Tag: Consensus reality

The Negative Approach

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The negative approach doesn’t reveal to us what is true or right, it doesn’t give us a path to follow, or ‘list the steps we need to take’. It gives us no map of the terrain, no metaphysics, no overview of what’s going on, or ‘what it’s all about’. It doesn’t do any of these things and that’s the whole point of it – the whole point of the via negativa is that it takes away whatever it is we think we know and gives us nothing in return.

The via negativa has never had very much in the way of mass appeal, therefore. It has never figured in any list of ‘what’s trending right now’! For most of us (for almost all of us) what we’re looking for is the exact opposite of this – we want to be given a path to follow, we want to be told what the steps are that we should take, we want an explanation of what’s going on and instructions as to what exactly we should be doing. We want it spelled out for us in nice black and white terms so that everyone can clearly see what’s true and what isn’t true, what’s right and what is wrong. We want all of that to be taken care of for us so that all we have to do is conform to whatever system it is that has been laid down for us.

In one way this seems reasonable enough, the desire to be guided in this way seems eminently prudent – think about all the mistakes we could make otherwise! Surely – we say to ourselves – there are wise people (or experts!) out there who can do this for us. It doesn’t (or at least it shouldn’t) take too long however for us to work out that there is a very big problem with this implicit demand of ours however, the implicit demand to be ‘guided’ or ‘shown the way’! It shouldn’t take us too long to spot the big problem with this because this is what has been going on for the whole of human history and it hasn’t ever done us the slightest bit of good. The desire to be guided by someone else translates – when it comes down to it – to the unhealthy willingness to hand over responsibility to someone (or something) else. We want someone else to ‘tell us what our lives should be about’, and that’s asking for trouble!

If we were to look at human history in psychological terms (rather than focusing on tedious accounts of the reign of Kings and Queens, or the dates pertaining to this battle or that battle) we would see that is only ever been one thing happening (albeit in many different guises) and that ‘one thing’ is the ongoing struggle to convert everyone else to seeing the world in the same way that the group we belong to does. This has absolutely nothing to do with any concern that we might have with that inconsequential little thing called ‘the truth’, and it has everything to do with the pursuit of power. Being the one ‘who gets to say what reality is’ is the ultimate expression of power, it’s the ultimate expression of power because it’s the ultimate form of control. If I get to be the one who defines how you perceive (or understand) the question of ‘What is reality?’ then I control you absolutely. Control doesn’t get any more ‘total’ than this…

Friedrich Nietzsche makes the comment:

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

When we have the power to determine which ‘interpretation’ is the official one (the only one that people ever get to hear about, the one we all have to go by) then we have complete control and – from a psychological perspective – this is what we all want. Control – we might say – is the ultimate commodity from the POV of the idea that we have about ourselves (i.e., the ego) because it is only because by being in control of how things are seen that this idea appears to be actually real. This makes ‘control’ not just important, but essential. If I have control (with regard to how things are to be seen) then I can use this to give myself high status, and anyone who is against me low status – within my own subjective sphere I can always make myself out to be ‘the good guy’ (or ‘the one who is in the right’) and this self-serving distortion of the truth is of course the classic hallmark of the everyday ubiquitous ego! We see it going on all the time…

On the personal level therefore, we have the power to tell ourselves whatever lies we want to and ‘get away with it’, and so this is what we – generally – do. We would like to extend this sphere of power if we could however and be able to control other peoples’ subjective reality too (if we could) and this is what lies behind the drive to wield power. This is why we (as egos) are forever playing nefarious ‘power games’ with those around us – it’s the natural progression of what we are already doing. Not everyone can succeed at this however and so we get this situation where we band together in groups, which vastly amplifies our ‘ability to distort reality and get away with it’. The bigger the group the greater the ‘power’ the group has and so our motivation – as ‘group members’ – is always to convert everyone else to see things the way we do, in ways that can be either subtle, or extremely crude. History bears witness to our ongoing attempts to control how reality is seen, therefore.

There are two complementary things going on here, we might say – there is the drive to be the one who defines ‘what is real’, and there is also the drive to conform to a convenient group identity so as to have our lives defined for us. In a crude way, we could say that there are ‘those who want to have reality defined for them’ and ‘there are those who want to do the defining’ (and enshrine their elite status within the set up that they themselves have thereby created). There’s not as much difference here as we might think, however – it turns out that it’s ‘all the one game’ (which is ‘the game of thought’, ‘the game of defining and being defined’). If I get to make up the rules of the game myself, which will of course be to my own advantage (as we all understand); if I define reality then you can be sure that I will do this in order to suit myself.

We might for example think of the Christian Church over the last thousand years or so – what better position could the Church put itself in than the position of being able to authoritatively say what life and death is all about, and cast themselves (conveniently enough) as ‘the exclusive mediator between God and Man’? It’s no surprise that the Church held on to this position for one thousand years or so or so – they were ‘the definers of reality’ and this brings serious perks. The Church Fathers thus demonstrated themselves to be consummate masters of the power game, and all in the name of saving souls!

The advantage gained here is entirely illusory, however. The one who wields power is just as hopelessly trapped as those who have been ‘disempowered’; the use of power is an evil to everyone concerned and there is no good outcome in it for anyone, despite what we all think. We think that this is the key to everything but it isn’t – the winner of the game is every bit as much a victim of the game being played as the loser is. That’s because the winner is – of course – just as much ‘defined by the game’ as the as the losers are; everyone playing the game imagines that playing successfully will allow them to ‘escape the game’ but it doesn’t. There is no ‘liberation’ to be had as a result of game-playing, no matter how well we play!

Power means that we get to take away the freedom of those less powerful than we are, the ones who are not as clever as us (or as lucky as us, perhaps) – they have to dance to our tune then. We’re in the coveted position of ‘being in control’; but the benefit here is an illusion, as we have just said – it’s an illusion because we’re tied into the arrangement just as much as everyone else is. We are being controlled by our own ‘need to be in control’, and so we have (paradoxically) given away our own freedom in the act of taking it away from others. The idea that there is this ‘supreme benefit’ in being a winner is ludicrous – the benefit in question is only nominal (which is to say, it only exists within the terms of the game). There is no freedom in a game, not for the winner or the losers! The only thing that benefits us – the only thing that’s worth anything – is freedom and no one ever became free as a result of exercising power!

The mediaeval Church got to say what reality is for everyone else, and it made sure to take up a privileged position in the hierarchy that it was responsible for creating, but when we look at it we can see that the members of the religious elite closed down reality for themselves just as much as they did for the population as a whole (who were given no autonomy, no voice, no influence, no ‘say so’). In recent times the game is changed of course – superficially, at least. Now, those with power have defined what life is all about in a different way – it’s not about God and the devil (or Heaven and Hell) anymore (and doing everything according to ‘religious rules’) but rather it’s about ‘buying and selling’, it’s about consumerism, it’s about ‘the law of the marketplace’. [The basic idea here being that happiness (or ‘well-being’) is a product to be bought and if we want to be able to afford it then we have to engage with the social game, and – essentially – sign our lives over to it.]

This is therefore another way of oppressing people therefore, and a very clever one at that. This is another way of having our freedom taken away from us without us realizing it. The ‘freedom’ we’re talking about here isn’t some vague wishy-washy metaphysical notion but something very concrete, something very down-to-earth, something very real. The freedom that has been taken away from us by having reality defined for us is quite simply the freedom to be something other than what we have been defined as being.

The freedom that has been taken away from us (via the masterful exercise of power) is the freedom to be anything other than what we have been defined by our society as being. But the rub here is that what we’ve been defined by society as being isn’t a real thing at all – it’s just a fiction that we have been persuaded to believe in. We might therefore think of various shortcomings or problems in society and tried to come up with ways to fix these problems, but this is beside the point entirely, once we see what ‘the collusion which is society’ is really all about. Society exists to prevent us from having any awareness of who we really are, any connection with who we really are. It just wouldn’t work otherwise – we wouldn’t have any interest in this artificial system of relations if it hadn’t sneakily substituted itself for real life (which is not and never could be defined or regulated). As Alan Watts says, “To define means to fix, and, when you get down to it, real life isn’t fixed.” The Defined World – and who we supposed are in that Defined World – is made up purely of ideas. It is purely and simply a manifestation of hyperreality and hyperreality operates by eliminating (or ‘denying’) the genuine article.

Any positive approach – without exception – does this; by their very nature, positive approaches always function by taking away our freedom. That’s why they are called ‘positive’ – that’s what ‘positive’ means, philosophically speaking. That’s how hyperreality functions – hyperreality functions by taking away our freedom and then telling us that it has given us something great. Positive reality – therefore – gest to exist by providing us with the illusion of freedom in place of the real thing. It gets to exist by ‘substituting itself for the real thing’ (which is to say, by substituting itself for ‘the negative or unstated reality’), by – in other words – ‘controlling us without us realising that we’re being controlled’.

