Month: September 2018

Aggressive Therapy

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There is a sort of ‘basic principle’ in social psychology that no one seems to talk about, least of all social psychologists! This principle has to do with the inherent aggression of human communications; or more specifically, the inherent aggression associated with the consensus reality that none of us ever acknowledges as ‘a consensus reality’  This lack of recognition is unsurprising enough – as we have already pointed out, aggression becomes invisible when everyone tacitly agrees to go along with it! In this case, when we have all ‘gone along with it’, were anyone to put up their hands and say ‘Hey, there’s a whole lot of aggression going on here!” then we can look at them in genuine bewilderment and completely fail to see what they’re coming from. The consensus reality is something that we have all agreed to so automatically that we never see ourselves agreeing; if we did see ourselves agreeing to it it would no longer be ‘a reality’, it would simply be ‘something that we have agreed to’. It would simply be a convention, a convenient system for dealing with things. It’s not just an accident that we never see ourselves agreeing, therefore – that’s how the whole thing works.

 

There is however a way in which we can suddenly become extremely sensitive to this all-pervasive invisible aggression and this is when something happens to us to destabilise or call into question our sense of ourselves. When we don’t have to question our ‘assumed sense of ourselves’ then we can get along just fine and we won’t ever have to pay any attention to our ‘sense of ourselves’. This is like never having to notice an internal organ such as the appendix, until it becomes dangerously inflamed and painful. Then we become aware of it, but in a way that we really don’t want to! When our assumed sense of ourselves is destabilised or ‘called into question’ (which is a perfectly legitimate thing to happen!) then we are no longer on an equal footing with everyone whose assumed sense of themselves is still ‘100% intact’, or ‘fully functional’. A whole new world is opened up for us when we find ourselves operating in the consensus reality with an ego construct that is not ‘100% intact’, that is not ‘100% functional’ – we find that we straightaway become extraordinarily sensitized to power and the use of power in human relations. We may not know (we probably won’t know) that this is what’s going on because the distress involved stands in the way of any clear awareness but, unbeknownst to us, we have now transitioned out of the nice and comfortable consensus reality to the extent that the aggression involved in human communications has now become visible to us for the first time. We have actually become more conscious than most of our fellow human beings – we’re conscious that everyone else is ‘playing a game’, even if we can’t articulate this awareness.

 

Few people can understand this however, or even come close to understanding it, unless they themselves have had a prolonged experience of being ‘an outsider’ to the consensus reality in the way that we have just described. If you happen to be someone who has never had their ‘sense of self’ seriously undermined, then the idea that this can happen (and just how bad it feels when it does happen) is practically impossible to grasp. This is a world that only a minority of people know about, and it just so happens that this is a group or section of the population that no one ever listens to. Very obviously, the only way to have a voice in the consensus reality is to be a fully paid-up member of the club, so to speak. The world becomes very different place when we get unceremoniously ejected from the CR; it becomes a very different place specifically because we have become so intensely vulnerable to other peoples’ ‘aggressive interpretation of reality’, if we may call it that. We then come away from almost every human interaction feeling bad about ourselves in some way, feeling that we have failed or are a failure in some way, and this is simply because within the terms of the consensus reality we are indeed failing, and there’s no question about it! If the consensus reality is the only reality – which is necessarily how it is represented to us – then the only conclusion we can come to is that the fault (whatever that fault might be) lies in us and nowhere else.

 

For someone who is in this situation it is as if everyone we meet has a kind of power over us, probably without realising that they do, and this interpersonal ‘power differential’ invariably puts us at a disadvantage. Having one’s ‘assumed sense of self’ compromised, for whatever reason, is to be permanently at a disadvantage, socially speaking. Socially speaking, we are at a permanent disadvantage and it is also the case that others will exploit this disadvantage, either consciously or unconsciously. Most of us will of course deny that this sort of thing goes on on a widespread basis; equally, most of us would immediately deny that human beings are constantly playing games of one sort or another and find it extraordinarily hard to disengage from doing so. We don’t see ourselves playing games – we acknowledge that there is such a thing as ‘a psychological game’, but consider this to be somewhat of a rarity, and certainly not something that we would be doing. For anyone who suffers from social anxiety or low self esteem (for example) what we have just described would be very familiar territory indeed.

 

Every interaction between one human being and another has a context which we assume without realising that any assumption has been made. The ‘assumed context’ of the consensus reality has all the more power associated with it because of the vast number of people who automatically subscribe to it. To be up against this is to be up against a the biggest brick wall in the world, to put it mildly, particularly since we are now in a position where we find ourselves taking on everyone else’s criticism (either open or implied) of us. Everyone else is ‘right’ and we are ‘wrong’ on all counts, so it seems. As we have said, we are ‘wrong automatically’.

 

There is no getting away from this all-pervasive underlying dynamic – there’s no sidestepping it. If there is such a thing as a’ consensus reality’, then such a reality is inevitably going to be aggressive, such a reality is inevitably going to be ‘denying’ of all other possible contenders on the field. That’s how it works, that’s how the consensus reality gets to be the consensus reality – by steamrollering all the opposition out of existence without even acknowledging what it is doing. By the same token therefore, each one of us – inasmuch as we are subscribing to the consensus reality (and how could we not be, given that it is a precondition of being a member of society, which we can hardly afford not to be) – is going to be automatically (or ‘unconsciously’) denying of anyone else’s reality if it does not match the ‘assumed context’ that we ourselves are operating within. Anything that doesn’t match the assumed context is automatically wrong, after all. Anything that doesn’t match the assumed context can’t help showing up as an anomaly. This is the thing about games – if something disagrees with the rules of the game then – on the terms of that game – it is absolutely wrong, it is ‘wrong without question’. That’s how a game gets to be a game – precisely by doing this!

 

What we talking about here is of course the ‘state of being psychologically unconscious’. To be ‘psychologically unconscious’ means having our way of seeing the world (i.e. ‘our context of understanding’) supplied for us so that all sorts of things become either unquestionably true, or unquestionably untrue. When we see everything in terms of the context of understanding that has been supplied for us (without us knowing or suspecting that it has been supplied for us) then we get to live in a world of absolutes, world made up of things that are either unquestionably true or unquestionably not true, and that’s what secretly we want. That is the ‘benefit’ (so to speak) that being in the unconscious mode of existence provides us with. Essentially, we are 100% orientated towards ‘running away from uncertainty’ and this is precisely what the unconscious mode facilitates for us. It facilitates us in ‘not questioning’.

