"Kill or be killed!"

That is the underlying mantra of human society today and it is being hummed in the boweled troughs of scale as well as at the high pitches where angels supposedly sing.

The mantra today is to distrust your neighbor and if he comes after you, you're supposed to say, "Fuck you and die, you bastard." Like you're Steven Segal in Hard to Kill, the entire War on Terror is based on the premise that a nebulous mass of sickened individuals are hell bent on killing each and every one of us at any time and place.

Is this any way to live?

This insanity has even pervaded business which is supposed to be providing the highest quality goods and services to the most people for the fairest market wage. But now it's too often, "Fuck you and die--let me step over your worthless corpse on the way up my ladder of corporate success."

This is no way for us to live as a species seeking to make it another hundred years on this warm wet rock hurling thousands of miles per hour through a space so cold and lonely it defies imagination.

Relationships are what make us human but so few of us ever stop to consider the mechanics of relationship and how important they are, not only to our happiness, but to our ultimate survival as individuals and as a biological species still finding its niche in a constantly changing and harsh environment.

So, let's take a moment to consider how relationships work and we must first begin with the way the mind works. The mind is an organ, like any other in our bodies. There is a reality which occurs in the moment and our bodies have five primary sense organs which gather raw information and relay it to the mind.

The mind receives this information from the five senses, processes it into mental images and then reacts to those images. If you hurt me, I store that image and it becomes part of your image in my mind. Likewise, if you flatter me, that also becomes part of your image in my mind. And this reaction based on fear and pleasure is what we call relationships.

But what the mind considers reality (the point at which it receives information from the five senses) is actually a step removed from reality. In other words, by the time the mind receives that information, reality in the moment has already changed and the mind is working with outdated material. And our sense of self is composed of these outdated mental images based upon false reality.

The mind is a warehouse of mental imagery from which we draw conclusions about the past and present and project the future. We have mental images of every person we come into contact with as well as how relationships between objects work in time and space. The scientific method is based upon observation, postulation, testing and theorizing about the certitude of causality in the relationships between objects in time and space and it's the same with mathematics.

Science works. Math works. They both serve a definite purpose and have allowed our species to construct the social niceties which have brought us down from the trees and let us build concrete jungles of glass and steel with weapons that can decimate all life on the planet in a string of nanoseconds.

But is there a point where the false reality of the mind actually becomes a danger and a detriment to our safety and future survival as individuals and as a species?

We keep images in our heads, not only of ourselves but also of the other people in our lives. These images are also based upon a false reality but even worse than that; they aggregate through a cataract filter of emotion which snowballs together until it becomes so obese with time and sappiness that the difference between the reality of that person and the image we have in our heads of them is as wide as the difference between Santa Clause and the parents who actually put the presents under the tree for their children.

It's a lie agreed upon and it is killing us like a gunshot to the heart.

If I have an image of you and that image is based upon my seeking pleasure from you and avoiding pain and you have the same type of image about me then we have no relationship. The only relationship is between two images which are based upon false realities and distorted by loaded emotional baggage.

So what happens when you see this as a fact? You recognize that it is unhealthy to allow dead images to drive your actions toward others in this life and you want to stop it because you realize that if you don't, terrible things will continue to happen in your life and in the lives of those around you.

You will continue abusing the ones you care most about and hating those who abuse you as will everyone else in the world. Seeing this fact is like the addict seeing the heroin taking their life after the needle has been injected and the plunger is halfway down the vial.

How do we stop?

How do we cease reacting towards others based on dead images? We recognize the true severity of the problem and the dire consequences for us all should we fail to act in some way? But what are we do?

The answer to that questions is a topic for another How to Think post. Stay tuned...