I went back to bed with the book in my hands but as soon as I started to read I fell sleep. I then had what, at the time, I could only think of as the worst nightmare of my life. It was so vivid I could hardly contain my tears in the months that followed. I was someplace completely dark, where I could only make out the contours of throngs of people thrashing in pain and hear their anguished moans. Little by little the pain of each of those thousands of human beings began to take hold of me. The whole of humanity cried within me, twisted in me, moaned in me. My poor body could not encompass so much pain. I felt I was going to explode. Desperate screams seemed to emanate from every cell. I suffered eras of anguish that night, centuries of hopelessness, millennia of darkness. I was sure there was no redemption from so much suffering. I woke up crying. Every inch of me, up to the tips of my hair, ached and I thought that if I had a soul it must have exploded into a thousand minuscule pieces.

As soon as I awoke I understood that this had not been just any dream. I had entered the collective subconscious, letting down the barrier normally provided by the body. I had always thought it didn't matter if you were Buddhist, Moslem, Hindu, Christian or Jewish, because the only real denomination was Human Being, but I didn't acquire the complete consciousness that all men and women are one body until that night. No one upon the Earth could be happy until the pain of every last person had been abolished. But how? No political or economic system, no religion had solved the problem of inhumanity and the pain it inflicts. From that moment on I knew the answer had to be Humanism, and the Homo Sapiens had never been humane. The nature of the Homo Sapiens is inhumane.

I remembered verses from the Bible, "Man does not live from bread alone but from every word that comes out of the Lord's mouth." "I shall lead you to drink from the water of life, and he who drinks from it shall never be thirsty again." Bread and water–what mystery was encased in those two words? I wanted to know, to drink from the water of life, to alleviate the pain of humankind with it. Then I realized my complete ignorance, the illusion of knowledge in which I had been imprisoned. "I only know that I know nothing," echoed in my heart. They were no longer the words of Socrates, they were mine. The ground had crumbled beneath my feet and the walls of my refuge had fallen with such force they were pulverized. I felt naked before infinity and immediately decided never to eat meat again. It was a strange impulse since I wasn't even familiar with vegetarianism, which was practically unheard of in Colombia at the time.

When mom came up to the mezzanine where you and I slept, she found me crying inconsolably. "My love, what's wrong?" I clutched on to her. My sobbing and your grandmother's murmurs of consolation roused you from your sleep. You immediately ran to me, "What happened mommy?" I was taken aback by the fear in your eyes, so I tried to contain my tears. You were so small, yet you would do anything to prevent me from having a bad moment. So much so that you once nearly gave me a heart attack when you tried to keep me from being frightened by a snake.

In those days there were still a few coral snakes around–mom had built upon what used to be a coffee plantation and many of the trees that had been used to provide shade for the coffee plants were still in the back of the house. One day, standing close to the creek, I bent to pick some wild flowers and nearly touched a coral. I ran to the house screaming. The brick layers who were building the terrace couldn't stop laughing and told me that the poor snake must be telling its family about the scare some crazy woman had given it with her screams. The next day, I went to the studio at nine in the morning as usual. I had already given you your breakfast and then gone to change into my painting overalls. I was surprised to find the door locked from the inside, but I figured Candida had decided to sweep and had pushed the bolt by accident. When I looked through the window though, I saw you trying to take out something from in between the table legs with a broom. I signaled for you to open the door but you refused. I was getting impatient when you walked out carrying a dead ground snake in a dust pan. "It's that I saw the sake," you were only three and couldn't say snake, "and I killed it so you wouldn't be scared." I had to make you swear that you would never do that again. "Ground snakes aren't dangerous," I explained, "But a coral would have bit you and then I would suffer a lot more than if I saw the snake."

You were the only thing that kept me going those two months after I had that dream. In fact, dad came from Cali when mom and Selene, worried because I could barely speak a word without bursting into tears, called him. I didn't even hear the unmistakable sound of his car as it pulled in. He had driven. He always loved the myriad of landscapes one passes from Cali to Bogota. As one climbed and then descend through two mountain ranges, the climate changed from warm to cool to cold, and the vegetation changed with it. When I finally noticed him, he was standing in front of me with his habitual nervous tapping of the tip of his shoe. He found me reading a bunch of esoteric books scattered on my desk: The Third Eye, History of Magic, The Cathar Treasure, The Kibalion, The Jewish Question, The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, among others. I had gone to Bogota to get some of mom's and Uncle Arthur's books. Outside of my father, I have never met anyone who read as much or memorized more than mom's brother. I remembered that Buddha had said something about the suppression of pain, so I asked him about it. Uncle Arthur told me that while reading about Buddhism I had to keep in mind that its adepts didn't consider Buddhism a philosophy, they considered it a way of life.

