What is mental clarity, and why does it seem so hard to reach in today’s world?
This article offers a philosophical reflection inspired by The Matrix on how we often don’t choose to see the truth, but are forced into it by life itself. We explore the difficult but liberating path to a more authentic existence—free from illusions—and introduce Pointfulness as a way to navigate that transformation.

“My ego must understand that it becomes greater when it leaves me in peace.”

I define myself as a deeply cerebral person. I need to understand things. I don’t believe in revealed spirituality, but in reasoned spirituality.
This phrase came to me during a moment of tension and temptation, when my ego managed to whisper that my calm was laziness, and that my conscious renunciation was just fear of losing.

We love to believe that this time, it’s really the end.
That the collapse is global, that the crisis is irreversible, that everything is about to change. Climate, AI, wars, economics — the signs are everywhere.
But what if that’s not the world ending?

I was listening to Jordan Peterson speak about the value of impulse control. He said there’s no merit in a weak person claiming to control their violence. Virtue lies in the one who can cause harm… and chooses not to. Like a martial arts master who holds immense power—and never needs to use it.

It’s one of the great spiritual dilemmas: do we need to let go of material things to find happiness?

Heroes show their scars—whether from the ring, the cage, or the battlefield. The broken nose or bullet wound may have healed over time, leaving a mark as testimony to past pain, often overcome. These scars become symbols of pride and recognition—for bravery, strength, and resilience. Our atavistic culture, shaped by conflict and the dominance of physical force, honors them as such.

In the film American Psycho (2000), Christian Bale plays an executive whose identity seems reduced to his business card. Paper, typography, texture—his entire persona summed up in material details. Belonging to the company matters more than his own inner worth. Behind the façade: a bottomless void.

One day, perhaps, Artificial Intelligence will know everything. It will have absorbed every formula, every word, every nuance of human history. It will be able to compose symphonies, cure diseases, simulate love, wisdom, and presence.

Not long ago, a client told me I was “a mind surgeon.” I had never thought of myself that way—but I must admit, the word Pointfulness—getting to the point—resonates deeply with that idea.

There are moments when we can no longer keep feeding illusions. Uncertainty stops being a hypothesis: it becomes a mere hope in the face of an adverse certainty—and the framework within which we must now operate.

Anyone who has lived long enough probably won’t remember a time when people weren’t saying the world had gone mad. Crises—of all kinds—come and go like waves in the ocean: sometimes calm, sometimes turbulent. We stay tuned in to the news and its constant (and well-commercialized) stream of events, statements, and speculations, which we often link to our own lives, even though they rarely affect us directly. Just a brief disconnection is enough to realize that, despite its ups and downs, life flows more peacefully than we usually perceive.

I spent several months investigating what we call gravity, and I’m now close to publishing a rather intriguing proposal on the subject. But behind that research, I found the same drive that fuels me in Pointfulness: the urge to understand how something works, rather than settling for ad hoc explanations.

I often say that, in past centuries, those who practiced science were also philosophers. Mathematics, physics, medicine and law—just to name a few—invited reflection on the foundations of conscious life. My philosophical practice, pursued alongside my professional activities, recently led me to dust off my engineering background and tackle—with equations—a mathematical and a physics topic that had been haunting my thoughts for some time. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to take a short break from Pointfulness... to return refreshed.

If you have ever watched programs like The Voice or Britain's Got Talent, you will have noticed that many people have talent, but they often do not really stand out from others with the same ability. What we value above all is originality, rarity, or the exceptional nature of a gift. It is common to see thousands of candidates for a position in a symphony orchestra or to hear a moving singer in a hotel bar. What about those actors who steal the show while so many others vie for a bit part? Is it luck, hard work, an innate gift, or a mixture of the three?

