Silo, The Internal Landscape

The Internal Landscape


I. The Question
1. Here is my question: As life goes by, is it happiness or suffering that grows within you? Do not ask that I define these words; answer instead according to what you feel…
2. Though you may be wise and powerful, if happiness and liberty do not grow in you and in those around you, I will reject your example.
3. Accept, instead, my proposal: Follow the model of that which is being born, not that which takes the path toward death. Leap over your suffering, and it will not be the abyss but life that grows within you.
4. There is no passion, idea, or human deed that is not linked to the abyss. Therefore, let us turn to the only thing that deserves our attention: the abyss and that which overcomes it.

II. Reality
1. What is it that you want? If you answer that it is love or security that is most important, then you are speaking of moods—of things that you cannot see.
2. If you reply that it is money, power, social recognition, a just cause, God, or eternity that is most important, then you are speaking of something that you see or you imagine.
3. We will be in agreement when you say, “I choose this just cause because I reject suffering! I want this because it brings me tranquillity, and I reject that because it disturbs me or makes me violent.”
4. Is your mood, then, at the center of all aspiration, all intention, all affirmation, and all denial? You might reply that whether you are sad or joyful, a number remains the same, and that the sun would be the sun even if human beings did not exist.
5. I will tell you that the same number differs depending on whether it is something that you have to give or to receive, and that the sun fills greater space within the human being than in the heavens.
6. The radiance of a spark or of a star dances for your eye. And though there is no light without the eye, on other eyes this radiance would fall with different effect.
7. Therefore let your heart affirm, “I love this radiance I see!” But may it never say, “Neither sun, nor spark, nor star have anything to do with me.”
8. Of what reality do you speak to fish or reptile; to gigantic animal, tiny insect, or bird; to a child or an old person; to one who sleeps or one who keeps watch in cold calculation or feverish terror?
9. I say that the echo of the real murmurs or resounds according to the ear that hears, and that for other ears what you call “reality” would play a different song.
10. Therefore let your heart affirm, “I love the reality that I build!”

III. The External Landscape
Look at this couple slowly walking. While his arm gently encircles her waist, she rests her head softly on his welcoming shoulder. They stroll on while the autumn of leaves that fall around them is crackling and dying in yellows, reds, and violets. Young and beautiful, they continue, inevitably, into the gray overcast afternoon. A cold drizzle begins to fall on the children’s toys, abandoned in deserted gardens.
1. For some this scene revives a gentle and perhaps pleasant nostalgia. For others it awakens dreams, and for still others, promises to be fulfilled in radiant days to come. Before the same sea one person becomes anguished, while another, inspired, feels exhilarated. And a thousand more are overawed in contemplation of those frozen crags, while still others gaze in admiration at those crystals carved on such gigantic scale. Some are depressed, others uplifted before the same landscape.
2. A single landscape, then, may be very different for two people, but wherein does the difference lie?
3. The same occurs with what we see or hear. Consider, for example, the word “future.” It sets one person on edge, while another remains indifferent, and still others would sacrifice their “today” for it.
4. Consider for example, music, or words with social or religious significance.
5. There are moments when a multitude or an entire nation will condemn or embrace a certain landscape. But does that rejection or acceptance lie in the landscape or in the hearts of that multitude or nation?
6. Between doubt and hope, your life is oriented toward landscapes that coincide with something that is within you.
7. This entire world, which you have not chosen but which has been given for you to humanize, is the landscape that most grows as life grows. Therefore may your heart never say, “Neither the autumn, nor the sea, nor the ice-covered crag have anything to do with me.” Instead may it affirm, “I love the reality that I build!”