Positive approaches are all about dislocating us from reality. To be guided or defined by any authority is to be hoodwinked, is (without exception) to be sold a fake reality. To be defined is to be the victim of aggression; it is to be exploited down to the nth degree. This business of ‘seeking to be told what life is all about’ (or ‘wanting to be the one who tells others what life is all about’, which is the same thing backwards) has been going on for as long as human beings have existed, and no one has ever benefited in the least bit from this. As we said at the beginning of this discussion, allowing ourselves to be hoodwinked by ten-a-penny ‘positive worldviews’ is what we absolutely ALWAYS do. It’s the only play in our playbook. The negative approach however is very different – the negative approach doesn’t take our freedom away, it returns it to us. The via negativa doesn’t compel us to identify with the social fiction – on the contrary, it shows up that cheap and unpleasant fiction for what it really is…




Life In The Generic World

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The Generic World runs on assigned meaning (as opposed to meaning that is innate, or inherent). We are – in other words – told what things mean in the Generic World. The meaning of our existence is imported from ‘the outside’, we might say. When we are told ‘what things mean’ then, in this process, we are very effectively made into prisoners – there is no better way of making people into prisoners than this. As actual individuals, we have been quite nullified.

There is no better way of making people into prisoners than by telling them what things mean and this is what we do all the time. We take a pride in telling recently arrived human beings what things ‘mean’, what reality consists of, what ‘life is all about’, and so in this way we pass on our lack of originality to the next generation. We pass on the prison to them, and we call it ‘culture’! This however only culture in the sense that it is the ‘culture of the prison’. Generic culture is always the culture of the prison…

When we are prisoners of the Generic World that nothing matters more to us than making sure that our offspring are prisoners of it too – ‘Well, my upbringing never did me any harm’, we say. We validate the state of being imprisoned and we want it for everyone. There is something frankly scandalous about the thought of someone not wanting to subscribe to the generic view of things, to the view of things that we all agree with. It’s as if we’re saying ‘Well – if I have to live in the Generic World then so do you!’  Only this isn’t a conscious attitude but an unconscious (or implicit) one – our conscious attitude is to validate the adapted modality of being, to say that it’s a good thing.

In terms of ‘group morality’ subscribing to the Generic World is the worthy and responsible thing to do – we get a pat on the back for this, we obtain the legitimacy that comes with being a member of the club. We have proved ourselves in this way, we have demonstrated our reliability and so we can be trusted. The converse is also true, of course – if we don’t sign up, or if, for whatever reason, we aren’t able to say the sort of things that we have to say in order to show as we are part of the group, then we’re left out in the cold. Not being a member of the group is immoral as far as the group is concerned…

The details or particulars of the Generic World have nothing to do with the truth, however – ‘generic’ (or ‘agreed-upon’) values and ‘the truth’ have nothing to do with each other! It’s all just a matter of spotting what everyone else takes for granted, and then taking it for granted too, in the very same way that they do. It’s all a matter of ‘working out what the game rules are and then following them as if you had been doing so all your life, following them as if you had always known them to be true…’ This is social adaptation in a nutshell – we have to forget that we were ever ‘un-adapted’, we have to obscure the fact as to the best of our ability. Nothing else is real but the game.

This is ‘an act of conformity’ rather than a ‘creative’ one; adapting to the template is what it needed rather than any actual originality. We create the Generic World via an act of mass conformity and then we ‘flip everything over’ so that conforming to the script that has been handed to us is ‘the great virtue’, and having our own individual take on things is ‘sheer wrongheadedness’. If we want to be truly accepted into the club then we have to fool ourselves along with everyone else; it is necessary for us to resolutely ‘turn our backs on the truth’. This act of ‘reality-denial’ is the price of admittance to the club.

We can’t ever let on that we’re conforming however, that wouldn’t do it all. On the contrary (as everyone knows), we are obliged to put on the show that this is what we really think all by ourselves, and that it isn’t the case that we are simply being coldly calculating in this regard (because we know what side our bread is buttered on). If we don’t sound properly sincere in our strenuous proclamation of loyalty to the generic values then this is the same as not conforming – we’re only pretending to conform in this case and so we’re going to be caught out. We’re not pretending sincerely enough…

So the situation is that – although we aren’t being true to ourselves – we have to pretend that we are. We have to pretend not just to others but to ourselves too – there must be no hint, on any level, that the show actually is ‘only a show’. We are copying from the template rather than being creative, and yet it is necessary that this act of mimicry present itself as being somehow ‘original to us’. We are reading from the script but we have to pretend that we’re being spontaneous; we are acting in a calculated way, looking for a very specific advantage, and yet we have to convince ourselves that we’re not. This is the tightrope we have to walk.

The Generic World is a very superficial kind of place, therefore. Everything has to exist on the one single level of meaning – if there were any other possible levels of meaning, or ‘levels of description’, then this would spoil the game. If there was ‘anything else’ then this would seriously distract from the effect. The generic world is a very bland one in other words, it’s a world that is entirely without nuance, entirely without individuality.  It’s a literal world. Or – as we could also say – the Generic World is the Image World, the world that is made up of two-dimensional meanings.

In the two-dimensional world of mass-produced literal truths – which is the world that thought creates – there can only be the one meaning for things,  the meaning that has been written down, the meaning that has been set down in law, the meaning that all right-thinking people subscribe to, and the consequence of this is that all other meanings are heresies that have to be dismissed, dangerous lies that have to be fought against. Everything is very obvious, very unambiguous in the Image World, and so the message is that we ‘just have to get on with it’. What we’re supposed to be ‘getting on with’ is entirely banal however – everything is always banal in the two-dimensional image world but we – for the most part – are too consumed by the game to ever notice this. The utter absurdity of ‘life in the Generic World’ is quite lost on us…




Image – wallpapertip.com




Image

Fully-Programmable Humans

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Ours is an age that specialises in the industrial production of fully-programmable human beings whilst at the same time generating the very persuasive illusion that it’s all about personal empowerment, personal freedom, personal choice, etc,.

It could be argued that we have always been subject to the invasive conditioning of whatever society we happen to have been born into and this is undeniable. It might also be argued – with some grounds – that personal freedom has increased dramatically over the last few hundred years. The grosser forms of enslavement and disempowerment would now be considered appalling anachronisms that no right-thinking person would tolerate for a second, but this visible progress could easily distract us from a more subtle form of bondage that has become both all-pervasive and extremely difficult to spot. We can explain how this could be by looking at what Douglas Flemons (1991) calls the Salesman’s Trick –

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.


The way we trick someone in this way, as Flemons says, is by offering them a profusion of trivial choices that capture their attention in such a way that they cannot see beyond them. When we can’t see beyond the domain that is composed of ‘choices that are only trivially different from each other’ then these trivial choices cease to be trivial – they become deeply significant and entirely worthy of our deliberations with regard to what choice we want to go with. The trivial issue becomes a big deal, in other words. Being fully engaged with what we have been provided with means that we are wholly oblivious to the bigger picture, and so what we’re talking about here is simple distraction.

Society empowers us to the extent that it offers us all these trivial choices therefore, but it is a phoney type of empowerment since what’s happening here is that we are being kept unconscious of what’s really going on. We are being granted the freedom not to see that we have lost our freedom, in other words, which is a freedom that feels good at first, since it is easy, but which takes us to a bad place in the long run since we are now lost in a pseudo-world that is made up entirely of issues that don’t really matter one way or the other. Once we look at things in terms of the Salesman’s Trick it becomes much easier to see that this is what contemporary society is all about. It’s not about anything else – only the provision of false and therefore entrapping freedoms. We are provided with false and entrapping freedoms which we compete viciously for (since all of these so-called ‘freedoms’ have to be paid for and only those of us who are successful in the game will be able to afford them).

In the past when society was much cruder in the way that it oppressed its members, it was relatively easy to see the lack of freedom; nowadays we have been so very effectively sucked in by the salesman’s trick that no one is going to see the oppression. We consider ourselves to be educated, sophisticated, cultured, capable of making our own choices in life, and so on and so forth, which makes it all the more difficult for us to understand that we have been made fools of. To see that we’re being taken for fools isn’t of course consistent with our idea of ourselves as being ‘empowered and autonomous individuals’, and so this is another reason for us not to see it (if one were needed).

