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Martian is direct experience (simple consciousness), while humans have been trained to identify themselves as separate. This sense of separation provides the capacity for reflection, i.e., ego-consciousness. For example, “I am me.” In a nutshell, humans are conditioned through socialization to believe they are separate entities, i.e., the sense of a permanent, autonomous, and constant “I”. The faith is that each one’s fundamental purpose in their bodies over a lifetime is get what they want regardless of how their cravings and acquisitions impact “the world” around them. The delusion of a solid separate self is best cared for through the establishment of an “all about me, and others like me” culture.
The notion of a chronological and separate “you” across time is a convincing fabrication. Humans have the psychic capacity for identification (Parent ego state function): we create an “I” that is independent in order to ground and express ourselves. Analytical psychotherapy and meditation are the means to undermine or overthrow the power and authority of our cultural conditioning (the artificial system or Ego). To be Martian. Subversion is the prerequisite. One must unearth core psychic material that is an echo of parental figures and the adaptations we made within the roles we played and identities we constructed. As one disobeys the identification process (e.g., Parent ego states) through analysis and contemplation one can begin to dismantle internal and external conditioning.
For example, the morals of American culture center on self-determination by any means necessary, i.e., compete for acquisition to “win.” Selfishness is an ideological value and prescription to be happy or mentally “healthy,” so the story goes. Optimize and get more for my “self” to be content. Delusion. If one abandons this pursuit of happiness in favor of non-attachment to desire, then you are letting go of the delusion of separation. This means to alter or detach our perspective from the dominant cultural messages. To be Martian or no-thing. One looks at what they want and the delusions about what it would mean if they received “everything” they wanted. What is the practical approach to this form of renunciation? Simple: meditation practice.
Therefore, everyone as teacher-student, but a conscious, relational symbiosis dissolves the concepts of teacher and student just as zazen is nonduality. The Parent ego state is a hindrance to zazen and as Berne (1972) notes, we need a friendly divorce from the Parent. Suzuki (2003) described direct experience or emptiness as actualized with zazen. This is when there is no conceptual, gaining or knowing idea for the self. All characteristics of the dualistic Parent are emptied, and you are one with activity. Emptiness is the suspension, via zazen, of the dualistically conditioned Parent. This is a personal form of subversion: undermining the existing power and authority that was borrowed from parental figures.
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