Month: August 2018

The Limitations Of The Game

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When all of our ‘capacity to do’ (or our ‘capacity to know’, for that matter) is supplied by the external authority of the game this might be said to be ‘fine up to a point’! It is fine (in a very limited sort of way, admittedly) up to a point, but then when that point is reached it immediately becomes not so fine at all. This critical point – which is the critical point at which external authority or ‘obeying the rules’ is no longer going to cut the ice for us – is always going to be reached sooner or later: either the environment we live in will place demands on us that the game-rules aren’t equipped to deal with, or – somehow – we lose faith in our ability for the rules or procedures to work for us, even though the tasks we are trying to carry out aren’t in any way new or especially demanding. In a nutshell, it could be said that what we’ve learned in life can no longer help us.

 

Whichever way it happens – and we could perhaps call the first scenario ‘stress’ and the second ‘anxiety’ – we’re caught out because we don’t have the capacity to call upon any resources other than those that are supplied by the external authority. If the EA can’t help us in a situation then it all starts to go to pieces, because we’ve never been encouraged to develop true autonomy. Nothing in society encourages us to (or supports us in) developing true autonomy; this is in fact the one thing the social system doesn’t want us to have! We go to pieces when we’re challenged in a way that the EA can’t help us with because we don’t have any intuition as to ‘what to do’  in the situation – intuition after all means ‘teaching from within’ and the only type of teaching we have (when we’re adapted to the game) is ex-tuition, or ‘teaching from without’…

 

Ultimately, it’s just not possible to live life solely on the basis of ‘teaching from without’ or ‘guidance from the operating system of the rational mind’. We’ve missed out something very important here – we’ve missed out ourselves and this omission is inevitably going to show up at some stage of the proceedings! Suppose I hit upon a neat way of living my life without me actually needing to be there – suppose I let the ‘inner robot’ of my habits run the show for me, to use Colin Wilson’s apt phrase. Suppose I just treat life as a kind of an established routine and just let it run according to the way it always does run – wouldn’t that be great? No real effort at all is needed in this case – I will never be challenged by anything radically new because all I’m doing is just playing the same loop over and over again. It’s all just ‘plain cruising’ in this case and I can put my feet up and hang an ‘out to lunch’ sign around my neck. I’m letting ‘the system’ run my life because I don’t want the bother, essentially. So the question we’re asking is ‘What’s the down-side to the plan? Where are the snags – if there are going to be any – going to appear?’

 

The question we’re asking is ‘How are the problems that arise from this business of me letting the system run my life (if there are any) going to present themselves?’ We have already said [in the Chapter Invisible Aggression] that when, in ‘the contest between realities’, the generic (or collective) reality wins out over our own unique non-generic reality – as it almost always does – then we have lost the core of who we are. We’re adrift as ‘an inauthentic constructed identity’ in the sterile, pointless world of society, trying to achieve goals that aren’t really ours, and which wouldn’t do us any good even if they were. Another way of putting this is to say that we’ve lost ourselves in the acts we put on to the extent that we know longer know that they are only ‘acts’! So we can now reformulate our question as “What problems are likely to arise when ‘the act we are putting on’ gets disconnected from ‘the one who is putting the act on’?’

 

We’re in the situation of a person who for the sake of convenience has put on a mask and then forgotten that they have done so and – as a result – are proceeding to live the ‘life’ of ‘the disconnected or unowned mask’. We have become identified with the mask and the point at which this identification takes place is the point at which the mask gets ‘a life of its own’, so to speak; the mask gets a life of its own, but at the same time it doesn’t really have a life because it’s not actually alive! Even just expressing matters this way (and it will be a very familiar perspective to anyone who has studied Carl Jung) clarifies things hugely. Already, the sense of ‘how the problem could manifest itself’ is very clear from this description of our situation. It is abundantly clear. When we look into it what we’re talking about here sounds more than just a little bit like ‘being possessed’ and Jung actually speaks in exactly these terms when we talks about ‘being possessed by the persona’. At the risk of being overly repetitive in our approach, we can now reformulate the question we have been playing about with here as “What psychological problems might conceivably arise of being possessed by a bundle of mechanical reflexes which masquerades as a self and has started living our life for us on our behalf, whether we like it or not?”

 

The question has in fact become little short of ridiculous at this stage – after all, what part of the situation that we have just described isn’t a problem? We would be better off asking if there is anything about the situation, as we have just set it out, that isn’t frankly and horrifically appalling! The only part of the package, as described, that is in any way ‘non-problematic’ would be the superficial representation of what’s going on, as provided for us by that mechanical agency, when we are able to actually believe in it (which will be, at best, only for some of the time). As we keep saying, the mechanical agency is living life for us (is living life as us) and the only way this is going to seem OK to us is when we are able to think that this highly limited (actually totally limited) frame of reference IS us. That’s the only way we’re ever going to feel good about the machine that lives life on our behalf…

 

There are two elements (we could say) to this illusion – [1] is that we think the machine is us (or that we are the machine) and [2] is that we don’t in any way perceive the machine to be only a machine, which is to say, limited or constrained to the point that there is actually nothing real about it at all. When both of these elements are present and intact then the illusion can function flawlessly; we will never smell a rat and the illusion will therefore perpetuate itself indefinitely!

