What's Wrong With Us?

In the motion picture "The Matrix," Trinity tells Neo, "You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad." What was wrong, as it turned out, [Spoiler Alert!] was that Neo--like everyone he knew--was living in a false reality: a computer-generated dream world.

Of course there's nothing wrong with our world, the planet Earth. There IS something very wrong with the human race. We--all of us--are living in another kind of Matrix; a false reality; a subjective mind-generated dream world. Because we believe this dream world is real we are insane. I'm not using the word "insane" lightly. Just because we have conveniently restricted the diagnosis of "insanity" to a more overtly disturbed minority, who can't hold jobs, who have to be medicated and/or institutionalized, doesn't mean the rest of us are in our right minds.

Notice that I said subjective mind-generated reality. The physical world, in all its perfection, is perceived by the objective mind: everyone with sight sees the tree. Subjective (individual) mind is the domain of value judgments, opinions, beliefs, tastes, customs, traditions, etc. that distort, like cataracts, our objective perception of the "real" world. It was the collective subjective mind of the Nazis that literally saw Jews as parasites in need of extermination. It is the collective subjective mind of one group or tribe to see all others as inferior. Hell on Earth follows: from slavery to persecution to exploitation to Doomsday. Fifty years ago today Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger because his subjective mind convinced him he was fully justified in doing so.

The source of our self-hatred, our shame, our blame, and our arrogance is our subjective mind successfully convincing us that it is objective reality. Subjective mind is the source of our insanity: the state of confusing subjective opinion with objective fact.

If we could suddenly see physical reality undistorted by our subjective bullshit we would be in paradise. The key to enlightenment is humility. I like to say,"You can't be any humbler than nuts." The fate of humankind hangs in the balance.

Read Kathleen Brugger's "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: The Mechanics of Compassion," which is based on our life's work, and presents this theory in detail. For a personal account of madness and transformation, read my autobiography "Exposing Myself: A LIfe of Sex and Truth."

Male and Female Survival Strategies: The Tusk and the Pit

The male survival strategy could often be likened to a bull elephant stampeding through the jungle and crushing anything in his path. The female would be crazy to stand up to such brute force, such overwhelming physical superiority. She therefore compensates by using her wits: epitomized by a deep pit dug in the jungle floor ahead of the charging male, with sharpened up-pointing bamboo stakes embedded at the bottom and the entire trap concealed by a delicate lattice-work of branches and leaves. The trumpeting, bellowing (and not-too-bright) bull usually doesn't stand a chance.

I believe that the lone alternative to flight/fight survival behavior is face: the experience of unconditional acceptance of what is (my definition of love).