IV. The Human Landscape
If even the most distant star is connected to you, what should I think of the living landscape, where deer slip between ancient trees and even the most savage animals gently lick their offspring? What should I think of the human landscape, where opulence and misery are found side by side, where some children laugh while others cannot even find the strength to cry?
1. For if you say, “We have reached other planets,” you must also declare, “We have massacred and enslaved entire peoples. We have filled our jails with those who cried out for liberty. We have lied from morning until night. We have falsified our thoughts, our affections, and our actions. We have assaulted life at every turn, for we have created suffering.”
2. I know my way in this human landscape, but what will happen if we pass each other going in opposite directions? I renounce every faction that proclaims an ideal higher than life and every cause that, to impose itself, generates suffering. So before you accuse me of not being part of any faction, examine your own hands—you may find on them the blood of complicity. If you believe it valiant to commit yourself to those factions, what will you say of one whom all the murderous bands accuse of being uncommitted? I want a cause worthy of the human landscape: a cause committed to surpassing pain and suffering.
3. I deny the right to make accusations to any faction that, whether recently or long ago, has figured in the suppression of life.
4. I deny the right to cast suspicion on others to any who conceal their own suspicious faces.
5. I deny that anyone, even someone arguing the extreme urgency of present circumstance, has the right to block the new roads that the human being must travel.
6. Not even the worst of what is criminal is foreign to me, and if I recognize it in the landscape, I recognize it also in myself. So it is that I want to surpass what in me as in everyone fights to suppress life: I want to surpass the abyss!
All worlds you aspire to, all justice you demand, all love you search for, all human beings you would follow or destroy are also within you. Everything that changes within you will change your direction in the landscape you inhabit. Thus, if you have need of something new, you must surpass the old that dominates within you.
And how will you do this?
Begin by realizing that even if you change your location, you carry your internal landscape with you.

V. The Internal Landscape
1. You search for what you believe will make you happy. This may not, however, be the same as what another is searching for. It might happen that you both desire things that are in some sense opposed, and you may both come to believe that the happiness of one opposes the happiness of the other. Or you may both long for the same thing, and if this thing is unique or scarce, you may again come to believe that the happiness of one opposes the happiness of the other.
2. It seems, then, that you can argue over the same object as much as over objects opposed to one another. What a strange logic beliefs have, that they are capable of producing similar behavior toward both an object and its opposite!
3. There, in the heart of your beliefs, lies the key to what you do. So powerful is your fascination with what you believe that you affirm its reality, even though it exists only in your mind.
4. But returning to our theme: You search for what you believe will make you happy. What you believe about things, however, does not reside in the things themselves but in your internal landscape. Gazing at this flower, you and I may agree on many things. But if you go on to say that this flower will bring you utmost happiness, it may become more difficult for me to comprehend, for you are speaking no longer of the flower but instead of what you believe it will do within you. You speak of an internal landscape that perhaps does not coincide with mine. It would be but one more step for you to try to impose your landscape on me. Consider well the consequences that could follow from such a deed.
5. Clearly, your internal landscape is not only what you believe about things, but also what you remember, what you feel, and what you imagine about yourself and others, about facts, about values, about the world in general. Perhaps we can now understand how: External landscape is what we perceive of things, while internal landscape is what we sift from them through the sieve of our internal world. These landscapes are one and constitute our indissoluble vision of reality.

VI. Center and Reflection
“External landscape is what we perceive of things, while internal landscape is what we sift from them through the sieve of our internal world. These landscapes are one and constitute our indissoluble vision of reality.” And it is by this vision that we orient ourselves in one direction or another.
1. Yet it is clear that as you go forward your vision is modified.
2. There is no learning, however small, that you achieve through contemplation alone. You learn because you do something with that which you contemplate. And the more you do the more you learn, for as you go forward your vision continues to change.
3. What have you learned of the world? You have learned what you have done. What is it that you want of the world? You have come to want according to what has happened to you. What is it that you do not want from the world? What you do not want also follows from what has happened to you.
4. Hear me, rider galloping astride time: There are three paths by which you can reach your most profound landscape. And what will you find within? Place yourself in the center of your internal landscape and you will see that every direction reflects this center.
5. Surrounded by a triangular wall of mirrors, your landscape is reflected infinitely in infinite hues. There, depending on how you orient your vision on the path of images that you have chosen, all movement is transformed and then restored, time and again. You can come to see your own back in front of you, and when you move your hand to the right, it will respond to the left.
6. If you aspire to reach something in the mirror of the future, you will see how, in the mirror of today or of the past, it runs in the opposite direction.
7. O rider galloping astride time, what is your body but time itself?