 

When we live in ‘unconscious mode’, therefore, we are not really interested in ‘seeing things as they might be in themselves’ – that’s the last thing we are interested in; that’s the last thing we are interested in because the way things actually are in themselves is always uncertain! What we are interested in is ‘sorting everything out so it gets to be slotted into its proper box’; we are interested in ‘organising or analysing all our various bits of experience in accordance with the system, in accordance with our established way of organising and analysing things’. If something is resistant to being organised or processed or sorted-out in the proper way, then this comes as an affront to us. We’re not interested in finding out why whatever it is isn’t fitting into the right box or ‘doing what it should be doing’, we’re just interested in the closed question of ‘how to get it to behave the way we think it ought to’!

 

In one way therefore, just as long as we are living safely within the consensus realm, then we don’t have to worry ourselves with any of this. As far as we’re concerned everything that we have just discussed is pretty obscure, pretty irrelevant. We can just get on with what we’re already doing, we can get on with ‘playing the game that we aren’t acknowledging to be a game’. We are after all perfectly happy living in the ‘unconscious mode’ (whilst at the same time not having our attention drawn to the fact that we are). The only time it does all become relevant is when we suddenly find ourselves excluded from the consensus reality and on the other side of the brick wall, so to speak. Then, it all becomes very relevant indeed! Another time at all becomes very relevant is when we are working or interacting with people who are in this situation, and when it is therefore incumbent on us to work or interact with them without inadvertently devalidating their reality, without inadvertently devalidating their experience. If we aren’t able to avoid devalidating (without meaning to) the people we working with, then we are clearly not doing a very good job of being a therapist, or a mental health worker!

 

The big problem is of course that our culture ‘trains people up’ to be therapists not by supporting them in their personal journey of growth to become more conscious (and therefore more sensitive) but by filling their heads with models and data and theory and skills and techniques, none of which are any good for anything other than furthering our ‘unconscious aggression’ (which is the aggression of ‘me trying to enforce my reality on you, without me even knowing that I’m doing this’). There’s no such thing as ‘an unconscious therapist’! There’s only an ‘unconscious enforcer of the consensus reality’, which is to say, ‘a person who have enforces the official story without ever realising or suspecting that it is only a story’!

 

Alan Watts (in his book Psychotherapy East and West) calls this unconscious enforcing of the CR ‘social adjustment therapy’ and says that this is always the result when the therapist stands with society against his client, rather than the other way around. Social adjustment therapy, Alan Watts points out, necessarily lacks all integrity as a therapy –

Whenever the therapist stands with society, he will interpret his work as adjusting the individual and coaxing his ‘unconscious drives’ into social respectability. But such ‘official psychotherapy’ lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing. On the other hand, the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism. This does not mean that he has to engage directly in political revolution; it means that he has to help the individual in liberating himself from various forms of social conditioning, which includes liberation from hating this conditioning — hatred being a form of bondage to its object.

Obviously ‘social adjustment therapy’ (or ‘official psychotherapy’) lacks all integrity – it lacks all integrity because it doesn’t have the slightest bit of regard for the the clients’ true well-being! Social adjustment therapy is aggressive therapy, and aggression (towards anything at all) always works against the health of the individual. There’s no way to ‘aggress’ (or ‘force’) someone to be mentally healthy, in other words! We’re actually manifesting our own ‘lack of mental health’ (our own ‘unconsciousness’) by trying to do this.

 

This is a collective failing in our part – by failing the person we are working with we are failing ourselves. There are no winners here, there is no one being helped. And yet mainstream culture (which is always the most unconscious portion of society) remains firmly ‘in charge’ of saying what mental health is and what it is not; we have therefore put all of our psychological well-being in the hands of those most unsuited for the job! The answer to the ongoing global crisis in mental health is never going to come from the mainstream and yet it is only when we are fully paid-up representatives of the mainstream that we are allowed to voice an opinion. No one else has a voice, after all…

 

 

 

 

 

Life In The Box

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So let’s suppose – just for the sake of the argument – that we have all been tricked or short-changed in the way that we have just been talking about. Let us assume that we have been pawned off with ‘a dummy reality’, a reality which a pale and tasteless imitation of the true thing. And – after all – since the way thought works is by ‘oversimplifying reality so as to make it agree with its categories’ (i.e. by steadfastly ignoring anything that doesn’t agree with them) it’s pretty much a dead certainty that this is the case! Assuming therefore that this is so, we can then ask what the psychological consequences might be of us being the victims of such a trick.

 

All we need to do – in order to arrive at some conclusions in this direction – is to think about all the ways all the things we can’t do in the fake reality. For example, we can’t be genuinely curious about anything, that capacity is lost to us. The reason why we can’t be curious any more is simply because there is nothing in the artificial world to be curious about! When reality is simplified down by only allowing that aspect of it which agrees with our assumptions (our’ evaluated criteria’, our’ categories’) then of course there’s nothing of interest in it. The only content that’s there is the content that we ourselves have put in it, so how can this possibly be said by any stretch of the imagination to be ‘interesting’?

 

When the content of my world is only what I myself have allowed or permitted to be there then my relationship with this predetermined content cannot be said to be one of ‘interest’. Curiosity cannot come into it; curiosity has no place in this world. They can be a kind of relationship to the prescribed content (obviously enough, since we do relate in some way to the artificial or oversimplified world) but it’s a relationship of a very different type. We can try to explain it by saying that it is somewhat akin to the relationship of miser has his goal, or the type of relationship an accountant has with his figures.

 

In the case of the miser (or the accountant) involved in an exercise in stock-taking there is a definite type of motivation involved – on the one hand there is the pleasure that comes with getting everything to add up properly, and on the other hand there is the annoyance and frustration, and ultimately despair, that come about when we can’t get the accounts to balance properly. This general setup is characterised by the fact that there is a’ ideal state’, which, if we meet it, will bring us great satisfaction – the target has been met, the criterion fulfilled. In short, the rule has been successfully obeyed. In the narrow or closed world, when the rule has been successfully obeyed then this is the ‘ultimate good’.

 

In the case of the miser, we may say that when he checks up on his stash and discovers that it’s all there, then this is the ideal. The discovery that’ ‘all my gold is there’ is what creates the pleasure or satisfaction. By the same token, when our miser checks his stash of gold and discovers that it’s not all there (or, even worse, he discovers that it’s all gone) then it is pain instead of pleasure that we get. What greater despair could there be than the despair of the miser who one day discovers that his stash has been stolen? All the pleasure that he has obtained as a result of ‘successful counting’ is now turned on its head and becomes its exact opposite. The more we have gloated, the more bitter is the despair when what we have been gloating over is one day taken away from us.