 

The ‘fully-functioning illusion’ is one in which there is no question of this bundle of reflexes and judgements (or prejudices) not being who we are; it is the situation where there is not even the slightest shadow of doubt [1] that this ‘foreign introject’ is our own true self and [2] that the subjective world in which we live (which is made up entirely of attractive and aversive projections based upon the inherent biases of the machine) is expansive and full of possibilities (and not at all ‘closed’, therefore). These two requirements for a fully functioning, fully operational illusion are – when it comes down to it – quite inseparable – if one starts to fail then both do. When we start to feel that our world is limited to the point of being empty of any worthwhile content this in turn causes us to doubt the authenticity of who we think we are and if – looking at this the other way – if we were to doubt our own authenticity, our own worthwhileness as a person, then the world would appear to have nothing in it for us – it would hold no promises for us, no possibilities for us. There might be something in it for someone else perhaps but that doesn’t matter because there is nothing there for me… The world reflects our own state of mind when we are unconscious, as Johannes Fabricius says in The Royal Art Of The Alchemists – if I feel bad then the world is a bad place and if I feel good then it is a terrible place. The world is a projection of my inner state – the possibilities I see out there for me in the ‘projected world’ are really nothing more than illusions deriving from the ‘central illusion’ of the self-construct!

 

Another (possibly clearer) way of putting this is to say that there are two ways in which ‘malfunctions of the machine’ might start to manifest for us, one being in terms of limitations that affect our purposeful (or goal-orientated) actions in the world and the other being in terms of what we might call ‘limitation in our very being’. A ‘limitation in the potency of our purposeful actions’ simply means that we are not able (or rather that we feel we are not able) to do, whilst a perceived ‘limitation in our being’ means that – actually – we don’t have any being since being can’t be limited and yet still remain ‘being’! The nature of being is to be limitless, without edges or boundaries. To perceive oneself to be in any way ‘a thing’, in other words, is to perceive oneself as having no genuine being. That’s why we say ‘a mere thing’; thing-hood is a degraded state of being, a state of being with all the good taken out of it. It reduces us to a joke. Perceived limitation of purposeful action corresponds to anxiety therefore, whilst ‘perceived limitation of being’ corresponds – we might say – to depression. In the former we are impotent to do, in the latter we are equally impotent to be – our so-called ‘being’ is felt to be fraudulent…

 

We can bring this all back to what Gurdjieff says about us being unable, in our normal everyday mode of being, it either do or be. On the face of it, to the overwhelming majority of us, this sounds like utter nonsense. It doesn’t penetrate our consciousness even by a millimetre, even by a nanometre. It’s double-dutch – our acclaimed (but deeply unconscious) experts will scoff for all they’re worth. And yet what Gurdjieff is saying isn’t that hard to understand – not if we look at it from the perspective that we have been setting out here. Of course we can’t do if our internalized set of rules and procedures are already doing everything for us! We have become so dependent upon the crutch of the ‘inner robot’ that if it were taken away from us we would simply collapse on a heap on the floor!

 

Similarly, then, it is perfectly clear and straightforward to see that in our normal, everyday mode of existence, we cannot be. We don’t have to be – we have a machine that will do that for us! We have a fully-functioning ‘slave-system’ to do that for us (only things have flipped over for us and we’ve ended up being the slaves). It’s like having slaves to chew our food for us because we’re too lazy to make the effort – if our slaves were to leave us or die then we would be thrown into a crisis since our jaw muscles would have become far too weak to chew any unprocessed food. We would have become functionally incapable of mastication! It’s not that there is any shortage of food – the table in front of us is heaped with it – it’s just that we can’t eat it. We’d choke if we tried…

 

In this analogy, ‘the food on the table’ corresponds to reality (or ‘genuine being’), and the sustenance that lies within it. Genuine being is however unknown to us and as well as being unknown to us it is something we seriously don’t want to have to meet; we are averse to ever coming across it because it completely fails to facilitate us. More accurately, it completely fails to facilitate our ‘idea of ourselves’, i.e. – who we think we are. More accurately still, reality will facilitate our idea of ourselves (just as it will facilitate any of our ideas, any of our thoughts) but what it won’t do is facilitate our unquestioning belief in this idea. We have to do that bit ourselves! Reality can float any number of ideas or concepts, just as the sea can facilitate any number of waves, but it doesn’t insist that we take them seriously – it is us who insists upon that. Truth is not in the business of ‘facilitating illusions’ after all! Far from facilitating them, it ruthlessly undermines them. And in the same way, far from supporting our ideas and concepts, the truth fatally undermines them…

 

Oddly enough, therefore, genuine being is actually destructive to us. ‘He who is near to me is near to the fire’, warns Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. Reality is destructive to us because it doesn’t support the illusions that we have about ourselves – it’s a food that is too rich for our blood! The only type of sustenance we can take is something that we might call ‘pre-digested being’, which is actually non-being in disguise. The conceptual self can only have conceptual being, in other words, and so to state that we, in our normal everyday mode of existence, cannot ‘be’ makes perfect sense. In the conditioned modality of existence, we cannot be, and what’s more, we cannot have anything to do with being. Our being is illusory and so too are our purposeful actions (naturally they are since they are ‘actions that stem from an illusory sense of self’). Our purposeful behavioural output – to a large extent – is actually our (covert) attempt to stabilize and promote our illusory sense of self and so it can’t be any more real than that mind-created self is.