The way the setup works therefore is that we are kept busy competing for a false type of freedom that we can’t see to be false. It is false because what it comes down to is ‘the freedom to choose between options that are only nominally different’. If the difference was significant then the freedom here would be real but this isn’t the case – all of our so-called choices come down to the same thing – we are choosing to play the game. Actually – however – we aren’t really choosing anything since we don’t know the game to be a game. In order for us to see the game for what it is we would have to be able to see beyond it and this is the one thing we can’t do! This is what the salesman’s trick is all about – distracting us from seeing that we have been cheated. We’ve been given some cheap trinket with one hand whilst being robbed of something which has genuine value with the other. We have been cheated out of the possibility of being genuinely free – because we can’t see the game to be a game we don’t realise that we don’t have to play it. We think it’s simply reality and so we don’t question it.

This isn’t some philosophical or sociological observation that we can amuse ourselves with if we wish, if that happens to be our thing – it is of the most pressing significance to us anything ever could be. What could be more deserving of our attention than the fact that we have been cheated (or have cheated ourselves) of our intrinsic freedom, and have been press-ganged into taking part in a game we can’t see to be a game? We can talk about the advances that we have made in our civilization and point – for example – to technology and medicine, but this is a bit of a decoy. What is all the technology in the world worth if we are ‘unfree without knowing it’? What use is it for us to extend our lifespans (as we have done) if this only means ‘extending the period of our enslavement’? If we are not putting our autonomy first then anything else we work on is merely part of our collective denial, the collective denial of our true situation. If we don’t put the truth first then what good is anything we do?

We would all agree that theft is ‘a bad thing’, and that we ought not to do it, but when it comes to the biggest theft of all – which is the theft of our intrinsic freedom – we don’t say anything about it. This societal game that we have been subsumed within is not life but a poor substitute for it, a sham version of it. Life isn’t a matter of choosing between one trivial choice and another – the act of deciding (as much as we might value it) is a denial of the freedom we have not to waste our time with such nonsense. As Oscar Wilde has said, ‘The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, accept what is worth knowing’. It turns out – unsurprisingly enough – that it is not possible to rob people of their intrinsic freedom in this way (and replace it with the deceptive extrinsic freedom which is provided by the social game) without introducing a ‘jinx’ that can never be remedied. We can celebrate the realm of trivial choice as much as we like, we can talk it up as much as we like, promote it as much as we like, but nothing can ever cover up its essential hollowness – or at least, not for very long.

Our socially-sanctioned ‘job’ – so to speak – is to try to cover up that hollowness as best we can. That’s the denial – our duty is our denial and our denial our duty. We put a spin on this however and say that we’re ‘chasing our dreams’ or ‘striving to achieve our life goals’, or whatever else, but what we’re really trying to do is fill an existential void (and whatever we chuck into that void is going to disappear without a trace). That is – of course – how it always is with existential voids. Were we not constrained to live out our lives within a superficial game that we mistake for reality then there would be no existential void, and so that in itself would be the cure for our jinxed situation. Instead, however, we go in the opposite direction and engage all the more feverishly in the societal game. ‘More and better doing,’ is seen as the answer to all of our ills; ‘set goals and persevere until you attain them,’ we are told. ‘Gain the confidence that comes with successful purposeful action’ is the message we are given – ‘Keep on striving and don’t ever be discouraged, don’t ever be beaten. Make sure you stay positive no matter what…’

Our goals are just ‘the game’ however. Our striving is the game, our attempts to find validation for our lives within the social framework is the game, and so we’re trying to cure ourselves with the very thing that made us sick in the first place. The problem isn’t that we ‘aren’t trying hard enough’ but rather that the goals which we have been provided with are lures which are being used to trap us. We’ve been tricked on two fronts: [1] we’ve been tricked into thinking that what we’re doing is what we really want to do (when it’s not), and [2] we’ve been tricked into believing that these activities will make us happy (when they absolutely won’t). Ours is not an age marked by our valuing of the autonomy of the individual, but the exact reverse of this. The ‘valuing of the individual’ which we hear so much about in the West is a myth – we’re buying our individuality off the shelf, and so what we’re saying isn’t true. We value the appearance of individuality, not the thing itself…





Society Reifies Us

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The official narrative always contains our own invisible hollowness. Whatever is done on the basis of this narrative is always going to be hollow – that’s the gift that it gives us. That is the gift that the official narrative gives us every time. What else would we expect, after all? If we are prepared to accept someone else’s account of what our lives are supposed to be about then we would surely expect for there to be some kind of downside to this. The official narrative is safe – or at least, it is safe inasmuch as following what some unquestionable external authority says is ever going to be safe. It is safe (we might say) in the sense that we won’t get caught out thinking or doing anything different to what everyone else is thinking and doing and so if the majority has good sense and is acting in a reasonably wise manner then we won’t make any terrible mistakes by foolishly venturing off on our own. It isn’t safe, on the other hand, if we consider that everyone else is just blindly copying each other just like we are! If everyone is blindly copying everyone else (and no one really knows what they are doing) then where is this going to lead us? Where is the good sense in this? Good sense comes from actual individuals, not from the collective. What comes out of the collective are dangerous psychic contagions, as Jung says. Nothing good comes out of the mass mind….

This obvious enough but all the same none of us are prepared to admit that this is what we’re doing. We all know that the strategy of copying what everyone else is doing so we won’t be caught out being ‘the odd one out’, or so that we won’t make some kind of terrible mistake by acting on our own untested and unproven impulses cannot really be expected to result in anything good but this is nevertheless what we are all doing. We’re going along with the social script, we’re living our lives in accordance with the formula that has been provided for us, and what this means is that we’re not taking any responsibility for our own lives at all. We’ve handed responsibility over to some sort of unexamined group instinct, we’ve handing over the reins to the consensus viewpoint, to the dubious process of mass-mindedness and collectives of people don’t have any sense, as Jung says. The bigger the collective the less sense there is! A very big collective has no sense at all! The collective has ‘everything on the outside but nothing on the inside’ – it is in other words ‘impressive but at the same time hollow’.

Contemporary culture as a whole is (we might say) ‘impressive but hollow’ – it can certainly look pretty amazing on the outside but were we to examine it we would discover that there is no actual content. Contemporary culture is ‘content free’ – it is ‘content free’ in the sense that it is all packaging and promotional frills with nothing behind it. It is composed of hyperreal fluff that pointlessly expands until it fills up all the available space; it is essentially a cul-de-sac that is being sold to us as a highway to somewhere great and meaningful. We are encouraged to see ourselves as a dynamic, forward-thinking civilization that is constantly progressing, constantly advancing and which embraces all the right values. This is the story that we tell ourselves – the only problem being that it isn’t a true story.

We are a culture, and we also say that we have culture. This is important for us to say because it shows that we have some sort of content. We will point to art, literature, theatre, poetry, ballet, dance and so on and we will say that this is our ‘culture’; There is something to us in other words, and so we are deserving of respect on this basis. We justify ourselves in this way and – being thus justified – we feel content to rest on our laurels. But if it is the case that the function of our ‘culture’ is to enable us to carry on as we are then this is nothing more than a joke. As James Carse says, the function of art is to destabilise society, not stabilise it. Art is always revolutionary and if it isn’t then it isn’t art or culture at all – it’s something else. If it isn’t revolutionary then it is merely ‘societal propaganda’, it is merely an advert for society dressed up as being somehow more than this.

This isn’t to say that art actually does have a function, which would be hugely demeaning of it! If something has some sort of function then this means that it is subservient to some idea or other. This means that art is serving some kind of ‘finite end’ and so it is nothing more than a ‘cog in the machine’. A cog in a machine is the machine and machines have nothing to do with art, nothing to do with ‘the transcendent’. Cogs and wheels and machine-like processes are the complete reverse of transcendence – cogs and machines are all about ‘locking onto the one concrete possibility’ and making that possibility to be the only important thing. A machine is always about facilitating the process of reification in other words, and reification is the exact antithesis of transcendence. What this means (of course) is that there can’t be any such thing as a procedure or strategy for growth or transcendence and procedures / strategies are what the machine is all about.

Society, as Ivan Illich says, is ‘a system of techniques’ – it is a system that is made up of ways of getting from A to B. The official narrative is that the movement from A to B is a meaningful movement, an important movement, a real and vital movement, and this is why we invest in the system as much as we do (which is to say totally). If we define mental health as the ongoing movement beyond the known, beyond the approved and accredited status quo, then we can say that society never enables growth, never enables mental health – the collective of us is a machine and machines are all about reification not transcendence, as we have just said, and what is being made concrete is the socially-conditioned self.

This socially-conditioned self is like culture, is like society – possibly very impressive on the outside whilst being utterly hollow on the inside. It is – like society as a whole – a ‘managed appearance’, an ‘act’, and so of course it can’t help being hollow. Being hollow, the socially-conditioned self is therefore always seeking, always striving, always searching, and what it is searching for is the remedy for this hollowness, this ‘blankness on the inside’. That is why we are kept engaged in the mechanism of society – because we believe that by playing the game which has been presented to us we are going to find fulfilment. It is the fact that the reified self is always going to be driven by the need to find relief from its own invisible hollowness that keeps the wheels turning and so we can say, uncontroversially enough, that the reason the process by which the self is reified is promoted so heavily by our culture is because this is essential for society (as we know it) to keep on thriving. Our invisible hollowness is thus ‘the battery’ that keeps the machine running.