I jumped up and embraced dad, crying inconsolably. A less understanding father would have sent me to a sanitarium when I explained the reason for my desolation. Besides, he wasn't surprised because mom had already prepared him. He glanced at what I was reading and said, "I see you sailing upon sea of esotericism. My only advice is that you have entered a stormy sea which is difficult to navigate. Remember that in turbulent waters even the best of sailors needs a compass. Find one and don't lose your way." Now I wonder if he realized the full wisdom of his words and the good they did me as I began my spiritual search.

We said nothing more about it. We all sat down to dinner when mom, poking fun at my personality, commented that I was too passionate about things, a defect I should correct. Dad started laughing, "How do you expect her to change if she got it from the two of us? You are easily enthused, but soon loose interest. I don't get easily enthused, but I am constant, patient. She learned from the two of us: She gets enthused easily and stays enthused constantly." That made me laugh for the first time since the dream. He was right. Twenty-five years later I am still enthused by the flame of the humanizing consciousness that sprang from that dream.

For years I continued my inner search, navigating that turbulent sea without giving up. Sometimes I would think I glimpsed a light house which would guide me to solid ground, only to discover it was just an illusion. As I began, I had a hard time picking out the specks of gold hidden among the muck in the myriad of texts on occultism I read. Some irresponsible authors took advantage of the subject and the real masters often lost their eager disciples in a maze of metaphors. If dad had not made me realize from that very first moment that I needed a compass, I may have been lost forever. I came to understand that the only useful compass would be Me. But I could not yet see clearly that the Me to which I clung was the same I whose vibrations the Beatles wanted to hear, the same one that their guru promised to help them find.

Looking back with accumulated understanding, I can see that the feeling of having completely lost my footing was due to my encounter with the terrible pain of man. An encounter which made me recognize the illness from which we all suffer. My consciousness, along with that of the billions of inhabitants of this planet, was cowering in the darkness. This recognition shook me up terribly yet as the North American psychiatrist Rollo May said in his book The Clamor for Myth, I had been hearing my own subconscious clamor since I was little. It was the desperate clamor of my own need for a myth that would sustain me and allow me to fight for my right to a myth about kindness and light in the middle of all the world's hate and darkness. I wanted a myth about love and humanity to help me survive amongst atomic bombs and germ warfare; a myth about Being, so that I would not disappear amidst all the unnecessary necessities, the commercials, the credit cards. As Dr. Jung said, "It is not that modern man is more evil than those of ancient history or primitive times. He simply has much more effective means of carrying out his evil tendencies." He can also now carry out his evil whims long-distance and mechanically, without having to see who he is inflicting them upon.

That coldness, extending like a cloak of ice across the Earth, was what I had tried to combat with the warm, humane myth of the Madonna and child during my infancy. But now that I awoke once again to the reality I knew as a child and that I recognized the tremendous evil of the collective unconscious and the suffering it caused, I found myself alone without a myth, without a way to salvation.

Dad still believed, like a typical representative of the Age of Enlightenment, that science would save us. But, as Dr. Jung said, even scientific education is based primarily on statistical facts, on abstract intellectual knowledge not translated to the emotions, so while it may be a rational picture, it is not representative of the real world. My father was in love with science, but my generation realized that, as a society, the individuals of the 20th Century became "an abstract number in the service of statistics." I couldn't stop crying after my experience because, even before reading Jung's The Self Not Discovered, I knew that I would spend my life swimming against the current of everything this civilization considered sacred. I needed a myth as strong as civilization, but opposite to it so I could stand against it.

Midas was the myth of our civilization. In his avarice, Midas asked that everything he touch turn to gold. His wish was granted and lost everything he loved. He turned his own daughter into a golden statue as soon as he touched her. He could no longer eat or drink, since all he touched turned to gold. Since the spread of capitalism, we keep the gold locked up in banks to support paper money, but the result of the myth is the same: Everything we touch turns to money because money is the most important thing to us. So we end up alone and without love, contaminating the very planet with our greed. The lust for money is the great sin of our civilization. This civilization's ethic is the virtue of being rich and its aesthetic is the number of zeros in a bank book.

Amid this unconsciousness and in exact opposition to it, stood Moses, Buddha and Jesus. They became my vanguard rebels. The seed of my desire for truth made me identify with the masters and their words created a sprout that would give fruit in its own good time. I was sure that my experience with the dream was similar to Siddhartha Gautama's (Buddha) vision. He once had terrible visions of the universe as perpetual chaos. In the world of darkness he saw, he was attacked by all kinds of ferocious beasts, shadows of men persecuted one another in a bottomless abyss and criminals paid for their sins again and again. He had become one, as I had, with the consequences of our false notions or, as Socrates would put it, our false opinions, or what Hinduism calls Sanskaras, the way we falsely judge our experiences and the things around us as good or evil according to the impressions of our senses. He had seen the hell of suffering and the monsters that lived in our psyche, since every lie is a monster that blocks the light. Not even the souls of the most fortunate could escape those inferior dimensions. The chaos consumed everything in existence, including the Gods. His conviction was that everyone in the universe suffered without hope. That was exactly the sense I had in my dream. That is why I poured over his four fundamental truths with great interest: the suffering, the origin of suffering, the suppression of suffering, and how to accomplish it.

