Glorifying Our ‘Aims’

When we’re greedy for the desired outcome, or fearful and worried about the unwanted one, then what happens as a result of this preoccupation is that we miss out on life itself. We miss out on life itself because life has nothing to do with either the ‘wanted’ or the ‘unwanted’ outcome – it has nothing to do with my fears and nothing to do with my hopes and desires either, which would be a very strange thing to consider were we ever to do so.

We understand this the other way around, however. Our understanding is that we will lose out unless we get to be good at obtaining the outcomes we want, and avoiding all the other ones, and this is of course why we put as much effort into our purposeful activities as we do, why we take the attitude that unless there is a reason for what we’re doing then we are essentially wasting our time. ‘Activity without purpose is the drain of your life’, legendary motivational speaker Tony Robbins tells us. Or – even more to the point – from Pastor Sunday Adelaja we learn that ‘Life becomes a dilemma when you are living a purposeless and goalless life.’ This is the unashamed message of our era – the message which glorifies the simple-minded purposeful strivings for our goals. Here lies our fulfilment, we are led to believe, and nowhere else. But if our goals have nothing to do with life, and take us in the opposite direction (if such a thing were possible) then the question we are bound to ask ourselves (if we have any curiosity about ourselves at all) is “What on earth are we playing at?”

The answer turns out to be very simple – the reason for our perverse orientation in this matter is because our rational-purposeful culture is an exercise in denial, not an exercise in exploring (or celebrating) life, which is what we would like to believe. Our hopes and fears are our own private projections and if we weren’t the fully paid-up members of such a profoundly unconscious culture we would see this without the slightest bit of difficulty. How could we not see that our hopes and fears are our own projections? This is the most basic psychological insight there is and it is also the insight that is least likely to ever come our way – we’re kept far too busy on the Wheel of Purposefulness for that. We’re always too fixated on the goal (and the next goal after that) to ever get philosophical about what the hell we think we’re doing…

If all I care about are my projections then this means that I am very effectively ‘cocooning myself from reality’, just as Jung says. This is the best way of ‘cocooning ourselves from reality’ there is – it’s totally fool-proof! The other way of putting this is to say that our goals – precious as they are to us – are only thoughts, and thoughts aren’t real. The thought is not the thing and it never can be, and so to see the world purely in terms of our ideas about it is to very effectively remove ourselves from it. To be focused exclusively on our goals is to be concerned only with those things that make sense to our logical categories (since if something can’t be represented in terms of these categories then it simply doesn’t exist for us). When we are constantly enthusing about our plans and intentions we are creating the impression that we have a full-blooded relationship with the ‘wider world’ (or at the very least that we aspire to have such a relationship) but this is just a ploy – the only ‘relationship’ we have is with our own private version of reality, which is of course a complete cop out.

Controlling only ever relates us to the sterile domain of our well-worn thoughts, our jaded and flavourless preconceptions, and so no matter how successful we might be in our purposeful endeavours, that is never going to get us anywhere different from ‘where we already were’. Just to reiterate this point – because it’s a point we miss every time – when we concern ourselves only with outcomes (either of the good or bad variety) then this means that we are in Control Mode and being in Control Mode necessarily limits us to ‘the domain of what we already know’, ‘the domain of our preconceptions’, ‘the domain of what we have already decided is true’. We don’t ever see things this way but what it essentially means is that we are trapped in the Prison of Purposefulness. We’re lifers in this most doleful of institutions and there’s no hope of parole, no matter how well we behave…

The reason we don’t ever see things this way is of course because we take it as read that the Known World – the world that is made-up entirely of our thoughts and concepts – is pretty much equivalent to what’s actually out there in reality. We never stop to reflect on what a ludicrous assumption this is; we might be familiar with our own description of the world, but we certainly shouldn’t go around assuming that what we are so familiar with is actually ‘the world itself’. Thought is a purely quantitative business, whereas in reality no quantities exist, only qualities; we all know that sugar is sweet, but we wouldn’t know what sweetness is just from the word. There’s no sweetness in the word ‘sweet’ and – what’s more – there’s no way there ever could be! There is a gulf between our descriptions and ‘the world that is being described’ which can never be bridged, not by any logic that we might be capable of putting together. We’ll never bridge it, and so rather than allow ourselves to get curious about what might lie on the other side of the abyss, we resort to ignoring it and pretending that it isn’t there.  

Because the Known World has no correspondence to (or no connection with) ‘reality as it is in itself’, it is perfectly appropriate to speak of us as being prisoners of thought. It is perfectly accurate to speak of the thinking mind as a person. “You are in prison”, says Gurdjieff, “all you can wish for, if you are a sensible man, is to escape.” The thing is however that we’re not sensible in this way – we’re not in the least bit ‘sensible’! We are preoccupied with anything else but escaping – anything interests us apart from the one thing that isn’t interesting (i.e., our trivial games). As Gurdjieff also says somewhere else, “our fate is to be forever turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims.” We ‘carry this off’ by getting excited by our aims as if they really do have some relationship to ‘the Wider Reality’. They don’t though and so no matter how much we invest in our fantasies, they are never going to bear any fruit. We devote ourselves to our distractions as if they weren’t distractions, in other words. “Are we not wasps who spend all day in a fruitless attempt to traverse a window-pane – while the other half of the window is wide open?” asks Wei Wu Wei.

Life itself (or reality itself, if we want to put it like that) exists at right angles to all our concerns, to all our interests and preoccupations. This is what Wei Wu Wei means when he says that we operate on ‘the horizontal’ dimension and ignore ‘the vertical’; the vertical dimension – we might say – is the dimension of depth, which is the ‘mysterious dimension’- it is ‘mysterious because we’re constantly moving beyond the veil of appearances. In the horizontal dimension however we never go beyond appearances and so everything we engage in here is guaranteed to be vanishingly trivial, vanishingly superficial, vanishingly inconsequential. The only difference between one outcome and another in the Realm of the Vanishingly Inconsequential (i.e., the Realm of our Games) is ‘the difference indicated by the mental boundaries which we ourselves have invented’, and so this is the type of difference that we contrive to get excited by in our games. This is the difference between one category and another (or between one idea and another) and this is an imaginary difference, a difference that is ‘only there because we say it is’. When we ‘glorify our aims’ – as we always do – it is this ‘imaginary difference’ that we are getting feverishly excited about and when we allow ourselves to get ‘excited by the imaginary’ this always happens at the expense of anything that is actually real….



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Life In The Generic World

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…




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Image

The Power Game

According to psychotherapist Morgan Scott Peck, neurosis is where we take on too much responsibility (where we take on an unrealistic degree of responsibility) whilst sociopathy is where we take on too little (or more often, none at all). This might sound a little over-simplistic on first hearing but it turns out to be a very useful way of thinking about things. It can give us a way of understanding how society works. A closely related psychological dichotomy would be to contrast people who have a tendency to blame others in times of difficulty and those who automatically blame themselves instead. When we blame ourselves for everything then we are clearly taking on too much responsibility and if on the other hand it is never our fault, no matter how damning the evidence, then obviously the converse is true.

In the most general terms this comes down to our style of dealing with pain – either we displace it onto other people (or onto the world in general) or we internalise it or swallow it down ourselves. This corresponds to Chogyam Trungpa’s dichotomy of ‘acting out’ versus ‘repressing’, which are the ego’s only two ways of dealing with pain. These are our two conditioned ways of dealing with pain that are – actually – not ways of dealing with pain! If we are considering the dynamics of society as a whole we can say that society must therefore consist, to a large extent, of [1] people who take on pain that doesn’t really belong to them and [2] people who pass on (or try to pass on) pain that is legitimately theirs, and which they won’t ever own. To give a very simple example, in the first case if I am having a run of bad luck and nothing is working out for me then I assume that I must be a flawed or defective person and that I just don’t deserve good things to happen to me, and if I have the other style of dealing with pain then I’m convinced that it’s someone else’s fault instead and get angry with them about what I think they’re doing. I want to find a scapegoat in other words, whereas in the first case I will make myself into the scapegoat.

