There is a wall around us. We live within a stronghold that we do not see. We run free in its courtyards that we believe the world to be, without realizing the limited space we are allowed.
It happens to some to become aware of it. Responsibility for the past coercion and castration is then given to someone or something. However, they are always scapegoats that allow us to hide from ourselves the ultimate truth to which, again, some happen to access. And when that happens, what was secret becomes banality. Under a permanent biographical push, which by ontology, never contradicts itself, we realize our only available destiny.
As long as something in us does not evolve. Provided we do not recognize ourselves as architects and masons of our back wall and circumstance. So, every single stone, brick and trowel stroke, used to erect the wall, are no longer the work of others but ours. Although we do not choose culture - as a wall erected by others - by interrupting the attribution of responsibility or objective reality, we can emancipate ourselves from the one in which we happen to be. That is, we can recognize its historical reasons, its philosophical necessity and also its arbitrariness and its instrumentality. That is, its ephemeral nature mistaken for a definitive wall. The path necessary to notice the great shift in the plan that changes and overwhelms everything is a job that is up to the individual.
Linus' wall and various blankets are genetically children of the same parent: the need to support one's self. They are shelters, habitats, bioregions where we can guarantee our survival. In which we can affirm our strength, our truth, identity and difference.
The size of the wall is proportional to the sense of personal importance that directed its construction. And personal importance is in turn a function of the gradient of awareness that the self is nothing but a wall built around us.
Identifying oneself with one's self is the condition for determining the delimitation of one's domain. Within which we are, outside which we are not. Within which we always know where the north is, outside which we are disoriented. Within which we travel the way of the true, the beautiful and the just. Out of which the ways are of the false, the ugly and the wrong.
Whoever is dominated by his own judgment stops reality, defines it and reifies it with his own judgment. Who is not dominated by his own ego observes the flow of reality, sees the forces, narrow and subtle, which act on it. In what he observes he always recognizes a truth. In the first case, he dominates the still image, in which we observe a reality corresponding to a photograph, whose composition is determined by our wall. It always corresponds to our advantage. In the other situation we see the film of becoming, the parable of history and its permanent legitimacy. A condition that allows even the most refractory walls to melt.
Self-referenced by our wall, we proceed with our heads held high as champions of the right morality, the right politics, the right use of force. The wall, one step at a time, leads us to places that we never would have suspected, it produces us realities that we never would have wanted. In all circumstances the wall always imposes its law for the survival of our metaphysics.
Only the associates pass through the large access portal to our fortress: only the ideas that do not disturb us and that comfort our positions. Or, to go out in proselytizing battle. From the loopholes we observe the outside world ready to defend in case of attack. A defense often the result of defensive-emotional reactions, unable to recognize the meaning of what comes towards us. Messages in varying form are rarely considered, accepted, chewed, digested, and ultimately made one's own.
Although the battles between ideas take place with rational-dialectical weapons - the only ones that are considered intelligent in the rationalistic domain of our time - unbeknownst to everyone, the only bullets that hit are the emotional ones. The rest are intellectual salvos who, whatever happens, touch the skin and never reach the heart.
And the single stones that make up the wall and the arguments we bring to support their implementation are also believed to be rational, therefore the strongest and most lasting. But it is protoscentist superstition. In fact, they are not at all strong and resistant, if anything, they are wavy and foldable. In fact, even those stones, each of those is placed by an emotional force with exclusively emotional reasons. All so-called and presumed rationality has emotional parents.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have extensively told about it. But, despite their vision having the cultural power comparable to the physical one of a nuclear fusion, it has remained limited to graduate theses and academic quisquiglias.
The autopoiesis of ourselves - the two Chilean researchers said - corresponds to the wall. Whose nature is to be partially permeable only by what is compatible with what we believe about us. We accept what is already in us, which integrates with that. Not only. This compatibility is measured by an emotional ruler. To schematize, it can be said that the same argument can be accepted / rejected if given to us at a different time. And that, at the same time, we can accept / reject an identical argument if provided to us by different sources. The first case depends on the variation of our intimate condition / belief. The second comes from the judgment we generate - and with which we identify ourselves - towards the issuer.
The popular open-minded formula would like to contain this ocean and these depths, so easily, unknown to ourselves. A mother's open-mindedness towards the misdeeds of her child tends to be maximum. In her circumstance, her wall is totally knocked down or permeable. No judgment keeps the child at a distance. No alterations propagate in the mother.
It is different with overt or minimal ideologies. The clash between these is guaranteed, as is the personal importance of the duelists.
With the awareness that the other is a different universe, which therefore has rhythms, vibrations, rotations and squares - which are just a hint of a full-bodied list - we can turn to the language, the way and the time to try to approach the next, to risk combining our thought and our spirit with his. In a word, modulating language means listening. And this alludes to the assumption of responsibility for what happens when the other's wall proves to be impermeable; when fiery darts go out from its slit aimed at us.
Just as weakness is directly proportional to the consistency of the wall, strength is indirectly. This reaches its maximum in listening, where the wall appears minimal or knocked down.
In the awareness that identity is an infrastructure of us, that it does not correspond to our universal self, we have firmness and flexibility, purified from toxic pollution of personal importance.
And then, the traumas are devastation of the wall, they are underestimation of the enemy.
Therapies are the awareness that we build it and that defending it head down will cause us other inconveniences, including madness. A state in which the wall is so narrow around us that even light cannot pass through.
Wisdom does not lie in not building the barrier but in distancing oneself from it, in freeing oneself from self-importance, in recognizing one's own and other people's walls with compassion.
Fighting then becomes playing a part, possibly a duty for us. As for the Samurai, for which the defeated enemy will have the honor of arms.