 

The ongoing endeavour to maintain, stabilize and promote the mind-created self – no matter how apparently successful it might be – is always going to be fundamentally irresolvably glitched and what we call ‘neurotic suffering’ is how this irreducible glitch manifests itself. And yet as unwelcome as neurotic suffering might be (and there is no visitor more unwelcome at our door), it betokens a freedom far beyond anything we could ever have imagined…

 

 

 

 

 

The Game Of Ignoring Who We Really Are

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We always ignore the thing that matters the most (which is our own true well-being) and contrive instead to be ridiculously fascinated and absorbed in all sorts of other things, things that not only have nothing to do with ‘our true well-being’ but are actually wholly inimical to it. Anything that causes us to ignore our own true well-being has got to be wholly inimical to us, fairly obviously!

 

It is perhaps not entirely fair to say that we ‘contrive’ to be ridiculously fascinated and absorbed in all sorts of extraneous affairs to the detriment of our true well-being. Partially, it is unfair because we have no idea that this is what we are doing and so we can hardly be blamed for it. In another way however it is a fair comment because – ultimately – it IS our responsibility what we get caught up in. If it’s not our responsibility then whose is it? We might want to hand over responsibility for what happens to us in life and what we end up doing or not doing, to external influences, but in the end it is us who agree to going along with these influences. We might have someone banging us over the head which a bunch of rules, but we have to agree to obey them. The rule is powerless over us otherwise!

 

Ignoring what we truly care about and being engrossed in inconsequential details is of course the ‘human condition’ – this is ‘the central absurdity of human life’ and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise then they are talking out of their hat! If anyone tries to tell you otherwise then they are shooting you a fine line in bullshit, and they are shooting themselves one too. If we can’t see this to be the human condition then we can’t see anything at all. If we can’t see ‘the central perversity of human life’ then what can we possibly say about anything that isn’t high-grade BS? We have to see that we are ‘unconscious clowns’ before we can say anything sensible – otherwise anything we might have to say is guaranteed to be just more ‘unconscious clown-talk’… A fool who cannot see himself (or herself) to be a fool is guaranteed to carry on acting foolishly, after all. Wisdom cannot come about without this key insight – there’s no way to bypass this painful but crucial bit of awareness!

 

If we were to take a honest interest in the vexed question of ‘what we’re actually at’ in our lives then we couldn’t help but see it to be folly. We wouldn’t be able to help seeing that we are spending most (if not all) of our time compulsively absorbed in nonsense that we don’t really care about. Honest self-observation always shows this! Who could possibly deny it? The truth is always there for anyone who is genuinely interested in seeing it – the only problem is us actually having that interest! What we do in life is this – we take up a trivial identity that isn’t us (because you we are isn’t a trivial or superficial identity!) and then we proceed to preoccupy ourselves in a ‘wall-to-wall’ fashion with things that matter to this trivial identity but which DON’T matter to us. As we started off by saying, we ignore everything that genuinely does matter to is and give our attention and energy over to all sorts of stuff that doesn’t actually matter at all. We don’t give ourselves a chance to find out what really matters to us – we keep ourselves far too busy for that. That’s the game that we’re playing, after all. We’re playing the game of ‘ignoring who we really are’!

 

This is the game we’re playing and of that there can be no doubt – not if we’re actually interested in looking into it, that is. If we take the trouble to honestly observe what is going on we will always see what we have just described here but the thing is that we practically never do take an honest interest in what’s going on because that goes counter to the rules of the game. Honest self-observation is counter to the rules of the game – naturally it is because (as we have just said) the game we’re playing is the game of ignoring who we really are. When we play the game of not knowing who we are without knowing that we are playing it then the truth becomes a very frightening thing. It actually becomes the ultimately frightening thing and it is this fundamental fear that stops us from ever being genuinely interested in looking too deeply at ourselves or the world. It is – in other words – this fear that keeps us so tightly identified with the trivial or shallow identity that the thinking mind provides us with.

 

The game that we’re talking about here is highly compulsive, highly absorbing. We’re preoccupied on a full-time basis with all of these things that don’t really matter to us, but which matter so much to the trivial identity that we have adopted without knowing it. Our unreflective allegiance to this trivial or superficial identity is the betrayal of who we really are – we are compelled by the rules of the game to betray ourselves at every step, therefore! We are compelled to sell ourselves short; we are compelled to go against our own true nature. As Philip K Dick says in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? –

 

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.

 

The game of ignoring our own true nature is ‘compulsive’ because it is made up of equal parts of ‘greed’ and ‘fear’. When the Trivial Identity is interested in something this is greed, and when it is negatively interested in something (i.e. when it is interested in getting away from it!) this is fear. Greed and fear are the two sides of the same thing and both make an equal claim on our attention – both control us absolutely. What we’re talking about here isn’t really ‘interest’ however – the Trivial Identity cannot ever be genuinely ‘interested’ in anything because it’s just a construct, because it’s just a ‘shallow thing’. Only who we truly are can be genuinely interested in anything or anyone. Only who we truly are can actually care about anything, or have actual curiosity about anything. The shallow identity that is the ‘adopted self’ is a kind of ‘sociopath’ in other words – it is a machine driven by mechanical compulsions that we are free to identify with if we ‘want’ to…

 

It’s not really a matter of ‘wanting’ here of course – not in the way in which we normally use the term. When we’re trapped within the sphere of influence of the shallow identity then everything is wanting of one sort or another. Everything is compelled, everything is mechanical (or as we could also say, everything is ‘attachment’, either of the positive or negative variety). Either we like it or we dislike it! This isn’t our own true will however; our own true will has been submerged beneath the alien will – our own true will no longer exists for us because it has been replaced by mere mechanical compulsion…

 

The strange thing here is that the things that the shallow self-construct is interested in are things that nobody is interested in. Nobody is interested in them because the shallow self-construct is nobody. It’s not anyone really, so it can hardly be said to be ‘interested’ in anything! That’s entirely the wrong word to use – the shallow self-construct (or Trivial Identity) only has mechanical attachment, as we have just said. So to be in this situation – the situation where we are flatly, unshakeably convinced that we are this shallow construct – is a very peculiar one indeed. It is both deeply peculiar and highly unsatisfactory!