We can see this dichotomy very clearly in abusive relationships – the fuel for the abuse – so to speak – is that I as an abuser have a lot of emotional pain that I am absolutely determined to take no responsibility for and so what I want to do is find someone who will take on the job feeling the pain for me, so I don’t have to. None of this can be transparent however – I can’t let myself know that I’m making you take on pain that is rightfully mine and not yours because this in itself would be a painful awareness and my whole orientation is towards avoiding pain or displacing it elsewhere. Because this is my orientation I have to really believe that it’s your fault, I have to be convinced that it’s your fault, and for your part, you have to be convinced – if possible  – that it really is you who is to blame (maybe not because of anything specific that you have done, although very often of course it is) but simply because you are a crappy worthless person who deserves to take the blame. I will tell you this over and over again, just to make sure it sinks in. This is what abusive relationships are all about, as we all know.

Abuse happens all the time of course – it’s a big part of life, whether we realise it or not. ‘You’re a crappy person,’ we say, hoping that this will stick, hoping that our target won’t ‘turn it around on us’ and send the label back to us with even more force that we put in it. This is what a row is – two people each trying their best to be the one dishing out the shit rather than the one who has to take it. Someone has to take the blame, someone has to take the negative kudos, and so we have to struggle to make sure it isn’t us. We have to struggle to be the winner and not the loser. This is no minor psychological oddity that we’re talking about here, therefore; what we’re looking at is the basic human game – the power game, the game of one-upmanship. This is why society – any society – is always based on a power hierarchy – as is well known by everyone, the higher up the hierarchy we are the less shit we have to take! If we make it to the very top then we don’t take any shit from anyone – we don’t take it, we give it. And – by the same token – if we are right at the bottom of the power pyramid then everyone can take a dump on us; everyone can shit on us because we have no status and so there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. We can’t even displace it onto someone else because there’s no one below us – we just have to suck it up.



If we say that society (any society) is a power hierarchy, underneath all the gloss, then this makes it plain what the game is here, this makes it clear what our motivation to play the game is – we want to (spuriously) validate ourselves by climbing as far up as the ladder as we can. This is why those of us who make it to the upper levels of the power structure – the aristocrats, so to speak – look so pleased with themselves. It is almost inevitably the case that we will assume that our position is the result of our own virtue, our own worthiness, our own innate ‘superiority’ (if we get to get right down to brass tacks) and so this is why we feel so good about ourselves. It’s not the case that we are at the top of the power hierarchy because of our innate superiority however, but rather it is the case that we get to feel superior because we are now in the position of being able to downwardly displace all of our angst and insecurity down to the lower levels. It’s the other way around – we’re not at the top of the pyramid because of our any special virtue that we might possess, but because our elevated position allows us to get away with defining ourselves as being especially worthy, especially deserving of the comfortable position we are in. We feel superior because we are able to define all those below us in the hierarchy as being unworthy, feckless, lazy and generally undeserving. It is this trick that allows the crude game of capitalism to remain respectable.

It might be imagined that we cherish power for lots of reasons but, as Nietzsche says somewhere, power is all about allowing us to say what the truth is. This is what we are ultimately playing for. When we’re at the top of the pyramid then we get to be the one who defines reality and we will do this to suit ourselves, naturally enough. We create the game that everyone else has to play and this game is invariably rigged in our favour; we say that the game is ‘fair’, but actually it’s anything but. It is said that ‘power corrupts’ but the corruption doesn’t lie in the temptation to use that power to gain material benefits – although this of course comes into it – but to use that power so as to be the one who says what reality is.  This means we are always going to come out on top; we are always ‘right’ and anyone who disagree with us is always going to be ‘wrong’. This is what happens in all social groups (all organisations, all institutions, etc) – the powerful say what is true and what is not true so that the only way to ‘get ahead’ is to play the game that has been given to us to play, which means that even if we win (especially if we win) we’re winning against ourselves. When sociologists say that ideology is the invisible prison that we ourselves constructed and maintain, this is what they mean. In society, it is always the case that we keep ourselves prisoner – we ourselves put in the work to do this, no one else. Or as Carlos Castaneda puts it, the strategy of the predator is to give us its own malign mind, and this way we are defeated whatever we do. Our very winning is losing.

Games don’t offer us the possibility of winning (which is what they claim to do) they are the way in which we get to be ‘trapped in someone else’s reality’, which is a situation that is never going to work out for us. Most of us want to ‘do the right thing’ and so our motivation is not malign, the only thing here however is that we never think about who it is that has said what ‘the right thing’ is, and this is our downfall. As Philip K Dick says, this is ‘service in error’ – it’s not enough that we are essentially goodhearted and genuinely want to do the right thing in life, we also have to be curious about what is going on and question the authorities which we serve. The only problem here is that ‘the authorities’ inevitably define ‘questioning’ as ‘a very bad thing’!







Society Reifies Us

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 Self Can Never Be Improved

Two ideas that we are very much unacquainted with in the field of mental health are [1] the idea that we cannot change our mental state on purpose and [2]  the idea that our concept of ourselves, the ‘ego’, cannot ever be ‘improved’ or ‘redeemed’ in any meaningful way. These two ideas are clearly very closely linked and both of them are equally unacceptable to us!

 

If we take the second idea first, we can fairly easily see that the idea of ourselves can never be improved or redeemed – the idea that we have of ourselves will always be just that, an idea – it can never be ‘worked upon’ in such a way so as to make it be not an idea. We like the idea of ‘turning ideas into reality’ it is true but this is one idea that will never become reality. Actually – of course – if we are to be strict about it – we would have to say that no idea can ever truly be made into reality. Ideas are ideas and reality is reality; ideas are ideas by virtue of the fact that they are ‘made-up things’ (or ‘constructs’), whilst reality is reality precisely because it hasn’t been made-up, precisely because it isn’t a construct. No matter how much we improve a construct it’s never going to become ‘not a construct’.

 

There is no big problem in understanding this point – where the big problem comes in however is in us understanding that what I call ‘myself’ actually is an idea, is a construct. We have an awful lot riding on the idea of ourselves not being merely ‘an idea’ – 99% of everything we do (as Wei Wu Wei says) is done for the sake of this construct and so to reveal ‘the idea of ourselves’ as being just that we demolish everything we have either attained or think we might be able to attain in one stroke. The perception that this particular idea isn’t an idea is the hook that we hang our whole lives on. That’s the linchpin for the whole shebang, so naturally we aren’t going to take kindly to having it knocked. We would have nothing to hang our narrative on then! It would be like having a fine collection of expensive shirts or a magnificent collection of stylish and fashionable outfits, but no wardrobe in which to hang them. More to the point, it would be like having the most wonderful hat in the world but no head to wear it on. It is easy enough to put forward the argument as to why our sense of ourselves is no more than an idea, no more than a concept, if only it were possible to find someone to listen to it. Everything we relate to via the thinking mind and take on this account to be real is a construct or idea. That’s how the thinking mind works, after all – it has all these ideas about the world and it automatically projects them out onto the world, and we then happily relate to these projections as if they were not our own ideas, as if they were not our own concepts. That’s basic psychology – albeit a basic psychology that we are never taught in any psychology courses! There is a very easy test we can carry out to see if the ‘reality’ we are perceiving is bone fide or if it is merely a formulation of reality that is being mechanically presented to us by the conceptual mind and that is to notice whether what we are perceiving is engendering a state of wonder in us – if it isn’t then we know that it is a routine construct of thought that we are encountering and not reality itself, which always gives rise to wonder. The routine constructs of thought can engender other types of emotional reaction in us, it is true, but never wonder.

 

We live – for the most part – in a world that is made up of our own projections and that is a very dismal thing to consider. The key thing about our own projections is that they unfailingly remind us of ourselves; they unfailingly remind us of ourselves in either a euphoria-producing way or a dysphoria-producing way. In what may on the face of it sound like rather simplistic terms, we could say that our projections are always either ‘slanted towards the positive’ or ‘slanted towards the negative’ – either we are given the impression that our situation is improving and feel optimistic as a result or we are going to be deflated and demoralised by the perception that things are dis-improving, by the perception that things are going in a bad direction. Although this might sound like a rather over-simplistic way of understanding what’s going on this ‘positive versus negative polarity’ is inherent in the very idea of ‘projection’ – since all my projections are centred upon me, and since all I care about (as an ego) is whether things are going to pan out in a way that is [1] to my advantage or [2] not to my advantage then very clearly there are only two types of meaning that my projections are ever going to hold for me. Either I’m going to be attracted to them because they spell good news or I’m going to be repelled because they spell bad news; either I’m going to be full of desire, or I’m going to be full of fear.