VII. Pain, Suffering, and Meaning in Life
1. Hunger, thirst, sickness, and all bodily injury are pain. Fear, frustration, despair, and all mental hurt are suffering. Physical pain recedes in the measure that society and science advance. Mental suffering recedes in the measure that faith in life advances, in the measure that life gains meaning.
2. If, perhaps, you imagine yourself to be a fleeting meteorite that has lost its brilliance upon falling to earth, you will accept that pain and suffering are simply the nature of things. But if you believe you have been thrown into this world to fulfill the mission of humanizing it, you will be thankful to those who have come before you, who have built with great labor the steps that allow you to continue the ascent.
3. Namer of a thousand names, maker of meanings, transformer of the world, your parents and the parents of your parents continue in you. You are not a fallen star but a brilliant arrow flying toward the heavens. You are the meaning of the world, and when you clarify your meaning you illuminate the earth. When you lose your meaning, the earth becomes darkened and the abyss opens.
4. I will tell you the meaning of your life here: It is to humanize the earth. And what does it mean to humanize the earth? It is to surpass pain and suffering; it is to learn without limits; it is to love the reality you build.
5. I cannot ask you to go further, but neither should it offend if I declare, “Love the reality you build, and not even death will halt your flight!”
6. You will not fulfill your mission if you do not apply your energies to vanquishing pain and suffering in those around you. And if through your action they in turn take up the task of humanizing the world, you will have opened their destiny toward a new life.

VIII. The Rider and His Shadow
As the sun tinted the path red and the shadow of the rider lengthened along the rocks and thick underbrush, he slowed his pace until at last he stopped by a newly lit fire. An old man, rubbing his hands at the flames, greeted him. The rider dismounted and they spoke together for a time. Then the rider continued on his way.
When the shadow of the rider shortened and fell beneath the horse’s hooves, he halted for a moment to speak with a man who hailed him from the side of the road.
The rider did not slow his pace as the shadow grew long behind him, and a young man who wanted to stop him was only able to shout, “You’re going the wrong way!”
Finally, nightfall caused the rider to dismount, and he saw the shadow only in his soul. Then, sighing to himself and to the stars, he said:
“On a single day an old man spoke to me of loneliness, sickness, and death. A middle-aged man spoke to me of the way things are and the realities of life. And finally, I came upon a
who did not even speak to me but only shouted out, trying to alter my course to an unknown direction.
“The old man feared losing his things and his life. The middle-aged man feared he would not be able to gain what he believed were his things and his life. The youth feared being unable to escape from his things and his life.
“Strange encounters these, where the old man suffers for his short future, seeking refuge in his long past; the middle-aged man suffers for his present situation, seeking refuge in what has happened or what will happen, depending on whether he grasps before or behind him; and the youth suffers because his short past nips at his heels, spurring on his flight toward a long future.
“And yet I recognize my own face in the faces of all three, and it seems to me that all human beings, whatever their age, can move through these times and see in them phantoms that do not exist. Or does that offense of my youth still exist today? Does my coming old age exist today? Does my death already dwell here today in this darkness?
“All suffering steals in through memory, imagination, or perception. But it is thanks to these same three pathways that thoughts, affections, and human deeds exist. So it is that even while these pathways are necessary for life, if suffering contaminates them they also become channels of destruction.
“Yet is not suffering the warning that life gives us when its flow is inverted?
“Life can be inverted by something that is done with it, perhaps unwittingly. And so it is that the old man, the middle-aged man, and the youth must have done something with their lives for them to have become ‘inverted.’”
Then the rider, meditating in the darkness of the night, fell asleep. And upon sleeping he dreamt, and in his dreams the landscape became illuminated.
He found himself in the center of a triangular space walled with mirrors. The mirrors reflected his image, multiplying it. Choosing one direction he saw himself as an old man. Choosing another his face was that of a middle-aged man, and in a third that of a youth. But in the center of himself, he felt like a child.
Then everything began to grow dark, and when he could distinguish nothing but a heavy darkness, he awoke.
On opening his eyes he saw the light of the sun. Then he mounted his horse, and seeing his shadow growing longer, he said to himself, “Contradiction inverts life and generates suffering… The sun hides itself so that day becomes night, but the day will be according to what I do with it.”