 

How – after all – can it not be ‘highly unsatisfactory’ (to put it mildly!) to be in this situation where we are forever being compelled to be interested in ‘unreal things’, ‘things that have nothing in them’? How can it not be highly unsatisfactory to be continuously fascinated in things that are nothing more than reflections of the ‘shallow self-construct’, which is a thing that isn’t who we are anyway, which isn’t who anyone is, and which – actually – doesn’t even exist in the first since it is only an idea, only a mental picture or image? And we’re not just ‘interested’ or even ‘fascinated’ in this projections of the unreal Trivial Identity – we frequently get very worked up indeed about them, and very often go through sheer hell because of them. So if this situation isn’t ‘deeply peculiar’ then what is?

 

 

 

 

 

Pseudo-Communication

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Everything is communication of one sort or another. To exist at all is to communicate! Even non-communication is a communication, if we can see it for what it is! But – on the other hand – if it happens that we can’t see non-communication for what it is, and think instead that it actually is communication when it isn’t, then what we have here in this case is something very different. What we have in this case is something that we might call pseudo-communication.

 

Pseudo-communication doesn’t so much mean ‘lies’ – it means that there is the appearance of a genuine two-way interaction going on when actually there isn’t. When it comes down to it there isn’t any ‘interaction’ at all going on in pseudo-communication because the term ‘interaction’ means that its two-way (otherwise we wouldn’t use the prefix ‘inter-’). When there’s no two-way exchange going on then what we’re talking about isn’t communication but control – the very essence of control is that it only works the one way, the very essence of control is that it happens ‘one way but not the other’…

 

Control is the very antithesis of communication (or ‘interaction’) and in this world of ours everything is about control – either control of the overt variety or control of the covert variety. In the past the authorities or rulers saw no need to camouflage their power – it was taken as being part of the natural order of things that the powerful had every right to exert their power over everyone else. It was the God-given right of the powerful to rule and no other explanation was needed. Power is after all its own explanation! And when it comes to the very widespread idea that Princes and Kings and Emperors had the divine right to rule, very clearly no other explanation is necessary! When the population believes in the divine right of kings to rule, and generally do as they please without having to explain themselves to anyone, then of course the notion of questioning their power never arises. It is no accident that monarchies and religion tend to go hand in hand, even to this day.

 

Even today the Queen of the United Kingdom has the title of ‘Supreme Governor of the Church Of England’, which – in theory at least – outranks the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would otherwise be considered the episcopal head of the Anglican Church. In the United States, democratically elected presidents often bring God into their public addresses, implying that God is of course on their side, as they are – of course – on His. What better validation could there be for one’s point of view, than to see it as aligned with that of the Divine Will? Invoking the deity, in these cases, is less a matter of personal piety and more – needless to say – a matter of consolidating one’s power in the earthly realm and, ultimately, the best way of consolidating one’s power is to makes one’s position (or viewpoint) unquestionable.

 

Within the last one hundred years or so the idea that one human being or group of human beings should have the right to exert power over others for no better reason than the brute fact that they are able to do so is widely seen as being completely unacceptable, if not downright abhorrent. ‘Might’ and ‘right’ are no longer synonymous. In one way this undoubtedly represents a huge jump in consciousness – humankind has woken up out of a long, dark slumber, or so we might suppose. In another, more important way however the gains we have collectively made in terms of freedom are more apparent than real. Control is not explicit anymore – the wielders of power have simply grown cleverer, out of necessity. The rulers have ‘upped their game’, and we have failed to keep up with them. We have allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked on a global scale.

 

Everything is communication of one sort or another. What else is there? ‘Communication’ is just another way of talking about consciousness and consciousness is our essential nature.  Our essential nature is to communicate – this comes as naturally to us as breathing. What passes for ‘communication’ in this modern age is in reality something very different however – it is something that has the appearance of communication but not its nature. We could equally well say that what passes for freedom in this world is a pale shadow (or ‘deceptive analogue’) of true freedom – we are free to do anything we want just so long as it takes place within the terms of the game that we are not acknowledging as a game.

 

In the same way therefore, we are free to communicate about anything we want to just so long as we communicate about those topics or issues that we have already been given to communicate about. Or to put this another way: we are free to communicate about anything we want just so long as we do so within the framework of reference that has been imposed upon us without us realizing that anything of the sort has been imposed on us. If I am thinking about the world within the terms of some framework of meaning (or framework of reference) that has been imposed upon me without me knowing that it has then I am ‘being controlled without knowing that I am’ – my way of seeing the world, understanding the word has been decided for me by some external agency and so what more effective ‘exercise of power’ could there ever be than this? This is the ultimate in control.

 

If I as a ruler or authority compel you to live within a certain structure, a certain format that has been decided by me, then this unpleasant authoritarian state of affairs actually comes as a pretty honest form of communication on my part. I am communicating my power over you in no uncertain terms – I actually want you to know about it. But when I control you by ‘supplying you with your reality’ (so to speak) then I am in this case most definitely not communicating my ‘use of power’ and this makes my power over you all the more complete. The ultimate form of control, therefore, is where I control ‘what things mean’ (or ‘what is real and what is unreal’); this is the type of control that can never be questioned, the type of control that will always go unnoticed.

