Our consciousness is controlled by compulsive external determinants which compel us to react to them on a full-time basis. When our consciousness is controlled in this way then reacting is all that we know – reacting is then the beginning and the end and we can never go beyond it. We can’t see beyond reacting and we don’t even understand that there is anything beyond it.
Another way of putting this is to say that our consciousness is controlled every inch of the way by the thinking mind and that when we are controlled every inch of the way by the thinking mind then we are completely lacking in freedom. Freedom is the one thing we can never have when we are under the Dominion of Thought – we don’t even know what freedom means, even if we do talk about it all of the time. Thought – we might say – is the utter absence of freedom disguised as ‘freedom’.
We don’t know that we are being controlled because – generally speaking – we think that we are the thinking mind. This is why the prison is invisible to us, this is why we don’t understand what it means to be ‘controlled without knowing that we are being controlled’; it’s a simple enough idea, but we just don’t get it (or if we do get it, we certainly don’t get it in relation to ourselves).
The problem is that we assume that these compulsive external determinants are us and just as long as we keep on thinking this then will never see that we are being controlled. Everything seems hunky-dory then, we have no cause to suspect that anything is amiss. ‘Why then would we want to know?’ we might ask at this point, ‘maybe we might even be better off continuing in this way, particularly if it seems that there aren’t any real problems arising as a result?’
There is a problem with the setup as it stands however, it’s just that we don’t see it – we don’t see that we are being controlled by external determinants that are not ‘anything to do with us’, and neither do we have any awareness of how this invisible lack of freedom might be backfiring on this. Our unawareness of the true nature of our predicament doesn’t mean that we are immune to its consequences however – we incur suffering as a result of being in this ‘enslaved’ state and although we aren’t generally in touch with the precise nature of this suffering it is there all the same, waiting for its chance to unfold and ‘show itself’ to us, which it will do sooner or later.
The question ‘Maybe we would be better off not knowing that we are being controlled?’ is an ironic one, really. How could we lose our freedom (which is the most essential thing we have) and yet expect not to suffer in some way as a result of this? Freedom goes deep – it goes deeper than we might imagine it to. Without freedom we cannot ‘be’, without freedom we are not ‘free to be’, and so we simply don’t get to be! It’s not just that our true nature cannot thrive in the absence of freedom; it is necessarily excluded! Freedom – we might say – is who we are.
When there is no freedom there can be no ‘unconditional being’ and unconditional being is the only type of being there is! If there’s no freedom then we can only exist in the way that the All-Determining System of Thought says we can, and this type of ‘obedient or compliant existence’ has nothing to do with who we really are. Conditioned existence has nothing to do with who we really are; control always annihilates ‘being’. Control only allows what has been chosen or selected to exist (i.e. it only allows what has been said by the system to be ‘lawful’) and whatever is said or asserted is not us. We are what has not been said, and cannot be said. Whatever is ‘said or asserted’ is the System of Positive Knowledge, and the System of Positive Knowledge will not ever permit us ‘unconditional existence’. It can never grant us that…
This brings us to the point where we might want to ask ‘What are the signs and symptoms of having no freedom and yet not knowing it?’ How, in other words, does this odd state of affairs actually manifest itself in reality? Given that our lack of freedom is invisible to us (since if we don’t know that there is such a thing then we won’t miss it) how can we become aware of it? We can best characterise the process that is taking place (in the background, so to speak) by saying that it involves a progressive narrowing of our world along with a progressive inability to be aware of this narrowing (we can’t be directly aware of it since the ‘narrowing down’ is precisely what defines our capacity to know or perceive anything in the first place). Because this ‘narrowing’ is the same thing as ‘the denying of who we really are’ it will inevitably become manifest sooner or later however – it will become manifest to us as a type of spiritual ennui, in terms (we might say) of a ‘semi-repressed sense of all pervading meaninglessness’.