Buddha believed man has to free himself from the suffering. "Here is the holy truth about the elimination of suffering: Suppression of anxiety through the destruction of desire. Pushing desire aside, detaching yourself from it, leaving no room for it." By identifying with its body, the Homo Sapiens wants to attract what he feels as pleasure and avoid what he experiences as pain. By identifying with Spirit, on the other hand, Buddha recognized that nothing in the universe was his enemy. Consequently, nothing could bring him pain. Pain emerged from the incorrect identification with oneself when one can't get what one wants or can't avoid what one doesn't want. For a person who has formed his view of the world according to the shortsightedness of his own body, other individuals become obstacles to the fulfillment of his desires. Such a person calls others potential enemies and so develops the human drama. It is the human potential which is victimized.

That is why Gautama saw that religion is simple: It is the identification with Spirit. This identification would gradually illuminate the darkness of erroneous identifications until the individual could be completely illuminated in word and thought, in order to be able to act in Truth. Therefore what is important is to desire only union with the Buddha nature in all of us (Buddha was a concept that existed even before Gautama, just as the Christ was a concept that existed even before Jesus). Once he realized that spirituality has to be expressed in thoughts, words and actions identified with spiritual stability, it became clear to him that rituals identified with the Sanskaras (false opinions) we have created don't work. False concepts such as heaven and hell are simply the result of our need for protection from what we sense as evil. That is why he abolished them among his disciples. Man should act with virtue, never mistreating any living creature and searching for purity of heart, tranquillity and humility.

"Love your neighbor as you love thy self," Jesus had said. Jesus, like Buddha, was a prophet of love, the recognition that everything in the universe is ONE. Love can only bloom from this recognition since we don't need to love "others." We only need to truly love ourselves because we, and everything else in the universe, are a part of one whole. History projects hate because until today mankind has only believed in the separateness of things. However, there has also simultaneously existed the golden thread of humanism. The culture of the spiritual seed that had sprouted in the consciousness of some Earthlings since the beginnings if history. The culture of spiritualism was always admired, but never recognized as attainable, and so never practiced by the masses. On the contrary, the real human being had been devoured like a lamb among wolves throughout history. Cain permanently lifting his hand against his brother Abel.

I was ready to assimilate everything I could from the masters of humanism, but I couldn't understand the Tao's description of Lao-tsu, nor its meaning. I could not yet understand its concept of Nothingness. Neither could I see the union of Nothing and All, because even though I had awakened to humanism, I hadn't realized that the flame of humanism is Spirit. The humanism of Lao-tsu touched me even though I could not fully comprehend his mysticism:

"To those who are good to me I am good; and to those who are not I am also and everything becomes good."

"A really good man loves all men and hates no one."

Lao-tsu seemed to have foreseen my lack of understanding: "My words are easy to understand and easy to practice, yet no one in the world can understand them or practice them."

Confucius seemed clearer to me–a great humanist: "Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you."

"What is love?" one of his disciples asked him.

"Loving humanity, that is love. To appreciate the effort more than the prize can be called love. To do good, not because of the reward but because of the joy of doing good, that is to love good. Love is its own reward, love makes everything seem beautiful, love offers peace. A loving heart cannot do evil."

"Love thy enemies," said Jesus, "bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who treat you with contempt or persecute you, that you may be the sons of your Father who art in heaven..." It was in the Father who art in heaven part that Jesus lost me; up to there I could follow. I did not understand the Father to whom Jesus referred had nothing to do with the anthropomorphic God I had rejected, the God man had created in his own image. Jesus was standing at the top of the Mountain of Zion. He had achieved a synthesis between his intellect and his emotions by uniting with Consciousness and seeing with new eyes that opposites are not in a constant struggle with one another. On the contrary, they share the harmonious interplay of polarity. He had found the Inner Center of Gravity, around which all his ideas and emotions rotated in harmony, abandoning the chaos created by the erroneous belief in dualities or opposites perpetually antagonistic towards one another.

I discovered in Krishna a myth almost identical to that of Jesus. Krishna had been the son of Devaki, a young virgin. "In the breast of a woman the ray of Divine splendor should take human form...She will be our mother because she will bare an incarnation of spirit that will regenerate us." Krishna had been an incarnation of Vishnu, a deity of Hinduism known as the Preserver. It wasn't until later that I would be able to understand the parallel with Jesus as an incarnation of Christ, or perfect Consciousness. Saravasti and Michali, the two sisters who fell in love with Krishna, reminded me of Marie Magdalene and her sister Martha. "To reach perfection," Krishna said, "One has to reach the science of unity. God resides in the heart of every man, but few know how to find him. The evil we inflict on our fellow man persecutes us like a shadow. Deeds which have love for our fellow man as their basis are the ones for which the just man should strive since they will weigh heaviest in the celestial scale."