 

We imagine ourselves to be freely communicating but we’re not, therefore. We’re not freely communicating because the terms that we have been given to communicate within are not our own – they have been decided for us by ‘the external authority’ for purposes of its own. We’re operating within the confines of a framework of meaning that has imposed on us from the outside, without us being wise to the event. Given these circumstances (i.e. given that we’re ‘playing a game without knowing that we’re playing a game’) there is of course absolutely no way that we can genuinely communicate! How could we – everything we supposedly communicate about has to do with a false reality that has been imposed on us. There’s no way that we can communicate about anything – in order to communicate one must be able to see what is going on!

 

If we look at this in terms of interaction, and our possibility of interacting meaningfully either with each other or with our environment, we can equivalently say that there is zero possibility of us genuinely interacting either with each other or with the system itself. There is the convincing appearance of that possibility, but that’s all it is – just the appearance. We’ve been wrong-footed from the start because everything is on a false basis. We’re not autonomously interacting, we’re ‘interacting as adjuncts or extensions or constructs of the system that defines us’, and this isn’t interacting at all. We can only autonomously interact with other people or with our environment when we are ‘autonomously ourselves’ in the first place, very obviously! If  our entire way of seeing the world has been provided for us by ‘the external authority’ then there’s no interaction – there’s no interaction because there’s only the system there, and in order for there to be such a thing as ‘interaction’ there has to be two things, not just the one. Or to put this another way, if I am interacting with my own ‘projections’, my own ‘externalized assumptions’ then this is just the illusion of interaction, the illusion of communication. For communication, there must be an ‘other’…

 

The ‘external authority’ that we’re speaking of here is simply ‘the game that we are playing without knowing that we are’ – which is the same thing as ‘the game which is playing us’. We live in a world of pseudo-communication because we live within the remit of this game, this ‘version’ of reality that has been imposed upon us. The crucial thing to understand about ‘living within a world made up entirely of pseudo-communication’ is that just so long as we continue to do this, then ‘who we really are’ never actually gets to be born, never actually gets to come into the picture. This then is what ‘control’ or ‘the use of power or authority’ actually does to us – it is (if only we could see it clearly) the ultimate form of violence, it is in fact what we might quite reasonably call ‘psychological murder’. Authority is ‘psychological murder’ because it prevents us from being here as who we really are…

 

 

 

 

 

The ‘Assumed Sense of Self’

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Our collective viewpoint on what so-called ‘mental illness’ is and how it comes about is, I would say, remarkably obtuse! It’s as if we have a lorry-load of logs stuck in our collective eye. It’s not an accident that we’re so obtuse either – it’s just that this is where our personal and collective ‘blind-spot’ happens to reside and this blind-spot (as all blind-spots do) takes precedence over good sense. It takes precedence over everything. The blind-spot which we are talking about here has to do with the assumptions that we make about ourselves, and (unwisely) use as a spring-board to enthusiastically propel ourselves forward in life…

 

Collectively speaking, all we can ever do is ‘charge blindly ahead on the basis of our unexamined assumptions’. This is because a group of people (rather than ‘a random collection of people’), by its very nature, can only exist on the basis of conventions that are tacitly agreed upon but never actually acknowledged. The group would never hang together otherwise; society itself would never hang together and this is of course why oddballs, misfits and eccentrics are always treated so badly. Anyone in the group, or anyone in society, who does start questioning these ‘unacknowledged conventions’ is there never going to get anywhere; this is ‘a given’ – they’re never going to be listened to, their voice is never going to be allowed on the platform. Only ‘non-questioners’ are going to be allowed this privilege. And yet it is only by questioning the group’s hidden assumptions (or society’s invisible conventions) that wisdom is ever going to arise – in this case, wisdom with regard to these chronic patterns of unhappiness that we call ‘mental health conditions’. Our refusal to look outside of the box means therefore that wisdom is something we are going to have to do without! Wisdom isn’t ‘evidence-based’, after all!

 

The Big Question we never want to go near is the question of ‘who we truly are’ – this is the question we have all tacitly agreed never to look at, and yet this is also the door to wisdom, which is actually something that our particular expert-based form of knowledge doesn’t even acknowledge as ‘a real or significant thing’. When we assume ourselves to be something that we’re not, then this becomes a source of existential problems later on. How can it not? We can go further than this and say that when we go forward (or rather what we think is ‘forward’) on the basis of ‘who we think we are but aren’t’ then we’re never really going to get anywhere. We can’t get anywhere because we’re proceeding on the assumed basis of us being who we aren’t! We might, at times, imagine that we’re ‘getting somewhere’ and this will feel good to us, but the problem or snag here is that sooner or later we’re going to find that ‘the territory we thought we’d gained we haven’t’.  sooner or later we’re going to find out that we’ve been conned, we going to find out that we’ve paid good money for ‘real estate that only existed on paper but not in reality’…

 

This straightaway gives us a model that we can work with: when we have the perception that we’re getting somewhere when we’re not (because the ‘sense of self’ we’re identified with isn’t us) then this gives us the ‘positive feeling in life’ that we’re all trying to get. This particular mind-created illusion generates a type of good feeling that we might call euphoria – euphoria being (we might say) the feeling that attends the apparent well-being of the false sense of self. When on the other hand we experience ourselves (or rather the FSOS) as losing ground rather than gaining it then this produces a type of bad feeling that we can refer to as dysphoria. Everyday life is thus the constant play of euphoria and dysphoria –we are forever going ‘up’ and ‘down’ in our emotions depending on whether we feel that we’re getting somewhere or not getting somewhere on the basis of the FSOS. It follows that just so long as we are convinced that we are this FSOS then all we will ever experience is euphoria and dysphoria. Going up and going is all we ever know – the banal terrain of advantage or disadvantage will constitute the whole of life for us, therefore.