In the Purposeful Realm (which is the world we live our lives in when we are being unknowingly controlled by the aforementioned ‘compulsive external determinants’) the pain of meaninglessness ‘loads onto us’ without us being able to see the pressure that we’re under for what it is. We are being ‘choked out’ as regards our ‘sense of meaning’ but we’re not directly facing this pain. The pain or suffering does not show itself where it is (i.e. right in the core of us) but rather it is displaced onto the external world where it appears as ‘drama’. The more ‘choked out’ we are with regard to meaning or spaciousness in our ‘inner world’ the more drama there will be in our external lives therefore. This drama may manifest in terms of our social interactions or in terms of what is going on in our lives, or it may go no further than our own thinking – we will in this case be plagued by the curse of ‘overdramatic thinking’ (or ‘neuroticism’).
The pain we’re talking about here (the pain of meaninglessness or ennui) manifests as ‘lack of peace’ in other words, and the curious thing about this ‘lack of peace’ is that it’s not necessarily experienced by us as suffering – although of course it can be. Lack of space in the interior world always manifests as increased activity in the Exterior or Purposeful Realm. Oddly however, we experience this ‘lack of peace’ as something potentially worthwhile, as something that is potentially fruitful, and for this reason we automatically ignore the downside of it all. ‘Drama’ – in the sense that we’re talking about here – means two things: it means ‘us getting our own way’ and being validated as a result. And, naturally enough, it also involves us not getting our own way and feeling painfully devalidated instead. Because we’re looking at everything with ‘rose-tinted spectacles’ however we don’t see the ensuing drama as containing ‘equal amounts of validation and devalidation’, as all dramas do. We’re blind to that fact – we need to be blind to that fact if we are to carry on playing the game!
This doesn’t mean that we can’t ever do anything if we’re not ‘unfree on the inside’ – it doesn’t mean that we have to be helpless and passive and just ‘go with the flow’. Action isn’t the same as drama – drama is where we do what we do in order to obtain validation and avoid de-validation, whereas action is where we simply act, without any thought of validation or de-validation. There is no drama involved when there’s no ‘striving for personal gain’ – there’s no displaced excitement either, either of the euphoric or the dysphoric variety. Freedom is not a passive state but the only truly empowered one; peace is not ‘a repressed state of being’ but rather the origin of all effective action. In drama everything is about how the action in question is impacting on me; it’s not really about what is done or not done, what is said or not said. It’s all about the ego being either pleased or displeased, whereas action really is about what it says it is about. Action is sincere, in other words. Anything we do for dramatic effect can never be properly effective – it’s not meant to be either, it’s meant to be perceived as being effective, which is a different kettle of fish entirely. It’s pure theatre.
People quite regularly say, in discussions on medication, that they wouldn’t want to lose their ‘reactivity’, which we often perceived as being the thing that puts the ‘Zing’ into our actions. We tend to imagine that life will be flat and boring without our reactivity, which is the same thing as thinking that life would be flat and boring without all of our constant dramas! Actually, however, it is our reactivity that is ‘boring’ – what could be more tedious than being 100% engaged in ongoing empty drama, after all? Drama is exhausting and devoid of interest both at the same time! Not only is reactivity/drama ‘boring’, it is a – much more to the point – pure undiluted suffering. Drama is suffering but we just can’t see it as such. We can’t see it as such because we are hoping to get some good out of it (just as an old-time panhandler might hope to get a few big nuggets of gold at the bottom of his sifting pan one day). There is no good to come out of what we’re doing however, no matter how long we stick at the panhandling. Where drama is concerned we are always going to come out empty-handed!
To get actual meaning in our lives we have to go beyond reactivity and reacting, we need to go beyond ‘being controlled by compulsive external factors without knowing that we are’. In the simplest possible terms, finding the meaning in our lives involves reconnecting with our actual sincerity, which is precisely what we lose when we allow ourselves to be controlled without realising that we are being controlled. Reconnecting with our sincerity does not of course mean that life gets any easier; the reverse of this is true – everything gets a lot harder straightaway! When it does mean however is that no matter how difficult the situation we find ourselves in, we never lose our connection with actual meaning. There is absolutely zero meaning in ‘unconscious suffering’ (which is when we are being ‘preoccupied by the ongoing drama’, or – as we could also say – when we are ‘being controlled without knowing that we are being controlled’) but the gift in consciousness suffering is that the meaning immediately comes back to our lives…
Image: taken from consciousreminder.com