Our hollowness is ‘invisible’ because we because the world we conduct our lives within is itself hollow – hollowness is all we know and so we can’t ever spot it. The narrative that we live by is itself nothing other than disguised hollowness – we’re always having our attention directed towards whatever drama it is that is going on and this prevents us from seeing that the one who is engaged in the drama (which is to say, ‘the reified self’) isn’t actually there, is only ‘an assumption that we have made and then forgotten about’. We are in other words convinced that life is something that has to be found ‘on the outside’ (which is to say, ‘the world of appearances’) and – because of our state complete absorption in (or fascination with) the outside – we simply don’t know that there is (or could be) an inside. As far as we’re concerned the outside is all there is and so – for us – it isn’t ‘the outside’ at all.

Our ‘invisible hollowness’ – which is a present from the Mind-Created Narrative – drives us to keep looking within the social game for fulfilment, we are driven to engage more and more in society (which is to say, to utilise the techniques and procedures which are society) but all that engaging in these techniques and procedures will do is reify us all the more, which causes us to be even more hollow, which causes us to throw ourselves into the social game even more. This is therefore a ‘perfect plan’, we might say, with the proviso that it is perfect as far as a system or machine itself is concerned. It certainly isn’t perfect as far as we as individuals are concerned – how can it be when the individuality which is who we are is thoroughly repressed in favour of the theatrical or reified self? When we allow ourselves to be guided in all things by the ‘official narrative’ then – in other words – we forfeit the ‘inner life’.  We forfeit the inner life and what we get instead is the outer life, the generic life, the life that is made up entirely of appearances that has to be constantly maintained, and this ‘outer life’, this life that takes place entirely within the Realm of Appearances, isn’t real.






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The Official Narrative

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The ‘official version of things’ is both authoritative and compelling – it is both coercive and intimidating, and it is – strangely – immensely attractive to us at the same time. It holds power over us. It appeals to the weakest part of ourselves, the part we won’t admit to, the part we don’t want to know about. When we try to renounce the official version of things we feel bold guilty and afraid – we feel guilty of betraying our guardian and fearful about having to face life on our own. When we leave ‘the official version of things’ behind we are confronted with our own helplessness, our own vulnerability. We don’t know how to survive without the official narrative to help us – even though its rule over us is harsh and uncaring. The official narrative is the Dark Father who wishes to control everything and keep us all in the darkness of the perpetual ignorance that he promotes. Ignorance and fear are the two tools of the Dark Father – these are the means by which we are controlled. When we grow nostalgic and homesick after venturing out of the Dark Father’s Realm it is because we miss the cosy certainty of his lies. These lies are the drug to which we are addicted.


The ‘official version of things’ may for example mean the narrative that is spun for us by that strange thing we call society and this is undoubtedly the easiest way to understand it. The idea that society controls us by promoting a particular and very narrow view of reality is not an unfamiliar – this sort of thing gets talked about every day. Anyone who reflects on the matter knows that social control comes about as a result of the narrative that we have been fed on since birth. We are given this script which we have to go by and we can’t ever get away from it. We are given this script and we are promptly trapped by it. We’re prisoners of that script, which stunts our growth and limits our horizons, and yet at the same time we’re strangely fond of it and will always come running back to it, no matter how many times we might muster up the courage to make a break for it. Like any abusive relationship, the unhealthy connection we have with the official narrative is not an easy one to break.


The official version of things could also mean the thinking mind – society is the thinking mind writ large, nothing more and nothing less. Very clearly, the thinking mind provides us with the all-determining narrative of our everyday life. Where else do we look for guidance if not to the agency of thought? Thought provides us with all the information we need to know in the course of the day and if there is some other source that is operating (such as dreams, intuitions, feelings) we ignore it. We ignore all other possible sources of information because they haven’t been officially sanctioned. They haven’t got the official stamp on them and so we have to reject them as being heresy or superstition. When there is an official story then this means that all other stories, all other interpretations have to be dismissed out of hand – they have to be ridiculed, sneered at, or angrily denied. If one story is right then all the others must be wrong and the only way this isn’t going to happen as if the story in question is metaphorical rather than literal, as both Joseph Campbell and James Carse have noted. Because thought is always literal in nature it always takes us prisoner. The literal will always take us prisoner.


It’s much easier to see through the societal narrative than it is to question the story-line that has been provided for us by thought. The social script is a crude thing and a significant proportion of us will always be aware of this, even though there isn’t much we can do about it. When it comes to ‘thought’s story of what is going on’ then the percentage of us who have any insight into the unreliability (or outright deceptiveness) of the ideas that we have about the world is far smaller. It’s one thing to recognise media bias but altogether another to spot where the System of Thought is putting us wrong! This is the Big Lie principle working at its best! It is exactly this same principle in both cases – the official version of how things are bullies and browbeats us into believing it and it’s hard to walk away from it but seeing through the System of Thought puts us in a much stranger place than seeing through society does. If we through see through society this expands our possibilities hugely it is true – we are released from the societal script and are now free to be true to our own nature rather than serving the External Authority. When we see through the authority of thought the world changes absolutely, irrevocably, unrecognisably, however.


Thought is the agency that provides us with our description of the world and so when we lose it (when its authority no longer holds good for us) we lose what we thought the world was – we lose everything since the description we are clinging to is the world as far as we’re concerned. And it’s not as if we will be given another ‘improved’ description later on to hang onto (after the first one has been demolished) – once we through see through thought then we see through all descriptions. Only thought describes, only thought ‘says what things are’. When we see through thought then we have to ask ourselves (as Baudrillard says) what things look like when we don’t describe them and what we look like when we don’t describe ourselves. We live fulltime in a world of positive descriptions and for the most part we don’t have the slightest inkling that there could be any other sort! We are very far indeed from seeing that the true reality is the negative one, the one that cannot be described. We are also – by the same token – very far from seeing – as Wei Wu Wei says – that being comes out of our perfect absence (rather than out of our over-valued purposeful activity).



The Negative World is the world that we don’t judge or name – it is the world in which there is no official story-line or description. In this world there is freedom because we are not being compelled to see things in any particular way; we’re free from the All-Determining Narrative and so we are also free from who we think we are or who we said to be within the terms of that constraining narrative. This is why being can only come out of our profound absence, as Wei Wu Wei says. Being doesn’t come about as a result of us forcing ourselves to be who we think we are (or who we think we ought to be) – which is the identity or positive self – it comes about as a result of us not doing this, as a result of not us not asserting the positive self. It comes about when we stop playing to win, when we stop trying to maximise our advantage (which is of course but we’re always trying to do). ‘Maximising our advantage’ is the name of the game, after all – what else do we ever try to do?



We believe that the state of being – which is (we might say) where we get to genuinely exist – comes about as a result of us optimising our performance in the game and efficiently sweeping up all the advantages that are there to be had, whilst all that really happens when we try to secure the best position for ourselves (or ‘assert our defined existence’) is that we lose all our being and end up living an unreal life, a life that is made up of ‘appearances only’. When we live a life that his based on ‘appearances only’ then the only path ahead of us is the predetermined path of being forever driven by the need to control these appearances. Appearances are a fickle master however – to base our perceived well-being on appearances is like basing our mood on the direction the wind is blowing. It blows this way one moment and quite another the next and whilst we might foolishly put all our money on the project of ‘controlling the wind’, the actual truth of the matter is that this fickle wind is controlling us…






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Life In The Consensus Reality [Part 1]

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The consensus reality works by not letting anyone see beyond it. This is such an obvious statement that we hardly need make it – if anyone were to see beyond the consensus reality then it would of course stop being ‘a consensus’ and when the consensus reality stops being a consensus it can no longer be a ‘reality’ either! It will in this case be nothing more than ‘something we agree to believe in’, which is all that it was all along of course. In order for the consensus reality to work as a reality it is strictly necessary that we never see beyond it, or think beyond it. That’s the one condition we have to adhere to – we can do whatever we like, just as long as we adhere to this. What’s more – and this goes without saying really – we have to make sure that we never go beyond whatever the consensus view is whilst at the same time never seeing that this is what we are doing. It is an absolutely necessary requirement that we be restricted without knowing that we are, ignorant without ever guessing that we are. Just as long as this is the case, we can do absolutely anything we want. This is the dubious freedom granted us by the consensus reality!