IX. Contradiction and Unity
1. Contradiction inverts life. The inversion of the growing stream of life is experienced as suffering. Thus, suffering is the signal that warns us of the need to change the direction of the opposing forces.
2. Those who through repeated frustration find themselves detained on their way only appear to be detained; in reality, they regress. Time and again their past failures close off their future. Those who feel frustrated see the future as a repetition of the past, even as they experience the need to distance themselves from that past.
3. Those who seize the future a prey to resentment, what intricate retaliation will they not attempt in order to avenge their past?
4. And in their frustration and resentment they do violence to the future, until it bends its back in suffering return.
5. At times, wise men have recommended love as a protective shield against the blows of suffering. But this deceptive word “love,” what does it mean to you? Does it mean getting even for the past, or instead a fresh, new, untainted adventure launched toward an unknown future?
6. Just as I have seen solemnity grotesquely cloak the ridiculous, just as I have seen an empty seriousness cast its pall over the grace of talent, so have I recognized in many loves a vindictive self-affirmation.
7. What image have you of the wise? Is it not true that you conceive of them as solemn beings, slow of gesture; as beings who have suffered enormously and with this merit beckon you from on high with gentle phrases in which they repeat the word “love?”
8. I have seen in all the truly wise a child running playfully through the world of ideas and things, creating generous and brilliant bubbles, only to burst them. In the sparkling eyes of all who are truly wise I have seen “the light feet of joy, dancing toward the future.” And very seldom have I heard them utter the word “love,” for the truly wise never promise in vain.
9. Do not believe that you will purify your suffering past through revenge, or by using “love” as an incantation or as the bait for a new trap.
10. You will truly love only when you build with your gaze fixed on the future. And if you remember a great love that is no more, let the memory be accompanied by a soft and silent nostalgia, with gratitude for all it has taught you until today.
11. You will not break with your past suffering by falsifying or degrading the future. You will break with it only by changing the direction of the forces that provoke contradiction in you.
12. I believe you will know how to distinguish a difficulty, which is welcome for you can leap over it, from a contradiction, that lonely labyrinth that has no exit.
13. Every contradictory action that you have done in your life, whatever the circumstances, has the unequivocal flavor of internal violence and betrayal of yourself. Why you found yourself in that situation will not matter, but only how—at that precise moment—you organized your reality, your landscape. Something shattered then, and changed your direction. And this, in turn, predisposed you to a new rupture. In this way, all contradictory actions orient you toward repeating them, just as all unitive actions seek to reemerge later on.
14. In daily actions difficulties are overcome, small objectives are achieved, little failures reaped. Whether pleasant or unpleasant, these acts accompany daily life like scaffolding accompanies a great building; it is not the structure itself, but it is necessary if it is to be built. It does not matter what material this scaffolding is made of, as long as it is suitable for its purpose.
15. As for the building itself, where you put defective material, the defect will grow; where you put solid material, you increase the structure’s solidity.
16. The essential construction of your life is built of contradictory or unifying actions. You must make no mistake at the moment you find yourself faced with your actions, for if you do you will jeopardize your future and invert the stream of your life—and how then will you end your suffering?
17. But it happens that at this very moment your contradictory actions are already many. And if everything from the foundation up is false, what can be done? Would you pull your whole life apart to begin anew? Let me tell you that I do not believe that everything you have built is false, and you should abandon any such drastic thoughts. They will only bring you greater misfortune than is already yours today.
18. A new life is not based upon destroying previous “sins” but upon recognizing them, so that from now on it will be clear how ill-advised are these mistakes.
19. A life begins when unifying actions start to multiply, so that by their virtue they compensate and finally favorably overbalance the previous relationship of forces.
20. You must be very clear about this: You are not at war with yourself. Rather, you must begin treating yourself like an old friend with whom you must now reconcile, for ignorance and life itself have driven you apart.
21. You must begin by making a decision to reconcile with yourself and to understand your previous contradictions. Then you need to make another decision—that you want to overcome these contradictions. Finally, you need to decide to build your life with acts of unity, rejecting those materials that until now have brought so much harm down upon your head.
22. Indeed, it is advisable that you clarify—in both your past and present situations—those contradictory acts that truly imprison you. To recognize them, you can rely on the suffering that is accompanied by internal violence and the sensation that you have betrayed yourself. These actions give clear signals.
23. I am not saying that you should mortify yourself in exhaustively recounting the present and the past. I am simply recommending that you consider everything that has changed your course in an unhappy direction and everything that keeps you fettered and tightly bound. Do not fool yourself once more by saying, “I have overcome these problems!” Nothing has been overcome or sufficiently understood that has not been weighed against a new force that compensates for and overcomes the previous influence.
24. All these suggestions will be of value if you are prepared to create a new landscape in your internal world. But you will be able to do nothing for yourself if you think only of yourself. If you want to move forward, you will one day have to accept that your mission is to humanize the world around you.
25. If you want to build a new life, free of contradictions, a life that increasingly overcomes suffering, you must be aware of two false arguments. The first holds that “I need to solve my personal problems before I can undertake any constructive action in the world.” The second leads you to declare “I am committed to the world!” while forgetting yourself completely.
26. You may agree with me or not, but in any case I will affirm that this is the only way forward: If you want to grow, you will help those around you to grow.