 

It is actually impossible for the Mind-Created Self to live outside the ‘closed world’ that is made up of its unrecognised projections – the process by which the MCS relates to its projections as if they weren’t its projections is the process by which the MCS gets to exist as a going concern! That’s the whole mechanism right there in a nutshell. So if we think it’s rather strange that the everyday self or ego should be relating to its projections in place of reality, and doubt that this actually happens as much as we are saying it does, it will come as a far greater surprise (or rather shock) to consider the suggestion that it cannot do otherwise, no matter how hard it might stretch or strain itself. In another way it surely shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to learn that the idea which we have of ourselves can’t actually ‘make out’ in the real world, but only in our ‘idea of the world’. Naturally the self which is a construct of the system of thought can only exist in a world that is also a construct; this is like saying that ‘who we are in the game that we are playing’ can only exist within the artificial terms of the construct that is ‘the game’. The character in the game cannot escape from the game, no matter how much it might like to believe that it can! As Greg Tucker says, the dreamer cannot leave the dream that the mind is dreaming and lead a life that is outside of the dream, independent of the dream, no matter how much effort it puts into proving that it can.

 

As Greg Tucker argues, everything we do in life is secretly for the sake of proving to ourselves that the dream isn’t a dream’, and that we do have a life that is exists outside of this narrow artificial context, and – on an unconscious level – we might say that this unconscious agenda equates to the urge that we all experience to ‘progress’ in life, to ‘improve’ ourselves or our situation. The everyday self or ego (the default setting for how we understand ourselves) is invariably perceived – once we start reflecting on the matter, which is of course something that we don’t always do  – and so are perennial urge is the urge to redeem the lowly (or inferior) situation of the self, and make it ‘worthy’ in some way. This struggle might be seen in terms of general moral improvement, or it might be seen in religious traditional religious terms as being ‘saved’ by Christ rather than remaining a poor sinner headed for damnation. In a more materialistic frame of reference we will understand the redemption of the everyday self in terms of gaining prestige and status in society, of becoming a ‘somebody’ rather than a ‘nobody’. And if we happen to be ‘spiritual materialists’, to use Chogyam Trungpa’s phrase, then we are going to try to ‘redeem the ego’ by teaching it how to be mindful, by training it to be compassionate and accepting and non-judgemental and so on. It’s all the same thing however, it’s the very same thing dressed up in different guises because what we’re trying to do is something that simply can’t be done. We are trying to improve the mind-created self or ego but there’s no ‘improving’ to be done here. ‘It is what it is’, as people often say.

 

The rational self or ego can’t be trained to be non-judgemental, accepting and compassionate – it would be easier to train a herring to bark, or train a caterpillar to pull a cart. The rational self or ego is a mechanism and as such it can only ‘obey rules’ and there is no sincerity in this. It can only do what it sees as being right (or, on occasion, rebel by doing the exact opposite of obeying and react against the rule, which is also a rule, which is also obeying). The rational self or ego is always the same – it can disguise itself in various ways (it can even disguise itself as a saint or enlightened teacher) but the underlying motivation or agenda never changes, not even by a bit. The ego is always the ego. The other way that we have of trying to ‘redeem the self’ is by this thing that we call therapy, and this brings us to the other impossibility that we have mentioned, which is ‘the impossibility of changing our mental state on purpose’. This – needless to say – is something that we have immense resistance to seeing. Just about everyone you talk to is going to tell you that they can change their mental state at will – most of what we do is done for the sake of changing our mental state, after all (although we don’t usually see things like this). I feel unhappy or dissatisfied in myself and so I do something in order that I might feel better! These are all examples of a change in mental state – or that is at least how we take it. If I’m feeling a bit down I can eat a slice of cake, if I’m anxious I can seek reassurance, or – if I am more psychologically minded, I can do some progressive muscular relaxation or perhaps take a few mindful breaths. If I’m feeling bitter or resentful or hard done by, then I can spend a few moments looking at inspirational memes on my phone, or I can start keeping a gratitude diary, and so on.

 

It might sound as if we’re being rather facetious here but the point is that mental health is – for us in the Western nations – all about using recipes or methods – if you feel like this then do X, and if you feel like that then do Y… It’s all about technical procedures and the implication is very much that we can change our mental state on purpose, which is laughable nonsense. What we don’t (or can’t) see is that feeling satisfied/unsatisfied, validated/devalidated, pleased/annoyed, hungry/satiated, etc are the two sides of the same coin. Feeling euphoric and feeling dysphoric (for whatever reason) are the very same bipolar mental state, which is the bipolar mental state associated with the Mind-Created Self, as we have already said. We believe ourselves to have a wide range of emotional states that we can experience during the course of our day-to-day lives but our emotional palette isn’t as diverse as we might think. All of our basic everyday emotions are states of mind that are based upon the ego’s perception of how well it is doing versus how badly it is doing, i.e. whether it is ‘winning’ or ‘losing’. All of our common emotional states are related to the question of whether the game we’re playing is going well for us or not and the problem with this is that we never acknowledge ourselves as playing a game. The ‘lower emotional register’ corresponds to what Tibetan Buddhism calls ‘the six poisons’ (or ‘the six worlds’) and what Christianity referrs to as ‘the seven deadly sins’. Essentially, these are games that are played by the self without it realizing that it is playing games (and this relates to what we were saying earlier when we said that the self creates itself by playing a game without acknowledging that it is). All of our common emotional states are ‘self-ish’ states, in other words; they are self-ish inasmuch as they only make sense in relation to the Mind-Created Self. Anger relates to insults that the ego receives, envy and jealousy relate to the question of whether someone else has got what the ego thinks it should have, desire relates to the self’s need to accumulate wealth or commodities (or the need to enjoy the pleasure associated with ‘obtaining good things’), pride relates to the polarity of validation versus devalidation (i.e. the age-old question of ‘Am I great or am I rubbish?’) and so on. I might argue that feeling in good form (rather than in bad form) isn’t a lower emotional state but it is because all that it means is that the MCS is doing well in its games; it’s won the lottery – so to speak – and that accounts for its good humour – if things went the other way and it ‘lost out’ (or didn’t get its own way) then that good humour would turn into bad humour in a flash, showing that both ‘emotions’ are really just the same thing…

 

All the ‘lower emotions’ are nothing other than the reflection of the self – the self is bipolar and so are all of the afflictive emotions (as Sogyal Rinpoche puts it). The lower emotions equal the Mind-Created Self and the Mind-Created Self equal the lower emotions. So at this point we can see how it is that neither the state of mind that we happen to be in at the time, or the state of identification that we’re in with the mechanism of the self (which is all of the time), can ever be changed ‘on purpose’. We imagine that we can meaningfully change our state of mind (from a painful one to a pleasurable one) and this is what drives us in all of our ego-games – this is the ‘freedom’ that we think we have in everyday life. We imagine (and this ‘act of imagination’ might be better referred to as ‘an absolute unquestionable conviction’) that we can win rather than lose (if we play our cards right, that is) and this belief is pure jet-fuel for us – it keeps us on the go all day long! This type of motivation can only come about when we DON’T see that winning and losing are the same thing therefore (or when we don’t see that both winning and losing equal ‘the self’ and that the self can never be changed or improved or redeemed). ‘Winning’ is my own projection and so is ‘losing’ but if I see this then there will be no more vindication in the former and no more demoralizing ‘loss-of-face’ in the latter and that would mean that the game cannot continue.

 

If I want to enjoy the euphoria of winning then I can’t let myself see that winning is ‘my own projection’, obviously enough. That’s a game-spoiler. More than this though, if I want to carry on being the concrete self then I mustn’t let myself see that my projections are ‘my projections’ because (as we said earlier) not seeing this is the very mechanism by which the everyday self gets to exist. It’s only when I believe in ‘winning’ as an actual real thing that the one who is either going to win or lose (the MCS) can continue to have its (virtual) existence. This being so, it is no surprise at all that we have such immense, implacable resistance to seeing that [1] We can never change our mental state of purpose and [2] the rational self or ‘ego’ can never be redeemed or improved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Challenge of ‘Becoming Real’ (Part 1)

The whole area of psychological therapy itself starts to look rather suspect at this point, not just this modern thing called ‘resilience training’. If our core problem is that we are ‘unreal people living in an unreal world’ (and if this is what lies behind our neurotic symptomology) then no amount of two-dimensional ‘fixing-type’ therapies are going to help us! Band-aids aren’t really going to be the answer here, no matter how hopeful we might be. When we are unreal people living in an unreal world then no type of ‘trivial, rule-based procedure’ that we might enact us is going to cut it when things really start getting rough. Rules can’t help us in the task of becoming independent from rules, after all!

