How I Perceive the World

There is a Buddhist sutta that I came across years ago and that has been living in me ever since. It says: go alone, just like a rhinoceros. Not as a metaphor for bitter solitude. As the description of a specific dignity: that of the one who does not need a herd to know where he is headed. The rhinoceros is not gregarious, and not because of an inability to bond. It is solitary because its nature demands it. Because the depth of the terrain it travels does not always admit company. And because there is a kind of freedom that exists only when you do not depend on another's pace to find your own.

I am that animal in the West.

I do not say it with pride or with lament. I say it as an objective description of a fundamental incompatibility between the way my consciousness processes reality and the way most of the people around me do. There is no superior or inferior here. There are different metrics, curving the same exterior from different geometries. And when those geometries are different enough, the real encounter does not happen. People brush against each other on the surface but do not recognize each other at the core.

The Beginning of Everything: The Source Is the Root

Everything began from a question that was not a question. It was a sensation before language. The sensation that something did not fit. Not in me, but in the way the world explained to me what it was.

I remember having arrived, from a young age, at the idea that there exist two kinds of opposite and complementary essences that cannot exist by themselves. Mass without a space to define it cannot manifest itself. Space without any reference lacks meaning. Those two entities are everything while being nothing on their own. And that irresolvable tension between the determinate and the indeterminate, between form and the emptiness that allows it, is not only the structure of the universe. It is the structure of my mind. It is the structure of any conscious mind.

I am that tension lived from within.

My ego is the determinate: form, narrative, the protection of identity, the pole that defines and delimits. My consciousness is the indeterminate: the space that contains it, that observes without needing to possess, that allows the tension to exist without resolving it prematurely. And between the two there is no fixed point of equilibrium. There is a pendulum in perpetual motion.

The Pendulum and the Forest

For years I used the image of the pendulum to understand my own states. The pendulum oscillates between the physical pole and the mental pole, between the ego that reacts and the consciousness that observes, between the emotion that arises and the space that contains it without identifying with it. The midpoint of the pendulum, where it would be still, is not the ideal. It is the death of movement. Real life happens in the arc, in the oscillation, in the going and returning.

What I learned is that the problem is not being at either of the extremes. The problem is not knowing that you are at one. When the pendulum rises toward awake consciousness, toward states of high clarity and presence, the energy that this requires is proportional to the height it reaches. And what has to happen next, necessarily, is the descent. Not as failure. As physics. As the same law that makes everything that rises, if it has no further impulse, descend.

The resistance to that descent, the self-punishment for needing rest, for not being able to maintain a state of high consciousness forever, that is the friction that brakes the pendulum and in some cases does not even let it move.

But there is something more I learned about the pendulum that took me longer to put into words: the real point of equilibrium is not at the geometric center of the arc. It lies in the capacity to step out of the point where you are and observe yourself from outside. That is the third-person perspective. Seeing oneself as if you were another. Not from cold judgment, but from detached understanding. The forest that lets you see the tree you are. Without that flight outward, the tree can only see itself from within, and from within one cannot see the whole, nor the terrain, nor the direction toward which it grows.

Meditating Is Not What People Think It Is

I have seen how the concept of meditation has been reduced to a relaxation technique, to a fashionable practice, to something you do for twenty minutes in the morning and share on Instagram. And I understand the frustration of someone who looks for something real within that space and finds only surface.

For me, meditating is a state, not an act. There are tools that help one enter it, but the tools are not the state. The state is when the fourth principle, non-thinking and non-reasoning, has dissolved the ego's noise enough for the third principle, thinking and reasoning, to operate without being anchored to the emotions, desires and impulses of the self.

Put another way: first you block the noise. You center your attention on the breath, on the senses, on the body. You lower the volume of the ego until the inner space widens. And when you are far enough inside that space, when the pendulum has left the orbit of the ego, you activate reasoning again, but now from a different place. From outside the box. From the forest's perspective on the tree.

In that state you can analyze your past without being the past. You can plan your future without already being in it. You can see your emotions as independent spheres without being dragged along by them. And that is not dissociation. It is exactly the opposite: it is total presence but without identification.