X. Valid Action
1. Contradiction is not the only source of mental harm; any reversal of the growing stream of life is experienced as suffering. Yet while the empire of circumstance may allow many forms of suffering to be overcome, contradiction persists, weaving its dark web of shadows.
2. Who has not suffered the loss of affection, of images, of objects? Who has not feared, been desperate, felt pity, or become agitated in angry rebellion against people, against nature, against all those unwanted but inevitable endings? But what was feared in darkness faded with the coming of day, and much of what was lost was forgotten. Yet that innermost betrayal of oneself continues in the past and poisons the future.
3. That which is most important in human life is constructed with materials of unity or contradiction. And this is the deep memory that either continues projecting existence beyond all apparent limit or causes it to disintegrate precisely at this threshold. May all human beings in their final review find remembrance of their internal unity!
4. And what is the flavor of an act of unity? If you would recognize it, rely on that profound peace which, accompanied by a gentle joy, leads you into agreement with yourself. This act bears the sign of the most integral truth, for in it, thought, feeling, and action in the world are united in the most intimate friendship. Yes, valid action is unmistakable; you would affirm it a thousand times over should you live as many lives!
5. Every phenomenon that makes suffering recede in others is registered as a valid action, as an act of unity, in the one who carries it out.
6. All action is bounded by two tendencies: There is the abyss, which grows through contradiction, and the flight above that allows you to overcome it through valid action.
7. And the cord of life takes on its singular modulation as it loosens or tightens, until reaching the note aspired to. There must be one note and one adjustment and one special procedure so that the vibration builds and resounds in a suitable way.
8. Babbling at human beings as they came to stand erect in their landscape, the moralities of the nations indicated the “yes” and the “no” of actions, upholding the “good” and persecuting the “bad.” But will this “good” continue to be good in a landscape that is so diverse? If an immutable God affirms it, it will be so; but if for many God has disappeared, who is left to judge? For the law changes with the opinion of the times.
9. Here is the point: Will those principles of valid action that allow all human beings to live in internal unity be static images that must be obeyed, or will they correspond instead to what one experiences when one rejects or follows those principles?
10. We will not discuss here the nature of those principles of valid action; we will simply take into account the need for their existence.