 

With regard to the accountant checking his figures, we can say that when the figures all balance out (when the debit column balances the credit column) then this (within the very narrow and rigid terms of reference of the accountancy game) is the ‘ultimate good’ – nothing trumps this, nothing feels better than this. And again – by the same token – when the columns don’t balance out then this is the ultimate disaster, the ultimate ‘disagreeable outcome’. This is the accountant’s nightmare. We can see from this discussion that simplifying reality (into a neat exercise in accountancy) automatically results in the situation where there is an’ absolute good outcome’ and the corresponding ‘absolute bad outcome’. If we weren’t simplifying reality down in this way and there couldn’t be any such thing as ‘an absolute bad/good outcome’ – this can only happen when we take a very narrow view of things. When we take the broad view, then all the so-called ‘absolutes get relativized (which is to say, they get turned into ‘non-absolutes’).

 

In a nutshell, what we talking about here are games, and the process of ‘turning games into reality’. When we turn reality into a game then straightaway we have the possibility of euphoria, along with the corresponding possibility of dysphoria. We all know this anyway of course – we all know that games contain the possibility of feeling euphoric and the corresponding possibility of feeling dysphoric. That’s why we play games, after all – we’re hoping to feel triumph rather than despair. This is what games are all about! There is a motivation for playing games therefore, but this motivation – as we have said – has nothing at all to do with curiosity! It can’t have anything to do with curiosity because there’s nothing to be curious about in the game. There’s nothing new in games (they can’t be anything new in games because a game is all about following the rules). The motivation in games have to do with arriving at a predetermined ‘known’ state that is nominated as being, for some reason, the ‘optimal one’. We can’t really ask ‘optimal for what’ because there is no answer to this; the only answer is ‘optimal for the game’. A game doesn’t acknowledge anything outside of it – if it were to do so then its integrity as a game would be fatally compromised.

 

This is of course exactly how thought works – it works by ‘creating a box and then not looking outside of it’. That’s the only way thought can work: there could be no such thing as ‘thinking’ if we didn’t do this! Before any logical process can happen we have to ‘limit the field’ (we have to ‘simplify the universe’, in other worlds). If we didn’t then we wouldn’t be able to create a definite model or theory of the world; we wouldn’t be able to define anything and if we can’t define things then we can’t think about them! It’s very hard thinking about something if you don’t know what that ‘something’ is it’s very hard thinking about radical uncertainty.

 

Representing our situation to ourselves in oversimplified way is of course a perfectly legitimate thing to do – if we didn’t discard all the irrelevant details then we’d never be able to get on with the job at hand. If I’m cooking a meal for example, and I allow myself to get interested in all sorts of random things that don’t have anything to do with the preparation of the meal, then this isn’t going to help me in my task. In all probability, the meal is going to turn out to be completely inedible. So when it comes to specific tasks like cooking food then it’s not just’ legitimate’ to disregard the relevant, it’s completely necessary. It’s necessary for the sake of doing whatever it is we’re doing! This isn’t to say that’ oversimplifying the universe’ is legitimate and necessary in any absolute sense therefore; only that it is necessary or legitimate in relation to this very specific goal.

 

This of course turns out to be the critically important point – this is exactly where (in one sense, anyway) it all goes wrong! Instead of being aware that our oversimplified view of the world (our ‘box’) is only necessary in relation to the pragmatic goal that is to be achieved (which means ‘keeping our awareness or some part of our awareness outside the box, so to speak) we get caught up in having the oversimplified version of the world on the table the whole time, for no pragmatic reason at all. We then get caught up living in a box without knowing that we are (without knowing that the box is a box) and we continue living our lives in this vastly oversimplified basis. Our superficial view of the world has now (for some obscure reason) become absolutely legitimate, absolutely necessary. And the other way of putting this is of course to say that it has now become absolutely illegitimate (or taboo) for us to ever depart from the oversimplified view, or admit or infer in any fashion that this might be a possibility.

 

On the face of it, we might say that this is a completely bizarre development – what on earth is there to gain from it? What could possibly be behind such a strange thing? On the face of it, from a psychologically naïve point of view, this might be a counter-intuitive, if not to say completely incomprehensible, development, but the point of view that is not psychologically naïve, it all starts to make sense rather quickly. This is a very basic human trait after all – hiding, running away, going into full retreat from openness. This is the operation of fear. When we ‘limit the field’ certain things pop into existence, as we have already mentioned. They’re not real things of course, but they are ‘things of a sort’. As we’ve already said, the possibility of definition comes into play. Definition doesn’t really exist, it is just something that’s imposed, not something that exists in itself, but when we’ limit the field’ (which again, isn’t actually a ‘real action’) then definitions (and the defined world) nevertheless comes into apparent existence.

 

When definitions come into play then – needless to say! – things get defined. All of a sudden they are all these definite things jostling around together, bouncing off each other, interacting with each other. Rule-based processes come into being, ‘logic’ comes into being, linear transformations come into being, orderly systems come into being. A whole ‘kind of’ world pops up – the world of mechanical order. This is like a company or organization coming into being, complete with all its policies and procedures. The point is therefore that – according to its own logic – the logical system has every reason for being there, every reason for existing. And yet – at the same time – the truth of the matter is that there’s no reason for it being there, no reason for it existing. Of course there is no ‘real reason’ for the logical system being there; it’s all just an artificial imposition, it’s all just a game. It’s only important from its own perspective. It’s an artificial imposition that has become ‘necessary’; it’s a game that has become real.

 

If we wanted to be more specific about what is happening here, we could say that what comes into apparent being as a result of us creating an oversimplified version of reality, as a result of ‘limiting the field’, as a result of ‘being constrained within a box that we cannot see to be a box’, we end up with the defined or conditioned self, which is the quintessential ‘game that has become real’. This is, naturally enough, a particularly hard thing for us to understand. It’s hard for us to understand because, we are almost entirely at the mercy of the framework which tells us what is real and what is not real. This framework tells us that the defined self is real (because definitions and defined things are real) and it implicitly tells us that anything outside of the framework (which is who we really are) is real. This is how frameworks (or ‘boxes’) work after all – by implicitly denying that there is anything outside of the box.

