I find satisfaction in the pursuit of love, and a life that gives full expression to the powers of my mind and my body, while keeping open, uncensored, and unmediated lines of communication with the spirit that dwells inside me.

It is a satisfaction not free of sorrow, but I let neither melancholy fill all my moments, nor allow my heart to steep in ennui and misery.

It is playfulness that fills all my moments. I play with all parts of my body, all ideas in my mind, and all emotions of my heart.

It is playfulness that makes me accept sorrow and death as normal, inevitable parts of life. I accept sorrow and death when they are brought naturally into my life by accident, disease, and deception. I refuse to produce sorrow and death artificially through oppression, exploitation, conflict, and war. I also refuse to produce sadness and pain by fencing love and life with dogmas and prejudices.

The long evolutionary process of human consciousness has increased my abilities to work in partnership with the creator in further improving human love and life by integrating and harmonizing what rationality has separated and opposed. Love and life were blind necessities in our archaic origin. They became ruthless competitive sports under the rationality of my parents and grandparents. It is my task to help love and life to mature into playful cooperative games.

I do not feel sick of civilization. I feel sick from the physical and mental poisons created by a civilization whose social metabolism went out of balance while it was guided by a drowsy rationality. I do not feel that to find a cure for this sickness I should lose myself in the chaotic wilderness of nature, deluded by ideas of returning to an archaic past. Neither will I find a cure by giving up my individuality to become absorbed in the amorphous, inflexible masses that political and religious leaders of the old consciousness still try to assemble for warring in defense of particular interests or for building repressive utopias.

I also reject the psychedelic delusions of intoxicants, which add misery and suffering to the misery and suffering from which they promise escape.

Aided by the inner push of the creative spirit, I want to pull myself into giving more careful consideration to those things that really matter to life. I will achieve this objective by transforming, as much as I can, painful labor to earn my life into joyful work to fulfill my life. My transformative instruments will be love, laughter, tears, knowledge, observation, intuitions, and instincts. I will free all of them from the restraints that ideologies, dogmas, and prejudices created in the minds of my parents and grandparents.

It is not just because I breathe and think that I am human and alive. I am human and alive when I breathe to make love, be in love, give, receive, and feel love. I feel human and alive when I think on how to wisely master the forces that arise from making, being, giving, receiving, and feeling love. I am human and alive when those forces help me to produce and create for myself, my beloved, my community, and the world. I am human and alive when I feel that I am still a part of nature, having grown from being one more of its submissive creatures to become her respectful and loving partner.

This article was excerpted from the book

The Invisible Player: Consciousness As the Soul of Economic, Social, and Political Life
by Mario Kamenetzky.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Park Street Press, a division of Inner Traditions International. Copyright 1999. www.innertraditions.com

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About The Author

Mario Kamenetzky

is a former science and technology specialist for the World Bank. He tackled socioeconomic development issues for nearly

fifty years as a professor, corporations officer, independent consultant, scholar, poet, and writer. He passed away at the age of 79 (1927-2006).