 

What’s more, we don’t have to be a stereotypical selfie-snapping narcissist in order to qualify as being ‘unreal’; this is a general condition rather than being some type of exotic psychopathology. We’re all ‘unreal’ in this particular ‘psychological’ way when it comes down to it. We can pick the most normal-looking, well-adjusted, competent person we know and the chances are very much that they will qualify as being ‘unreal’ in the sense that we are talking about. The whole point that we are making here is that it is possible to be superbly adjusted to this consensus world of ours and yet at the same time be unreal. We are unreal precisely because we are so superbly adapted to the consensus reality – we are taking the illusion much too seriously, in other words. We are taking something seriously that we oughtn’t to be taking seriously and that is the whole root of the problem right there. We are taking our games, our conventions, our arbitrary preoccupations, more seriously than we are taking reality itself, and there is simply no way anyone can say that this very peculiar orientation of ours isn’t going to have major ramifications in the field of mental health!

 

When we are adapted to the socially-constructed world we immediately feel confident in ourselves and this is the confidence of a game player who is good at playing their game. Within the context of this game, this confidence is entirely justified; outside of the game however it’s not, and this is where the big problem lies. The ‘big problem’ comes about because we don’t understand the game to be a game; we don’t think that there is anything outside of the game in other words, but there is – outside of the game there is this little thing called ‘reality’!

 

When we see people who are confident, self-assured, socially integrated, well-adjusted, and all the rest of it this doesn’t mean that we are in a state of good mental health. The inference is unwarranted. In societal terms, we are mentally healthy’ (or saying’, or whatever term you might like to use) (or well-adjusted’), but these are – as we have just been saying – very narrow terms stop test’ – as always – is when things get difficult. When things get difficult do we ‘rise to the occasion’ or do you ‘lose it’? Do we ‘keep our heads’ (as in Rudyard Kipling’s poem) or do we freak out and become utterly useless to everyone concerned, including ourselves? But it isn’t so much about some difficult external situation that comes along unexpectedly to challenge us, that’s only a rough and ready indication, albeit a rather good one. Our mental health isn’t just a measure of our ‘degree of equanimity with regard to difficult external situations’, it also has to do with our ability to be non-reactive and non-judgement in relation to our own state of mind when that state of mind becomes painful or difficult for us in any way.

 

This is a more intimate gauge of our mental health (or ‘resilience’), we might say – how well are we able to stay present with our own difficult mental states?’ It ought to be noted at this point that our ability to stay present with ourselves ‘through thick and thin’, or ‘for better or for worse’ doesn’t mean ‘coping’ with our difficult mind states. This is one of the great absurdities of Western culture – the idea that we have that mental health consist of to a large extent of something as frighteningly superficial as ‘coping strategies’! We are told to be strategic with difficult states of mind; we are taught appropriate ways of ‘managing’ them. Good mental health thus becomes a matter of being a good manager of our emotions, or a skilful manager of our anger, stress or anxiety. The current fashion – and fashion is what it is – is to learn off a whole bunch of coping strategies that are seen as being ‘healthy’ or ‘adaptive’ rather than relying on mechanisms that have been shown to be ‘unhealthy’, ‘non-adaptive’ or ‘dysfunctional’. To say that this is ‘trivializing’ mental health is a tremendous understatement, but it is very hard to find anyone in the mental health services that we even come close to acknowledging this. No one wants to ‘buck the trend’, after all…

 

This approach sounds so eminently reasonable that we never think to question it. We can plainly see that our ‘normal’ response to recurring mental pain is to react in ways that make matters worse rather than better, so it makes sense that the answer must be to do helpful things instead. The only problem with this commonsensical way of looking at things is that nothing we DO in order to help us deal with difficult mental states is going to be genuinely helpful – nothing we do in order to be able to ‘cope’ is going to be healthy or helpful because all we are doing – no matter what strategy in question is – is avoiding pain. So what’s wrong with avoiding pain, we might ask, if we can get away with it? What’s wrong with this plan is of course precisely that we can’t get away with it; we can’t legitimately ‘escape’ or ‘fix’ our own mental pain – all we can do is find ‘new and improved’ ways of ignoring the pain, postponing the pain and generally ‘dissociating’ ourselves from it. All we can do is disconnect ourselves from what’s going on with us, in other words.

 

This is ridiculously easy to see once we actually look into the matter – if something is happening to make me feel that I need to use some kind of coping strategy then this straightaway tells me that there is something there that I need to look at rather than ‘cope with’. If I find a strategy that allows me to use over than the one thing that we can be sure of is that we are not we won’t look at it! After all not taking a closer look at our mental pain (whatever that pain might be) is the one thing that we don’t want to do! Jung makes the point (speaking from the undoubted authority of over half a century of clinical practice) no one ever changes unless their back is well and truly against the wall. If we have the option of not changing (which is to say, if we have the option of utilising some convenient coping strategy) then we are most definitely not going to change. We’ll make the situation more manageable instead.

 

We utilise coping strategies as an alternative to changing, as an alternative to developing resilience. The popular idea that accumulating a whole load of coping strategies (so as to be able to avoid being in that zone where we are ‘no longer in control’) is what being mentally healthy is all about is an extraordinarily obtuse misrepresentation of what being a genuine human being actually is. To be ‘in control the whole time’ – which we think is a good way to be – actually means to be hiding from life; if it were possible to have strategies to cope with every difficult situation that comes along so that they never becomes too difficult (and ultimately it isn’t possible) then we would as a result be permanently removed from life. We would then be leading a life that is ‘safe but sterile’ and that would to be no fun at all. More than simply ‘no fun’, this type of ‘safe’ or ‘managed’ life actually turns out to be a living death – it turns out to be ghastly parody of what life is meant to be.

 

We don’t see things like this because we imagine that it ought to be possible to avoid the more challenging moments in life by using clever strategies and yet at the same time not be insulated from the rest of life (which is to say, the part of life that we would like to engage in / not be disconnected from). We want to ‘cherry pick’ in other words – we want the sweet without the sour, the good without the bad. We want to be reliant on gimmicks and strategies some of the time (the knife is getting tough) but independent from them for the rest of the time, and whilst this idea might seem reasonable enough when we don’t focus on it too much, if we actually were to give it any real attention at all then we would immediately see it to be the purest hogwash! We’re trying to have our cake and eat it.

 

What we are asking for here – without admitting the fact – is the convenient situation in which we can insulate (or remove) ourselves from life with our thinking when it gets too difficult for us and yet not insulate or remove ourselves with our thoughts the rest of the time. Unfortunately for us it just doesn’t work like this – what actually happens is that we get insulated (or removed) all of the time. To be directly in touch with what is happening to us (i.e. not in touch ‘via the agency of the thinking mind’) requires a type of muscle – it requires the development of a type of strength. This strength or muscle grows through ‘weight-bearing’, and the weight in question is simply the inherent ‘difficulty’ of life. Life makes us strong when we don’t avoid it in other words, and to say this is hardly to say anything very new or revolutionary! There are – in life – two roads that we can go down – the road of getting better and better at avoiding difficulty, or the road of getting better and better at not avoiding difficulty! The first road involves control, and the second road doesn’t. The key thing to note here is that we have to put our money on one horse or the other – we can’t ‘hedge our bets’, we can’t ‘chop and change’ to suits ourselves. This is a bit like saying that we either have to decide on lying or telling the truth in order to get by in life. Or to put this another way, we have to decide between ‘finding the easy way round all of our problems’, or ‘doing the required work, whatever that work might be and however much we don’t want to do it’. This doesn’t mean that if we opt for the ‘honest approach’ we won’t ever cheat or tell lies, it just means that we don’t believe that cheating or lungs can really get us anywhere worthwhile, and so because of this insight we won’t invest in the total way that we would have done before.

