Sense comes from the inside, it comes from ‘the inside out’; what comes from ‘the outside in’ isn’t good sense (or even anything remotely resembling it) but rather it is brainwashing, conditioning, ideology, and so on. It’s the ‘biased account’. The one direction is honest, healthy and sound whilst the other is malign and profoundly unsound — nothing good ever came out of letting some external agency direct us with regard to how we see the world.
Instead of ‘sense’ we could talk of wisdom and say that there is only one place that wisdom can come from and that’s the sovereign individual — it can’t be piped in from the outside, it can’t be taught by teachers or learnt in online seminars. It doesn’t come from schools and universities. If our only source of knowledge about the world originates from ‘the outside of us’ then it’s not wisdom that we’re talking about here but a false or contrived narrative. It’s propaganda, it’s advertising, it’s promotional material for the dysfunctional Artificial World that has been brutally foisted upon us from a very early age. Knowledge and power are inseparable, as Foucault points out — those with the power are the one’s who say what is knowledge and what isn’t. That’s why power attracts us — because that way lies ‘impunity’.
When our understanding of things has been systematised (by the proper authorities) and piped into us from some ‘external store’ then this isn’t wisdom but — on the contrary — it is a disguised control system, a self-consistent structure of lies cunningly designed to subvert authentic insight. When sense comes from the inside (in a natural way) then this frees, when it comes from the outside — and is forced upon us — it imprisons. The principle here is nothing if not simple: when our way of understanding the world and our part in it comes from inside then there is clarity and when it comes from the outside then what we have instead is fundamental confusion. This is the fundamental confusion that comes from treating an illusion as if it were real, the fundamental confusion that comes about when we are browbeaten from an early age into believing some kind of crassly stupid narrative about ‘what’s going on’ (and thereby get bullied into turning our backs on the connection to the truth that we already have, the direct connection that we don’t need some external agency to provide us with).
Only slavery, confusion and illusion can result when our ‘sense of what’s what’ (our grasp on ‘what everything’s about’) has to be imported from the outside, and this is precisely the situation that we currently find ourselves in — everything does come from the outside. We’ve been brought up to believe that we don’t need an ‘inside’, that we don’t need an interior source of wisdom that can’t be tampered with (or contaminated by) any control systems. The door to the inside is locked and bolted and we’ve been trained from childhood not to go there, not to look there, not to trust anything that doesn’t come with the official stamp of approval. We have been trained to not even know that the doorway is there — we have been taught to doubt our own insight, to have misgivings about anything that doesn’t accord with the ‘official line’. We have been made to feel ashamed of ourselves when we don’t believe and uphold the official line — how could we be so ungrateful as to bite the hand that feeds us? We experience ‘loyalty to the lie’ and this means ‘not seeing the lie as a lie’…
None of this is accidental — the only way the arbitrary / artificial world that we inhabit can survive (and thrive) is if we unconditionally accept it as the sole legitimate authority. ‘The Lord thy God is a jealous God’, so we read in Exodus 34:24. We might think of the Doctrine of Original Sin (which the church has used to alienate us from our own good sense for the last few thousand years) or we could think in terms of the early Church Father’s insistence on dianoia (as opposed to epinoia) — dianoia being when our ‘knowing’ is of the officially validated or sanctioned type. dianoia can be defined as ‘correct thinking’ (‘correct’ according to the Presiding Authority, that is). Epinoia, on the other hand (which is also called gnosis) is as Elaine Pagels tells us — a direct unique connection with the truth that is not provided by others, which doesn’t come via a self — serving intermediary. Other people can’t provide us with the unique and direct connection with the truth — naturally enough! ‘Someone else’s truth is a lie’ (as Jung says somewhere); authority is slavery for everyone who is subject to it (which is something Krishnamurti never tires of pointing out). To live our lives in accordance with how someone else says we should be living it is not to live — this is a parody or mockery of life, a ‘perverse inversion of the natural order’…