 

‘Living in the box’ means being disconnected from ‘mind at large’, to use Aldous Huxley’s term. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t any such thing as ‘mind at large’ (or ‘unconditioned consciousness’) – it just means that we are pragmatically disconnected from it. It just means that we are profoundly alienated from it. In pragmatic terms it’s exactly as if unconditioned consciousness does not exist – for us it doesn’t. The nonexistence of unconditioned consciousness (or ‘mind at large’) is however an entirely ‘subjective non-existence’ – it is a manifestation of our blindness. When we live in the world of definitions it is impossible to see beyond this world – it’s impossible to see how a ‘defined thing’ has no actual inherent thing-like nature, only the ‘apparent thing-like nature’ that we ourselves give it.

 

 

In the defined world (i.e. the ‘conceptual reality’) there is no place for curiosity as we have already said, and this ‘anomaly’ ought to tip us off that there is something artificial about it, something about it that is ‘not right’. How can we live without curiosity, after all? What degraded form of life would that be? And yet, for the most part, we don’t notice anything amiss. We take it as normal. On the whole, we don’t ‘smell a rat’ and the reason for this – as we have said – is that curiosity gets substituted for by an entirely humourless ‘concern with obtaining the positive outcome’. This ‘concern with outcomes’ which keeps us so busy, keeps us so ‘consumed’, that we simply never have the time to notice that we have no actual curiosity about life any more. This is the way the whole world has gone – we’re all ‘obsessed with outcomes’, we’re all ‘humourlessly concerned with goals and ego-competitions’, and no one seems to think that there’s anything wrong with this. It’s actually a sickness. It’s an abdication of our true nature; it’s an abdication of our true (open) nature in favour of ‘life in the box’….

 

 

 

Therapy Or Brainwashing?

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There is something particularly odious – in my view – about the way in which we in the West approach what (until very recently) used to be called ‘mental illness’. We may use a slightly different terminology now, preferring to talk in terms of ‘conditions’ rather than ‘illness’, but our approach is still the same. There is something very unpleasant – toxic even – in our attitude, and this unpleasantness, I think, stems from our fundamental lack of respect towards the experiences of the people we, as mental health professions, are dealing with.

 

In a nutshell, we’re arrogant; we’re arrogant because we are so convinced that our ‘neat and tidy’ rational way of looking at the world – which we did not arrive at ourselves but rather passively absorbed from the cultural milieu (in a ‘default’ way that requires no effort on our part) – is the right way that we can’t even come close to empathizing with other, often very different, perceptions of reality. This is precisely where our unconscious arrogance lies therefore – it lies in the fact that we (by some special virtue of our own) know what the right way to view reality is. The great philosophers of the past may not have known what the right way to look at reality is, but somehow we do…

 

Not everyone is guilty of this unconscious disrespect of course. The point we are making is that the ‘disrespect’ is systematic – it’s built into whole structure of things and so it’s always going to set the tone. It’s always going to be the dominant influence. Disrespect is always systematic where there is an inbuilt ‘power differential’, when one group of people have more power given to them by society than another, and this is exactly the state of affairs in psychiatry, or in the mental health industries in general.

 

A crude but nevertheless very effective way of determining whether a power differential exists between the professionals whose job it is to work with people suffering from mental health conditions and the people themselves is to ask the question ‘Who is the most successful in society’s terms, a consultant psychiatrist or clinical psychologist (for example) or a psychiatric patient? We’re not supposed to ask this question, of course. It is very politically incorrect suggest that patients might be granted lower social status in the basis of the fact that they are patients (i.e. on the basis that they are not, in most cases, highly qualified professionals but are, rather, sufferers of a mental health condition); it is politically incorrect to suggest it but that doesn’t mean that it is true. We all know that it is true…

 

We don’t want to admit that the actual patients themselves may not have the same social status as the healthcare professionals who are trained to treat them but at the same time we all know very well that this is the case. Society operates purely on the basis of status and prestige, whether we want to admit it or not. Society operates on the basis of the power gradient that exists between those of high status and those of low, and it would be foolish in the extreme to pretend otherwise. Society isn’t a ‘free’ kind of an affair; it’s coercive, in other words. It’s based on following rules….

 

When you as a patient look across the desk at the mental health professional who is dealing with you it is evidently the case that you are looking at someone who has more power than you; this isn’t just power in terms of how we usually understand ‘social status’, it is power in the sense of ‘Which one of us has the authority to say what the proper way to see the world is?’ Power is a basic part of all human interactions – every time we interact with someone we are involved in a struggle (whether we are conscious of it or not). We are involved in the struggle to see who has the power to define the ‘consensus reality’ that is to be negotiated in the interaction. This contest can be very subtle, or it can be very unsubtle indeed! When we are involved in an argument, for example, then this is an unsubtle example of ‘the struggle to see who can define reality’! Our current way of understanding mental health conditions is a perfect illustration of ‘something that has been defined by the powerful’ – when depression (just to give one example) is defined as ‘a mechanical malfunction of the brain’ then this is ‘disrespect’, this is ‘an abuse of power’.

 

There are times when human interactions are not based on power, it is true, but my point is that they are comparatively rare. Interactions that are not based on power are interactions that are based on love, and love – as we all know – is not usually part of the equation! All interactions that are based on the roles we are playing, or the social personas that we are acting out, or on the unquestionable rules that exist in the social game, are predicated upon power. All games full stop are predicated upon the use of power, and we’re all playing games of one sort or another almost all of the time, whether we realize it or not. To not play a game is to be ‘totally honest’, and how often can we afford to be totally honest in a human interaction? When we see our therapist or our psychiatrist or our psychologist the chances are very much that we’re playing a game here too. We’re playing ‘the patient / therapist game’, as Ram Dass says in the following passage-

Then I was a therapist and so many hours a week I had somebody sitting on the other side of the desk, and he was playing patient, I was playing doctor I would run thru my list of theories as he would run through his list of symptoms and we’d compare them and match them up and, you know, it wasn’t enough. It didn’t quite gel.  It was as if psychology had a reason to be as defensive as it was.

The patient / therapist game is a very comforting and familiar one to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that it’s therapeutic! Whilst a good old-fashioned power hierarchy has everything to do with the way we organize social groups (in baboons as much as humans) it has nothing to do with therapy. Therapy isn’t an exercise in power-play, it isn’t an exercise in ‘doing what you’re told’ (or ‘doing what you’re expected to do’). A power gradient between two people (or two groups of people) equals disrespect. The use of power IS disrespect! That’s the whole point – what the use of power comes down to is ‘My way of looking at the world is more valid than your way’. ‘Might is right’, would be another way of putting this. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, what we call truth is simply ‘an interpretation’ and the one who has the most power is – naturally enough – the one whose interpretation passes into law! This is why Nietzsche talks about ‘the impossibility of truth’ –

Against [empiricism], which halts at [observable] phenomena—‘There are only facts’—I would say, no, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.