XI. Projection of the Internal Landscape
We have spoken of landscapes, of suffering, of contradiction, and of those actions that give unity to the stream of life. One could believe that all of this remains enclosed in the interior of each human being, or if it has any external expression, it is only in the form of individual actions that have no further consequences. However, things are precisely the opposite.
1. Contradiction inverts life, jeopardizing not only the future of the one who suffers it but also of all those in contact with this person, who has now become a transmitter of misfortune. All personal contradiction contaminates the immediate human landscape like an invisible sickness, detectable only through its effects.
2. Long ago, the plagues that befell a region were blamed on witches and demons. But over time, the advance of science did more for both the persecutors and the persecuted than all the millennia of irresponsible clamor. To which faction would you have given your support? Whether on the side of the pure or the wicked, you would only have increased your folly.
3. Even today, when you search for culprits on whom to blame your misfortunes, you simply add to the long chain of superstition. Reflect, therefore, before pointing your finger, for perhaps it was accident or the projection of your own contradictions that has provoked these unhappy endings.
4. That your children orient themselves in a direction opposed to your designs has more to do with you than with your neighbor, and more to do with you, certainly, than with an earthquake in some distant latitude.
5. Should your influence, then, reach an entire people, take great care to overcome your own contradiction so as not to poison with it the air that all others must breathe. You will be responsible for yourself and for all those you gather around you.
6. Thus, if your mission is to humanize the earth, strengthen your hands, hands of a noble laborer.

XII. Compensation, Reflection, and the Future
1. Hunger dreams of satiety, the imprisoned yearn for freedom, pain longs for pleasure, and pleasure wearies of itself. Could it be that life is nothing more than action and reaction?
2. If life is but pursuit of security for those who fear the future, self-affirmation for the disoriented, the desire for revenge for those frustrated with the past—what liberty, what responsibility, what commitment can be held aloft as an unvanquished banner?
3. And if life is but a mirror that reflects a landscape, how will it ever change that which it reflects?
4. Between the cold mechanics of pendulums and the phantasmal optics of mirrors, what do you affirm that you can affirm without denying? What do you affirm without regressing or with more than arithmetic repetition?
5. If you affirm that which searches for itself and whose nature is to transform itself, that which is never complete in itself and whose essence opens to the future, then you love the reality you build. This, then, is your life: the reality that you build!
6. And there will be action and reaction, as there will be reflection and accident. But if you have opened the future, there will be nothing that can detain you.
7. May life speak through your mouth, and may it say, “There is nothing that can detain me!”
8. Oh useless and wicked prophecy that proclaims the end of the world. I affirm that the human being shall not only continue to live but shall grow without limit. And I say, moreover, that the deniers of life wish to steal all hope—that beating heart of human action.
9. In the darkest moments, may your future joy remind you of these words: “Life searches for growth, not for the compensation of nothingness!”

