Tag: Thought

Fear Of Vastness

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What brings about our suffering in life – when we get right down to it – is our terrible narrowness and rigidity, and identity is the narrowest and most rigid thing there is! Identity is so narrow and so rigid that it doesn’t actually belong in the real world at all – it belongs not to reality but to the world of names and designations, the world of definitions and evaluations. We like the world of definitions and evaluations however – we really are very fond of it. We’re fond of the world that has been defined for us by thought just as we are fond of having an identity – it’s all part and parcel of the same thing. We are fond of living in a defined world as a defined identity because this allows us to orientate ourselves, obviously enough – we can say who we are and where we are and what we are all about, and this feels good! This feels good – as no one will deny – but it also brings about unending suffering. There are two ingredients in this particular package, not just the one.

This is of course just another way of expressing the traditional eastern teaching-formula which says attachment causes suffering, which is more familiar to us but which at the same time tends to be understood in an overly simplistic way. It’s not so much that we are attached to things or people (although of course we are) but that we are attached to the type of orientation that we are talking about here – the orientation of knowing who we are and where we are and what we are supposed to be doing in life. If we can readily answer these questions then we are considered by all and sundry to be orientated and this is taken as a sign of good mental health. There’s no confusion here, we’re on the same page as everyone else, we are adapted to the world that we have been given to live in, and so on. This assessment of ‘orientatedness’ is only a measure of our mental health on a very superficial level however – it’s the appearance of good mental health only.

To be sure and certain of all our parameters in this way is actually a guarantee of suffering, as we’ve just said, and anything that is ‘a guarantee of suffering’ can hardly be said to be a measure of good mental health! We want to be defined in this way because that gives us our sense of identity, our sense of knowing who we are and what we are about, but this desire for security, when acted upon, prevents us from having any connection with who we are behind the narrative, behind the neat and tidy cover-story. We have been provided with an answer, an explanation, but it is a hollow one, a false or superficial one, and no happiness or well -can ever come out of it. No sense of meaning can never come out of this false understanding of who we are – how can a sense of meaning come out of this business of living life on the basis of who everyone else says we are, after all? That isn’t a recipe for a meaningful life, it’s ‘a recipe for mental unwellness’!

The problem is that we have, in our haste to have a sure and certain explanation of who we are and what life is all about, short-circuited the whole process of life – the idea (even if we don’t know it) is for us to quickly skip ahead to finding out the answers to the existential questions so that we can then get on with the important business of ‘living life on the basis of the sure-and-certain identity that we have thus acquired’. That’s where the real satisfaction in life lies, we imagine – not in this awkward feeling of not knowing ‘who we are’ or ‘what it’s all about’. That’s the basic idea but it just doesn’t work out as we imagine it should. It doesn’t work out the way we thought it would because there just isn’t any solution satisfaction or fulfilment to come out of living life on the basis of a spurious identity, an identity that ‘isn’t who we are’, an identity that is nothing more than a cheap gimmick. There isn’t any fulfilment to be had from this way of living life because being attached to a thought-created identity (of whatever sort) involves being fundamentally disconnected from what actually is true – which is clearly a situation that doesn’t bode at all well for us.

There is – undeniably – this very strong urge or desire to ‘say who we are’, or to ‘assert an identity’. When we do this then that feels good, there is satisfaction (of a sort) in it. This type of good feeling comes about not because we have achieved anything real however but because we have managed (successfully, it seems) to run away from something that frightens us. We are running away from ‘wide-openness’, we’re staging an escape from the Realm of Unlimited Uncertainty – which is what the philosopher Kierkegaard calls ‘the dizziness of freedom’. We want to be told who we are (or we want to believe in the story of who we tell ourselves we are) so as not to have anything to do with all those open-ended possibilities. Open-endedness isn’t good news as far as we’re concerned. We want to skip that, as we have said; we want to skip all that uncertainty and rush on to the logically unchallenging business of ‘living life on the basis of a defined identity’. We want the security of knowing what it’s all about so that we can just ‘get on with it’ in a mechanical or non-exploratory way, and the very big problem with this – which we are painfully slow to see – is that all of this business of ‘thinking that we know what we’re doing’ and then just ‘getting on with it’ is profoundly meaningless.

So there is this euphoric feeling of accomplishment or attainment when we assert who we are, or when we are rewarded by society by being given some honourable or prestigious identity, but the euphoria in question (which is the euphoria of winning at what James Carse calls ‘a finite game’) very quickly ebbs away leaving nothing behind but a dreadful sterility. The defined identity is always sterile – as we have said – it is always sterile because it’s an act of denial with regard to who we really are (or what life really is all about, which is ‘growth’). It’s nothing more than a convenient fiction that allows us to turn our backs on the ontological challenge that life is presenting us with. When we perform a manoeuvre that enables us to escape from whatever awareness we might have of how much bigger the universe is than anything we ever could have imagined then this feels good; we get great relief – but this isn’t the type of good feeling we get for any kind of a wholesome reason. Very clearly, this isn’t a ‘wholesome’ sort of thing at all! We get a rush of euphoria for sure but that is only the (very temporary) good feeling that comes from denying what we don’t want to know about. That type of ‘good feeling’ doesn’t really help us!

