The Alienated I By Raissa L. Azarcon Its all in your mind. Its all in your mind.

This mantra never fails to console the cynic in me. In times when I am tormented by the failures I have accumulated in my dire score-long existence, this will always ring true, or so I believed it to be. I will always remind myself that my mind is in control of things; that these externalities would pale in significance to the truths I have inside. The world around me can be mastered if and only if I put a premium to my mind and not let it meander to anything concerning matters as incoherent as emotions. I demonize emotions as Medieval Church condemned heretics. To me, emotions and sensations will only mar my clarity and detain me to that far-off realm of surreal rearing, where the only thing that can merit me existence is my ability to detach myself from reality. Little did I know that acting that way and being such is gradually getting the best of me and making me less of what I am supposed to bea human. Exalting the mind and making it central to every activity we have is very constraining, if not repressive. However, I cannot just turn my back away from this dominant form of thinking, of making the mind the mastermind of all things essential to living and, might I say, loving. This is the way we are predisposed to think, our current default mode. To think otherwise would be fatal. To completely denounce the system is to make your existence an aberration, your thinking nil. I get an impression that most people today operate in this kind of thinking. They unconsciously succumb to the idea that anything not discernible to the mind and the mind alone is not worthy of their time, much less of their money. People are dubious of anything that cannot be measured; hesitant of anything that they cannot name; and frightened by anything that cannot be reduced to simpler terms. This society is a society of sceptics in desperate need of certainty. Anything that diverges from precision should not be entertained and be completely dismissed. Only concepts confirmed by science are honoured; those that fail to adhere to this conferred canon are rejected in furtive contempt. This society is a society of walking and breathing Descartes. If you have religiously listened to your math professor way back high school, Im pretty sure you know who Descartes is. This man is the reason why we need to buy graphing papers in Algebra. He and his Cartesian Coordinate System made our relationship with Math all the more complicated, if not heartbreaking. However, Descartes is more than his ordered pairs or his quadrants. He claimed something that has changed how we perceived knowledge; and has, consequently, altered the terrain of human reason. His popular line Cogito ergo sum has become the battle cry of people who want to wield power through knowledge. Translated in English, this becomes even more influential. The I think, therefore I am was so viral that it paved way to a paradigm industrialized societies embrace up to the present. The Cartesian paradigm (named after its proponent) gave rise to a consciousness that separates man from nature. If anything, this paradigm asserted the superiority of man over all things inanimate, over all things incapable of thinking; and posits that man, having the faculties for sound judgment and rational thinking, should govern nature and be in complete control of it. Sounds pretty familiar? Yes, it should

be, particularly in this Catholic country where we are preached time and again to gain dominion over things our forebears have left to our keeping. The Cartesian paradigm has construed a binaristic way of viewing the world and has given man the license to exploit nature by means of controlling it and making it a mere specimen to be experimented with. Because man is detached from his surroundings, it comes off easy for him to make decisions that are disruptive to his immediate surroundings. His factories exhale poison to the air and dispel toxic materials to the rivers and waterways without fail. All in the name of capitalism. This materialist society that we have come to identify with aggravates this pandemic mindset and tolerates our disdainful ways to the brim. Our hunger to accumulate more, to acquire more fuelled by distortions we are being fed with by mass media makes us oblivious to the gnawing fact that we have nearly exhausted our resources and payback time is lurking just around the corner. Seeing the world today with naked eyes, I am convinced that not everything is in the mind, that not everything can be resolved through reason or science. This is not anymore an intellectual warfare. Our problems are not anymore in the mind but the mind. The problems we are faced with today are neither sensationalized nor illusory. This is not a figment of any fictionists hyperactive imagination or a propaganda to make the public buy this product and not that product. The problems we have are rooted in our reluctance to accept that we are part of each and everything in this world, in our anthropocentric bearings that fail to recognize the vital role of other creatures in our survival. The I think, therefore I am seems pretty obsolete to me now. ***