It was impossible for me to reconcile these words of Krishna with the struggle describes by the Bhagavad Gita, a portion of the sacred books of Hinduism meaning "the song of God." It showed me a sword carrying Krishna who demanded that his disciple Arjuna go to war in defense of "the sons of the sun." Arjuna's words sounded more like what I would have expected from Krishna. He told his master, "I have no desire for victory, Krishna, nor for kingdoms, nor for pleasures...If they kill me...I still would not want to kill them...Atrocity will persecute us if we kill those who turn against us...I would be happier if the men of Dhartarastra kill me in battle while I am unarmed and putting up no resistance."

Krishna's answer seemed completely merciless to me, in disagreement with his humanism: "How is it possible that in this time of crisis you, Arjuna, can become so weak? Noble men hate such weakness. It does not lead to heaven. It is degrading. Be a man, a son of Prtha!...Stand as a conqueror! The whole world will speak of your eternal dishonor and dishonor is worse than death to a man of fame." After calling him cowardly and effeminate, he convinced him of the importance of winning that battle.

I couldn't help thinking that if the name of a prophet of peace and love Christianity had committed so many atrocities, what would have happened if the prophet had taken up arms against his enemies? I had to admit that Mohammed had done so and it had not made Islam worse than Christianity. I told myself that since the Gita had been written around 200 a.d. it could very well have been expressly formulated to defend a specific Hindu caste. Besides, the Old Testament also described constant battles, which I could not yet understand as metaphors for the work or battle necessary to achieve the destruction of erroneous thought and emotions through the light of Consciousness.

I felt thirsty for messages of love and peace to counterbalance man's historic inhumanity. My leftist friends disassociated themselves from me because, outside of our desire for justice, our identifications diverged. Yet it was still easier for me to talk with them than with the churchgoers. I wanted to see a possibility of redemption for the whole human race, but history gave me only the inhumanity that constantly ruled over every civilization, eradicating any attempt at humanization and persecuting all those considered "different" by the masses.

You were my inspiration amidst the darkness of such inhumanity. I watched you growing up and continued to be dismayed by the contrast between your childhood softness and the world of iron in which we live. I was also aware that not all the children of the world were as lucky as you or me, so I thanked life for everything it had given us and cherished everything about you. I fondly remember cutting your hair because you screamed to high heaven every time I tried to comb it. When you were three, I painted your portrait wearing your favorite clothes, your galoshes, your favorite cat, your basket of flowers and your tricycle. In it I wrote, "I hope when you can read what I have written, man will have been able to let out the torrent of goodness which it carries inside." Reading that now makes me realize how close I was to becoming conscious of Spirit. It showed that I already knew that Good is not learned, it lives within us. We have to open a path for it to come out by destroying the obstacles of ignorance, the Sanskaras, that imprison it.

The total obscurity and pain of the billions of people in my dream stayed with me. The pain made me think there must be a better world than this, a world where love reins. I wanted that world for you. "If we returned to paradise..." The round little dwarfs I painted while you were growing up started to form in my mind at that time. The circumferences of their faces and bodies moved curiously. They opened everything: flowers, trees, fruits, all of nature, which I had also made round. I didn't know yet that the circle is the symbol of Spiritual Truth (since it encompasses everything) but everything had become round on my canvases. I now understand that I was trying to find the ONE. My consciousness did not yet comprehend it, so it could only perceive it fragmented in the dwarfs. What I did know is that those dwarfs represented that atom of goodness that I felt shining in my heart, wanting to open a path for itself through the shadows of my fears and doubts. Their round eyes seemed to reassure, "Let us grow strong and we promise to hand you the path and the key to paradise." Curiosity made them open their own heads, where they would find light. They looked through windows in their bodies and in nature, where they saw the stars. They were of all races. They played with everything, shared everything. Sometimes they even slayed snakes, which I now know symbolize Sanskaras. My "little people" taught me humility towards nature, love and faith.

I was using the symbol as a metaphor for another reality, even though my images back then had the ingenuousness of youth. Since the beginning of time, the symbol has served as a powerful tool of illumination. Our subconscious mind expresses itself through symbolic images.

Jung's theory of the human psyche is that it is made up of three parts: the ego (conscious mind), the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. As C. George Boeree, Ph.D., explains it, the collective unconscious is "the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences. The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes. An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way. The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an 'organizing principle' on the things we see or do. The archetype is like a black hole in space: You only know it's there by how it draws matter and light to itself."

