Beyond the Tribal and Self-Centered Mind

Beyond the Tribal and Self-Centered Mind is a collection of essays addressing the blunt disjunctive we face as individuals and as a species: Either the human mind/brain undergoes a veritable mutation or the accelerating growth of interrelated variables of enormous destructive power will continue to bring about increasingly intolerable circumstances and eventually the extinction of the entire species. The same divisiveness, irrationality, and reckless behavior are deeply inscribed in...
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Beyond the Tribal and Self-Centered Mind is a collection of essays addressing the blunt disjunctive we face as individuals and as a species: Either the human mind/brain undergoes a veritable mutation or the accelerating growth of interrelated variables of enormous destructive power will continue to bring about increasingly intolerable circumstances and eventually the extinction of the entire species. The same divisiveness, irrationality, and reckless behavior are deeply inscribed in our different tribal and personal identities and the conceit we all together share of existing in separation from one another and even life. Worse yet, these harmful traits are also profoundly incised in the physiological substrate of consciousness: the human brain. Nothing of what we already know or could learn and put in practice in the future can benignly and efficiently access the physiochemical ground that determines how we perceive, feel, and think about ourselves and life and, consequently, how we behave.Are we then condemned to be the separate beings we think we are and to endlessly act in the senseless and all-too-often murderous ways we do? Has humanity imprisoned itself in a subtle physiological/mental ghetto with self-induced extinction as the only way out? These are the seminal questions posed in these essays, along with the suggestion that deep involvement in perceiving directly (and not merely intellectually) the chronic failure of traditional ideologies, methods, and technologies and, more importantly, the falseness of our claim to separate existence, may end our toxic mental and behavioral patterns and dissolve their neurological underpinning.The fundamental challenge we face is finding out in and by ourselves whether the fantasy of existential separation can end and whether that ending gives birth to a mind free of any form of tribalism and egotism and, therefore, capable of creating a sane, intelligent, and, therefore, profoundly caring society. The essays are interspersed with a set of photographs metaphorically representing the mutation that can make our species whole, one with life.