The CR (to the extent that we are aware of it at all) probably seems like a fairly harmless sort of thing – irritatingly petty at times perhaps, but basically harmless. It isn’t harmless, however! The CR is far from harmless – it’s a spider’s web from which we can’t escape. We can agree that it is ‘functionally useful’ but this doesn’t mean that it is in any way harmless. Because all meanings are fixed in the CR (because we can never go beyond the meanings that have been set by the system) we are able to use words and know that everyone will understand them as we meant them and in no other way; this is useful in a practical way but it is also a trap. It’s a trap because the fixed meanings that our words have control us, have power over us, have a ‘determining influence’ over us. It might seem odd to say that fixed meanings ‘control us’ but a moment’s reflection is all that is needed to show that this must indeed be the case – as soon as we take a fixed (or literal) meaning for granted and start operating on that basis we create a world that reflects those meanings back at us wherever we go. We create a closed world, in other words. This is the same as saying that when we use rules without acknowledging that we are then these rules will constitute an absolute limit to our existence, a limit that we cannot ever question. The only questions we can ask are those that are predicated upon the rules which we are taking for granted, and so our ‘mode of questioning’ is itself a manifestation of our unexamined rules.


We could make a list of all the things that we human beings have invented over the course of the years, including such things as the printing press, the sewing machine, dynamite, the steam engine, the aeroplane, the computer, the television set and so on. The thing that never gets put on this list however is the consensus reality and this really is a pretty big invention! Not only that, but it’s the type of invention that subsumes all other inventions, the type of invention that subsumes our entire lives in fact, so this surely makes it worthy of mention. The CR is reality for us so that must put it on top of any list we might like to draw up with regard to all the clever things we have invented. Tools and instruments and machines are one sort of thing but manufacturing our own reality is quite another kettle of fish. How the hell do we even do that? How is it possible to ‘create a reality’?


The problem here of course is that we don’t recognise the CR as being an actual thing and so we never do ponder the question of how we managed to pull off the stunt of ‘creating our own reality’. We have in other words invented the consensus reality without knowing that we have invented anything. This being the case, we get ‘subsumed by the system’ without being any the wiser with regard to the fact that something extraordinarily significant has actually happened here. The simulation isn’t content just to be a simulation; it actually replaces what it has simulated so that there is no further need for the original, as Jean Baudrillard says. The hyperreal is a fundamentally aggressive type of phenomenon – it can’t rest until it has converted everything it comes across to its own ilk, to its own formula. Everything is converted to Disneyland. Then – and only then – can it ‘rule supreme’. Who’s to say what is really ‘real’ when reality itself has become something we are no longer capable of registering, something that we’re not even able to miss? Anything can be real, in this case; anything can be real because there is nothing to show up illusion for being illusion. There is no one left to challenge the Great Liar which is the system.


The consensus reality is created via our agreements, as we started off by saying. We make an agreement with regard to what is true or what is important and then we get trapped in this agreement. It might be wondered why this should happen – an ‘agreement’ sounds like a positive sort of thing, after all. Surely – we might argue – it’s good to agree on stuff because then we can get on with each other on the basis of the agreement that we have made. That’s how civilisations come into being, after all. All great civilisations are founded upon a tacit agreement as to what is important in life, as to what our values are, and so on. The fact that agreement forms the basis upon which our collective endeavours can take place is one side of the coin (and this certainly does seem to be a positive thing) but what we are not so quick to see is that an agreement of this sort – by its very nature – is something that can’t be altered once we have made it. Our agreed-upon foundation wouldn’t work as a foundation if we could go back any time we wanted to and change the details of our agreement. We aren’t free to ‘disagree with our original agreement’, in other words, because if we did then there would be no more basis, no more foundation. This is the whole thing about ‘making rules’ to govern society – once we’ve made the rules we have to abide by them! Rules are rules, after all…


Civilisations and cultures are created on the basis of the agreements we have made it is true, but the other way of putting this is to say that civilisations or cultures work by repressing the questioning of our original agreements, our original assumptions. The CR works as a world, as a reality, only because it has surreptitiously taken away our ability to ask original questions, or see the world in an original way. We don’t know that it has done this, but it has all the same. Perhaps this is the price we have to pay for any sort of culture, for any sort of ‘group’ that we can have the convenience and comfort of being part of, we might wonder. Perhaps that’s just the way things are… If so however (and it is inarguable that it is) then this is surely a price that is too prohibitively high to be worth paying! To lose the capacity to see the world (or ourselves) in an original way is to lose rather a lot, after all. We are losing more than we realise here because ‘our ability to see the world in an original way’ is actually our individuality and our individuality is who we actually are!  Aside from this, we are nothing; aside from this, we don’t even exist – not really.


One’s individuality is not a small thing, even though it’s easily overlooked; if we were to lose our individuality, who would we be, in this case? We could actually be anybody because all of us are perfectly interchangeable when this element called ‘individuality’ is taken out of the picture. We actually are ‘anybody’, even though we don’t know it. We are Jung’s ‘Everyman’. We are (in this case) no more than perfectly disposable representatives of ‘the Borg’. There is a concept in sociology known as ‘false spontaneity’ and false spontaneity is where we come out with conditioned views and opinions in such a way that we really do think that we are the original author of the view or opinion in question. It absolutely does feel as if we are and yet at the same time these views are mere ‘prejudices’ that we have picked up along the way without realising it. It’s our ‘programming’ in other words. We feel that these are our genuine views just as we feel ourselves to be ‘genuine individuals’ when this is not at all the case. It can’t be the case just as long as everything about us is supplied by society; it can’t be the case when we are in a state of ‘automatic agreement’ with the consensus reality and are therefore in the position of being completely defined by it. We can’t be defined by the CR and yet at the same time be ‘the true individuals that we are’, obviously enough! We can’t have it both ways. The individual has to be sacrificed for the sake of the state, as Okakuru Kakuzo says in The Book Of Tea –

Definition is always limitation – the “fixed” and the “changeless’ are but terms expressive of a stoppage of growth. Said Katsugen, “The sages move the world.” Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same? The observance of communal traditions involves a constant sacrifice of the individual to the state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We never forgive others because we know that we ourselves are in the wrong. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the word itself is so ridiculous!


The ‘price we are paying’ is the loss of who we are therefore, and the fact that we do not perceive this loss – since we have been automatically provided with a false sense of individuality  – does not in any way make it less significant as a loss. We will continue to believe that everything is fine, that everything is OK (for the most part, anyway) but underlying this conditioned perception that ‘everything is OK’ there is a howling void. This isn’t the ‘fruitful void’ spoken of in Buddhism but a sterile void, a blank void – it is ‘the voidness or absence of our actual true nature’, which is not a convenient societal construct. Much has been made in recent times of our growing lack of ‘resilience’ with regard to the difficulties and challenges that come our way in life. Possibly – it is said – this is a trend that is occurring at the present moment – the eroding or undermining of our natural ‘resilience’. We don’t know the half of it, though! We’re missing the point in a big way. Current thinking on the subject is that there can be such a thing as a ‘course’ or a ‘therapy programme’ to build up our resilience and teach us skills and strategies that we can use in difficult situations in order to ‘cope’ better (‘coping’ and ‘managing’ are two of our favourite words in therapy, it seems). We imagine that with the correct ‘coping strategies’ we ought to be able to weather the storms that life throws at us. Rules are a substitute for consciousness however, as Jung says – and they are not a very good substitute either! Our tacit assumption is that the central deficiency that we are suffering from (the ‘invisible elephant in the room’, so to speak) is the ‘lack of who we truly are’ and we are supposed to get around this deficiency by learning skills and coping strategies. How do we think this is ever going to work? Resilience isn’t an ‘add-on’ or an ‘extra’, it is not something we learn, it isn’t something that is ‘separate from us’; what we call ‘resilience’ is actually who we are!








The Inescapable Suffering Of The Conditioned Identity [Part 1]

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Our woes originate in the fact that the generic or conditioned identity is an impoverished state of being. Living on the basis of this identity is never going to be much fun – as we can plainly see when we look at things this way. It might seem to us that we are having fun – from time to time – but this is only because we are buying into the deluded perception that we are shortly to become less impoverished and this is cause for great jubilation, naturally enough. This can never actually happen however, conditioned identity – by its very nature – can never not be impoverished and so any pleasure that we might have felt when it seemed that we were getting someone is always going to be counterbalanced by the pain and disappointment that we feel when we discover that this happy eventuality isn’t going to happen after all.

