What happens is that the eventuality scares us more than reality, and this makes us weak, denying us to respond in an efficient way to unexpected situations.

The imaginary is based on the past, namely not so much on what we know as our experience but rather on what we consider to know. Indeed, the mechanism of the knowing acquired through direct experience should be understood in depth: knowing is the base of individual development, but what should be learned is to not fall into the net of what we have acquired from others, and accept as our experiential knowing. And, this is usually what happens. This could seem

an intellectual and abstract statement, but it is more than practical in order to find concrete solutions in our daily life.

But, if we wish to better understand what fear is, we should put all our attention on the concept of division. What is this? How does it function? And, what is most important: is it real? The most immediate answer would be that its existence is a matter of fact, something concrete and undeniable. We have a body that divides us from the outside world, and this body can be harmed by the environment. Likewise, our emo-tional and intellectual fields are similar but different from the same fields of others. And, even these fields can suffer external attacks. So, that division exists, is a tangible fact, and fear has its reason for existence.

Is it so really? The first answer that could arise in our mind is discounted, but the topic is not so simple. Facing this argument, we enter into a field belonging to the realm of “what lies beyond appearances”. What is usually not per-ceived byhumans, could be formulated in the following way:

reality is not what it seems to be, and we pay for this percep-tive deviation with suffering every moment of our lives.

Once more, an individual whose aim is individual de-velopment should make a distinction between what is “sepa-ration” and what is “division”. This is not a sophism, but a concrete analysis of practical implications for human exis-tence.

Physically, separation represents a reality: we can’t pass materially through a wall nor become one thing with an external object. We could say that this is correct from a point of view focused on matter, because it represents a common ex-perience. Of course, this is so until proven otherwise. But, for now, we’ll accept the separation of physical objects (physical bodies included) as a matter of fact.

This “touchable” and “evident” experience that we are physically separated from the external world makes arise

an-other conviction: that this “fact” belongs also to the field of emotions, intellect and, for those who are “spiritual”, even of the “soul”. “My soul is not the same as yours”. “My essence can’t resonate with yours”, etc…

And here lies the great mistake. Emotionally, intellec-tually and, let’s say, “spiriintellec-tually”, things are very, very differ-ent.

An example: when we fall in love, for the time that this love lasts as a deep and warm passion, the sense of fear and of division doesn’t exist.

Another example: a mother, and even a father, does not fear their children (at least while they are small) because they consider them as part of themselves. These two are the

Another example: a mother, and even a father, does not fear their children (at least while they are small) because they consider them as part of themselves. These two are the