The Nowhere Box: Largest Area of the Human Mind

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 23 Feb 2026

Robert J. Burrowes, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

22 Feb 2026 – Do you remember how you felt during that embarrassing incident as a child? Or is the memory so painful that you unconsciously filed the embarrassment and other feelings associated with the incident in ‘the nowhere box’?

Can you still feel the boredom you felt staring out of the window at school? Did you focus on feeling it, more consciously, later? Or have you filed it in the nowhere box?

Do you remember how terrified you were when you had that nightmare as a child? Did a parent listen to the feelings you felt while keeping you safe or did they help you suppress awareness of it by ignoring or distracting you? Don’t worry. It is still there. It is in the nowhere box.

Do you remember just how furious you were that time when someone who should have known better accused you of committing some trivial childhood ‘offence’. Or did their violent reaction to your initial outburst cause you to shut it down? Don’t worry. The anger is all still there in the nowhere box.

Do you remember how painful it felt when that first girl/boy you fell for didn’t reciprocate? Not really? Don’t worry, it is still there. It’s stored in the nowhere box.

I know someone who was bell monitor during year 8 at school. On 14 occasions throughout the day for an entire school year, he was required to interrupt his lesson, walk to the school office and ring the bell to end one class and start the next. He has never been on time for a social event since for the simple reason that his unexpressed fury at endlessly interrupting what he was doing so that he could do what he was required to do by the school has been suppressed by his fear and now manifests, powerlessly, in being late for virtually everything. All this fear and anger is now in the nowhere box but he doesn’t realize it has been shaping his behaviour ever since.

The most interesting thing about human beings is that they have no idea why they behave the way they do.

And if you tell them that, for most of the time, they are doing what their unconscious fear makes them do, such as attend school, work at a job they hate, or simply comply with an endless series of government regulations and laws, they think you are crazy. Remember the Covid-19 lockdowns? The ‘mandatory’ injections? How many people objected? How many people attended a protest? How many people actually resisted?

The idea that they are not acting out of their own volition just doesn’t make sense to most people. After all, they have spent most of their life choosing their study, their forms of entertainment, their job, their spouse, their place of residence and their holiday destinations. They just didn’t make the most fundamental choices but they don’t even know what these are any more. Life has been reduced to the mundane and the trivial.

The monumental issues related to how the world works, who drives the key institutions that control our lives, the nature of the many threats to our existence – from the threat of nuclear war and the ongoing annihilation of life on Earth to the technocratic prison being built around us – simply fail to register in the consciousness of most people or are consigned to the nowhere box if they do.

The reality is that most people’s entire Selfhood – their capacity to think for themselves, to feel their emotional reaction to what is happening, and then to act out of their own volition – has been buried in their ‘nowhere box’.

So what happens then?

Of course, all of these feelings in the ‘nowhere box’ haven’t gone anywhere. They are stored and, later – sometimes rarely, sometimes occasionally, and sometimes routinely – projected onto other people or events that ‘trigger’ the feelings because of a memory they unconsciously remind the person about. This often leads to completely inappropriate behaviour but for the person experiencing the feelings this is incomprehensible. See ‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’.

Projection, for example, can often lead a parent or teacher to misinterpret a child’s behaviour and to blame, and punish, the child for doing something that, in fact, the child believed would get them approval. When I listen to individuals talk of their childhood experience, I routinely hear accounts of times when they were blamed & punished for something they did not do but of which they could not convince their parent or teacher. If an individual is trapped in a projection (because the feelings unconsciously driving their delusion need to be heard first), the truth is effectively impossible to hear or believe.

Projection plays a key role in world politics. For example, many Jews, particularly those in government in Israel at the moment, carry a heavy burden of deeply suppressed terror as a result of how they were treated by parents, teachers, rabbis and other significant adults during their childhood.

But absent any opportunity to feel and express this terror and the anger about it towards those who inflicted it – their parents, teachers and religious leaders – they are reduced to projecting it.

And in the current context, it is easy to direct this fear, and the anger about it, at the target that is socially-approved by most Israeli Jews: the Palestinians.

Having lived through this socialization process, the child, in turn, will later terrorize their own children into suppressing awareness of their fear, anger and other feelings. So these children will also ‘learn’ (by copying what is modeled) to project their own fears and anger onto the approved target, the Palestinians.

Similarly, throughout the western world, a great deal of fear is directed at the Russians, as Elite propaganda routinely taps into the suppressed terror of western citizens to project it at Russia. This is easily done as a psychological leftover of the Cold War.

What is in the Nowhere Box?

