Candice O’Denver studied critical theory in graduate school, attending classes at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and California College of the Arts.

1. SEEING THINGS IN A NEW WAY !
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When we don’t know how to connect with the simplicity of the natural presence of our
experience, then we scamper about lost in a conventional way of thinking. Most of us never
have access to any kind of knowledge that will jolt us out of our arrogance and ignorance. !
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There are some interesting examples in the past of how humankind has completely
misperceived reality. A common belief many years ago was that 19 the earth was flat and that if
a ship sailed too far it would fall off the edge. However, some people believed that the earth
wasn’t flat, and they proved it by traveling across the oceans without falling off the edge. The
people who thought the earth wasn’t flat developed this new notion, then slowly gathered a few
supporters and then proved that their idea was true. Yet, it took some time for their discovery to
become common knowledge. !
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In a similar way, we have fundamental misperceptions about our own reality. Humankind has
been very focused on appearances, and descriptive frameworks have been developed and
believed in which describe a dualistic reality based on good and bad. The premise is that there
are positive and negative things that occur, and the more we have of the positive, the less we’ll
have of the negative, and vice versa. !
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Even though we’ve assumed this and deeply believed in it, it has in fact never been the case.
We’ve never been able to eradicate the negative by accumulating the positive—not within each
of us as individuals or within society in general. When we really understand how we’ve misled
ourselves in the past, then maybe we can say to ourselves, “Well, if we’ve misled ourselves so
grossly in the past, perhaps we’re misleading ourselves now, too. Is this assumption about good
and bad one of the ways we are misleading ourselves?!
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”When we don’t accurately perceive our reality, then we live a life based on confusion. We really
don’t understand ourselves, and we don’t fully understand much of what is going on. We fail to
see the very simple nature of reality, because we have relied on descriptions to determine what
we’re experiencing. By relying on descriptions rather than on our actual instinctive experience of
reality, we are always looking for a new description to replace the description we are currently
having. We’re always caught up in our data, and we overlook the basic state of everything just
as it is. !
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The basic state is beyond all phenomenal appearances. As data are only expressions of the
basic state itself, they have no independent or individual substantiality, identity or existence
other than the basic state. When phenomena are reduced to their fundamental essence, there’s
only the basic state and nothing else. As long as we don’t see that everything rests within a
basic state, we can never go beyond our self-limiting ideas about who we are and what the
world is.