‘Everything is subjective [for example, a figment of your reasoning mind],’ you say; but even this is interpretation. The ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented … [Is] it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? …

In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is … interpretable, otherwise it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings—‘Perspectivism’.

Those who have the power have the right to say what is true and what is not true. It is not just that the powerful ‘decide upon the agenda’, the powerful decide on what game we should be playing (or to put this another way, the powerful decide what reality should consist of, what it is and what it isn’t). Inasmuch as society is a power hierarchy therefore, it is the top of the hierarchy that tells us what reality is, and we don’t get to question it. We don’t even know that our perceptions of reality have been defined for us! So if we’re in this situation of not being aware that our perceptions of reality have been defined for us (because we’re ‘socially adapted’) then it is inevitably the case that we will impose the very same assumptions we have passively absorbed upon everyone else we meet, without realizing that we are doing this.

 

This is of course a very important thing to be aware of, but when we’re talking about therapy, it becomes even more critical, even more poignant. Being unconsciously socially conditioned means that we are incapable of engaging in ‘honest human interaction’ – the only type of honest human interaction is after all that interaction which takes place without an assumed context, and because we can’t SEE our assumed context, that just isn’t possible. We’re not aware that we’re seeing the world via the lens of our social conditioning and this (as we’ve just said) means that we’re imposing that conditioning on everyone we meet, without knowing that we’re doing it. We’ve been set up as virally-infected ‘zombie-units’ whose job it is to unconsciously propagate the ‘officially approved view or interpretation of reality’ whilst imagining the whole time that we are acting as independent agents!

 

This situation is good from the POV of ‘perpetuating the socialized view of reality’, but not good from the POV of anything that might properly be called ‘therapy’! ‘Therapy’ and ‘brainwashing’ aren’t supposed to be the same thing, after all, and yet we confuse the two all the time… If we’re working in the field of mental health therefore, then the only way we can AVOID imposing our unexamined assumptions on everyone we meet is by taking the trouble to ‘examine’ them (and thereby examine ourselves). This isn’t what happens though – instead of becoming less programmed when we get trained as therapists or doctors or psychologists we get more programmed; instead of becoming more broad-minded we become narrower, as is always the way with specialization…

 

 

 

Art: Taken from bbc.com/ a-tour-of-melbourne-street-art

 

 

 

 

The Great Deception

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We start off in life with what looks like a wide, wide road ahead of us – a road that branches off in all directions, a road that could potentially lead us anywhere at all. As we make our way down this road however it closes in on us more and more until before very long all we’re left with is the one very narrow track that has been allotted to us, a track that only takes us in the one direction, whether we happen to like it or not. This process is called ‘becoming an adult’.

 

In one way it is true that a huge field of possibilities lies ahead of us when we start off in life. Of course this is true – life itself lies ahead of us!  The road we’re on is as wide as life itself and there’s no telling where it will lead us. Something happens to narrow the possibilities that are available to us however, without us ever realizing that any ‘narrowing of possibilities’ is happening to us. This is what we might call ‘the imperceptible erosion of life’. We all know that this process happens, even if – naturally enough – we may not want to focus on it too much. We instinctively know that life shouldn’t be like this – that it shouldn’t be a ‘narrowing down of possibilities’ – and yet somehow it is. Entropy sets in, and makes the pattern of our life ever more predictable.

 

In one way this is a perfectly natural process – entropy isn’t something that human beings invented, after all. This ‘narrowing down’ occurs as a result of us getting trapped in our own habits, our own opinions, our own beliefs about ourselves and the world. We cherish these opinions and beliefs of ours, and yet at the same time they strangle us slowly but surely. The sense of security they engender blinds us to the fact that we are fashioning our own prison, brick by brick. We can call this a ‘natural process’ because it happens as a result of our own doing therefore – no one forces us to build a prison cell of belief for ourselves. We are our own very willing jailers. We get trapped in our own mental habits, which solidify around us and block out the wider view. In The Dawn of Tantra (1975) Guenther and Trungpa speak of this process as ‘going astray’ or ‘falling into error’ –

The process of transformation which we have described is one of growing narrowness and frozenness.  We are somehow tied down to our senses, to the ordinary mode of perception.  We dimly feel that something else might have been possible.  If we try to express this situation in traditional religious terms, we might say that man is a fallen being.  But here he has not fallen because he has sinned or transgressed some commandment coming from outside him, but by the very fact that he has moved in a certain direction.  This is technically know in Buddhism as bhranti in Sanskrit and ‘Khrul-pa in Tibetan, and is usually translated as “error”.

In another way however we could say that this ‘narrowing down’ (or ‘going astray’) process also has an external component – an aspect to it which is ‘artificial’ or ‘unnatural’ in the sense that it is ‘imposed on us from the outside’. This aspect of the narrowing-down process is enforced upon us by an external agency, independently of what we may want, and this ‘external agency’ is more generally known simply as society. The social world – inevitably – has some kind of an idea regarding ‘who we should be’ and ‘how we should live life’ and it pushes us in this direction. Society doesn’t just have ‘some kind of an idea’, it has a very clear and precise idea!  This is essentially what society is – it is a set of templates, a set of ideas regarding ‘who we should be’ and ‘how we should live life’.  What else would society be, after all?

 

Even though it is obvious enough in one way that society ‘externally determines us’, in another way it is not so obvious at all. When we start off in our adult life and we are looking at the social world and all that it offers us we have the impression of there being many diverse possibilities being dangled in front of us. The choices we are faced we are too many, if anything! We are if anything bewildered by the sheer range of possibilities and the road ahead of us seems very broad, at this stage. There is a sneaky trick being played on us here though – this is the so-called ‘salesman trick,’ described here by Douglas Flemons (1991) –

As any good hypnotist, magician, or comedian knows, the offer or availability of freely choosing between alternatives at a given contextual level brings the particularities of choice into the foreground of conscious awareness. This necessarily relegates to the background (i.e. out of awareness and out of the realm of conscious choice) the higher-level context or premise determining the range and meaning of the offered alternatives. The presence of choice (between particularities) at one level masks – and in some sense precludes – choice (between premises) at a more encompassing level.

We feel so empowered by all the apparent choices that are being offered to us that we completely fail to see that whatever option it is we end up going for, we’re always going to end up with the same old thing. The ‘same old thing’ that we’re talking about here is ‘the socialized life’, which always means going down predetermined tracks, tracks that have been ‘decided in advance’ for us. It doesn’t matter what role we take up, it’s still something that is being imposed upon us from the outside. We’re conforming to the template that’s been provided for us by society no matter what choices we make; we may think that we’re in the driving seat but really it’s the other way around, society is controlling us.