 

So far we have said nothing that relates directly to what is called ‘mental illness’. We have just described the arena of everyday life in its ‘unproblematic’ or ‘unglitched’ aspect – this is the game when it’s not manifesting any systematic faults, faults that cannot be ironed out or ignored. Two major glitches present themselves immediately however, when we start looking into it. One is where we get disillusioned with what we are calling ‘the game’ (i.e. ‘the game of pretending that the assumed sense of self is really who we are’) on some deep level such a way that we can no longer believe in the possibility of ‘gaining ground’. We have this deep-down feeling that we won’t be able to get anywhere (on the basis of us being who we mistakenly think we are) and even though we will try our hardest to fight against this feeling it keeps coming up time and time again. When the process progresses far enough it ends up paralyzing us; we can’t move forward (in the sense of acting purposefully or obtaining goals) because we have no more confidence in our ability to do so. What we’re talking about here is of course anxiety.

 

The other possibility is where we somehow become disillusioned, in a deep-down way, with ‘the game’ (i.e. with the assumption that we are the FSOS and that genuine honest-to-goodness possibilities await us on this basis) in such a way that nothing that we have achieved or gained seems to be actually worth anything. Equally, we are no longer motivated to try to achieve anything, not because we suspect that we can’t (as is the case in anxiety) but because we can’t help feeling that nothing we could achieve would be worth anything. Our so-called ‘achievements’ mock us with their fraudulency and we have been brought to a standstill because we can’t help knowing that nothing we could do would make any difference to this.  We ourselves – in our very core – feel hollow and worthless and – more to the point – we feel as if we’re pretending to be someone rather than being someone. This is of course utterly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been disillusioned with the game and – more than incomprehensible – it is perceived as being a deeply sinister development…

 

From the conventional point of view (which is everyone’s point of view) this is a development that is both inexplicable and utterly malign – it is an evil to be resisted with every means at our disposal. We are – when this happens – pronounced by those who have the official authorization to make this sort of pronouncement to be suffering from ‘clinical depression’, which is said to be an illness like diphtheria or smallpox. From the point of view of the model that we are looking at here however neither anxiety or depression is  ‘sinister’ or ‘wholly negative’ sort of a thing, and certainly neither can be equated to a physical illness which is caused by some sort of pathological agent such as a virus or a bacterium. On the contrary, it is through the pain of seeing – in whatever indirect or occluded way – that we aren’t at all who we take ourselves to be (and that this was an utterly mistaken view) that we come closer to remembering who we really are.  Seeing through the false is the prerequisite of seeing the truth, no matter how painful that might be, and the pain we endure is certainly no reason to avoid seeing the truth – the truth is after all not a ‘bad’ thing, it’s just something we could never have imagined…

 

If everyone we came across were disposed towards supporting us in remembering ‘who we really are’ then this would make all the difference in the world but this is not the way it works – that’s not the way it works at all. To experience profound and painful disillusionment with the game (that no one recognizes as a game) is a tremendous opportunity, more tremendous than we could ever imagine, but neither anxiety nor depression (nor any other crippling disturbances to the life of the FSOS) is seen as any sort of an opportunity at all – all the talk is of ‘recovery’ or ‘being cured’, which is code for ‘returning to a wholehearted belief in the game that no one sees as a game’. If things were left to the proper authorities the opportunity would be crushed unceremoniously and we would be led to understand that there is something wrong with us – we would be led to understand that everyone else is well (in the way that they see the world and themselves) but that we are unwell. This has of course always been the way things are when the consensus reality has been called into question.

 

It isn’t the onset of anxiety or depression that is unaccountable but rather why some of us get disillusioned with the game (against our own wishes) whilst others don’t. If someone doesn’t develop a crippling neurotic condition this doesn’t mean that they’re not living life on the basis of a false sense of self – we’re all in the same boat there – it just means that they’re still sleeping soundly! So the question becomes, why do most of us sleep on soundly, obliviously, whilst others – apparently against their wishes – are called upon to painfully wake up to the true nature of their situation? This is the real mystery…

 

We now come to what is called ‘psychosis’ and how this relates to the model we are exploring here, but before we do that we could say a few more words about this question of ‘who we really are’ as opposed to ‘who we assume we are within the context of the game we are playing without admitting that we are playing it’. The assumed ‘sense of self’ that we’re all so familiar with (or most of us anyway) is such an extraordinarily limited sort of a thing – it’s fantastically limited, but we just can’t see that. The assumed SOS is made up of limitations (i.e. statements about what we’re not) rather than actual context, even though saying this does not make any sense at all to the rational viewpoint, which is the only viewpoint society cares about. We are constructed out of restrictions, out of denials, out of prohibitions, even though we don’t (and can’t) see it like this. When I say “I am this” (which sounds positive to us) I am at the same time saying that I am not everything else, whatever that ‘everything else’ may be (and I don’t actually know that). I have therefore reduced the ‘range of possibilities’ to virtually zero; I don’t see what I have just excluded in order to arrive at this positive statement – I don’t see what I have had to ‘throw away’ and – what’s more – I don’t care either because all my attention is on the ‘defined world’, which is an abstraction created by the thinking mind.