Carl Jung explained that the images of the subconscious rise to the conscious mind "automatically." The symbols that spontaneously expose themselves to our consciousness must be deciphered. Surrealist artists use their work as a link between the collective unconscious and the conscious mind. Without realizing it, I had embarked on a path as a painter of Veristic Surrealism. As Carl Jung put it: "Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers."

The conscious mind, believed Jung, can be continually expanded by confronting the contents of our unconscious. But, Jung warned that this "visionary" quality of the unconscious could cause a pathological problem in the conscious mind if the unconscious overwhelms it with its messages. Therefore, he felt the value is not in the vision or the dream itself, but in its interpretation–how it is integrated into the conscious mind. That is why Dali quipped, "The only difference between me and a crazy person is that I am not crazy."

With that series of paintings, I began the process of faithfully putting to canvas the images that spontaneously arose to my consciousness from the unconscious. I had not read Jung, but I intuitively began to do what he had formulated. Through my work, I have been able to prove the veracity of the theories Jung expounded in his book Symbolism of the Dream in Relation to Alquemy. To help me decipher the images I was painting, I began to delve into mythology, symbolism, mysticism, philosophy and history. Little by little I was able to divest the images of their apparent individuality and find the Eternal Arquetype within them. In this sense, the "myth" contains the images of the collective unconscious. It is vital to recognize this "archeology of the psyche" because it drives us. Some of the "myths" under which we live, although we may believe them to be sacred, can be straight-jackets that do not allow the expansion of our conscious mind. Jung said that only the men and women who can truly live in the present can be called modern. No one can live in the present while acting under false opinions conjured up in the past.

This insight allowed me to interpret history through the lens of our collective psyche. History, I realized, chronicles the struggle against our erroneous interpretations of reality; interpretations created by the belief that what our senses tell us is the truth (simply remembering that for hundreds of years our senses told us that the Earth is flat demonstrates how wrong they can be). Our only weapons in this struggle are the very components of the Human Spirit: Reason, Beauty and Harmony.

Without realizing that this would be my conclusion, I was reading the history of Judaism to be able to accept or deny the concepts of Henry Ford, the father of mass production and car manufacturer, in The International Jew, written in the 20's. It had been first published as articles in his magazine The Darbon Independent. He belonged to that class of history-hating people for whom history (thanks to school texts) is "bunk," as he once declared. The Spanish edition I was reading had been published in 1957 and the cover was illustrated with the menacing shadow of a star of David over the planet. Its 373 pages testified that the 20th Century had taken the definitive step from the power of the land-owning nobility to the secular economic power. The virtues of the capitalist world turned against the Jews just as every civilization throughout history had. But this new civilization would no longer demand that they be baptized, it demanded their extermination. Three billion people could not tolerate 12 million Jews and the majority waited in silence for Nazi Germany to finish its work. Ford's book is evidence of the aberration that is anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, for many like Ford, history is "bunk" since what we study in school never has a global vision, much less a coherent one. Our history education begins with our individual countries without an explanation of how its very existence has historical significance. We memorize a series of events and dates which tell us nothing except that history is boring. Historians are actually marvelous. They make us laugh and cry as they describe the whole of the human experience. Reducing all of their investigation to a text book, it becomes a bore that puts classrooms all over the world to sleep.

History has made me understand that if we are not conscious of history, it will be impossible to save ourselves from the imminent destruction that threatens us. On the other hand, your grandmother's death has made me reflect upon the human race as a species. I look around me and I see old people like her, middle-aged people like me, young adults like you, adolescents like my nephew, babies like the grandchildren I desire, and I realize that humanity is eternal. Like a tree in which we see leafs sprout, grow, mature and die, but the tree goes on. Humanity too goes on, always rejuvenating itself physically through new births and psychologically through culture. But there are trees that die. A tree can disappear in a forest fire or from disease, or a simple drought. The human experiment can perish just as easily.

In The International Jew, Ford sat an entire race in the chair for the accused. I wanted to be an impartial judge, but as time went on and I read more of the history of Judaism, I realized that Ford's conclusions were due to the fact that he had never studied history and that blind masses need scapegoats, which the Jews had been for 2000 years. I admired their resistance and tenacity. I still did not see the force of Spirit behind everything under creation, but I could not help getting excited in the face of these people's cry of faith, generation after generation: "Hear oh Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One!" A cry which accompanied them during their captivity in Babylon, the massacres they suffered at the hands of the Greeks and Romans, the Christian and Islamic persecutions in Europe and Asia, as well as the Nazi holocaust. For 2,500 years this cry rose to the heavens during the martyrdom of an entire people. A people who did not die because time and time again it rose from the ashes willing to die again, crying: "Hear oh Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One!" Death and resurrection for 2,500 years! I didn't believe in miracles (at least I had always bragged that no rational person should) but these people's survival broke through my barrier of the impossible. The survival of the Jewish people seemed impossible if it hadn't been for a miracle and it had been Ford that had forced me to see it.