 

A good way to think about this is in terms of ‘playing a game’ – there can be lots of roles that can be played in the game but it is nevertheless always the same old game. On the level of ‘what roles shall I select’ there can be tremendous choice, but all of these so-called ‘choices’ come down to the same thing – we are choosing to play the game. All the apparent choices (and all the excitement that comes with that apparent freedom) boil down to just the one choice. We are again victims of ‘the salesman trick’. So what’s wrong with this, we might ask? What’s wrong with choosing to play the game, if we want to?

 

The answer to this question is ‘nothing at all’ – if we actually know that this is what we’re doing, that is. This is where the trick comes in though – we’re never told that there is anything else. We’re never given the option of ‘not playing the game’, in other words, and this is a very big deception. It’s not just ‘a very big deception’ either – it’s the ultimate deception. It’s the archetypal deception. This is the deception that was played upon Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, the deception that is inherent in the concept of the Matrix. In the ancient Gnostic myth, it is the deception that is the Demiurge employs to trap and imprison the soul-sparks of mankind in the False Creation.

 

 

It’s fine to choose to play a game if we know that this is what the choice is, in other words, but if we don’t know that it is only a game (if this hasn’t ever been explained to us) then what exactly does this mean for us? If we are being offered a substitute version of reality (a ‘Toontown version’ which is incomparably narrower than the genuine thing) and we don’t know that we have been tricked in this way (‘tricked out of our birthright’, so to speak) then how are we to feel about this? Is there any way that we are actually going to feel OK about being tricked like this, if we knew? Are we really going to feel OK about spending our lives in some two-dimensional sterile Toontown, and missing out thereby on the true reality itself?

 

 

 

Mindfulness Myths

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Mindfulness is packaged and sold as some kind of marvellous thing that can (in a scientifically provable way) reduce stress, increase resilience, immune response, concentration, clarity of mind and productivity, and plenty more besides. All of this hype is however selling mindfulness short in a very important way.  That mindfulness or meditation can result in all of these benefits are undoubtedly true but to focus on the benefits in this way is to miss the point. Worse than merely ‘missing the point’, we are going down the wrong road entirely. We are looking at mindfulness in terms of outcomes and this is putting the cart in front of the horse.

 

What we are doing here is promoting mindfulness as yet another tool in our arsenal of tools, and when we do this we get everything backwards. The reason we’re getting everything backwards when we do this is because we’re putting all the emphasis on the wrong place – we’re putting all the emphasis on ‘how we can work more effectively (or live less stressfully) within the given system’ and this isn’t what mindfulness is about. Mindfulness isn’t about becoming better adapted to the system that we happen to find ourselves in – it’s about being able to question that system, it’s about becoming independent from it. Mindfulness (or meditation) isn’t a tool that we can focus or direct narrowly where we want it – it’s not something we can control in that way at all. It’s more like a crate full of sweaty dynamite; we know that it’s liable to explode at some point, but we don’t know what the result of the explosion will be, and we certainly can’t direct it.

 

Another way of putting this is to say that mindfulness isn’t something that we can use to enhance the performance of ‘the self we think we are’. That’s what we are generally told – we’re told all the benefits and that – naturally enough – sounds very attractive to us, but this isn’t really the way it works at all. These ‘benefits’ come from ‘letting go of the self we think we are’, which means that the benefits we like the sound of so much can’t really be for that self. The benefits in question only come from relinquishing this shallow idea that we have of ourselves. As Ajahn Chah says,

 

If you let go a little you will have a little happiness. If you let go a lot you will have a lot of happiness. If you let go completely you will be free.

 

It’s not just that we have to let go of various things that we are attached to, the things that we either love or hate, things that we might want for ourselves or are afraid of. Simultaneously, we also have to let go of ‘the one who has these attachments’. Letting go means letting go of our idea of ourselves. This is what ‘letting go’ is really all about – it’s not a question of giving up this or that bad habit in order to benefit ourselves; it’s a question of letting go of the illusion of who we think we are (which is actually our only reason for doing anything, including ‘trying to let go’). We let go of the notion that there is someone there who has to let go! In short – we let go of everything, including our scientifically-proven ideas of benefiting ourselves.

 

‘Letting go’ isn’t a tool. It isn’t something we do in order to obtain a particular result or get a particular benefit. If it were, then it wouldn’t be ‘letting go’! Obviously enough, tools are the very opposite of ‘letting go’. This is all alien to our Western rational/purposeful way of looking at things – tools are all we know, control is all we know. If something can’t be used as a tool then we just not interested – we call such things ‘useless’ and we have no time for them. Saying that we’re only interested in tools (or that we’re only interested in ‘control’) is of course just another way of saying that we’re interested in looking outwards, at results, rather than looking inwards at the question of ‘why we should want those results’. The more the emphasis there is on results (or control) the less the emphasis there is going to be on ‘reflecting upon our basic assumptions’. When all the emphasis is on control then there is no emphasis on ‘why we want to control’; when all the emphasis is on tools then there is no emphasis on thinking about why it is that we need them!

 

We are not a philosophical culture. There’s no way that anyone can say that we are – that would be ridiculous! All of our attention is directed outwards onto outcomes. It’s all about outcomes; it’s all about purposeful doing. Quite possibly, we are the least introspective people ever to walk the face of the earth – we’re all about the image that we have of ourselves, and the banal never-ending business of protecting / promoting this image. We are not all about questioning our basic assumptions about who we are and what life is all about. Such philosophical considerations are for fools as far as we are concerned! We see ourselves as being practical and ‘hard-headed’ – the truth is rather that we are obtuse and at the same time perversely proud of it. We are working hard to benefit ourselves – even if the ‘self’ we are working to benefit doesn’t actually exist…

 

Our immensely conservative, control-based attitude is nothing to boast about, nothing to feel good about. It’s only ‘fear turned into a virtue’. As Sogyal Rinpoche says, it’s not just possible, it’s nearly 100% certain that we will spend our entire lives hypnotized by the mass-produced images and ideas and never coming close to finding out who we really are. This is what our civilization is geared towards, after all – it’s geared towards protecting us from the terrifying challenge of having to question our basic assumptions. It’s because we are running away from looking at our assumptions about life that we are so focussed on control, so focussed on ‘looking outside of ourselves’, and our culture is fully supporting us in this endeavour. The world outside of us is only a reflection of our inner attitude, after all. If society not only supports but enforces our running away from ourselves it is because – deep-down –this is what we want it to do.