 

The ‘default setting’ is for us to absolutely wholeheartedly believe whatever it is that the thinking mind tells us, so that when the TM tells us that we are ‘onto a winner’ we get foolishly excited, and when it tells us that we have ‘screwed it all up’ we become equally foolishly despairing. We are ‘one hundred percent gullible with respect to what the TM tells us’ in other words, and this is what lends that particular and peculiar ‘mechanical’ quality to our responses. We don’t have to be 100% gullible though (that’s only our ‘default’, as we have said) – we can learn to doubt the thinking mind and become perhaps only 98% gullible instead! We will still ‘react’ even when we have – to some limited extent – started to see through the thinking mind; we will still react because our ‘perceived well-being’ is still linked or coupled to what our thoughts tell us about ourselves and the world, but there is now a part of us that is not buying into it as much as we used to. The ‘buy in’ is not total anymore, and this changes everything – something else has entered the picture apart from ‘mechanical reacting’. Consciousness has come into play…

 

The point that comes out of this therefore is that it actually suits us to buy into what the TM tells us because if we don’t then we can’t use the thinking process to insulate ourselves from the difficult times in life. This is the argument that we are making here – that if we want to use ‘strategies’ to help us when things get rough then we have to ‘believe our thoughts to be real’, but once we take the step of ‘believing our thoughts to be real’ then we can’t simply go back to not believing in the reality of our thoughts once the need for a coping strategy is past! If we invest in games and game-playing to make ourselves feel more secure in life then we can’t just ‘exit’ our games a bit later on. This is the point that we keep on making – that what we are looking at here is strictly a ‘one-way street’, which is to say, the process in question is ‘irreversible’. Once we ‘start playing the game’ then we can’t just ‘stop playing it’; we can’t just ‘stop playing it’ because we have now lost the capacity to know that the game is a game!

 

 

 

 

Art: wallpaperhi.com

 

 

 

 

 

The Secret World Of Suffering

The most terrible ‘mistake’ we could ever make would be to miss the point of what life is all about and spend all our time preoccupied with something else, something that isn’t life, something that has nothing whatsoever to do with life. What bigger mistake could there possibly be than this? What worse screw-up could there be than this?

 

This is of course a rhetorical question because we never could make a bigger mistake than this. You really would want to kick yourself for making a mistake like this – you’d want to kick yourself particularly hard! The point we’re making here is of course that this is exactly the mistake that we – as a culture – are making; we are making precisely this mistake and we are far too stubborn to listen to those amongst us who try to point this fact out. We absolutely won’t be told.

 

This is an astonishing statement to be able to make – it is a staggering statement to hear as well (if, that is, we were able to hear it). How could we have got things so wrong? It is however very clearly the case that very few people are ever going to take this on board, and of those who do see it, none of them have a position in the rigid hierarchy of society and this means that no one is going to listen to them even if they were to say something about it. We only listen to people in positions of authority, and positions in people in ‘positions of authority’ (those people whose opinions get listened to) are inevitably the most heavily conditioned of us all, as Noam Chomsky points out. Who cares what the misfits and eccentrics think, when by definition what they think doesn’t matter?

 

The two main ‘parts’ of life, we might say, are ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ and – as things stand in our society – neither of these two things has anything to do with life. We could just as well say that neither of these two things ‘have anything to do with who we really are’, which is another way of saying the same thing. Most work doesn’t require us to be able to ‘tap into who we really are’ – it’s hardly necessary to point this out! No one is going to pay us to ‘be ourselves’; quite the contrary is true – most of us are actually being paid to be who we aren’t! As Philip K Dick says in Do Androids Dream, ‘we are required to go against our own nature’. The other way of putting this would be to say that ‘no one is going to pay us for doing what we would do anyway’ but only for ‘doing what we don’t want to do’, and therefore wouldn’t do, and that this is why we are being paid. We’re being paid to compensate us for doing what we don’t want to do…

 

In a rather simplistic way, we could say that when we have a job we have a role to play and that role isn’t us, obviously. This in itself is harmless enough: if I am a waiter then I can step out of role when I’m not working. I know very well that I’m not this role and, what’s more, it is probably that I can even be myself, to some extent, when I am in role at work – I don’t have to act like some kind of robot, after all. If I happen to be working in a very expensive restaurant then I will be required to be ‘more in role and less myself,’ it’s true, but I still know that it’s only a role. The problem is however that in the last few hundred years in particular life has become more complicated and our roles have become ever more two-dimensional, or artificial. As the social world becomes more abstracted from nature, and the demands that the natural world place on us, our conditioned sense of who we are gets correspondingly more removed from who we really are. The ‘natural world’ is replaced by the ‘designed world’ and so thought becomes the guiding principle rather than the natural (or ‘spontaneous’) order of things. Thought itself gives us roles to perform, roles that are – moreover – extremely hard to see through. We have ‘ideas about ourselves’, in other words, and we live our lives on the basis of these ideas.

 

It’s actually extraordinarily hard to not do this – we never stop to consider that the ideas we are living our life on the basis of are only ideas. Who does that? The urgency to ‘get on with life’ is such that we never had time to stop to reflect on matters such as this. Certainly don’t feel that we have the time to do much in the way of reflecting, or philosophising The whole ‘trip’ of thought is that it never allows us to pause to consider the fact that the thoughts which we are basing our lives on are only thoughts – if we did this then we could there would be the chance of radical change in our lives. As it is however, there is no chance of radical change, and we don’t miss this possibility either! We don’t miss it because we are convinced – without ever reflecting on the fact that we are convinced – that everything we could ever possibly want or need or aspire to is to be found within the realm of trivial change (which is the only type of change we know or understand). And because the realm of trivial change is the only type of change we know, we don’t see it as being ‘trivial’, obviously!

 

When we are ‘in role without knowing that we are in role’ then it is of course the case that the only type of change that we will ever know or acknowledge is change of the trivial variety. The only way there could be radical change would be that if we were to come out of role, but because we don’t actually know that we are ‘in role’ we are profoundly incapable of conceiving of or in any way comprehending that possibility. This then gives us a very neat way of looking at the mechanism by which we can miss the whole point of ‘what life about’ without knowing that we have missed anything – a whole world becomes invisible to us when we ‘are in role without knowing that we are’, a whole world that is actually the only word there is! What other the world could there be than the world we see when we are not in role, after all? The world we see when we look through the conceptual filter of the thinking mind isn’t the world at all, and – as we have already said – this isn’t something that we ever stop to reflect on.

 

When we are in role without knowing it then we are not at all interested in any other world than the world that makes sense from the point of view of the ‘part’ that we are playing. Because nothing else is of any interest to us, the possibility of our lives changing in a radical way is not going to be a possibility that we are in any way curious about. If we ever were to have the inking that that there were such a possibility – which we will inevitably do from time to time, no matter how carefully we organise or regulate our lives – then our only response will be fear. We will be terrified without knowing why we are terrified; we will be afraid without being interested in finding out why we are afraid. When we are in role without knowing it (or conditioned by thought without knowing it) then awareness of the type radical change that we have implicitly denied is bound to manifest as ‘ontological terror’.

 

If we were in role but at the same time knew ourselves to be in role then the possibility of radical change, the possibility of ‘dropping out of role’, would of course not be terrifying to us. It would simply represent a greater degree of freedom; it would represent ‘blessed relief from the onerous set of restrictions that we are operating under’. It would be ‘good news’ not ‘bad news’, in other words. When we are unconsciously identified with the part that we are playing however then – as we have said – radical change is synonymous with ‘ontological terror’ and for this reason we are going to take very great care never to permit any awareness, however faint, of the possibility of such a thing. What this means therefore is that we are straightaway going to be constrained to ‘a false life’! We are confined to an area of experience that has nothing to do with who we really are, but only to do with who we are playing at being. This ‘area of experience’ is the world which only makes sense in relation to the identity we mistakenly think we are!

 

There is a very interesting question that comes up here and that is the question of whether it is possible for us to continue in life in this very restricted mode of being (the mode of being in which we think trivial change is the only type of change there is) and yet remain undistressed by this fundamental restriction? Can we get off ‘scott free’, in other words? In one way we might come to the conclusion that it is indeed possible for us to continue indefinitely in this mode without ever missing the wider reality from which we are cut off; we might come to such a conclusion as a result of our observations of the people around us, the people we know and have regular interactions with. On the whole, people seem to be getting on well enough, and if we take into account the media’s unduly positive representations of how we are getting on then it would seem that we are certainly not distressed or troubled by our ‘lack of Wholeness’. Life has never been better, if we are to believe the media’s super-glossy representations of modern life!