 

By making something ‘definite’ (i.e. by making it ‘this-but-not-that’)we exclude Wholeness, in other words, and by doing this we imagine that we have obtained something real, something that is tangibly true and ‘objective’. But when Wholeness is excluded – as it must be in order to define anything – we obtain nothing. Or rather, we obtain a skinny mind-created abstraction which now looks like a real thing to us (because we have excluded Wholeness from our awareness) whilst what is truly real has been placed ‘out of bounds’ for us. We can no longer relate to or have any connection to reality itself, and instead can only believe in the images that the thinking mind produces for us, which includes ‘the image of myself’, which is the assumed ‘sense of self’ that we keep talking about. I now have no way of relating to or connecting with reality as it is in itself and if by accident I did ‘run into reality’ then it would show up the basis of my experience of ‘being here in the world’ (which is the assumed SOS) as being a mere abstraction, something that is not there at all but only seems to be there when we look at the world in the peculiar narrow way that the thinking mind makes us do. Both the cut-and-dried world we believe so unreflectively and the black-and-white idea of myself that I place so much reliance in are shockingly  revealed as being insubstantial mind-produced phantoms – the ground is ‘cut away from under my feet’, in other words.

 

This brings us to the nature of psychosis. Using Stan Groff’s terminology, we can say that al psychotic experiences, without exception, are due to ‘holotropic intrusions’. The Whole manifests within the realm of the fraction that had up that point arrogantly considered itself to be the Whole, when it was no such thing. What happens when Indivisible Wholeness starts to show itself in the fractional world of the assumed sense of self? How are we going to relate to this occurrence? It is Everything and our entire world (never mind us) is nothing more than a mind-created abstraction, something like a cartoon or an ad on a subway wall. As far as we were concerned the Whole of Everything doesn’t even exist – the thinking mind has made it unreal, even though it is the only reality. We didn’t really think that the Whole of Everything ‘didn’t exist’ of course (as we have already said) because we have our ‘substitute’ for it, which is the image that we have in our minds of reality and our place in it. So when the substitute gets shown up as ‘only a substitute’ and the real thing sudden enters our little world, what are we going think then? This is like the Buddhist story of the frog in the well who doesn’t believe that the ocean could be bigger than his well until he goes to see the ocean one day and his head explodes…

 

To say that this eventuality comes as a tremendous earth-shattering shock is far too mild and feeble a way of putting it – it is Indivisible Wholeness itself we are talking about here, and what are we to compare this with? What happens to us when we try to cling to our mind-created world in the face of Indivisible Wholeness? And yet our trained experts in the field of mental health will tell us that what is going on is merely due to ‘chemicals misbehaving in our brain’ (or some such story), and that our extraordinary perceptions when we’re suffering from ‘psychosis’ don’t really mean anything at all really…

 

 

 

 

Invisible Aggression

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It’s something we don’t ever seem to see or appreciate in any way but every time two people meet there is always  some kind of ‘power struggle’ going on. So-called ‘communication’ occurs in accordance with a pre-established power-structure. We all know that there is a power hierarchy going on in society and that those persons with high status can wield authority over those with lesser status (or perhaps no status!) but what I’m talking isn’t so much that but a type of ‘confidence’ thing which determines who can push their reality on someone else. This is a contest that goes on (in most cases) without us without realizing that it does and that’s why it might seem strange to suggest that it is such a basic part of human interactions.

 

One reason we don’t usually notice this power struggle going on because most of us have already tacitly agreed to buy into the same consensus reality, and once we have agreed to do this then obviously there is no more struggling! This is like saying that when the ancient Romans conquered a country then there was peace – this is perfectly true but we shouldn’t let the existence of this peace (the Pax Romana, as it was called) blind us to the fact that it was achieved by aggression. When the Roman Legions entered your country this was not a peaceful thing! The same is true with regard to the ‘peace’ that prevails in the consensus reality, the version of reality that we have all agreed to believe in – there might be no more struggling going on but this doesn’t mean that the situation isn’t the result of aggression.

 

When we agree with aggression then that aggression straightaway becomes invisible and if we agree to the structure (whatever it is) that was there beforehand without ever noticing that we have actually ‘agreed’ with anything then this creates the very compelling illusion that there was no violence, no aggression involved. When we meet the consensus reality we almost always do agree with it instantaneously and the reason we do this is because there is a type of trickery going on. The trickery is that the consensus (or ‘tacitly agreed-upon’) reality isn’t presented as a ‘version’ of reality, or an ‘interpretation’ of reality but simply as ‘reality itself’. The aggression that we’re talking about here isn’t by any means overt therefore, but rather it is something very sneaky. It’s so sneaky that we never see it happening – we don’t see ourselves as ‘agreeing to go along with a particular interpretation of reality’ but as ‘agreeing with reality as it actually is’, which is a very different thing indeed.

