A New Language for Living. The introduction of my next book.

­­

"When you hear the distant bells, it means that Saoshyant is present. The Savior ...", said Emanuele. "Who is the Savior, Elijah?" "You have to be yourself," said Elijah. “Sometimes I despair of being able to remember." He could still hear the bells, far away, ringing slowly, moved, he knew, by the desert wind. It was the desert itself that was speaking to him. The desert, through the bells, was trying to make him remember. He said to Elijah, "Who am I?" "I can't say," Elijah replied.”But you know." Elijah nodded. "By saying it you could make everything very simple," said Emanuele, "You have to say it yourself," said Elijah. "When that time comes, you'll know it and you'll say it." “I am" said the boy, hesitating." Elijah smiled.

Philip K. Dick

"The world is like a sheet of paper on which something is written. The reading and meaning will vary with the reader, but paper is the common factor, always present, rarely perceived. When the typewriter tape is removed, writing leaves no trace on the paper. So is my mind – impressions keep coming, but they leave no trace."

                                                                                                           Nisargadatta Maharaj

INTRODUCTION

Who am I? Can there be a simpler, more fundamental question? I hadn’t said it clearly to myself nor had I told others explicitly, yet this question was already alive in me as a teenager. It was not formulated verbally, but it was deeply present – in momemts when I felt bewildered, when I experienced an acute sense of not belonging, when I almost did not feel my feet touching the ground, when I felt I was leaving my body and dissolving into the abyss between what I felt I was and what I managed to be.

The perception of this abyss opened up suddenly, unexpectedly, yet felt familiar, and was part of me for as long as I can remember. It was like living in two worlds, and between them, there was a passage, a kind of no man's land, to cross. I recognized myself in one world and the other, but in both there was a sense of lack, of incompleteness, and in the middle ground lived the yearning for their union, and the impotence due to its absence. I felt like I was made up of pieces, composed of parts that I intuitively knew were all me, but which lived distinct, separate, incommunicating, except for very brief glorious moments. For the rest of the time, a subtle melancholy was my home, and the search for an intensity, which would allow me not to feel it.

Subconsciously, everything I did, the relationships I lived, the sex, the sports, the politics, the painting and writing, the friendships, the travels, the alcohol, the drugs, the reading, the dangers I put myself into, the challenges I sought, everything was part of the search for unity and the dissolution of the middle ground. Everything was a preparation to openly ask myself the question: Who am I?

One night, I think it was the spring of 1978, while in the arms of a friend and lover, I heard myself say, for the first time, loudly and clearly: "The purpose of my life? Finding who I am, that's the only thing I really care about." The words sounded simple, obvious, final. From that night on, the priority of my life was clear, and in that clarity, which was of the soul, it became even more evident that everything in my life was aligned with the result/ pursuit of that need: to know and be myself. It was like the sun pierceing the clouds, its light not only revealing things previously hidden but also suffusing everything with a brilliance that makes everything brighter, more real, more defined, and deeply interconnected. The light became the very fabric on which everything was woven.

That same year a crisis opened up and progressively widened within me that had to do with words, and with what I perceived as their misery and inadequacy in expressing the middle ground, my yearning for unity, my frustration in separation and the need to be and express authenticity and spontaneity. What created the most pain was the feeling that most of the words were disembodied. I rarely saw substance, or any life in the words. Yet I knew that substance in me, in others, and in some of the authors I read. I felt the intrinsic beauty of those words that were "true," but what made them so? What was the sun that illuminated them and gave them body? And how is it that even in those that expressed pain and misfortune, tribulations and loss, death and dissolution, there was an aura of subtle joy, a shine of humanity?

I remember that in December 1978, while I was in Rome leaving for Mexico, letting go of Italy and my story as a failed revolutionary, I got to the point of deciding to almost stop talking rather than continue to say things that were not my flesh. I felt the need to throw away what I thought I knew and the various ideas and ideologies that I had built and fought so hard for. I say almost, because there was no real decision, only an acknowledgment of the malaise and an internal dislocation, a retreat into a space where there were few words and little communication; This was facilitated, in the following months, by living in a nation that spoke an unknown language and had a culture and values that were alien to me.

Also, something inexplicable happened to me when I was reading Osho, whom I had met through the book ‘Tantra the Supreme Understanding’, almost three years earlier. The language Osho used was provocative, in the sense that I felt touched in the first person. It seemed to speak to me, rather than about me. It was intimate, close, enveloping. I felt seen, loved, recognized, and supported. It was a language that had disruptive effects on me, and resonated with the understandings, visions and feelings that were known, but had not received much attention. All this turned me even more introverted, and simultaneously, I was filled with curiosity and excitement as I recognized a language, a use of words and communication, different from what I knew, and that almost everyone seemed to share.