Other people can’t provide us with the unique connection to the truth — they can only control us so that ‘we think what they want us to think’. The so-called ‘correct’ interpretation is the interpretation that the external authority (which is to say, the dominant culture) wants us to make. Whatever it is that we see and understand to be true is the result of external manipulation and nothing more. This is an astonishing thing to become aware of, an utterly bizarre thing to become aware of — how on earth can someone else’s ‘doing’ be responsible for this sense that I have of being me? How can my sense of identity (which seems to be the most intimate perception of reality that I have) be ‘the result of regulation’ (or ‘the output of a machine’)? ‘Me’ means that it’s not someone else, after all, so if my sense of being me (and no one else) is the result of external control then this turns everything on its head. How can control the control of perception and the control of the thinking process results in this thing we call identity? It turns out that ‘identity’ is a trick that is played on us, a trick that works by controlling (or limiting) what we are able to be aware of, and the result of being fooled in this way is that we end up — as we’ve already said — being (perversely) loyal to our captor, loyal to our abuser, and just as long as our ‘understanding’ comes from the outside, this will remain our situation. We’re doing all the work here, no one else…
We do a thing — which is to say, we act as if some proposition or other were true when it isn’t — and then we take the fact that we are, with 100% consistency, acting as if the thing in question were true (when it isn’t), and then use this super-consistent behaviour to say (or rather imply) that there must be something there necessitating it. I act (for example) as if a lamppost were there when it isn’t and then walk studiously around it every time I’m going in that direction and then I infer from this — in an unstated (or ‘inconspicuous’) kind of a way — that what I’m at such pains to avoid must actually be there. Why else would I be avoiding it, after all? This logic (which is — we might say — ‘the superficial logic of appearances’) only convinces when we take pains to remain as shallow as possible. Being superficial on a full time basis — doesn’t feel very nice (it’s a source of suffering), but we’re prepared to ignore this ‘cost’ in order to maintain the illusion that we are so attached to (which is ‘the illusion of reality being what we think it is rather than otherwise’).
The illusion is thus produced by our own inattention to what we are doing. It’s not that we are ‘creating the illusion’ therefore, but rather that we — [1] ‘paint the picture that we want to see’, and then [2] neglect to see that this is what we have done. This isn’t in any way a ‘creative process’, therefore; the production of the ‘positive’ (or ‘generic’) reality isn’t an act of creation but — on the contrary, the result of an act of systematic inattention…. We create plausible illusions (which is to say, ‘illusions that super-effectively trap us within them’) by ignoring the bigger picture (the ‘bigger picture’ that includes our own participation in engineering the illusion) and it is this collapsing of perspective that result in the unhappy situation where ‘we have an outside but not an inside’. We thus think about everything in a back-to-front way (as Jung notes) — I’m not happy, so I fix a smile on my face and keep up with the positive thinking until hopefully it takes. Deep down (where I can’t go) I am shaky, fearful and unsure of anything and so I put all the emphasis on being ‘dogmatically certain’ on the outside. Then — when I’ve done this — I can point to the veneer, I can point to the behaviour, and declare that I actually am sure of myself, infer that I actually do know what I’m doing.
In short, I can’t control the inside (because the inside, we might say, is made up of ‘what’s really happening’ — not ‘what I’m artificially causing to happen’) but I can — up to a point — [1] Control how I appear on the outside and then [2] Conflate the inside with the outside so that ‘the pretence’ becomes ‘the actual’. This collapsing of the original indeterminate situation (which equals ‘conflating the outside with ‘the inside’ means that the inside disappears from view. Reality has been ‘murdered’, in other words. When I imply that ‘the outside is the inside’ then what’s happening here is that I am (indirectly) saying that there is no inside; I’m saying (without coming out and openly saying anything) that ‘what you see is all there is’ and so this is therefore where the ‘neglect’ that we have been talking about comes in. Neglect is what lies behind the conflation of ‘appearance’ and ‘essence’; systematic inattention is what results in us living in the ‘Shell World’, which is the world that is made up entirely of ‘the outside’ even though there is no such thing as ‘the outside’…
Image credit — nottelevision.net