It’s far, far worse to be impoverished in ourselves (so that who we are is the impoverishment, as Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas) then it is to be living in an impoverished environment – this constitutes a very particular type of predicament however because if my identity is impoverished (which is to say, hugely restrictive in terms of the possibilities that are open to us) then we going to have no direct no way of knowing this; we can only know that if we have something else to compare our situation with and we don’t. We can think of this in terms of perspective – if I happen to have very little perspective then I also have no way of knowing that I have very little perspective. And yet at the same time there is no getting away from the suffering that is inherent in our impoverishment, invisible though it might be to us. The cause of the suffering may be unknown to us, but the suffering itself is not – we get to know it very well…

All of this is very well of course but how do we know that the generic or conditioned identity is so very impoverished? How can we justify such a sweeping statement? And what exactly do we mean by ‘the generic or conditioned identity’ anyway? There is after all no point in going on at length about the consequences of having an extremely limited or constrained identity if it hasn’t anyway been established that this is or could be the case. This turns out to be thorny subject to get to grips with and that is because our subjective perception of ourselves (or of others for that matter) is not of ‘extremely limited beings’. We don’t perceive ourselves like this because we don’t see what we ‘lack’. Moreover, it is of course true that this idea is highly objectionable to us, if not to say downright offensive. We are happier saying how great we human beings are and what wonderful things we have achieved. We are much happier talking ourselves up than we are in saying how limited we are, in other words!

It is not however disrespectful to humanity to say that our ordinary situation in life is extraordinarily restricted and – when it comes down to it – entirely unworthy of us. It is actually far more respectful to say this than it is to say that the way we currently is the only way we could be, and that this is our true, undistorted nature. In the first case we are reminded not to get to get complacent and as a result enter into some sort of sentimental love affair with ‘the idea that we have of ourselves’ (which is clearly a healthy thing) whilst in the second case we have been given a totally false sense of security which – far from benefiting us – prevents us from becoming what nature secretly intends us to become, so to speak. In his Guide to the Perplexed E.F. Schumacher makes this point by saying that we have celebrating acorns as ‘an end in themselves’, so to speak, rather than seeing them as a kind of vehicle that leads to something inconceivably greater – the tree itself:

Our ordinary mind always tried to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but this is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.

If I was informed that I was a very, very limited kind of a creature then this could of course be taken as a terrible putdown that should not be tolerated even for a moment, but this is of course plainly ridiculous – this is actually the most valuable information that I could ever receive! To learn this is to have my horizons opened wider beyond anything I could ever have imagined possible. I am however very likely to resist this ‘widening of my horizons’ and stick fast to the small (or restricted) world that I know. By celebrating (or validating) who we think we are, we effectively deny who we really are and this is exactly what ‘the collective of us’ – more known commonly as society – always does. This is not a particularly familiar idea it is true, but ‘the collective of us’ is in this way the implacable enemy of every single individual making up that collective. Society – which presents itself as our friend, our ally, our ‘life-support system’ – is actually our greatest enemy, as Carl Jung pointed out eighty years ago or so.

This gives us a very good way of talking about the generic or conditioned identity therefore – we can say that what we are looking at here is a kind of ‘social fiction’ that we are required to identify with if we are to be taken seriously (or even acknowledged at all) by all the people around us, and by the social system as a whole. In a way, this is like having a Social Security number or something like that – if we don’t have a Social Security number then the system literally has no way of recognising us, as far as it is concerned we simply don’t exist. In another way what we’re talking about here isn’t like a Social Security number because it is who we actually experience ourselves as being! We obediently experience ourselves as being ‘who we are told we are’. This is similar to identifying ourselves with our social role, which is something that Jung talks about, but there is more to it than just this because the collectively constructed template (or image) of ‘what it means to be human being’ covers everything, not just what we do or how we behave in certain specific social situations. It covers every single aspect of us, such that if we ever started to become aware of an aspect of ourselves that was not congruent with ‘the socially approved image of what it means to be human being’ then we would experience this as being weird or strange and we would be very likely to be majorly worried about what was happening to us.

It might sound rather absurd to suggest that he could be so socially conditioned to such an extreme degree but if we think this then that is because we have underestimated the power of the consensus reality! When something out of the ordinary happens to us then what we generally do is to tell our ‘friendship group’ about it, or anyone else who can be persuaded to listen to us. If however something happens to me that is so ‘out of the ordinary’ that no one I meet has had any experience with it, nor knows anyone else who has, then obviously I can’t share it – I can try to tell people about it but that just won’t work in this case. The question is therefore, if something happens to me but I can’t tell anyone about it then is what happened actually real? Our inclination is to say yes it is!’ When this sort of thing happens to us (and particularly when it happens consistently enough) we always find that we start doubting ourselves, wondering if perhaps there might be something wrong with us. We might doubt our sanity. Consensus reality isn’t just something that is ‘convenient for communication’ therefore, it defines reality for us. The real purpose of the consensus reality is to define reality. It might have started out as ‘a convenience’ but it has ended up very much more than this. It has ended up being a world. ‘We all say it so it must be true,’ says a spokesman for the Monkey People in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

It is a matter of common experience that if we go up against someone in a debate who happens to be considerably more confident in themselves than we are then we will start to feel that they are right, not because of the sense or otherwise of their arguments but purely as a result of the force of their confidence (which in turn might be said to be a function of their ability to ‘not question themselves’). If this is true in a one-to-one situation (as it obviously is) then how much more true must it be when we are going up against the consensus reality, which is constituted of millions of people all joined up together in one tremendous ‘power block’? The consensus reality never questions itself – it is actually functionally incapable of doing so – and so its power is absolutely immense. The ‘false logic of the monkey people’ rules supreme and it always has done. The coercive power of the ‘collective reality tunnel’ – to use Robert Anton Wilson’s phrase – determines what is real for us and what is not and what it ‘allows as being real’ (what we are actually allowed to talk about or think about) is very, very narrow indeed and, as we have said, ‘narrow’ is just another way saying ‘impoverished’. It isn’t just our picture of what reality (supposedly) is that is extraordinarily impoverished either; it is our conditioned understanding of who or what we are.




The System Runs Us As Extensions Of Itself

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The generic self is dependent upon the system. In a way, this is a very obvious statement. Of course the generic self is dependent upon the system. In another way, this question of the GS being dependent upon the system is well worth going into, this relationship – a so-called ‘relationship’ – is at the very heart of everything. This relationship is a paradoxical one, as Alan Watt says – it is paradoxical because whilst we are told that we are independent, and given the apparent ‘responsibility’ of being autonomous agents, we are in truth wholly dependent upon the system, which determines everything about us. Everything about the generic self comes from the system after all; that’s the whole point of the generic self – the whole point is that nothing is truly ours, the whole point is that everything comes from the outside. This being the case – as it is the case – how could we possibly be ‘independent’ of the system? Society might be said to be a type of ‘hall of mirrors’ in which we only know ourselves through our reflection in other people’s eyes, or in other people’s minds. This makes each person dependent upon every other person to know who or what they are, or even – you might say – if they are. We are addicted to the approval or good opinion of our fellows just as surely as a heroin addict is addicted to heroin, says Anthony De Mello, and this is why – because the collective tells us who we are. The system tells us who we are, and this is why we can’t ever be autonomous beings in the way we like to think we are, or in the way that society paradoxically holds us to be. When we allow ourselves to be defined by the system then we are not independent of that system. When we are defined by a system then we never have any separate existence from that system and so naturally ‘being free from it’ is never going to be a realistic proposition! Neither can it be said to be the case that we can have a relationship with that system – we need to be ‘other’ than something in order to have a relationship with it. A thing can never be said to have a ‘relationship’ with itself.

 

The generic self is the system which informs it, therefore. When we deal with the generic self we are dealing with the system – that’s who we’re talking to. When we are dealing with a socialised human being, then it society itself that we dealing with, and yet the rub here is that society itself doesn’t exist. It might seem somewhat stupid to claim that society doesn’t exist when we can all plainly see that it does (or at least, we can all plainly see that society is an actual ‘thing’ that needs to be taken into consideration) what we mean is that it doesn’t have any genuine existence of its own – it’s a production, it’s a thing that we vote into existence and so if we didn’t vote for it then it wouldn’t be there, plainly. The same is true for any group, clearly – a group is created by everyone involved agreeing to take certain things for granted and if we didn’t so agree then there wouldn’t be any group. Society is created by agreement as are all groups and what this means is that its emissary – the ‘generic self’ – also only exists because we’ve agreed for it to. The GS is no more ‘an autonomously existing entity’ than society is, therefore.

 

It might seem that this (the nonexistence of the GS) would constitute something of a disadvantage but nothing could be further from the truth – the nonexistence of the GS central to the whole scheme of things! The fundamental nonexistence of the GS means that when we identify wholeheartedly with it (as we do) we become very ‘needy’ and that of course suits the system down to the ground. When we are identified with the GS (so that the game which we are playing is the game that we are it) then in the game there is an absolute irrevocable absence of existence, an absence of existence that no one can ever do anything about. This has to be the case – obviously this has to be the case since – by definition – there is nothing of us in it! The GS corresponds to Gurdjieff’s ‘personality’, which James Moore explains by saying that it is ‘other people’s stuff made concrete in us’. We are busy living out other people’s ideas of who we are and what life is about, and the people we got it off acquired these ideas from yet other people, and so on and so forth. Everything is just ‘passed on’ and ‘passed on’ and it’s impossible to identify the original culprit, the original ‘instigator’ of the whole damn thing. The ‘originator’ is a meaningless concept. But because we are all ‘handing over’ our responsibility, with fervent eagerness, to this idea of who we are and what life is about the idea grows and thrives and takes on ‘a life of its own’. It grows and thrives and takes on a life of its own’ despite the fact that it doesn’t have a life, despite the fact that it doesn’t actually exist and never did. It isn’t really life that we talking about here therefore but a species of ‘pseudo-life’ – for what that’s worth.

