There is a subtle, relentless dictatorship that governs our existence without us ever really noticing it. It does not come from outside, it is not imposed by regimes or hidden powers, it does not manifest through explicit prohibitions or concrete threats.
It is far more covert, far closer, far more intimate.
It lives inside us, speaks with our own voice, uses our very thoughts to keep us imprisoned in a golden cage whose keys we lost ages ago.
It is the mind that judges, labels, separates, categorises, constantly evaluates and sentences without pause, without respite, never granting us a moment of genuine breath.
We are hypnotised by the mind, and we do not realise it.
We walk through the world with our eyes wide open, yet our gaze is clouded by an ultra‑thin, immensely powerful veil of preconceptions, habits, memories, desires, fears, expectations.
All of this unfolds in a flow so continuous, so automatic, so terribly natural that for centuries—perhaps always—we have stopped noticing it.
We believe we are awake, while in fact we are sleeping deeply.
We believe we see, while we only look at the projections of our memory, the shadows on the cave wall, to borrow the ancient philosopher’s words.
The inattentive mind, the one that runs on autopilot, that accompanies us from morning to night without ever being held accountable, is literally full of thoughts.
It is not empty, not silent, not receptive: it is packed, congested.
It constantly creates images in a passive state, applies them to what it perceives, and on the basis of those images constructs judgments of pleasure or pain that settle in memory like sediment on a riverbed. Around the desire for satisfaction, ever‑more elaborate paper castles arise, which we mistake for reality itself, forgetting that they are merely our constructions, our projections, our waking dreams.
As if that were not enough, as if the picture were not already complex enough, the mind establishes within itself a fixed point of view, a separate observer, an inflexible judge that reacts to everything with a pre‑conception based on what it has already learned, what it has already lived, what it already believes it knows. This internal disposition—a constantly judging attitude—may be the greatest obstacle, the thickest barrier that separates us from receiving authentic impressions, from directly experiencing reality as it is, before our mind transforms, deforms, reduces it to something already known, already catalogued, already filed.
We judge ourselves, we judge others, we judge situations, we judge time, we judge life, we even judge our own judging.
Whatever it is, we always judge.
It is our primary occupation, our favourite pastime, our daily drug.
There is a cruel aspect, a sort of tragic irony, in this mechanism that keeps us in its grip.
There is not a single moment of the day when we stop judging.
Not even when we are alone, in the privacy of our room; not even when we think we are resting, sunk into an armchair after a tiring day; not even when we are immersed in nature or in an activity we love, which should rejuvenate us.
Judgement continues, inexorable, like a musical background that never stops, like that white noise that persists even in the deepest silence.
And this habit—stronger than us, older than us, more rooted than anything else—keeps us prisoners in a fierce slavery.
We are slaves to what we think we know, prisoners of what we think we are, chained to a version of ourselves that we have built brick by brick from past experiences, inherited family and cultural convictions, unconscious identifications with roles we enact without even remembering we are acting.
Yet, and this is the decisive point, beneath all this, beyond all this, at the bottom of all this, there exists something completely different, something we have never truly encountered.
Within us there is an essential energy, a silent presence that is the foundation of everything that exists, the very basis of every possible experience.
Mystics have called it soul, spirit, deep self, pure consciousness.
Philosophers have chased it with thought, never reaching it. Poets have glimpsed it and sung about it.
But in our ordinary lives we do not feel it, we do not perceive it, because our attention is constantly occupied, absorbed, sucked in, devoured by everything that lives in memory: thoughts that chase each other endlessly, overlapping images in a tight montage, desires that flare and fade like fleeting fires, disappointments that weigh like boulders, bodily impressions that demand our attention with the insistence of children.
In this inner clamor, in this pandemonium that grants no respite, the voice of essence cannot be heard. It is like trying to listen to the rustle of a leaf falling amid a rock‑concert.
Consequently we feel we are nothing; we feel we are only that flow, that noise, that incessant chatter, that theatre of shadows in which we play our part without even noticing there is a stage, an audience, a script.
Nevertheless, amid all this, almost miraculously, something continues to speak.
A faint, barely perceptible voice, a whisper that rises when, for an instant, the noise eases, tells us to look, to listen, to seek seriously and truly.
It is the call of our deepest part, the part that knows—though we do not know we know—that there is more, that there is another dimension of experience, accessible right here, right now, if only we could make silence.
But when we try to listen, when we turn toward that voice, we are immediately blocked, assaulted, overwhelmed by thoughts and feelings of every kind that rush in to occupy every space. We pay little attention, or rather we pay an attention still contaminated, still captured by the contents, still prisoner of the very dynamics we wish to transcend.
We are not calm enough to truly listen, to truly feel.
What we wish to know, what we sense exists beyond the veil, is subtler, lighter, deeper.
We have not yet developed, have not yet refined, have not yet discovered within us the attention required to grasp it.
The crucial issue, the decisive point of this inner journey, is to understand—existentially, not merely intellectually—the difference between two radically different kinds of attention, opposite as light and darkness.
On one side there is fixed attention, the kind that comes from only one part of us, that clings to an object like a castaway to a wreck and stays there, nailed, like a lighthouse that illuminates a single point and leaves everything else in the deepest shadow.
It is the hunter’s focus on prey, the scientist’s stare at the microscope, the lover who sees nothing but the beloved.
It has its merits, certainly, its uses, but it is limited, partial, exclusive.
On the other side there is a completely different attention, a free attention that is not attached to anything, not held by anything, not possessed by anything.
It is an attention that engages all centres simultaneously, that embraces everything without grasping anything: thought, sensation, emotion, body—all together, in a unitary, total perception that excludes nothing and no one.