Reading the history of Judaism, I realized that Judaic Diaspora had touched all cultures and eras since its birth as a nation. From ancient Egypt to Mesopotamia, Syria to Babylon, Persia and Greece to Tyre, Sidon and Carthage; from pagan Rome to Christian Rome, to the kingdom of Parthia and the movement of Mohammed. In the Common Era, from the Europe formed by the Germanic invasions, to Byzantine and Slavic Russia, from India to China. In modern times, from Spain to Portugal, England, Holland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, India, Iraq, Pakistan and America. The world had passed through the Jews and the Jews had passed through the world.

Before my very eyes, the pages of history revealed the accusations, the expulsions, the baptism orders, the pogroms. The tribulations of 2,500 years. After the industrialized and systematized final holocaust, when inhumanity decided there was no room on this planet for those 12 million people, the Jewish people rose before me showing me their healed wounds and I was scared. Scared that punishment may once again be inflicted upon their scarred backs, their blistered hands. Mankind had to become human. Israel became a symbol for me of the need for humanity. It showed me how much we needed to abandon the beast which still expresses itself by trying to jump on others, even in a man of genius like Ford. The extent of man's inhumanity towards man inflamed me. So I repeated the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus with a vengeance: "The human race is a rabid beast, obtuse and cruel, to whom it is not worth teaching anything." The human race is not the beast though. The problem is that we are not human yet. Do you remember that citation you once read me from your collection of quotes? "Man is the missing link between the ape and the human being."

Ford based his book on The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, a book commissioned by Czar Nicholas II, who ordered the monk Sergei Nilus to write something that would condemn the Jews. Historically, nothing happens without a reason. The reason for that book was that anti-Semitism had entered the Age of Enlightenment and it had to be made palatable intellectually. Some historians say the monk adapted a French document of Napoleon's plan to conquer the world. Others say the adaptation was from a French conspiracy novel. Whatever its origins, that book helped transform, psychopathic paranoia against Jews into an acceptable "reason" for anti-Semitism. Society's penchant for secularization made it easy for hate to pass from religion to race, a transition that was necessary since the new democracies didn't give as much importance to religion. What was still important was the need to hate and the new "reasonable" way to do so was race. Gobineau introduced the first theory on the superiority of the white race in 1853. According to him, the downfall of civilizations had been the dilution of "noble" blood. Gobineau decided the blood of Aryan nobles was being diluted by the non-Aryan masses through the process of democratization. This is when the aristocracy was replaced by the "pigmentocracy," lent credence by the multiple publications filled with this type of outrageous claims.

At first, Ford's views on Judaism, based on the Protocols and racist theories, made me wonder if there was a Jewish conspiracy. Reading history I did indeed confirm its existence, but what I found was a conspiracy against injustice, inhumanity and lack of reason.

In The International Jew, Ford considered the scattering of Jews throughout the world as a modification of the plan for salvation assigned to Israel. Jewish leaders proclaimed their people's mission to be a spiritual one, but Ford said he never found any practical evidence of this. He concluded that the Jewish people looked upon others only as things to be exploited for their own material gain. The Jew himself was to blame for such broad scattering during thousands of years because if he had been more industrious he could have stayed in one place longer. "But, since he preferred to become an unproductive merchant," Ford wrote," his errant instinct made him an adventurer throughout all the inhabited lands of the Earth." If Mr. Ford hadn't felt such drowsiness in the face of a little history, he would have discovered that European Jews had been farmers until Christians, no longer able to stand to see "blessings showered upon the assassins of Christ," threw them off their lands. By law they were excluded from any vocation desired by gentiles, most of all agriculture since the power of the medieval nobility was based on land ownership. Christians, in their boundless generosity, chose the Jews to do the mercantile and financial duties they were prohibited to perform by the Catholic church. That is how the European Jews ended up as international merchants and money lenders, with kings and noblemen turning against them when they didn't want to pay their debts. The Jewish people were able to overcome their martyrdom only because of their belief that their sacrifice would help redeem humanity. They had to submit to being scattered to every corner of the Earth as part of the divine plan extolled by the prophets. They were "the chosen people." They would bring salvation to mankind and to do so they had to keep their Zion pact. That pact demanded loyalty to only one God. But the God of Judaism could not be forced into the Homo Sapiens anthropomorphic patterns of polytheism or monotheism, the image of God or the gods as actual beings. The God of Judaism is a synthesis of the Absolute and plurality, the notion of God as all things, a difficult concept for anyone to grasp. Even without complete understanding of the concept, however, the Jewish people were willing to give their lives rather than let themselves be forced to convert to another religion.