 

If I go along with reality as it actually is in itself then of course I don’t see this as me ‘caving in’ as a result of some sort of act of aggression – I see it as me being sensible and well-adjusted. Not to go along with reality would be a form of maladaptedness; we could see it as a pathological form of maladaptedness even. But if it is a ‘version’ of reality that we are automatically going along with then even though it could still be a form of useful (or even necessary) adaptation – particularly if it’s the dominant version – this doesn’t alter the fact that we have just been beaten or subdued in what amounts to a covert power-struggle. The aggression isn’t up-front and so we don’t recognize it as such, but it is aggression none the less. What we are calling the ‘consensus reality’ is disguised aggression therefore and because it is there is always going to be a flip-side of suffering and misery involved. When we cave in to aggression always results in suffering because we have lost our autonomy, and it is impossible to hand over our autonomy without suffering the consequences. We might ‘want a peaceful life’, but there is inevitably a price to be paid for this type of ‘peace’…

 

In one way, we need hardly go into the reasons why ‘handing over our autonomy’ is inevitably going to result in suffering. My autonomy isn’t just some minor attribute of my being, it’s who I am and so if I hand this over then I’m handing everything over. It’s not a thing that we can afford to relinquish, no matter what we might think that we’re gaining as a result. In a one-to-one relationship with another person ‘handing over my autonomy’ would mean that I am letting that person determine everything about me, because they are more aggressive, more powerful than I am. I am letting them ride rough-shod all over me and I have agreed to this arrangement because it’s the only way I can get any peace. The aggression in the situation will become invisible to me just as soon as I adapt myself completely to their way of thinking but this does not means that I am going to be happy as a result. I am going to be very far from happy – I’m going to be in a state of profound unhappiness, whether or not I am willing to acknowledge the fact. I have, after all, achieved ‘peace’ at the price of betraying my own true self…

 

It’s as if ‘who I really am’ doesn’t actually exist – it certainly isn’t acknowledged as existing by anyone involved! We have pushed it to one side; we have acted as if it doesn’t matter. This is after all the aim of all aggression, all violence – to get rid of the opposing viewpoint, to get rid of anything that stands in the way of the aggressor. In the hypothetical case that we have just been discussing, I get peace by identifying totally with my aggressor’s will, so that it now seems like my will. This way there is no longer any conflict, there is no longer any struggle, any fighting. But even when I do identify 100% with my aggressor’s point of view, so that my separate will, my separate point of view, no longer seems to exist, this doesn’t mean that who I really am has somehow ceased to exist. My true self is still there even in its absence – it’s just that it now manifests as pain!

 

Our relationship, as socialized human beings, with the ‘consensus reality’, is exactly analogous with the hypothetical scenario that we have just been talking about. Our situation is exactly analogous to an abusive relationship, even though we can’t see it as such. We can’t see it as such because we no longer have any connection with our true selves – that’s how effective the process of socialization has been. When we have adapted ourselves to the consensus reality then there is no other reality as far as we are concerned; if we came across the true (or unconditioned) reality we would not recognize it – we would reject it or run away from it as if from something completely alien to us. The same is also true for ‘who we really are’, the same is true for ‘our true nature’ – if we came across it we would not be able to relate to it in any way, such is the extent of our alienation from ourselves…

 

So when we have been effectively socialized, and have accepted the consensus reality as the only reality there ever could be, then the ‘true self’ (or our ‘true nature’) is absent. It has been gotten rid of. But in its absence it is still present – it is present in the form of pain. Absence of being (or absence of our true nature) is always pain. We reject and attack this core of pain as much as we can, of course. Either that or we repress and deny it as much as we can, which is the other possibility. We all tend to opt for one strategy or the other – either we adopt the strategy of ‘acting out the pain’ by directing our aggression outwards towards others or we repress the pain and act – therefore – aggressively towards ourselves. As a collective, our undying commitment and enthusiasm towards passing on the consensus reality to all new members of society can be seen as ‘the acting out of our unacknowledged inner pain’ therefore, and if we do experience the pain self-doubt or anxiety or lack of confidence in ourselves, etc and we blame ourselves for this (for being somehow weak or a failure) then this is the very same aggression, only in this case it is being directed at ourselves.

 

Our inner ‘core of pain’ isn’t just how we get to know about the loss of our autonomy, the disconnection from our own true nature, it is what our own true nature has now become for us. This is another way of saying that our pain is legitimate and cannot be attributed elsewhere (i.e. either to circumstances or to what other people have either done to us or not done for us). If therefore we go looking for our true selves this pain is what we will find! If we want to be authentically ourselves, or be ‘true to ourselves’, then we will have to ‘be’ this pain! Needless to say, this is the very last thing we want to do – we want to get shot of the pain not ‘own it’, or ‘be it’. Our every instinct tells us to get rid of the pain in any way that we can and when we can’t do this, and when the pain becomes chronic and unendurable, then we go to seek professional help to rid ourselves of it. The pain is now made into a ‘technical problem’ and technical solutions are sought, be this through medication or be it through rational therapies. We apply all of our resources to fixing the problem of the pain and this is – of course – the very antithesis of ‘owning it’. We’re busy disowning it as hard as ever we can…

 

Everyone jumps on this ‘fixing’ or ‘curing’ bandwagon of course because its seems so obviously the right thing to do but the ‘fixing of the problem of the pain’ in what is called neurotic mental illness is actually nothing more than a renewed effort to eradicate our true nature. We couldn’t do it the first time around so we’re coming at it again, with new and better techniques… And yet if our first attempt to eradicate the true self caused such misery, what new and hitherto undreamt of dimensions of pain await us when we put our white coats on and start getting all technical and scientific about it?

 

 

 

Art: William Kurelek (1929-1977) I Spit On Life