XIII. Provisional Meanings
1. When moved by the pendulum of compensation, I search for meanings to justify my existence, directing myself toward what I need or what I believe I need. In either case, and whether I reach my objective or not, how will that affect the meaning of my life, inasmuch as it is movement in a given direction?
2. If I define myself by a particular situation, what will happen when, through some accident, that situation falls apart? These provisional meanings, though necessary for the development of human activities, cannot serve as the foundation for my existence.
3. Unless you wish to reduce existence to nothing more than exhaustion or frustration, you will need to discover a meaning that not even death—were that the accident—could exhaust or frustrate.
4. You will not be able to justify existence if you place as its end the absurdity of death. Until now, you and I have been companions in the struggle. Neither you nor I wished to kneel before any god, and that is how I would like to remember you always. Why, then, do you abandon me, even as I set forth to defy inexorable death? How is it possible that we have said, “Not even the gods are above life!”—and now you kneel before the denial of life? Do as you see fit, but I will bow my head before no idol, even when it is supposedly “justified” by faith in reason.
5. If reason is to be at the service of life, it will help us leap over death. Let reason, then, produce a meaning exempt from all frustration, all exhaustion, all accident.
6. I want no one at my side who projects transcendence out of fear, but only those who rise up in rebellion against the inevitability of death.
7. I want those saints who do not fear but truly love. I want those who day by day seek to conquer pain and suffering with their science and their reason. And in truth I see no difference between the saints and those who, through their science, encourage life. What better examples could there be, what guides superior to these?
8. A meaning that seeks to go beyond the provisional will not accept death as the end of life, but will instead affirm transcendence as the maximum disobedience to this apparent Destiny. As for those who affirm that their actions unleash events that continue in others, they hold in their hands a strand of eternity’s thread.
XIV. Faith
1. Whenever I hear the word “faith,” I feel suspicion grow within me.
2. Every time someone speaks of “faith,” I wonder about the purpose of what they are saying.
3. I have seen the difference between naive faith (also known as “credulity”), and the violent and unjustified faith that gives rise to fanaticism. Neither is acceptable, for the first opens the door to accident, while the second imposes its feverish landscape.
4. But something important must lie in this tremendous force that is capable of mobilizing the best of causes. Let faith, then, be a belief whose foundation rests on its usefulness for life!
5. If it is said that faith and science oppose each other, I will reply that I accept science as long as it does not oppose life.
6. Nothing prevents faith and science from progressing, as long as they have the same direction and enthusiasm to help sustain the effort.
7. And those who would humanize, let them help raise our spirits by pointing out the possibilities that the future holds. Or is the skeptic’s anticipation of defeat useful for life? Could even science be sustained without faith?
8. There is a type of faith that goes against life. It is a faith that proclaims “Science will destroy our world!” How much better to put our faith in working day by day to humanize science, so that the direction it was endowed with from its birth may triumph!
9. The usefulness of faith is evident if it is a faith that opens the future and gives meaning to life, orienting it away from suffering and contradiction and toward everything that is valid action.
10. That faith, like faith placed in oneself, in others, and in the world around us, is useful for life.
11. In saying “Faith is useful” you will doubtless offend some particularly sensitive ears. But do not worry, for if those musicians simply examine themselves a little they will recognize how faith is also useful to them, though their faith may flow from a different instrument than the one you play.
12. All those problems that until now have seemed insurmountable will begin to diminish if you are able to achieve faith in yourself and the best in those around you, faith in our world and in a life that is always open to the future.
XV. To Give and To Receive
1. Let us look at the relationship you establish with your external landscape. It may be that you consider all objects, people, values, and affections as things presented for you to choose among and devour according to your own particular appetites. It is likely that this centripetal vision of the world denotes a contraction that reaches from your thoughts to your muscles.
2. If this is the case, it is certain that you will have the highest regard for everything that is related to you—your sufferings as much as your pleasures. It is doubtful that you will even want to surpass your personal problems, because in them you will recognize a tone that is, above all, your own. From your thoughts to your muscles, everything has been taught to contract, not to let go. Hence, even when you act with generosity, calculation motivates your apparent disinterestedness.
3. Everything enters and nothing leaves, and from your thoughts down to your muscles everything becomes intoxicated.
4. And having contaminated all those around you, how can you later reproach them for their “ingratitude” toward you?
5. If we speak of “giving” and “helping,” you think of what others can give you, of how they can help you. But the best help that could be given you would consist of teaching you to let go of your contraction.
6. I tell you that your selfishness is not a sin but rather the fundamental error in your calculation, for you have naively believed that to receive is better than to give.
7. Remember the best moments in your life and you will recognize that they were invariably accompanied by a disinterested giving. Reflecting on this should by itself be enough to change the direction of your existence—but it will not suffice.
8. Let us hope I have been speaking of someone else and not of you, since surely you have understood such sayings as “humanize the earth,” “open the future,” and “overcome suffering in the world around you,” all of which are based on the capacity to give.
9. “To love the reality that you are building” does not mean to place the solution to your own problems as the key to the world.
10. Let me end by saying: If you want to overcome your profound contradiction, you must produce valid actions. If these actions are valid, it is because they help those around you.