 

This is what happens as a result of our ‘gullibility’, if we might use that word. Another term might use is ‘conformity’ – we have such a such an urge, such an overwhelming tendency, to conform to the structures and systems that we ourselves have created that these structures and systems take on a life of their own and rule over us (despite the fact that – as we have said – this isn’t real life at all but only a cheap imitation of it, an imitation ‘without any soul’). This process of handing over responsibility (or ‘handing over power’) to the systems that we have ourselves created so that they are empowered and we are correspondingly disempowered is utterly perverse and yet at the same time absolutely characteristic of what it means to be a human being. It’s what we do all the time! We do it all the time and we never pay attention to the fact that we doing it and so the origin or source of our malaise remains a complete mystery to us. We have created endless trouble for ourselves in this way – by handing over our power to the structures that oppress us and render us ‘not properly human’. It might sound unreasonably harsh to say that we are ‘not properly human’, or that we ‘fall short of being human’, but what else would we expect? We create the system and hand over all responsibility to it (so that we think what it wants us to think and behave as it wants us to behave) and this enables the system to ‘create out in its own image’. The system runs us as extensions of itself in other words, and this is what it means to be ‘the generic self’.

 

Because the system ‘runs us as extensions of itself’  – which is absolutely what it does do – it is inevitable that we are going to ‘fall short of what it means to be a human being’. We are no longer functioning as human beings after all – our humanity was the price that we had to pay in order to adapt ourselves to the security-producing mechanical system, as unpalatable by this awareness might be to us. When push comes to shove we will always do what we’re supposed to do; when there is no particular pressure on us then we can have the luxury of fooling ourselves that we are free agents, that we can act autonomously, that we can rebel’, but the bottom line is that our allegiance is always to the system. We can ‘act the rebel’ – we can act any way we like, of course – but these are only ever postures; the GS loves to look as if it’s a rebel but rebelling is the one thing that it can’t ever do. How can the GS rebel when it isn’t us in the first place? How can the GS rebel (or ‘think for itself’) when how it was created in the first place is by totally conforming to the system. The GS is a puppet, it is ‘the act of conformity personified’, and on this account it is never going to make great rebel! Puppets never do.

 

When we are the generic self then we are always going to fall short of what it means to be a human being – that’s a given – but the rub is that we are always going to fall short when it comes to the system’s standards too. The system always has impossible standards to live up to and no matter how machine-like we make ourselves we are always going to fail to meet the required standards. This is simply because the system is an abstract (or ‘unreal’) entity and so its standards are not practically realisable in the real world, which is where we happen to live. This is why the system is such a tyrannical master – because it is trying to impose its unreal standards on us, because it is always trying to make us into an unreal thing like it is’. The machine can’t help doing this because it can’t see itself as being unreal, because it can’t ‘recognise reality as being reality’. So when we experience the inner critic’s ongoing abuse of us, it’s constant derogatory putdowns and vicious belittling of us, this isn’t another human being inside us, it’s the machine. If (just to give one example of this sort of thing) I suffered throughout my childhood at the hands (or at the tongue) of a critical father then the inner critic isn’t ‘my father inside my head’ – for all that it might seem like it – it’s what we are calling ‘the machine’. It’s the very same machine that was in my father’s head. It’s the very same ‘machine’ that keeps on being ‘passed on and on’ from generation to generation. The machine inevitably wants to turn us into faithful versions of itself; whenever we put a machine in charge of us this is always what is going to do. It can never totally succeed however because there is always going to be something human in us, but it’s going to keep on at us all the same. It’s going to keep on ‘putting us through the wringer’ until it gets what it wants, which is an outcome that is never going to happen.

 

Being the GS definitely isn’t what it’s cracked up to be therefore! The only way we can never get to feel ‘good’ is when we get the approval or acceptance of the collective and we can only get the approval or acceptance of the collective by turning our back on ourselves as we truly are and dedicating ourselves to the values that everyone else is dedicating themselves to. Such is society – whether we choose to see it like this or not. This becomes particularly obvious in the type of small rural community where everyone is afraid to be seen as being in any way different or odd; this is a very real fear because when we get to be seen as different or odd in a very small rural community then it becomes all but impossible to live in that committee. But this is a slippery slope that leads inescapably to a very bad place since there is always going to be something a little bit odd or peculiar about us, were anyone to look closely enough. Eradicating all our personal peculiarities is an ‘impossibly ideal’. It is of course also true that folk can get very good indeed at being just like everyone else, and thinking just like everyone else, exactly like everyone else, and believing the very same thing that everyone else believes in but even when we are superlatively skilled at doing this (superlatively skilled in the art of mimicry) there is still always going to be the fear that we are going to be found out for something or other that is out of our control, and this is a fear that is never going to go away. We are balancing on a knife edge and there is no way to get off it. No matter how complacently normal and comfortably judgemental we might be, we are still balancing on a knife edge. The generic self is both complacent and running scared at one and the same time, even if this may sound contradictory.

 

Society is all about interjecting external ideals, external values, and treating them as if they were our own. We are educated in the game and then we play the game. We talk about chasing dreams or achieving our goals but almost invariably these are the system’s dreams and goals and not our own. When I am the generic self then nothing is my own, as we keep saying. It’s always ‘somebody else’s stuff’ When I am the generic self then my individuality, my uniqueness is an illusion; it is no more than a flimsy fantasy that the system supplies me with. It’s a comforting illusion to be sure, but it is an illusion all the same and that’s the frightening thing…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Environment That Compels

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We are constantly being told that we should fit in to whatever it is that going on – this is the only message we ever hear. All messages are this message – obey, obey, obey. We’re all obeying machines and obeying is all we know. We’re either obeying machines or we’re failing machines. The message is so constant that it isn’t even as if we are being ‘told’ it. The environment itself is the message. We just know that we have to adapt, we just know that we have to fit in. The system isn’t just telling us that we have to comply – the system is compliance! Compliance is the only reality we know and so it isn’t compliance, it just ‘is’. It’s the inescapable condition of our existence.

 

 

The logic is inescapable. Logic is always inescapable; that’s the nature of logic – logic isn’t something that you’re supposed to be able to escape from! Logic leaves no loopholes. Logic is something you obey and the obeying is so total that it isn’t even obeying any more. It’s just ‘existing’. It’s the only form of existing we know of. It’s the alpha and the omega. This is the compulsive environment, the environment that compels. The only question is, how well do we comply? That’s what makes this into successes or failures, winners or losers. This is the world we live in – the world that tells you what to do and what to be. The world that tells you everything. What it doesn’t tell you doesn’t exist…

 

 

How well can you obey? How well can you obey? Only it’s not called ‘obeying’, is it? It’s called something else. Or it’s not called anything at all. Why call it something when there’s nothing else? Why call it something in particular when there are no other possibilities to talk about? You just have to get on with it; you just have to be what the system wants you to be. How well can you be what the compulsive environment wants you to be? Can you really make the grade? What will become of you if you don’t? Of course, the question we should really be asking is, what will become of us if we DO succeed? That’s the question we should be thinking about. What will happen then, huh? Not that we can think that – we never look that far. We’re not allowed to think it – it’s not within the parameters of our design. It’s not part of the game to question the game. How well can you obey, my friend? How successfully can do what you’re supposed to do, what you’re told to do? How well can you fit into a world that doesn’t allow ‘not fitting in’, a world that doesn’t have any concept for not fitting in, other than a wholly negative one? How will you obey even when you don’t know that you are obeying? How successful can you adapt and what will you become when you do attack? That’s the question the machine won’t ever let you ask!

 

 

Can you feel the pressure pushing down on you? Can you feel it there every minute of the day? Can you notice yourself straining to obey? Strain, strain, as hard as you can. Strain every day. Strain to obey the rule because you know what will happen if you can’t. Although you don’t really know. Strain to conform to the compulsion because you know the compulsion won’t allow you not to conform!

 

 

How well can you conform, my friend? Can you get it right? Will you feel at ease when you do so? Will you at last feel relief? Will you feel joy when you obtain the goal? Your attention is stuck fast to the defined surfaces that are being provided for you. Strain, strain, strain – strain to succeed! Strain to get it right! Your attention is glued to the concept of what you’re supposed to be, of what you’re supposed to do, and all you know is straining, all you know is straining. It’s the condition of your existence.