It is like crossing the atmosphere and going out into space. From outside, the planet you were inside of can be seen whole. And from that point, you think again. But no longer with the noise of someone trapped inside the atmosphere.

Consciousness as a Tool and Perception as a Practice

I do not separate formal meditation from everyday life. For me, meditating is also cooking with complete attention. Feeling the texture of the ingredients, the smell that changes with the heat, the exact moment when something is ready without needing a timer. It is a form of presence that requires neither a specific posture nor time set apart from the day.

Eating consciously is the same. Not as an ascetic discipline but as an act of being where you are while doing what you do. The mouth that notices the temperature, the acidity, the sweetness, the texture. Without being simultaneously somewhere else inside the head. That kind of presence trained in the small is what later transfers to the large: to how I listen, to how I look, to how I process what happens to me before reacting.

I believe in the movement of the body as an extension of the movement of the mind. When I move physically, when I train, when I ski slopes that frighten me, when I walk with a stick while I think, something in the inner circuit falls into order in a way that stillness does not produce. My mind needs the body to accompany it. Not as an external support but as part of the same system. Thought that is not embodied stays a map. And I do not want only maps of mountains. I want to have climbed them.

Living in Probability: The Most Honest Way of Looking

One of the things that most distinguishes me from most of the people with whom I share the world is that I do not collapse my judgments prematurely. I live in probability, not in certainty.

This has a price that I already know well: I can keep spaces open about people, situations and possibilities that the other closed long ago. And then I am the one who holds an expectation that no longer has reciprocity. But I prefer that risk to its opposite: that of judging too soon and closing off something that had not yet fully happened.

I always ask myself three questions before collapsing toward a judgment: how? why? what for? Taking into account the circumstances, the people involved, the environment, the history. I do not look for the right answer. I look for the answer most honest to what is there, without adding what I would like to be there.

And when I collapse, I collapse upon facts. Not upon words. Not upon declared intentions. Upon actions. Upon what someone does with their time and energy when no one is looking. That is the real metric of anything: what a person does, not what they say they do or what they believe they are.

The Formless State as the Origin of Understanding

There is a state that I have reached only a few times and that is difficult to describe without it sounding like cheap mysticism. It is what happens when detachment from the ego reaches a sufficient level for the separation between observer and observed to begin to dissolve. It does not disappear completely because if it disappeared completely there would be no one left to register it. But it becomes so thin that what remains is an unfiltered perception, without the noise of the self that interprets.

In those moments I have understood things all at once that it later took me months to put into words. As if understanding came before the concept. As if the body knew before the mind names it. And what always emerges from those states is the same intuition that lies at the origin of the MCMC and of the Art of the Path: everything is the same thing expressed in different forms and structures. The universe, the human being, life, societies, me breathing, you reading. Everything is two types of energy structured in different forms that permit each other's existence.

That is not a belief. It is what I feel directly when the filter of the ego thins enough. And that direct experience is what makes me trust the model not only as an intellectual construction but as a description of something I have lived from within.

The Asymmetry of Being This in This World

What all of the above describes produces an asymmetry that has no easy fix. When one has developed the capacity to read the interior of people through what they project outward, when one sees the reflection of what is inside in every gesture and every need for validation, what one often sees is neither bad nor good. It is emptiness. An emptiness that is covered over with layers of identity built outward: roles, masks, labels, needs to be on top.

And living in a play while being the only one without a costume is tiring in a very particular way. Not because one wants to give up. But because authenticity in a world of theater produces a specific loneliness: that of being completely surrounded and still being completely alone.

The rhinoceros of the sutta does not wander in solitude because it has failed to connect. It wanders alone because its nature and its dignity require it. Because there are things that happen only in solitude. Because the most important work of any existence is the work one does with oneself, in the silence where no one can enter unless invited.

I am that animal. Neither better nor worse. Different. And the world I inhabit is the same as everyone's, seen from a perspective that very rarely finds a mirror.

But that does not make me less. It makes me more responsible for what I build within, because it is the only thing no one can take from me.