 

Genuinely looking within is a game-changer of the very highest order. There is no game-changer like it, and there never could be! Krishnamurti called this ‘the only revolution’ to distinguish it from all of our superficial political or social revolutions. Awareness of what’s really going on inside us comes as a total revolution and the reason it comes as a total revolution is because we’re questioning the bedrock of all our beliefs; we calling into question the lynchpin upon which the whole world turns – the idea we have of ‘who we are’. If this idea goes then everything goes – this is the biggest ‘paradigm shift’ there ever could be. There could be no stranger and more unexpected thing for us than seeing what the world looks like when it ISN’T seen from the POV of the control-loving, tool-using rational-purposeful self. This is like ‘the universe next door’ – it’s there all the time but we’ll never see it. We’ll never see it because we’re not at all interested in seeing it, and we’re not interested in seeing it because it’s not any ‘use’ to us!

 

We’d be going against all our conditioning to take an interest in life as it is when its not lived on behalf of the narcissistic compartmentalized self. As far as we’re concerned we’d be going against ourselves, since all we know of ourselves is our conditioning. Society – we might say – requires us to be narcissistic consumers. It wouldn’t hold together otherwise – society needs us to be narrowly self-interested and not-at-all interested in ‘the bigger picture’. It relies on that. What we call ‘society’ (or perhaps ‘the system’) is the game we play to protect ourselves from seeing that this superficial self-image that we have passively identified with isn’t who really we are. The function of the game is to distract us from seeing the truth, in other words. This is of course the function of the game – what else would it be, other than ‘distraction from the truth’?

 

Living on the basis of the narcissistic compartmentalized self (or self-image) isn’t a happy situation however – there’s no actual joy in it. There’s no joy or happiness possible in the game because it’s only a game – we need hardly say this! It’s all happening on a false basis, it’s all happening on the basis of ‘let’s pretend’ and so there’s never going to be any fulfilment for us here, only anxiety, depression and alienation. To imagine, therefore, as the purveyors of corporate mindfulness do, that the chronic unhappiness that afflicts the game-playing self (the ‘self-who-we’re-not’) can be ameliorated by the judicious application of standardized meditation techniques is ridiculous – the only cure for the unsatisfactoriness of our situation is for us to wake up and see that we aren’t at all who or what we think we are. The only ‘cure’ is the radical one. No one actually wants this, however. No one wants a radical paradigm shift. Who would benefit, after all? Who’s going to make a profit?

 

 

 

 

 

Living In The World Of Foregone Conclusions

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Living in the world of our thoughts is a drag, as Alan Watts would say. What could be more dispiriting than always staying within the remit of our tired old thoughts, which are – when it comes down to it – nothing more than a bunch of recycled, tawdry old memes? Our conventional way of looking at things tells us that everything that everything good is to be found here, within this ‘realm of the known’; it tells us – more implicitly than explicitly, of course – that all possibilities are to be found here. And yet there are no possibilities here, not really – only the endless rehashing of the same old categories, which will never get us anywhere…

 

The world of our thoughts is ‘the world of foregone conclusions’, when it comes down to it – every thought, every idea every concept, is ‘a foregone conclusion’. It’s a cliché – it has nothing new to bring to the table!  All of our mental constructs are clichés in this way; all of our mental constructs are ‘foregone conclusions’. As Krishnamurti says ‘thought is always old’. What could be more fundamentally dispiriting than always going around on the same old tracks therefore, whilst trying to make out to ourselves that actually we’re headed for some grand destination? Of all the malicious tricks we could play on ourselves, wouldn’t this be the worst? And yet this is what we do just about every day of our lives – we go around in circles and tell ourselves that we’re going somewhere.

 

We tell ourselves that we’re ‘getting somewhere when we work towards a ‘foregone conclusion’ (or ‘known outcome’) and so does society as a whole. Conventional wisdom tells us that working towards a foregone conclusion is the best way to do things (if not the only way to do things); conventional wisdom tells us that we should always be working towards a goal, towards a known or defined outcome –that’s called ‘being in control’ and being in control of our lives is what it’s all about, or so we are led to believe. Being in control is good, just as being out-of-control is bad, but what we don’t see (and don’t show any sign of seeing) is that being in control all the time means never leaving the world of foregone conclusions…

 

We’re led to believe that the right way to live life is always to be working towards a known outcome (to be ‘always in control’) but being in control of what is happening (or of where we are going) isn’t what life is about at all – that’s something else we are talking about here, not life! We’re talking about some sham version of life, some sad mockery of life, not the actual thing itself. The actual thing isn’t ‘a drag’, isn’t a dull and wearisome matter of ‘working towards a known outcome as if we were actually interested in that. Quite frankly, that’s an appalling thing to have to do; it is – if we were to be honest – a form of torture that we are subjecting ourselves to. It is however a form of torture that we are, both on the collective and the personal level, constantly validating for ourselves.

 

Psychologically speaking, working to a foregone conclusion (or ‘known outcome’) is a form of living that is not living – it is in fact not so much ‘life’ as ‘the avoidance of life disguised as life’. Working towards goals the whole time is an avoidance of life because life is not a foregone conclusion! Life is not about ‘working towards a goal’, no matter what we might have been told, and no matter how many times we might have been told it. Life has absolutely nothing to do with our goals, as we would surely realize if we were ever to reflect on the matter. My goals are my own affair, they are important only inasmuch as I say they are, and I would be foolish in the extreme to think otherwise. Goals are not life and life is not a goal.

 

Intuitively, we all know this – we all know deep down that life is a mystery and that living life is to embrace this mystery on its own terms rather than putting it into neat little boxes of our own design. ‘Life is a movement towards an unknown goal’, says Jung, and not a movement to a goal that we ourselves have made up! When we move towards a defined goal or predetermined outcome then this equals ‘running away from life’; being always orientated towards goals equals ‘running away from life’ because we are thereby avoiding all uncertainty, all ‘risk’, and life is nothing else but uncertainty, nothing else but ‘risk’. All psychotherapists know this – all psychotherapists know that if you put all the emphasis on avoiding risk (which is the ‘sensible’ thing to do) then you will avoid life too. As Jesus says in John 12:25, ‘He that loves his life shall lose it; and he that hates his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.’ [King James Bible]

 

So – just to repeat the point – the movement towards a known outcome isn’t life but the avoidance of life, and yet this is what our collective ‘wisdom’ tells us we should be doing. The template has been laid down in front of us and all the sign-posts have been put in place and nothing is left for us but to adhere as best we can to this template. The route-directions have been etched into our minds via the process of socialization and the only job remaining for us is to follow the route that has been mapped out for us. The behavioural reinforcement involved here is immense and it would be foolish of us to try to pretend otherwise – the more slavishly we conform to the template, the closer we follow laid-out route the more ‘success’ we stand to gain. The more we diverge (or deviate) on the other hand, the more certain is our ‘failure’ (within the terms of the game that has been thrust upon us). The more successful we are the more social reinforcement we receive (needless to say!) whilst the less successful we are, the more negative reinforcement (or negative kudos) we will incur. This is how society works, as we all know.