XVI. Models
1. In your internal landscape there is an ideal man or woman that you search for in the external landscape. Through so many relationships your ideal remains always just out of reach—like two fragments of flint that do not quite strike except for that brief moment when perfect love dazzles us with its spark.
2. All human beings, in their own ways, launch their lives toward the external landscape, seeking to complete their hidden models.
3. But the external landscape continues imposing its own laws, and as time goes by, your once most cherished dream becomes only an image before which you now experience shame or even less, as this dream is reduced to a faded memory. Nevertheless, within the human species profound models exist, sleeping, biding their time. These models are the translation of impulses that your body sends to the space of representation.
4. We are not discussing the origin or consistency of these models, or the complexity of the world in which they are found. We are simply noting that they exist and pointing out that their function is to compensate needs and aspirations which, in turn, motivate human activities toward the external landscape.
5. Entire peoples and cultures also have their own particular ways of responding to the external landscape, responses always colored by internal models, which history and their own bodies continue to define.
6. Wise are those who know their profound models, and wiser still are those who can place them at the service of the best of causes.

XVII. The Internal Guide
1. Who do you so admire that you would like to have been that person?
2. Let me ask you in a more gentle fashion: Whom do you consider so exemplary that you wish you could find some of that person’s virtues in yourself?
3. Perhaps there have been moments when in sorrow or confusion you have appealed to the memory of someone who, whether existing or not, came to your aid as a comforting image?
4. I am speaking of those particular models that we could call internal “guides,” which at times coincide with real people.
5. Those models, which you have wanted to follow from the time you were very young, have changed only in the most external layers of your daily awareness.
6. I have seen how children talk and play with their imaginary companions and guides. I have seen people of all ages connect with these guides in prayers offered in sincere devotion.
7. The more strongly these guides were called, the further away they responded from and the better the signal they sent. Because of this I knew that the most profound guides are the most powerful. But only a great need can awaken them from their millennia of lethargy.
8. Such a model “possesses” three important attributes: strength, wisdom, and kindness.
9. If you want to know yourself better, observe the characteristics of the men and women you admire. Notice how the qualities you most value in them are also at work in the configuration of your own internal guides. Consider that even though your initial references may have disappeared with the passage of time, they have left “traces” within you that continue to motivate you toward the external landscape.
10. And if you want to understand how diverse cultures interact with each other, in addition to studying their modes of producing objects, study as well the methods by which they transmit their models.
11. It is important, then, to direct your attention to the best qualities in others, because you will project into the world those qualities you have managed to configure in yourself.

XVIII. The Change
Let us look back for a moment.
We have considered the human being as integrally connected to the world, influencing it and influenced by it. We have said that human actions are made manifest in the external landscape according to how their internal landscapes are formed. These actions will vary, but what ultimately defines a life are its contradictory and unifying actions. While contradiction inverts life, contaminating the world with the suffering it produces, unitive actions open the future, causing suffering to recede in oneself and in the world.
“To humanize the earth” is the same as “to give” in unifying actions. Any purpose that ends in receiving can only have a provisional meaning; it is destined to lead toward contradiction.
Faith is an enormous energy that can be mobilized in the service of life. And there are other forces that also operate in the internal landscape, motivating human activity toward the external landscape. These are the models.
1. Definitively the question is this: Do you want to surpass the abyss?
2. Perhaps you do, but how will you take a new direction if the avalanche has already been unleashed, dragging with it everything in its path?
3. Whatever your decision, you must know what resources and what energy you can count on to produce this change.
4. While your decision is very much your own, I would like to point out that you will not be able to change the direction of your life by relying only on the resources of internal work. Rather, you will need to act decisively in the world, modifying behaviors.
5. And how will you carry out this task and also add to it your immediate environment, which decisively influences you, and which you, in turn, influence? Only by awakening the faith that it is possible to convert this inverted life.
6. I will leave you at this point, but if you are prepared to change your life, you will transform the world—and then it will not be the abyss that triumphs but that which overcomes it.

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