 

We could on the other hand make the sober point that there is an invisible side to society, a side that isn’t on general display, either in terms of how human life is represented to us by the media, or in terms of how we personally wish to see it. What we are talking up here could be spoken of as ‘a secret world’ – the secret world of unacknowledged suffering. We ‘filter for misery’, as psychiatrist Scott Alexander puts it – we see the world as being a happier place than it really is. To a significant extent, we also filter other people from seeing us as being miserable, of course. On the outside we might seem to be fine – or ‘halfway fine’ at least – but what’s really going on with us on the inside? How would it feel if we really tuned in to ourselves, instead of only going on the images that we are fed? This secret world is the world of the ‘walking wounded’, we might say – we are still functioning (in some kind of a fashion) and we can still keep up the front (more or less) but the passion (or ‘sense of meaning’ with regard to life) has long since fled. This is the world we don’t see represented very often, or even at all; there can be no doubt that it is a substantial world, that there are many of us in it. Statistics do not exist to tell us just exactly how big this world is however; there are no stats to draw on here since this type of profound alienation from life is the norm rather than the exception!

 

When we can’t keep up the pretence anymore (and are forced to ‘declare our hand’) then this means that we have automatically graduate into another ‘secret world’, which is the secret world of overt or acknowledged mental suffering, where there is at least now a degree of honesty about what’s going on. This too can rightly be spoken of as ‘an invisible world’ inasmuch as we are no longer part of ‘visible society’. Whilst it is true that there is a movement to bring the various types of ‘mental ill health’ into the public consciousness (in contrast to the policy adopted in Victorian times where the main purpose of the asylum, as Erving Goffman says, was to ‘segregate the mentally unwell’ so that us normal folk would never have to have the unpleasant experience of actually encountering them) our approach to the whole matter of mental suffering is still to see it as some sort of pathological process that can be cured without ever having to look at the deeper causes that might exist in society itself. We’re trying to be more inclusive, which is good, but we still don’t want to look into the real causes of mental suffering, and so we’re not actually going to get anywhere with our efforts.

 

We certainly don’t see any connection with the profound artificiality of modern society and the way in which – ultimately – it causes us to ‘miss the very point of life itself’, as we put it earlier. Who amongst those of us who are adapted (and therefore invested) game-players are ever going to admit to such a thing? We are not exactly inclined to ‘ask big questions’, we are not exactly very likely to start wondering if our whole way of doing things (or seeing things) is wrong – on an individual level it usually requires a massive crisis to bring such questioning about and on the level of the ‘collective mind’ which is society, even the biggest crisis isn’t going to trigger honest reflection of this sort. The generic/collective (or ‘adapted’) mind isn’t able to ask big questions like this – it has an unholy terror of them. Our only option in this case is to assume that the patterns of mental suffering that we are witnessing are due to individual pathology that can (hopefully) be cured without bringing into question the overall structure we are adapted to, which is the game we are committed to playing without knowing that we are.

 

 

In short, we just don’t want to see that 100% adaptation to society causes us to miss the key point of life itself. We just don’t want to see it and we won’t see it. Society causes us to ‘miss the point’ by giving us a false basis upon which to live life and – as we have argued – the way in which it does this is by compelling us to see ourselves as being who it says we are. ‘The system says who we are’, in other words – it defines everything about us and we’re perfectly happy about that! There can be absolutely no doubt that this is what society does. Just to emphasise the point that we have already made: society would not be society unless we were all socially constructed, socially conditioned. If we all came ‘out of role’ at the same time, where would society be then? What would happen to the collective way of seeing things if we did this? Society is after all nothing more than a set of agreements that we covertly make with each other and what we are ultimately agreeing to is to be ‘in role’ without acknowledging either to ourselves or anyone else that we’re actually doing anything at all!

 

In conclusion, the point that we never want to look at is that it is utterly impossible for us be mentally healthy (or ‘mentally well’) and be socally conditioned at the same time and the reason for this is that being socially conditioned or socially adapted means that we are who society says we are rather than who we actually are, and if we’re not who we ‘actually are’ then it is absolutely the case that we’re not living life. We might be doing something else alright but whatever the hell it is that we’re doing we’re definitely not living life. We’re ‘playing at living life’, which isn’t the same thing at all…

 

 

 

 

The Surrogate Challenge

Life is hitting us with a big challenge every single day of our lives, and every single minute of every day, and yet – collectively speaking – we are completely oblivious to it. As a culture we do not recognise the existence of this challenge at all and – as we might expect – this obliviousness, this lack of recognition – brings about a whole heap of unpleasant consequences. It is simply not possible to ignore life’s essential challenge and get away scot-free!

 

The ‘essential challenge of life’ – if we may continue to speak of it in these terms – is inevitably reframed by whatever culture or society it is that we happen to be part of. This has always been the way – this is how human collectives work. This is how the ‘group mind’ works – it works by reframing life’s central essential challenge!

 

So what is this challenge, and how does society reframe it (or ‘bend it to its own purposes’)? Very simply put, the challenge is to work out, by ourselves, ‘who we are’! This was the inscription above the entrance of the temple of Apollo in ancient Greece; this is the famous Delphic maxim – “Know Thyself’.

 

This is the only challenge that counts since if we fail to ‘know ourselves’ and we just charge ahead and live our lives on the basis of ‘who we are not but who we mistakenly think we are’ then this isn’t going to do anyone any good!’ What’s your problem – mistaken identity‘ says Wei Wu Wei. If we don’t sort this critical issue out then how can we possibly to sort anything else out? If we start from the standpoint of delusion, then how can any of our activities come to any good?

 

The way that society ‘reframes’ this essential challenge is very simple – it tells us who we are and gives us various games to compete in on the basis of this false identity. That is society in a nutshell. The challenge thus becomes ‘can you win at the game which we insist on you playing?’ In the past this was often put in religious terms – we were told some stuff about God and His plan for us and the world, we were told about our immortal souls and the jeopardy we will place these souls in if we fail the test that we are being presented with by God in this life. The existential challenge is not to ‘know ourselves’ therefore, but to obey the rules that the church has set for us in God’s name. The ‘reframed challenge’ is therefore ‘can I conform to the system correctly or not?’ and this isn’t really the same thing at all!

 

We may think that we have moved on in the 21st century, but we haven’t at all. The situation is exactly the same – the essential challenge in life has been reformulated to become something entirely trivial – ‘how well can I adapt to the rule-based system that I have been presented with in place of life?’ The social system is a complicated game and it is constantly hitting us with its own distorted version of the ‘existential challenge’, which is ‘can the identity we have told you you are succeed at the game we have recruited you to play without ever telling you that it is only a game?’ Again, this is not the same thing as ‘Know Thyself’ at all. Actually – of course – it’s the very antithesis of it! It’s the very antithesis of life’s challenge because playing society game means forgetting all about ‘who we really are’.

 

What could be a better way of getting us to forget all about the question of ‘who we really are’ than giving us a ready-made identity and then giving that ready-made identity all sorts of supposedly ‘important’ tasks to succeed at? And what else is ‘society’ if not exactly this? We have been kept busy the whole time achieving these things that only make sense to the identity which society says we are but which we are not. What better way could there be to get us to neglect rising to the challenge that life itself has set us than to set us all sorts of false or spurious challenges that have to be accomplished on behalf of the false self?

 

In psychotherapy this sort of thing is sometimes called ‘pseudo-solution’ – pseudo-solution  means fixing the thing that that doesn’t need fixing, in place of the one that does! This doesn’t necessarily mean that the ‘surrogate tasks’ which we so enthusiastically involve ourselves in doesn’t need to be done (they might well do) but what it does mean is that they are ‘welcome distractions’! The whole point of pseudo-solution is that we are very much on the lookout for ‘semi-legitimate distractions’, and the social game is superbly effective in helping us out in this regard! Up to this point we have been talking about society as if it were some sort of sinister agency that is responsible for aggressively ‘side-tracking’ us so that we end up missing out on the whole point of life (which is Satan’s job, if we were to speak in theological terms). In one way this is perfectly true – the collective, the ‘group mind’, does serve this ‘adversarial’ or ‘antagonistic’ function, but the bottom line is that it only does this because – deep-down – we want it to!

 

We are after all hungry for distractions, and so the ‘mass-collusion’ which both supplies us with them, and collectively validates them at the same time, is exactly what we want. Blaming society for ‘putting us wrong’ is missing the point therefore – all are doing in this case is pushing the responsibility away from us again, which is exactly what we did when we let society tell us ‘who we are’ in the first place. Society serves the illegitimate function of both ‘defining reality for us’ and ‘defining ourselves for us’, therefore saving us from the trouble of having to work this out for ourselves, and then – after we have let the system take over this unwanted job for us – we can still evade responsibility by saying ‘look what the wrong things that society has done to us’. We get to have our cake and eat it this way, therefore!