The list of things that people do not want to know is enormous, effectively constituting the domain of what it is necessary to know to understand oneself and the world (rather than live in delusion about them).

Here are just six items to illustrate this point:

1. Fundamentally, people do not want to know that their own emotional damage from the violence they suffered as a child is helping to drive the violence in our world. Each of us participates, to a greater or lesser extent (even if it is just by ‘turning away’), in inflicting this violence and each of us fears resisting violence in any way that is effective because of the (unconscious or conscious) memory of the reaction by parents, teachers and other significant adults when we attempted to resist their violence against us during childhood.

Of course, each of us can heal from this life-shaping damage – see ‘Putting Feelings First’ – but admitting the need for it, let alone undertaking it, frightens most people too.

2. Equally fundamentally, people do not want to know that they violently terrorize children into being submissively obedient. In essence, they do this so that the child does not behave in ways that frighten the adult. But this leaves virtually all people in one simple, fundamental state: Terrified, self-hating and powerless. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

Imagine the pain of acknowledging that you emotionally destroyed your own children when you believe that you love them and only sought to teach and discipline them in accordance with the universally accepted socialization ‘practice’. Of course, no-one told you that socialization is fundamentally a sanitized way of describing and legitimizing violence against children.

As a result, humanity faces a vast range of threats on what I call the spectrum of ‘visible’ violence: this includes economic exploitation of particular races, nations and classes, ecological destruction (in turn ranging from rainforest destruction to geoengineering), genocide and war, not to mention the extraordinarily wide range of ‘lesser’ versions of violence.

Moreover, not wanting to know the fundamental cause of violence means that few want to know how to address it either. See ‘Time to End the Adult War on Children’ and ‘My Promise to Children’.

Nor do they want to know what action is necessary, in a strategic sense, to end each of the manifestations of violence. See, for example, ‘Nonviolent Strategy to Halt the Genocide in Gaza, Liberate Palestine and Defeat the Global Technocracy’ and ‘The War to End War 100 Years On: An Evaluation and Reorientation of our Resistance to War’.

3. But our violence against children has no boundaries. As a subset of the above violence against children, people do not want to know that there is a vast industry of child trafficking that involves rape of children of all ages, child sacrifice, cannibalism, child pornography, child torture and a range of other depravities, all of it supported by the Elite families that control our world.

While the evidence of some of this is long-standing, particularly in certain contexts such as religious violence against children – see ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’ – another layer was more fully exposed with the recent partial release of the Epstein files. See ‘Epstein Library’.

But don’t be fooled by those who claim, like Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, that ‘January 2026 marks a rupture. It is no longer possible to treat the Epstein case as a sexual scandal involving powerful individuals. What has now come to light – documents, images, records, explicit connections – has pushed the debate to another level. This is no longer about “abuses,” “excesses,” or “individual crimes.” What has been exposed points to systematic, organized, ritualized practices. And that changes everything.’ See ‘Epstein, Western Decline, & The Moral Collapse Of The Elites’.

In fact, it changes nothing. And nothing will change. The information in the ‘Epstein Files’, like all of the evidence of violence against children before it, will be consigned to the nowhere box. (The evidence of violence against women will get some attention because some women are powerful advocates of women’s rights. But again, nothing will happen.)

And the reason for that is simple. We are all implicated in perpetrating violence against children. This is what socialization entails. Our world exists as it is – depravity, war, genocide, annihilation of nature – because of this violence against children.

You cannot emotionally destroy a child and expect them to grow up into a powerful, loving, self- and other-respecting individual. You cannot expect them to grow into an adult who nurtures powerful, loving, self- and other-respecting children.

4. People do not want to know that ‘international law’ does not function in the realm of international security when the interests of powerful states are at stake (even while it still functions, in many ways, in other areas). What people believe to be international law is law that has acquired customary status because it is widely accepted by states or it is law written into the range of treaties that have been negotiated between governments at various times in the past.

But, whatever good it does in defining preferable behaviour, this ‘law’ has limited impact in the world of geopolitics when it matters most. Israel is not prevented, constrained or held to account for its genocide in Gaza; Trump was not prevented, constrained and won’t be held to account for bombing Venezuela and kidnapping President Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.

No-one of genuine responsibility will be meaningfully held to account for perpetrating the disastrous political, economic, medical and technological outcomes that resulted from the ‘Great Reset’ coup, perpetrated under cover of a nonexistent ‘virus’ labeled ‘Sars Cov-2’ that supposedly caused the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’. See ‘We Are Being Smashed Politically, Economically, Medically and Technologically by the Elite’s “Great Reset”: Why? How Do We Fight Back Effectively?’

