Author: Selene Calloni Williams

In our hyper-rational and materialistic culture, individuals have no doubts in perceiving earth, water, fire, and air as substantial objects. Their senses, however, are mental operations. When they see, hear, smell, taste and hear, it is their mind that chooses, among an infinite number of possibilities, what to perceive and how to perceive it. In the end, individuals commonly find themselves living in a kind of mental map of reality, and it is in this map that reality appears objective and substantial to them.

We live in a virtual world and we have to discover and figure it out. The great deception is precisely believing in the objectivity of things, that is, in a substantial and concrete reality that is not emptiness.This is not a nihilistic position, and in fact in the Buddhist vision, emptiness is not nothingness. It is the pure will to exist. But existing means to be there for death. Therefore, the aspiration to exist is the will to give oneself, to offer oneself. Existence is elusive, by virtue of its intrinsic nature.
We live in a virtual world where material things appear real, in reality they are dreams, illusions, images. We live in a mundus imaginalis which is also a mundus symbolicus. In this world, nature, with its characteristic of impermanence, appears to be the main symbol of the “sacrum facere”, of giving one own self.

Evolution is the movement of nature towards freedom: from the first amoeba, to the first fish, to the first amphibian, to the first reptile, to the first bird, to the first mammal up to the self-awareness of man, which represents us the freedom of choice, nature evolves. Then in man it starts all over again. The human individual, in fact, can fall into a dark slavery, given by his own mind or attain the divine freedom to create his own universe. He falls into bondage when it transforms beliefs and theories into certainties, it frees itself when it overcomes beliefs and theories and relies on the knowledge of the present moment.