When I read the words of Ibn Gabirol and Judah Ha-Levi, two Spanish Jews, I couldn't help being overcome by these people's strength: "Ismael (Islam) is a lion, Esau (Christianity) is a vulture, when one lets go of us the other puts his claws on us." Years later, Ha-Levi wrote: "Ismael persecutes us with its hate, we beg Esau and it turns against us...Do we have, in all of the east or west, a place to rest our hope?"

I still couldn't understand why this identification with Judaism had been inculcated in me. I didn't have enough knowledge of psychology to realize that my defense of Judaism sprung from my own desire for synthesis which is the process of individuation, as Dr. Jung called the process of differentiation or emergence from the collective unconscious. I had not yet read his books and I hadn't expanded his concept to understand that the entire historical process was one of differentiation as an individual, of synthesis as a society. Every one has to separate the individual psyche from the collective unconscious in which everything from pre-history on had transpired. I defended the Jew because, like him, I wanted to be accepted as Ariadne. The Jew didn't want to be Christian or Islamic or Buddhist, he wanted to be Jewish! Despite being the smallest minority on Earth, they wanted to be accepted in their difference, not absorbed by other groups. Therefore, despite my love for that minority, I didn't want to be Jewish, I just wanted to be human.

I began to understand that biblical symbolism held great lessons about my own psychological life. It was showing me a way out of Egypt, out of the obscurity of the collective unconscious, to differentiate myself from it and stop being indifferent. If each one of us was able to differentiate himself, we could stop being a mass and become a collective of individuals in communion. We could then overcome our ancient animal instinctive patterns and create a new collective unconscious, patterning it according to the Truth which we call God. There was something redeeming and vital in accepting the challenge of differentiation. That is what the history of the Jewish people had shown me.

A book as ignorant as Ford's can have followers for one simple reason: it is easy to unite the masses against a common enemy. Anti-Semitism became a weapon for those with economic power, a weapon that could take the scared, accusatory eyes of the hungry masses off them. Ford pointed his finger at the Jewish people, just as the gentile masses had done in every social crisis, first for religious reasons, now for racial ones. Ford wanted to save the "Christian values." He, being a bourgeois industrialist, could not understand that the cultural and institutional crisis he was witnessing was due to the industrial revolution. A revolution which was propelled by his own invention: the assembly line. It was the capital based industry which had eroded the world of nobility based on land ownership. What he was witnessing was the final shift from a feudal society to a capitalistic one.

Karl Marx simply added himself to the socialist and communist struggle that were already taking shape as part of this shift. He studied the rudiments of capital to decide in what direction the financial gains provided by mechanization and the socialized work of the laborer would go. It was the machine that socialized work, not the men who saw this fact and named it socialism. Products were no longer begun and finished by one individual or artisan. In an industrial society, products were produced by an association of workers. "Should the gains go to the private pockets of the industrialists or to the workers?" asked Marx and Engels, "Should social production be allowed to be appropriated for personal gain?" After the Russian revolution, the fear that Marxism might expand, specially into Western Europe and the United States, was enormous. With its revolution, Russia won the right to become industrialized in the communist way of giving importance to the power of labor, to the human energy that produces all of industries products.

With the publication of the Protocols in 1905, Nicholas II had tried to prevent the inevitable. Russian intellectuals had been writing about the importance of not repeating the capitalistic errors committed by the West. Why not pass straight to communism and develop industry in Russia, which was still a feudal country, according to the Marxist ideal? So industrialists grabbed on to the old escape goat of the nobility: anti-Judaism, guided now towards race rather than religion as anti-Semitism.

Ironically, Ford accused the Jews of being the great capitalists as well as the great Bolsheviks of the world. "As Americans who have witnessed the fanatic verbosity of young Jews, the apostles of a social and economic revolution, we have the advantage of being able to make a clear judgment about what is real and true in such accusations...In England it is said that the Jew is the real master of the world, that the Jewish race is a supernation that lives through and over other peoples, dominating them through the power of gold and heartlessly pitting one against the other, while hiding behind the scenes." Ford's comment as a North-American is anti-Communist because the capitalist civilization took complete control of the United States. The English sentiment was the complaint of the European nobility when capitalism developed in the island and the continent and displaced them. From these two sentiments, Ford concluded that the capitalist Jew and the Bolshevik Jew walk hand in hand "because they are only interested in success by any means." So Ford did not consider himself a capitalist, nor did he think he was anchored to the power of gold. Instead he blamed Jews for everything he disapproved of in the new popular culture. The real irony is that Ford was one of the principal founders of this new popular culture, since it was based on mass production and the commercialism it engendered.