Fans of Benoît Poelvoorde will recognize the inspiration behind the title. The irony here lies in the fact that the brand new secret is actually the same as the old one, or almost. For millennia, millions of people have actively sought ways to live a full and satisfying life, in alignment with their values. What I bring with Pointfulness is not very different in appearance. Let's summarize:

• Learn how your mind works ("Know thyself" - Socrates, Descartes, Jung)
• Identify and control your illusions (Buddha, Epictetus, Plato)
• Maintain a tranquil mind so your life flows naturally (Epicurus, Lao-Tzu)

We generally conceive that our present is situated on a single timeline that stems from the past and runs towards the future in an eternal journey. Even though we can only experience the present, we freely fantasize about the possibility of moving backward or forward in space-time, and it has even been mathematically proven that there are no theoretical obstacles to such a feat. Thus, we accept the paradigm, we strive to understand the notion of relativity, the influence of speed and gravitational fields that might disrupt the synchronization of our earthly clocks. However, there are other ways to view time, one of which determines that it might simply be an illusion of the mind or an extreme simplification.

A friend of mine, who studies cosmology, shared a quote from an expert in the field: "It cannot be that the entire evolution of the cosmos over 13.5 billion years since the Big Bang was just so we could shop at a mall over the weekend." This reflection leads me to think of Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence, which challenges us to value our lives under the perspective of having to live them over and over again, eternally.

Nearly twenty years ago, when I experienced depression, I often described it, like others, as a constant, diffuse physical pain caused by a feeling of emptiness in my chest. This painful sensation remains difficult to explain because it isn't associated with a specific organ or nerve that can be numbed, and appears to originate, until proven otherwise, in the mental realm.

My central argument is simple yet profound: the diameter of a circle is not exactly equal to twice the radius. This claim is based on an observation about the parity of points: a diameter, including the central point, consists of an odd number of points, whereas two radii, added together, always result in an even number of points. Although the difference is minimal – just one point – this small discrepancy prevents the equality from being absolute.

Welcome to Pointfulness. In one of his talks, Eckhart Tolle says that he does not like the word “Mindfulness” because it means “Full of mind” when one seeks precisely to get rid of the empire of the mind over our life. Pointfulness attempts to correct the original word, placing emphasis on the singularity of the point, in the Here and Now.

A friend of mine, referring to my book during a conversation, said to me, "And to think that it all started with a point..." Whether consciously or not, his comment was very precise. If someone were to remember only one thing from my book, it would be about the importance of the point, of Singularity.

One of the things I pursue with Pointfulness is to practice an engineer's philosophy, that is, to find ideas that work based on reason and common sense, with more emphasis on the substance than on the form. The reason why I wrote my book in Spanish and not in French, which is my mother tongue, was to limit myself in the literary sophistication to which the French language almost inevitably invites. Living in a Spanish-speaking country was obviously the other motivation. That said, there are concepts that need to be described and explained carefully and the first, fundamental among all, is the Fullness of Being.

I have two good news: the Present is still there and the Future is not written.

One of the great questions of philosophy is related to defining what is human. What makes us human and differentiates us from other animals? I certainly do not have the answer, however, I addressed the topic in my book when I mention that human beings developed a level of intelligence such that they were able to recognize the presence of pure consciousness as an entity distinct from the creations of their own mind.

Who says you have to be happy? , was Ragnar Lothbrok's question to his son Björn in an episode of the television saga Vikings. It is an interesting question because it sounds dissonant in a world that projects happiness as the supreme goal of modern life. In times past, honor or the fulfillment of duty had similar status to judge the fullness of life, without forgetting fidelity to the will of God or the gods. All these concepts of happiness have evolved with the values, principles and paradigms prevailing in different times, driven by systems of thought and beliefs that gave them meaning.

In the so-called hard or exact sciences, the advent of new theories that attempt to explain the complexity of the Universe is always celebrated as the discovery of unknown phenomena pushes the frontiers of knowledge. It is common to cite the genius of Newton in the 17th century and how his laws of physics were perfected by Einstein in the 20th century. But also, almost in parallel a hundred years ago, physicists such as Planck, de Broglie, Schrödinger and Bohr developed theories on quantum mechanics that are related to the physical behaviors of atomic and subatomic particles, which escape the laws of Newton and Einstein. If an astronomy fan can dazzle his audience by predicting the movement of planets and eclipses with Newton's equations, he could no longer talk about gravitational lenses in the observation of galaxies without resorting to Einstein. And if we talk about a cat whose life depends on the random decay of a radioactive atom (the famous Schrödinger's Cat), neither Newton nor Einstein have managed to deal with a reality that is and is not at the same time.