Our ordinary attention, the one we employ every day without noticing, is constantly seized by something and remains trapped in that movement, imprisoned in that dynamic.
If we ask, for example, what we are feeling at this precise moment, thought answers for us immediately, automatically, based on a knowledge that is not at all real, not an immediate, direct, living knowing.
It is only recollection, only memory, only label. “I am fine,” “I am tired,” “I am hungry”: canned phrases, pre‑packaged responses, ready‑made categories into which we shove experience like a garment that is either too big or too small.
Our thoughts are merely expressions of what is stored in the dusty warehouses of the past.
We never truly relive the new, we never directly experience what is happening in this instant, because we continuously, incessantly, cover it with what we already know, wrap it in what we already understand, suffocate it under the weight of our expectations.
This thought is confined in a narrow space inside us, a fence made of habits and associations, a courtyard walled by towering barriers.
Always worried, always agitated, always apprehensive, it holds our attention in this restricted space, isolating it from the rest of us—the body that also inhabits, the feeling that also feels, the totality that also is.
Thus, with attention constantly jumping from one thought to another, from one image to the next, in an uninterrupted flow that knows no pauses or intervals, we are hypnotised by the mind.
Hypnotised in the literal sense: we do not steer the thoughts; the thoughts steer us. We do not direct attention; attention is dragged here and there like a leaf in a raging current.
These thoughts—our desires, affections, fears, hopes, disappointments—are linked only through habits or attachments, which bind one to another in an endless chain, in a vicious circle that feeds itself.
Our attention is caught in this current because we have never fully understood, never truly realised, never existentially comprehended that it was given to us for another purpose.
Attention is not meant to be a slave to thoughts, not meant to wander aimlessly through the maze of mental associations, not meant to get lost in the labyrinth of memory and imagination.
It is meant for something far greater, far deeper, far truer.
It is meant for presence, for awareness, for the direct encounter with what is.
Hence the decisive question, the one that can change everything, the one that opens a crack in the wall of habit: Can the mind remain silent during perception? Can we perceive without naming, without immediately separating the watcher from the watched, the judge from the judged, the subject from the object? To achieve this, to realise this possibility, we would need an attention we do not yet know—a new, virgin attention that never separates from what it observes, that creates no distance, that never establishes a separate subject from the object. Only such an attention, one that is one with its object, can allow us to have a total experience that excludes nothing, rejects nothing, prefers nothing.
Because only when we do not exclude, reject, select, or favour anything are we truly free to observe and understand ourselves in our entirety, without censorship, without filters, without mediation.
When the brain can be active, sensitive, awakened in a state of active stillness—where activity is not feverish agitation but vigilant presence, where movement is not convulsive but quiet attention—something extraordinary happens, something that radically transforms our way of being in the world.
A movement of completely different quality emerges, one that does not belong solely to thought, nor solely to sensation, nor solely to emotion.
It is a movement that involves, traverses, and unifies everything into a higher synthesis.
It is a movement that leads to truth, to that which we cannot name because any name would already be a reduction, a limitation, a prison.
In this state, attention is total, full, complete, free of distraction. In this state we can finally experiment with what it means not to know, what it means to dwell in the fertile ignorance that precedes every knowledge, what it means to inhabit mystery without trying to solve it.
I wish to see whether I am capable of not knowing, whether I can suspend for an instant my incessant naming, whether I can refrain from labeling what I perceive.
I have a sense of myself that my habitual thoughts call “body,” but in this state I do not know what it is; I have no name to give it, no category into which to slot it.
I am aware of tensions, down to the smallest, those subtle ones we usually ignore completely, those that run beneath the threshold of ordinary perception, yet I do not know what tension is; I have no theory, no explanation.
Then I feel the breath, which I do not know, which I have never truly known, because I have always only thought about it, only named it, only conceptualised it, only observed it from afar as one observes an object.
In a body I do not know, surrounded by people I do not know, in a world I do not know, immersed in a mystery that has no name and perhaps will never have one, my mind finally settles. Not because someone silenced it by force, not because violence was exerted upon it, but because, faced with the pure mystery of existence, faced with the naked presence of things, it has nothing left to say, no more labels to apply, no more judgments to emit.
It silences.
It simply silences.
And it is a full, vibrating, living silence.
I then begin to see, with a clarity that is not intellectual but existential, not logical but experiential, that true knowledge is possible only at the moment when attention is full, when consciousness fills everything as water fills a vessel, when there is no longer any space for doubt because there is no longer any separation.
Then there are no longer distinctions, no longer separation, no longer one object more important than another, one experience more valid than another, one moment more significant than another.
There is only pure existence—bare, simple, evident, luminous.
The creative act that gives rise to something authentic, that produces works that endure, that generates beauty that consoles, is nothing other than the vision of what is happening, the direct perception of what is, without filters, without mediations, without interpretations.
I learn to see.
Finally, after a lifetime believing I was seeing, I learn to truly see.
This is not philosophy, not religion, not mysticism, not psychology, not self‑help.
It is something simpler and at the same time more difficult: it is a concrete possibility, accessible to anyone who has the courage to stop, to observe their own mental functioning, to question the daily hypnosis into which we have been immersed since birth.
The invitation—simple and radical together—is to experiment, to verify directly on one’s own skin, to believe nothing that has not been seen with one’s inner eyes, felt with one’s heart, touched with one’s soul.
Because truth, the real truth, is not a concept to be learned from books, not a doctrine to be received from a teacher, not a belief to adopt for social convention.
It is a living reality to discover, every day, every moment, every breath.
And discovery begins right here, right now, in this precise instant, at the moment we cease judging and start seeing.
At the moment we drop words and listen to silence.
At the moment we let go of labels and meet life face‑to‑face.
RVSCB