Industry brought with it the necessity to raise the economic standing of the masses in order to have consumers. The industrial North had fought a war against the slavery of the agricultural South in order to industrialize the United States. The machine needs consumers, not slaves. That mass of consumers was not educated, but it was given a limited power of acquisition. It was logical then that industry, when selling products to the masses, would have to appeal to the mainstream. But, according to Ford, all that "Jazz" was happening because Judaism was subjecting Christians to a colossal pogrom "produced by the systematic economic misery organized against an almost lifeless humanity. This humanity is more helpless against the well-organized inequities of the economic power of the Jews, than the small groups of Russian Jews were when they were persecuted by the masses."

Such anti-Semitism was used by those with economic power so that during the recurrent economic crises that are inherent to capitalism (a fact of the economics of capitalist production thoroughly explained by Engels and Marx), the fault would not be placed at capitalism's doorstep. It had to be the Jewish economic power at work! The fact that the system leaves the majority of people suffering from what you once termed "pocketus smallox," had to be explained, and the reason those with the "pocketus maximus" provided was the international Jewish conspiracy against humanity.

If Mr. Ford had read any history, he would have found that trading intensified in the south of Italy and Sicily during the 11th Century (the beginning of the events that gradually led to the birth of the commercial and industrial world) to fill the needs of the crusades. With the amplification of commerce, cities which had been left in ruins after the Germanic invasions resurged and other hamlets were born. As handicrafts gained popularity, the first artisan's guilds were formed, followed by commercial guilds. However, the Jews weren't allowed to join them. But somebody had to sell the products because, as Marx said, "The goods can't go to market by themselves." The Jewish people filled this need for a long time. It was one of the few trades they were allowed to do because Christians considered it sinful. In addition, the even more "sinful" labor of lending money with interest was relegated to the Jewish people.

The Crusades themselves, in need of funding, were often financed by Jews since, because of the Catholic church's prohibition against charging interest, nobody else made loans. The nobles and the church needed money for construction and the Jews were the only ones who could lend it. Once it dawned upon the Christians that one didn't have to be Jewish to lend money with interest in the 15th Century, they kicked aside the Jews, as had been the custom throughout history. What the church and the feudal noblemen hadn't realized is that this "contemptible" work would be much more important during the industrial era than land ownership.

The land-owning nobility, which had left itself out of the industrial and commercial era through its belief that work would soil their hands, had indeed ended up, as Ford claimed, "helpless" in a capitalist world. Capitalism was born in European boroughs, or hamlets. That is why the middle class created by capitalism was called "bourgeois." This professional class, with its handicraft and commercial labor, brought Europe from a purely rural economy to an urban, monetary one. With capital, the borough inhabitants acquired political power. Eventually they become powerful enough to confront the feudal lords and free themselves from their domination. They were then free to make their own lives, intellectually as well as materially, excluding the nobles from public office.

The bourgeoisie began to develop at a time when Europe was illiterate. Back then most of the professionals were Jews. The courts always used Jewish scribes because they could not only read and write, they could also speak various languages due to their constant travel. Their help as translators was crucial to Christians as well as Moslems.

In his book, Ford asked the Jews to "Fulfill the ancient prophecy according to which all the people's of the world would be blessed by them...which up until now they had not fulfilled because of their absolute exclusivity." If Mr. Ford had had more power of analysis, he would have found he could not have been a Christian if it hadn't been for a Jewish prophet and his thirteen Jewish apostles. And as far as the Jewish exclusivity goes, without it Mr. Ford could not have had his precious sacred texts of the Old Testament nor his Sunday sermons. The Old Testament is a testimonial to the Jewish spiritual struggle against being absorbed by other cultures. When the Jews settled in Palestine around 1150 b.c., they suffered the impact of all the adjacent cultures. It was their differences and exclusivity which allowed them not to succumb to foreign customs and to mature their spirituality. The Old Testament is a manual on how to be different and stay that way, on how to acquire the strength to have different customs and to maintain them.

Thanks to this manual, they gave birth to the two monotheist religions: Christianity and Islam. Once they became empires, however, each one of these wanted to conquer the others so as to prove its superiority.

History helped me overcome the ignorance of Ford before it could contaminate me. Little by little I learned to judge each era and society according to its actions and to separate the wise deeds from the ignorant ones, the culture from the civilization. I was finally discovering what Socrates taught me: evil is ignorance and good is wisdom. But what is ignorance if not the illusion of knowledge? As a Homo Sapiens, Mr. Ford thought he knew something. The Homo Sapiens, or "man who knows," has to recognize that he doesn't know, since believing he knows is what makes him more dangerous than the beasts.

Thanks to the marvelous work of exhumation and resurrection of the dead conducted by archeologists and historians, I was able to remember not only our childhood on this planet, but our fetal stages. Without them I would not have had the means to judge our effort to ascend towards our redemption, increasing Reason and decreasing the animal instinct of self-defense.

Beyond the Homo Sapiens
© 1996 Mariu Suarez
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.

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