There is a thoughtful elaboration of issues in relation to international law in these answers to questions posed by Iranian journalist Asgar Ghahramanpour to Professor Richard A. Falk: ‘Geopolitical Obstacles to International Law Enforcement: Deficiencies in the Management of Global Security’.

Equally importantly, people do not want to know that law in national contexts is fundamentally a tool of Elite social control: it is used to scare people into compliance with a vast range of rules, regulations and laws. So while there may be some aspects of law we do not like, most people actually prefer to delude themself that we live in a world of ‘law and order’. It is less frightening than grappling with reality. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

5. People do not want to know that individuals like Trump and Netanyahu are not the problem (although they perform their assigned roles in ways that distract our attention from those who exercise effective power in the world) and electing different people to political office does not make any difference. See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’

It is the Elite families – who control the banking system and all major human activities as well as political puppets like Trump and Netanyahu – that should be the focus of our resistance. See Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until ‘You’ll Own Nothing.’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

6. People do not want to know that doing what they feel capable of doing – such as ‘protesting’ by walking in a crowd down Main St, the equivalent of powerlessly complaining to their parents when they were a child – will achieve nothing. Genuine resistance must be strategic. That is, it requires action that undermines Elite power to execute its strategy to kill or imprison us all and the cost of that resistance must be paid, whether in fines, seizures of wages, goods or particular freedoms, prison terms or death in some cases. Again, see ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’

Freedom is not free.

Liberty has its price. It is something for which we must fight and which we must defend.

And if you are only willing to do something that entails no risk – such as lobby a political representative, sign a petition, attend a conference/webinar or protest rally – then your fear and thus powerlessness has already ensured that your liberty will be lost or now depends on others who have the courage that you do not.

Awareness versus Fear

One fundamental problem which I have long observed is that when efforts to raise awareness about an issue simply trigger’s a person’s fear, then awareness-raising cannot occur. So, for example, talking about adult violence against children and the fact that all adults are implicated in this frightens people and the knowledge is consigned to the nowhere box rather than considered. Similarly, the genocide in Gaza frightened people and meant that even those who could pay some attention to it were unable to listen to a message about what effective resistance actually required. And so there is none.

It is the same when it comes to wars and other acts of international military violence such as those routinely perpetrated by the United States. Fear makes most national ‘leaders’ into sycophants and reduces ‘activism’ to ‘clicktivism’ or the usual ineffective demonstrations.

As for the technocracy, with its wide range of threats that will profoundly alter the very nature of human existence if not resisted effectively, most people’s fear simply consigns its details to the ‘nowhere box’ instantly.

Who wants to know that so much of what has become familiar to people – using a computer or phone running corporate software such as Windows or Apple, using social media such as Facebook and X, using 5G, shopping in a supermarket, surrendering personal (including biometric) data to facilitate something you want, buying food rather than growing it, paying with a card rather than cash – is enabling those who intend to control us to gather the data and expand the surveillance network that will make it possible?

Fear suppresses awareness before anyone realizes.

Thus, the notion of resistance doesn’t arise, even when there are effective ways of doing so. See ‘We Are Human We Are Free’ with a one-page flyer, in 24 languages, outlining critical actions here: One-page Flyer.

Conclusion

The terrified mind has no problem concealing itself: A lifetime of unconscious practice suppressing awareness of how one feels, whether sad, angry, frightened or anything else perceived as ‘negative’, leaves virtually all humans powerless to act and ready to offer one of the usual justifications for inaction such as why there is no threat or what little they or others do already is sufficient to counter it.

And so ‘resistance’, wherever it exists, is routinely reduced to tokenism: actions that make no difference.

We live in a world in which people are just watching, without seeing, what is really happening. They observe the small, often technological changes to daily existence without perceiving the ‘big picture’ in which these changes are taking place. And they are endlessly misled by government and corporate media.

So war, genocide, the economic tools of capitalism and violence generally are reshaping world order and the technocracy is being built around us.

Our life and our liberty are on the line but virtually no-one is resisting.

Our fear is in control.

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Robert Burrowes, Ph.D. is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He was a member of the Gulf Peace Team in 1991. Robert has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of Why Violence? Websites: (We Are Human, We Are Free) (Charter)  (Flame Tree Project)  (Songs of Nonviolence) (Nonviolent Campaign Strategy) (Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy) (Robert J. Burrowes) (Feelings First) Email: flametree@riseup.net

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 23 Feb 2026.

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