 

 

One illusion straining after another – do you know that feeling? One illusion trying to reach another. And what happens when you get there? What then? Will there be joy? Will there be happiness? Will there be relief? What happens with one illusion reaches another illusion, what does that add up to? What happens when you add one illusion to another? That’s the question we ought to be asking ourselves. Just what do we expect to happen then? Did we think that far ahead?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Finger-Trap

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The world we see all around us has been put together by economic forces: just about everything we see in the socially-created world is because of economic forces. If it isn’t there to make money then what’s the point of it? We could of course agree with the above statement happily enough and yet at the same time not consider it a matter of any great importance. We may not see any problem with this at all; we are after all so very used to this way of life that we can’t see the world existing in any other way. Economics has been ‘God’ for a very long time now. Money has made the world go round for a very long time now…

 

And yet what is meant by this thing we call ‘economics’? When we look into it we can see straightaway that it is nothing more than ‘a system that is based on the manipulation of resources for personal gain’. No one can argue with this – that’s what capitalism is all about, after all! At the very root of economic theory is the tried-and-trusted idea that the motivation to personally benefit ourselves is the strongest and most reliable motivational force there is, which – goes the argument – makes it the ideal psychological drive to tie everything to. Whether this is really true or not is highly dubious however – if our motivation isn’t particularly wholesome, then neither will the outcome be! This goes beyond ethics and morality – it is starting to be accepted in the mainstream scientific world that what fulfils us the most – i.e. what is ‘healthiest’  for us – is not to live on the basis of narrow self-interest but on the basis of compassion and empathy, which doesn’t serve the interest of our way of life. Again, this isn’t anything to do with morality or ethics, it just seems to be the way that we are built. Now it isn’t of course exactly ‘breaking news’ as far as the great religions of the world are concerned, but it’s only very recently that a study of the anatomy of the brain shows that when the area of the brain known colloquially as in the centre – otherwise referred to as the medial prefrontal cortex.

 

According to Rebecca Gladding in This is your brain on meditation, it is also called ‘the self-referencing centre’ because it is the part of the brain are used to process information related to us. When the ‘me-centre’ is linked to strongly with other centres, such as the reactivity-producing amygdala, then this is bad news, according to Rebecca Gladding; it’s bad news because we’re always going to be taking things personally and ‘over-reacting’ accordingly. In general, it is clear that when relate to the world (and other people) in a ‘me-centred way’ (i.e. a way that is ‘all about us’) then we won’t have a very good time. We aren’t going to get on particularly well with other people either, obviously enough! This is a modality of functioning (or a ‘modality of being in the world’) that shouldn’t be overly encouraged or promoted, therefore! It certainly shouldn’t be made ‘top dog’…

 

Very obviously, if we are always operating on the basis of self-interest then we aren’t going to feel very fulfilled in themselves; if it were true that self-interest were a ‘healthy motivation’ then the richest people in the world would also be the happiest people and this just isn’t so! We don’t actually need to be experts on neuro-anatomy to see this – it’s as obvious as a nose on your face! How could we not see it? This is the most basic lesson in life there is; we learn it in pre-school and kindergarten – it’s the lesson called ‘learning to share our toys with the other kids’. If we never do learn to share our toys (or, even worse, if we learn to do the opposite and steal all the other kids’ toys so that we have all the toys ourselves) then this is not a very good prediction for us having a happy life! No one is going to be stupid enough to argue with this – how can I be incorrigibly self-centred and yet also be a happy person? There isn’t a person in the world who would go along with this, if they were to actually sit down and think about it!

 

This – as we keep saying – is just common sense – if we think that the world revolves around us then we are in for a rude awakening. If we think that life is all about ‘us securing our narrow advantage’ then we going to have a thoroughly miserable existence. And yet the message we receive every single day from this commercially-orientated world of ours is that the world ought to revolve around us and our wins; the message is that life absolutely is all about securing our own personal advantage. No one can deny this that this is the case – that’s how the consumerist paradigm works, after all – it works by having consumers being highly motivated to play the game that they’re supposed to be playing, and consume! Money is what makes the world go round, after all, as the song says.

 

 

Again, this is most emphatically not a contentious issue – we all know very well that consumerism works by getting people to operate on the basis of personal gain, and putting this uninspiring motivation on a pedestal. Such words as ‘successful’ and ‘winner’ say it all – we can only think well of ourselves when we are visibly better than those around us at obtaining personal gain. This is the measure of us as human beings, this is what determines our worth or lack of it. It sounds like we’re going over old ground here but the simple point that we’re making is this – the inbuilt structure of the world (or system) that we live in guides very strongly in the direction of operating on the basis of personal advantage in everything we do, whilst our actual mental health and well-being lie in exactly the opposite direction.

 

The way that the current set-up works is for each and every one of us to be acting and thinking as entirely ‘self-interested beings’. This is beyond any doubt, this is a ‘given’. We can very easily understand why it is that we are being constantly ‘tilted’ in this direction; why it is that we are being ‘formatted by society to be narcissists’. That’s what is required by ‘the current set-up’. There’s nothing else our particular society can do; that’s the world we have elected – however unwittingly – to go down. That’s the nature of the game that we are playing. Pragmatically speaking, all we can do is ‘go along with it’ – the argument is ‘irresistible’, so to speak. And yet at the same time, when we do ‘go along with it’ this is to the very great detriment of our mental health!

 

Our response to this dilemma (and ‘dilemma’ is putting it mildly) is to ignore it, is to pretend that it doesn’t exist. We never really talk about it, either on the grass-roots level or – unsurprisingly – on the level of public policy. We do hear regular items about how immersion in social media is destroying our ‘resilience’ and turning us all into ‘snowflakes’, etc. etc. , or how sad it is that no one talks to strangers on the bus anymore because we are all too busy looking at our mobile phones. These are all well-known and deeply comfortable topics – they’re comfortable because they are of a manageable size, they are ‘discrete’ and therefore non-threatening issues, but it’s not mobile phones or social media that’s the real problem here but our whole way of life. The set-up that we are caught up in creates mental suffering for us and prevents us from ever expressing (or knowing) our true potential. The system we are part of is, by its very nature, hostile to our mental health, inimical to our true well-being. We just don’t like to see this.

 

No one can say that this is something that we sometimes discuss, either in private or in public. It isn’t. We daily hear leaders of state pontificating about this and that, discussing this weighty matter or that weighty matter, and it all sounds very serious, but at no time does anyone ever point out the fact that the commercially-orientated way of life which we have opted for (the way of life which in which our primary role is that of a consumer) is fundamentally inimical to our true well-being, that it stunts and distort us and prevents us from ‘being what we could be’. No one ever points out that it is impossible to be in this system and yet at the same time grow as the individuals we truly are. And if we refuse to acknowledge this biggest issue of all, the real elephant in the living room, then how can we possibly make out that we are being ‘serious’ or ‘responsible’ about anything? We might as well dress up as clowns and go to work in the circus – that at least would be an honest profession,, that course of action would at least would have some integrity.

 

This is an extraordinary challenge – we live in a world that is fundamentally hostile to ‘who we really are’ and yet always almost always refuse to see it. This certainly isn’t a situation that we can afford to get too complacent about. The world we live in is a world that conditions us to look outside of ourselves for everything that is good, everything that is worthwhile. This has two linked consequences – [1] is that we automatically identify with a contained or isolated sense of self, a tightly-wrapped sense of identity, and [2] is that we are very strongly motivated to act so as to obtain and secure all these ‘good things’, and this misguided motivation is what powers the commercially-orientated way of life and keeps it going. This system we are part of has one agenda and only one agenda and that is to maintain itself or perpetuate itself, and the only way it can do this is to keep us locked firmly into the position of the need-driven and tightly-defined self that always has to be looking out for its own interests.

 

We all know this well enough on one level, it’s just that we can’t afford to focus on it. It’s not pragmatically useful (on the short-term) to focus on it. All the pressure is on us to succeed within the terms of the gain that we have been inducted into from an early age. We have invested so very much in this game that it no longer seems like a game – it’s not a game to us, it’s everything. It’s all we know). We have waded through blood so much that going back is as painful as going forward, as Shakespeare says in Macbeth. We are locked into the contradictory position of ‘looking for our freedom on the outside’ and the more we do this the more unfree we become in real terms. This is a classic example of a ‘Chinese finger trap,’ as Alan Watts points out somewhere – the more we try to free ourselves the more trapped we become! Society happily provides us with limitless ways and means of trying to free ourselves, all of which embroil us all the more in the mess, but no way of actually recognizing our the true nature of our predicament. Freedom is there, but it’s not to be found on the outside…