 

Who could possibly be brave enough to stand up against this type of pressure? What would it take for us not to fall in line with everyone else, and strike our own path, in flagrant contradiction of everything we have been taught? What would it take for us to let go of this business of working our way towards the foregone conclusion which – as we all know very well on some level – is terribly, terribly uninteresting? The ‘factor’ that would inspire us to ignore the game rules (and give up all the ‘safety behaviour’ that goes with them) is itself profoundly mysterious and not therefore amenable to logical analysis, whilst the factor promoting conformity is as plain as the nose on your face! We don’t need a PhD in psychology to understand what type of a process is involved here – we see it at work in every school playground…

 

There is a strong tendency at work for human culture to become more homogenous or less diverse and to a very large extent we can attribute this to advances made in the technology of communication; we are all much more ‘hooked up’ in this information age of ours and whilst there are obviously advantages to this there are also significant disadvantages – disadvantages that are for the most part much visible. The disadvantages of being in ‘lock-step’ with millions and millions of other human beings is that the behavioural reinforcement factor that we have just been talking about has now arguably become more powerful than at any other point in our history. This ‘conformity to the mental and behavioural template’ is at this stage – without any doubt at all! – the Number One threat to mental health that we face in our lives. It is ‘the Number One Threat to mental health’ because it reinforces to an extraordinary degree the tendency we already have which is the tendency to avoid the intrinsic uncertainty of life by following pre-established patterns of living life.

 

We need only look around us to see this – we live in a world that is governed by hypnotic images, images whose purpose is to tell us that our happiness and fulfilment are to be found ‘on the outside of us’, in the collectively-generated consensual hallucination that Jean Baudrillard calls ‘the realm of the hyperreal’. Hyperreality is by its very nature immensely hypnotic, overwhelmingly hypnotic – it is a drug like no other and we are pretty much all addicts!  We’re addicted to seeking life on the outside of ourselves in the realm of the hyperreal, in what we could call the ‘Image World’. We are – we might say – all addicted to looking for happiness and fulfilment on the outside of ourselves in this collectively-validated version of life where everything is all about ‘moving successfully towards socially-sanctioned goals. These goals contain – we imagine – the possibility of our happiness, the actualization of our very personal dreams (which is to say, the expression of our true uncompromised individuality).

 

This is the most ridiculous joke of all time however, if only we could see it! It’s a ridiculous joke because these ‘dreams’ were implanted in us in the first place and have therefore nothing whatsoever to do with our ‘true individuality’; actualizing them only increases the insidious control of the system that is regulating and defining our consciousness. Seeking the goals we have been told to seek empowers the system and disembowels us; the consensus world (which is unreal) becomes all-powerful whilst we (who are real) lose every last little bit of our power or autonomy. The game we are playing is based on the denial of who we really are and yet we are led to believe that we are ‘celebrating our individuality’! ‘Go on, you’re worth it!’, says the ad on TV…

 

There’s no fulfilment, no happiness to be had in this ‘world that exists outside of us’. It should actually be necessary to say this – of course there’s no fulfilment or happiness in the world that exists outside of ourselves! Whose fulfilment or happiness would it be, anyway? Certainly not ours! It’s fulfilment / happiness that belongs to the world of images and the world of images isn’t real. The world of images isn’t real and if it isn’t real then there can’t be any happiness in it! There’s no one in this world that exists outside of us (obviously enough!) and because there’s no one in it there can’t be any fulfilment or happiness. Happiness and fulfilment have to belong to a real person – they can’t belong to an image in image world, they can’t belong to an act we’re putting on!

 

The Image World – which is the world that we have collectively agreed upon – is made up of ‘known outcomes’ or ‘foregone conclusions’. That’s all that’s in it. The consensus hyperreality world itself is a ‘foregone conclusion’ – it’s a foregone conclusion that nothing real is ever going to happen here. It’s a foregone conclusion that our search for happiness and fulfilment in the world of images is going to fail. Saying that nothing real is ever going to happen in the image world (which we do not of course see as ‘the image world’ but rather as the one and only true world) is equivalent to what Buddhist teachers such as Milarepa have said about the ‘barrenness of samsara’ (samsara being the deceptive world of appearances). Samsara or the world of appearances is the most barren of all environments, for reasons we have already gone into. No desert is as sterile as this! And yet we perceive it to be positively bubbling over with the most enticing of possibilities. We avoid seeing the terrible barrenness of the Image World and instead fixate our narrow attention on our games of loss and gain, saying that ‘such and such an outcome’ is supremely important and then feeling either good or bad depending up how skilful our controlling is!

 

But no matter how much effort we put into the task of ‘denying the barrenness of samsara’ (or denying the futility of the game we are playing’) this barrenness (or sense of futility) will always show themselves at some point and when they do they will show themselves in the form of a particularly bleak for of suffering – a form of suffering so bleak in fact that we will think of it as a curse, or – in a more medical idiom – as a pathology or sickness. But this supercharged suffering isn’t a curse, or a ‘sickness’ – it’s actually the awareness of the barrenness of the Image World (which is an awareness we have worked so hard to avoid) that we have thrown away with such force (and then forgotten about) coming back at us like a deadly boomerang of pain.

 

‘Avoidance’ doesn’t just mean running away from things, it also means running towards them! When we run full-tilt towards our goals, towards our desired outcomes (or ‘dreams’) then we are avoiding life; we are avoiding life because life – as we have said – isn’t a goal or a desired outcome or a ‘dream’. Or to put this another way, when we run full-force at this thing we call ‘winning’ we’re creating a boomerang; we don’t know that we’re creating a boomerang, for sure, but our ignorance of what we’re doing won’t stop it coming back and hitting us in the head! Both ‘running away from negative certainty’ and ‘running towards the positive variety’ equal ‘the game’ and the game equals evading every last trace of awareness of the Great Mystery that is life…

 

Art: Eduardo Martinez. Taken from creativeboom.com