 

Blaming isn’t really isn’t a very useful response to the situation, needless to say – it compounds our problems rather than solving them. What is helpful is for us to start taking responsibility for ourselves and realise the frightening truth, which is that we are – on a very deep level – divided against ourselves. There is some part of us which does not want to take on any responsibility at all (and which certainly doesn’t want to take on responsibility for ‘responding to life’s essential challenge’) and this part of us also doesn’t want to take responsibility for owning up to its own existence, which means that it can – since we don’t even know that it is there – act with complete impunity. This secret and murky part of us – which will do absolutely anything  rather than ‘take responsibility for itself’ – corresponds to what Carl Jung calls the shadow‘.

 

When  we all refuse to ‘own our own shadow’ then, as Jung says, this shadow gets to roam freely around the world and do what it will. When we talk about society and its repressive influence on our consciousness (or on our true individuality) then what we are actually talking about is our ‘collective shadow’. Our ‘shadow side’ is what drives and sustains the deterministic/controlling system that we live out the course of our lives within, and so the power and weight of this system (Philip K Dick’s Black Iron Prison) depends upon what proportion of the population are completely unconscious and are – therefore – completely manipulated (or rather possessed) by it. Statistics don’t exist to tell us what exactly this ‘proportion’ might be, but we can make a pretty good guess that it is greater than 99.5%!

 

Life is hitting us with this big challenge every day of our lives, and every minute of each day, and we are displacing it and keeping ourselves busy solving various ‘surrogate versions’ of that great challenge. Taking part in the game which is society is the ‘collective surrogate task’ and – unlike the core existential challenge of ‘finding out who we are’ – it is compulsory. Meeting life’s challenge isn’t compulsory – we are completely free to either rise to it, or not rise to it – that’s our own business! Participation in the distractions that are provided for us by society are, on the other hand, most definitely compulsory!

 

There’s no choice here – we are not free ‘not to play’ – how could we be, when we don’t even know that what we doing is ‘playing a game’? We don’t go around thinking that we’re ‘going around constantly distracting ourselves from what life is all about’ – on the contrary, we are – for the most part – entirely convinced that what we doing is ‘living life as it should be lived’ and so we’re not looking any further than this. How could we doubt that ‘this is what life is supposed to be’ when everyone around us is doing the same things that we are doing, believing the same things that we believe in? Unconsciousness is always compulsory, whilst consciousness is always free…

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Shoe-Leather Of Samsara

What society tells us is important doesn’t really matter. What our minds tell us is important doesn’t really matter either – neither society nor the thinking mind knows what really matters. Neither society nor the thinking mind have any wisdom in them – all they contain are innumerable recipes from the past, formulae from the past, pre-established patterns that we are compelled to adhere to, pressurized to adhere to. As Krishnamurti says, there is no actual intelligence there.

 

So what does matter then? What does ‘wisdom’ tell us? It’s actually much easier to say what doesn’t really matter than what does. It’s easier to point out the ‘red herrings’ as being red herrings than it is to point out what it is that truly matters in life and the reason for this is that ‘pointing out things’ almost invariably brings our unexamined assumptions into play and it is our ‘unexamined assumptions’ that always put us wrong. As a general principle, we can say that the ‘False Task’ in life is the task of validating our unwarranted assumptions and thus preventing ourselves from seeing that they are only unwarranted assumptions, whilst the ‘True Task’ (so to speak) is to see through all the clutter, all the rubbish, all the hocus-pocus, all the time-wasting nonsense masquerading as ‘the truth’.

 

In short then, society is always recruiting us into the task of validating and upholding its collective assumptions. That’s what it does. That’s what society is all about and this has got nothing whatsoever to do with uncovering the truth either about ourselves or the world we live in. Human society hasn’t (and never has had) anything to do with establishing a relationship with the truth – on the contrary, it’s all about ‘worshipping false idols’. It’s hard to see how anyone, looking honestly at the world that we have created for ourselves, could fail to observe that this is what is going on. How could we not see something as obvious as this? ‘If it were a dog it would bite you’, as the saying has it. The extent to which we have been recruited into worshipping all these ‘false idols’ is the extent to which we have turned our backs on what really matters to us. The degree to which we have been enlisted in the ‘False Task’ is the degree to which we have ignored the True Task, which is – as we have suggested – uncovering the actual truth about things.

 

Society is in the business of selling illusions, as Sogyal Rinpoche says. We think it’s about something else but it isn’t. We work all our lives in order to earn the money to be able to afford these by wonderful illusions and if we are diligent enough and hard-working enough we might get to accumulate a big pile of them! It makes us feel very bad if we aren’t able to accumulate all the illusions that we are led to believe we ought to be accumulating and yet if we do ‘succeed’ and manage to do what society tells us we ought to be doing then we’re still no better off! What good are illusions going to do us anyway? They’re only ever going to distract us what really matters. The pursuit of society’s goals is only ever going to waste our time; we’re wasting our time if we ‘fail’ and we’re wasting our time just as much if we ‘succeed’. We’ve been taken as suckers either way. No matter how we do in the game we’re wasting our time – the game is nothing more than a big red herring, after all. Society is nothing more than a big red herring. All the things that the thinking mind gives us to concern ourselves with, preoccupy ourselves with, worry about, are red herrings. That’s the name of the game…

 

Understanding this straightaway points us in the direction of understanding what ‘really does matter’. The thing that ‘really does matter’ is uncovering the truth that has been hidden so well, as opposed to burying it ever deeper. Even those elements within society that ostensibly claim to be concerned with the truth (especially those elements of society that claim to be concerned with the truth, such as education, religion and spirituality) are red herrings. As we’ve just said, that’s the nature of the game that we are playing! Education and religion have nothing whatsoever to do with orientating people towards the truth – all they do is encourage ‘mass mindedness’, all they do is brainwash us all the more effectively because we actually think we ‘know’ something! So-called ‘spirituality’ is no better – for the most part it just sells us ‘candy-coated dreams’; it sells us the illusion that we are (or could be) ‘living a more spiritual life’. This is a very nice illusion to have and we are very happy to buy into it by going on this course or that course, taking part in this online seminar or that online seminar, following this teacher or that teacher. That’s not how it happens though – seeing through all the falseness in our lives is an individual endeavour, something we do ourselves, on our own, working against the entire tide of collective thinking as we do so. Surrounding ourselves with the new (supposedly ‘enlightened’) type of collective thinking isn’t going to help us any. That’s why joining groups or organisations, no matter what they claim to be about, always has the opposite effect to the one intended – we become more brainwashed, not less. All that’s happening is that we are subscribing to ‘society in a different guise’.

 

The problem with the mass-mind phenomenon that we might call ‘online spirituality’ (which is a phenomenon that is currently burgeoning) is that we imagine that by adopting a new language, a new way of looking at the world and the new way of living or behaving in the world that goes with it we imagine ourselves to have become ‘more spiritual’. We imagine that we have become more spiritual because we have ‘changed our outfit’, so to speak. We’re wearing a new set of clothes. But becoming more spiritual doesn’t mean ‘becoming more spiritual’! It doesn’t mean becoming anything. That’s not it at all. That’s an escape, an evasion. If we want to see through all the falseness then adopting a spiritual lifestyle (a new, improved way of thinking and behaving) isn’t going to help us any – that’s just going to confuse us into thinking that those ‘falsehoods’, those ‘self-deceptions’, those ‘inner contradictions’ are no longer there. We’re going to become bliss ninnies, imagining that everything is OK when it isn’t! We might have the teachings of all the masters at our fingertips but diligently ‘counting our neighbour’s gold’ isn’t going to improve the state of our bank account any…

 

 

The only thing that’s going to help us see through the falsehoods that live in us is to consciously live our life as it actually is, and be ourselves as we actually are. This isn’t very glamorous and it certainly isn’t going to make our lives any easier but it will certainly open our eyes! We wear out the shoe-leather of samsara by walking on it, as Chogyam Trungpa says somewhere…

 

 

Art: Detail from Banksy’s Injured Buddha

 

 

 

 

 

The Sham Life

The essential point is this – we allow society to nullify (or negate) ourselves in return for some kind of package which is supposed to be life, but which isn’t. That’s the basic deal. That is the basic story of what’s going on. That’s it in a nutshell. So how much more ‘to the point’ could we be? This is exactly the deal we make and there are no two ways about it. The matter is crystal clear – no one but a fool would argue otherwise!