I began to pay attention to the symptoms that made me feel the truth in the words I said, felt, and read. I began to try to understand which was the sun that illuminated the words sometimes, and sometimes not. Listening to myself, I began to recognize that in everyday life, the words I spoke did not express the experiences I lived, rather they gave a constant commentary and evaluation of my experiences. It was as if everything was filtered, sifted, judged, revised and packaged, and only then offered to the world along with a particular image of myself that I wanted to be seen in and wanted approval of. It was like regurgitating something after half digesting it. There was an internal pressure to appear a certain way and that pressure eliminated the unacceptable in my eyes.

I also realized that rarely – mostly in moments of intimacy – did my words reflect what I was truly experiencing in that moment, and my feelings. Instead, they often referred to the past or the future, ccausing me to miss the present. This presence is what Osho and many other mystics and poets so clearly invited me to live, with passion and abandon.

Even so, I was struck by the recognition that more often than not,  I was missing the same presence in the words I spoke. Or rather, I was there, but not as the subject of the words, the one who said them, but as a speaker, a repeater who found authority in expressing concepts and ideas that held up because they were supported by an ideology, because they were part of a system, of a tradition, because they were consolidated over time. Even when I rebelled, what I said and communicated was not rooted in me, but in something considered superior. The value of my words was given by external factors, not by my feelings. This inevitably forced me to justify, explain, and refer. Implicitly, it meant that to be myself, I needed someone else's validation, that the value of what I said was not given by the uniqueness of my feelings, but by external acceptance and support. In this shift, my own experience of the truth of each moment, absolutely subjective and relative, was objectified and generalized through the support that something external gave it, to which I attributed a higher value. At the same time, I also began to recognize, little by little, when the words rang true.

It began when I became aware of the concept of “Resonance,” described by Osho as a quality of truth transmitted and perceived:

"Every encounter with an enlightened person is an encounter with a mirror. You see yourself as you really are, not the mask but your original face, not the personality but your universal being. The encounter with the enlightened creates a resonance, a certain vibration that reaches the depths of your being. Since you do not know yourself, it seems to you that you have already met this enlightened being before, because you do not know your enlightenment. It's your nature."

I soon understood that this resonance stemmed from the speaker's presence – their words reflected their direct experience rather than something read or heard. Every word was filled with lived truth, free from doctrine, ideology or tradition. I also saw this as a common trait among all the people who had touched me over time: they were not only sincere but also authentic and fully present in what they said.

Another obvious quality of the language that rang true for me was the communicator expressing himself in the first person, in a way that would normally be labeled "self-centered" and "arrogant." Without shame or guilt, the words reflected that at the heart of the experience and understanding that was shared, there was an I, an individual who was aware of his existence and who did not hide behind generalizations (you, one, people...) and did not seek support in doctrine. Subjectivity was stated in no uncertain terms and not hidden behind a presumed objectivity or popular "facts." Everything was clearly an interpretation, a relative truth perceived by an individual and shared as such, leaving the listener free to agree or disagree, to accept or reject. The speaker simply and consistently affirmed, through his words, a profound freedom from the recognition and approval of others! And this, as I learned in the years that followed, is only possible when there is already inner freedom from one's own conditioning and from the false self of the personality.

One last thing I noticed was truly amazing: real words left no residue. By this I mean there were no afterthoughts like, "I could have said this..." or "If only I had said that thing..." – you know what I mean? The words were said completely, nothing was left out, and this completeness was based not on any external standard or measurement, but on the presence of the communicating subject and the silence that naturally followed the words that had come to an end.

Finally, I want to emphasize that having traveled extensively from those years onward and meeting people of different races, nationalities, religions, genders, ages, and social and cultural backgrounds often placed me in situations where I could not communicate through language, due to not knowing it. This compelled me to observe in silence the realities around me, without the pressure of "having to say something." What liberation! I began to recognize signs beyond words, discovering other forms of communication that are not obvious, enabling me to feel the deepest currents under words, the language under sounds and symbols, reconnecting me to a more primal, more animal part of me. I began to realize how giving up my control over words corresponded to a dissolution of the tensions that supported my mask. This also allowed me to sense what might be behind the mask of others. My transparency, as a corollary, led to some form of transparency of the other. Gradually, "hearing" and "seeing" began to converge into a singular experience.