KEY 1: CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE
Society is certainly in crisis, but human beings have both a timeless dimension and a temporal one. The crisis may affect the temporal, but not necessarily the timeless. This means we must give proper size and proportion to the problems that affect us: we need perspective.
First Lesson in Perspective
Human beings are timeless, even though they have temporal manifestations (childhood, maturity, old age, another life). Look in the mirror, look deeply into your eyes. When you look at yourself, don't you feel that deep down you are the same person you have always been, the same since childhood? Don't you have the feeling of being beyond time, of continuity? "Deep down, I haven't changed, I'm the same, I recognize myself."
But how is that possible? Please, look at yourself again, but now look at your exterior. What do you see? A man or woman weighed down by years, perhaps ill, or perhaps young and full of energy? Maybe a father or a mother? Remember your childhood, school, your parents, your first love. How much has your body, your face, your gaze, your voice changed?
So, there is something in you that changes, and something that remains. There is something superficial and something deep; things that others know, and things that only you know, because they are impossible to explain.
Please, I invite you to do an exercise: connect with that "stranger" inside and look at things from that angle. Look back and forward, trace the line of your life from above, with distance. With the same distance you sometimes use to judge what you say and what you think.
Question: Are you the one who thinks, the one who speaks, or that other one who observes and judges how you think and how you speak? There are two "selves" in you, and you didn't know it, though you sense it.
Second Kind of Perspective
Do a little experiment: walk with someone through the city streets and let the topics of conversation flow. If you pay attention, you will see that over 80% of the seemingly random ideas that arise have been triggered by something you saw along the way—a sign, a color, a noise that initiates a cascade of automatic associations. In other words, our thinking is conditioned; most of the time, it is not free. Try the experiment, I beg you, and then we'll talk.
And yet you still consider yourself independent and free...?
Third Kind of Perspective
You have relatively little interest in ants. You only talk about atoms in physics class, but they aren't important in your life; you could perfectly well live without knowing what an atom is. They are so small! They can be ignored, although ants are more interesting because they eat the things you don't keep. Yet every day you walk and crush them without being aware, and the truth is you don't care about them, except when they eat your sandwich.
Okay, I understand. But why don't you look "up" now? You are a small being; there are millions like you (7 billion). You are not special in any way; your opinion is therefore worth one seven-billionth of humanity. You are a tiny speck on a local map—a very local one, because you aren't even visible on a national one.
When you see a group of birds flying in one direction from a distance, or a school of fish moving in unison, you think they are reflex actions, that they move instinctively, following the majority. Of course, they have no consciousness of their own, they are not free!
However, you buy an iPhone and wait for hours at the door of a store to get the latest model, as if your life depended on it. When we say "iPhone," we mean anything else: political choices, trends, fashions, cars, etc., etc. Why this uniformity? Could it be that those in control know how to manage the herd, how to excite passions, how to make us buy what we don't need, how to make us hate who they want us to hate or love what interests them? You would be amazed to know the many forms of manipulation that exist.
And yet you still think you have your own opinion and independent judgment...
Fourth Class of Perspective
Consider your small size, which we already talked about, and also your remote-controlled or automatic reactions. Now look up and contemplate how the Earth is nothing more than a tiny planet in a solar system that is far from being the most important. Our sun is small, very small compared to other suns, and it is almost like a speck of dust next to our galaxy, which is a very ordinary galaxy among the billions up there, forming immense galactic fabrics.
When you look at the cells in your body, you say to yourself, "Well, this is my skin, made up of millions of cells. If I scratch because it itches, I remove millions of cells, but what does it matter? They are not important, nor are the millions of bacteria I remove when I wash my hands." In short, everything is relative; we understand that. The problem is that from other perspectives, we are also relative, small, and expendable.
Fifth Class of Perspective, the one we must not forget, the authentic reality
All the perspectives we have seen are those of our everyday self, let's say our lower self: simple, human, impressionable, lost.
If we were to represent that lower self in a graph, it would be nothing more than the confluence of all those constants that affect us from the external, phenomenal world. It is a fragile and unstable self. Leonardo da Vinci, about whom we are told so many things—some true, some false—represented this human self in a famous drawing, the so-called Vitruvian Man:
Here we see that dependent self; its perspectives are as discussed above. As you can see, it is a man framed in a square—that is, limited to the earthly, which is what the square symbolizes: body, life, feelings, and thoughts. It is dependent on those things; take any of them away and it will disappear; it is mortal. Think about it, do the mental exercise. His self is merely the geometric result of those elements: damage his body, for example, and you will see how the center of the self shifts; or damage his emotions and the center will shift again; remove one of the sides and there will be no center. It is an illusory self. That is why our self changes with illness, with good or bad luck, whether we have energy or are tired. It is very unstable.
Let's take it a step further. Now let's look at the whole picture. This other man, inscribed in the circle—the blue one—touches the limits of the circle with his hands and raised feet. He is a man in whom a fifth element appears, which is why he is also framed in a pentagon formed by his body. He raises his arms and legs and rises above it all. In other words, he no longer depends on those four things we mentioned before—body, life, feelings, and thoughts—but is another self, a higher, more elevated one.
Do you know who he is? Yes, you guessed it: he is the one who contemplates what you think, who judges and sees beyond time. And he is not an angel, but your other self. You know him.
The more often and the longer you can see things from that fifth perspective, the more you will have taken the first step toward being yourself—your real, timeless self.
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