 

The matter is crystal clear and yet we allow ourselves not to be clear about it. This is of course the only way that we can commit wholeheartedly to society – by not facing up to the cost. We are very good at not facing up to the cost of social adaptation; we spot threats and enemies everywhere but never do we number among them the threat of ‘losing custody of our very soul’, so to speak. Other things spook us, but this apparently does not…

 

This is not a new dilemma – it’s something that’s been around ever since human beings first settled down in large groups, presumably. There has always been the danger that we will end up making the unwise decision to ‘sell our birthright for a mess of pottage’. And if this was the danger thousands of years ago when this line was first written down – and the human population was so very much smaller than it is today – then what must the danger be like now? Even the word ‘danger’ is inadequate in this context – it’s more of an inevitability.

 

What takes place when we ‘adjust ourselves to the way in which everyone else thinks’ – which in one way seems to be a perfectly reasonable thing to do – this is that a type of ‘switch-over’ takes place. Beforehand, we might say, our orientation was towards ‘reality as it is in itself’, afterwards it is towards ‘reality as it is being presented to us by the Group Mind’. Another way that we could put this is to say that our natural orientation is to be ‘curious’, just as children are ‘curious’; the ubiquitous process of socialisation changes this however – instead of curiosity conformity is now the thing. Curiosity and conformity are ‘antithetical principles’; the whole point about the ‘consensus reality’ is that we reach it by agreement, not curiosity. No one ever bought into a consensus reality by being curious (which is to say, no one ever ended up believing in the CR via an actual healthy interest in the truth of things as they really are).

 

Kurt Vonnegut says something like this. Vonnegut says that we agree with people not because we think that what they are saying is right but more as a type of social nicety, because we want to establish a friendly relationship, because we want to ‘establish ties’ –

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.

The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.

Establishing friendly relations with those around us is obviously important in one way – a very limited way – but we take it too far. We take it ridiculously far! When we are living within a consensus reality, a reality that we all collectively agree on, then curiosity actually becomes a thoroughly undesirable sort of the thing – no one gets on in the conditioned reality by being curious as to ‘why the rules are the rules’; we get on by accepting the rules, not by questioning them. We can of course see this happening all around us, in all corporate and institutional environments, in all organized groups – people become deliberately obtuse rather than acknowledging absurdities that are staring them right in the face. Who has not come across this type of deliberate obtuseness? If we don’t ‘play dumb’ in this time-honoured way then it is a fact that our careers are simply never going to get anywhere. More than this, our whole lives are going to be very hard indeed. We’re going to be ostracized. Who wants to swim against the tide of social convention?

 

This isn’t some fanciful theory that we are trotting out here – it’s very evidently the case in all arenas of human activity – when we are part of a group, when we are part of a consensus reality, then our fundamental allegiance is to maintaining the group, maintaining the (apparent) integrity of the collective viewpoint. There is therefore always going to be a conflict between ‘acknowledging the truth’ and’ maintaining the consensus reality,’ and when we are part of a group then ‘acknowledging the truth’ is always going to come very poor second! This might sound strange from the POV of our everyday thinking but the consensus reality is essentially a game and the only way to play games is by tacitly agreeing to ignore the fact that the game is only a game. Games work – as we all know – by substituting themselves for reality and – for obvious reasons – this substitution can never be an honest (or ‘upfront’) kind of a thing.

 

What we are essentially looking at here is the phenomenon sometimes known as ‘groupthink’. Groupthink is always a fundamentally dishonest business. If I’m engaged in groupthink then I speak the group’s truth and not my own and yet I cannot admit this to myself. I have to pretend otherwise. I have to pretend that I really do genuinely and sincerely mean what I say, even though, on another level, everyone (including myself) knows perfectly well that I don’t. This is the fundamental conflict that exists within all social groups; this is the ‘basic insincerity’ that lies behind society itself. It is of course perfectly possible to conform to what we are supposed to be saying whilst at the same time being clear that we don’t mean a word of it, but in practice this honesty is extraordinarily rare. We all know from our experience of living in this world that honesty of this sort is extraordinarily rare. It would be the height of foolishness to assert otherwise! We are not just talking about the isolated occasion every now and again when we are obliged to ‘tow the corporate line’ – adapting to the consensus reality goes far, far deeper than this. Our whole life has been constructed on the basis of the consensus reality and so to question any bit of it would be to question the whole thing. Pull on this particular bit of thread and the whole jumper comes undone, and then we’re going to get cold!

 

The example of someone who is obliged to tow the company line, or come out with the bland meaningless jargon that their organisation wants him or her to come out with is a very good one all the same however because we can all easily relate to this type of ‘internal conflict’. It feels very bad to go around being fundamentally insincere and knowing that one is and so – in practice – what we do is that we tune out of the conflict by allowing ourselves to believe our own lies. This is the oldest story there is – we end up believing in our own convenient fictions! No matter where you go in the world you will find this happening – people believing in their own convenient fictions. It’s just too uncomfortable to stay conscious in this world of ours otherwise – there are far too many lies going around for that. We might even find out that it’s all lies….

 

A simpler way of putting this is to say that we play games, but we are not conscious that our games are games. We could be conscious of our games (or ‘conscious in our games’, but that would be highly ‘inconvenient’, if we can continue to use that rather inadequate word. We exist within a system and in order to gain advancement in this system we need to take it for granted, not question it. There is no pragmatic advantage in becoming aware of the system as a system, of the game as a game. Moreover, this is a cumulative sort of a thing – lies always add up, in other words! In any one instance we might opt to do what is ‘pragmatically or politically advantageous’, so to speak, but over time the sheer weight of all these little decisions to ‘play the game’ add up to one vast inertial mass – a vast solid inertial mass that has become all but impossible to go against. Lots of little lies become one big lie; lots of little evasions become ‘one evasion’, and that ‘One Big Evasion’ is what we commonly call ‘society’.

 

We are so very averse to seeing this. Collectively speaking we are absolutely averse and we won’t see it; the generic mind will never see itself what it is (the generic group mind always assumes itself to be right and so of course it can never see itself what it is). As ‘individuals’ we are also extremely averse to seeing this truth, for the simple reason that society supplies everything for us – it supplies our identity, it supplies our way of seeing the world, it supplies our friends and our relationships, it supplies a whole life, in fact. We are dependent on the social system for so much (for far more than we would ever allow ourselves to see) and this dependency makes it impossible for us ever to look at it critically. As the character Morpheus says in the film The Matrix

 

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

 

The only thing about this is that the life which the system supplies us with, in return for our compliance, isn’t actually worth it, as we have said right at the beginning of this discussion. Deep down we know that it isn’t worth it! How could we not know? What possible worth could there be in a ‘second hand reality’, a reality that is never more than ‘someone else’s idea’ of what is real or true? And what’s more, we can’t ever find out who that ‘someone else’ is either because every person we come across is going to a fervent believer in ‘someone else’s idea of reality’. It’s ALWAYS ‘someone else’s idea of reality’ and that someone else doesn’t actually exist. That ‘someone else’ is ‘the system’ and the system isn’t real. It’s a thing we made up, supposedly to help us…

 

What could possibly be more ludicrous than living our lives on the basis of what ‘someone else’ has told us that life should be? Could our keenness to conform to the consensus reality really outweigh our own actual interest in (or curiosity about) what life actually is, or about what reality actually is? Could this really be the case? Could we really be that shallow? And yet it clearly is. We clearly are that shallow. It very clearly is the case, and who could possibly deny it? It is abundantly obvious (more than ‘abundantly obvious’, even, if that were possible) that all of our energy is channelled into conforming to the so-called ‘reality’ that has been presented to us by society, by ‘the system’ (by thought, as Krishnamurti says), and none at all on ‘checking it out for ourselves’!

 

The question is therefore, “What kind of a life can we create for ourselves on this on the basis of ‘second-hand ideas’ (and ideas are always second-hand)?” Very, very clearly, the answer has to be that it’s going to be an inauthentic life, a sham life. It’s not going to be our life that we are living, after all – it’s ‘someone else’s idea’ of what our life should be and – as we have already said – that ‘someone else’ doesn’t even exist!