When it comes to identification then it’s very much a matter of ‘Marry in hast, repent at leisure’. We can’t live life when we are saddled with an identity – all we can do is go through the mechanical motions of asserting and reasserting that sterile identity over and over again in the forlorn hope that some good will come of it. All we can do is continue to move through the repetitive steps of ‘playing the finite game’ (which is consolidating ‘who we think we are’ when ‘who we think we are’ is a dull fiction) rather than exploring the possibilities of what we genuinely might be – uncertain though these possibilities may be. The possibilities that lie in store for us when we put all our money on consolidating the fiction of who we think we are add up to a big fat zero, whilst the possibilities that await us when we relinquish this comforting illusion (the comforting illusion of the Mind- Created Identity) are infinite. The possibilities here are infinite and that is precisely why we want to run away as fast as we can in the opposite direction, so to speak! We experience terror when faced with the unimaginable vastness, and comfort when we retreat into the pointless, tedious world of the small and the petty, and that’s why we continually engross ourselves in playing finite games in the way that we do.

Our fear of vastness is the same thing as our love of the mind-created certainties which we have surrounded ourselves, in which we have buried ourselves. Ontological terror drives us meekly into the welcoming arms of thought, in other words; the comfort we obtain from the act of believing our thoughts (however bland, however banal, however stupid or malign they might be) is the perfect remedy for the fear that holds us in its grip when we confront open-ended reality. Thought always creates a world in which there is no ‘open-endedness’ – the Mind-Created Virtual Reality is a world that contains no mysteries, no ‘discontinuities’, and that is precisely how we know it to be false (if we care to know such a thing, that is). How could we have ever put ourselves in this position where we have to accept the wretched banality of the thought-created world as being the same thing as reality itself? What kind of a trick is this to play on ourselves? Instead of life, we have to make do with a grey, pointless bureaucracy – the grey, pointless bureaucracy of thought – and that dreadful old bureaucracy won’t ever let us go (bureaucracies never do, after all). Because we are under the power of thought (which is the position we have put ourselves in) we cannot help believing that what the rational mind says is real actually is real, and so we are obliged to try our hardest to get thought’s bureaucracy to ‘work out for us’, which it never will. No matter what we do on the basis of the thought-created identity, things aren’t ever going to work out for us. We however are in denial of this; the conditions of the deal we have accepted require us to be in denial of this – if we are to continue believe ourselves to be this Mind-Created Identity then we obliged to ignore (or misunderstand) all the suffering that comes about because of this. We are obliged to ‘stick with our story’ no matter what, in other words, and this is of course always the way with denial…












Trapped In The Prison Of Thought

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There are only two ways to be in life – one is where we are contained by our thinking, defined by our thinking, and therefore controlled by our thinking, and the other way is where we are somehow bigger than our thinking. Thinking still happens in this second case, but it happens within us, not to us. It’s part of us, but it doesn’t define us. It’s just thinking – it doesn’t create our whole world for us.

 

Clearly there is a tremendous difference between these two modes of being – in the first case the thinking is the boss and in the second case we are the boss! One way the boot is on the one foot, the other way it’s on the other foot, and there’s no question as to which foot the boot should be on. Why on earth would we want thinking to be the boss? Why on earth would we want to let our thinking control everything about us and ‘tell us who we are’ and ‘what we should be doing’, after all? Why would we want to be shrunk down to size so that we have to live out our lives within the limited domain of the petty little world that thought has created for us?

 

This is really a matter of choice however – even though we are inclined to imagine that it is. It can’t be a matter of ‘choice’ however because choices come out of thinking and so we can’t choose to be ‘bigger than thought’, or ‘bigger than the thinking process’. ‘Choosing’ – just like ‘planning’ or ‘strategising’ or ‘analysing’ – locks us into the thinking process; it makes us a prisoner of the thinking process. It is an odd thing because the act of choosing automatically feels as if it’s empowering us; having choice sounds like the same thing as ‘having freedom’. It isn’t though because – as we have just said – ‘choosing’ is an operation of thought and operations of thought cannot lead to freedom.

 

Another way of making this point is to say that we can’t choose to be free. The only way we could ‘choose to be free’ would be if we could ‘choose not to choose’. If we could choose not to choose then would be free but we can’t do that because ‘choosing not to choose’ as a blatant self-contradiction! That would be like ‘deciding not to decide’, or ‘planning not to plan’ or ‘having a goal to give up all our goals’. We are trying to be free from the thing by doing the very thing that we want to be free from doing, so how is this ever going to work? The trouble is that when we are caught up in thinking we don’t have the perspective to see this blatant self-contradiction. We need to be outside the prison of thought to be able to see this and it’s precisely the fact that we can’t see it that makes ‘the prison of thought’ into a prison.

 

This is sounds wrong to speak of thought as ‘a prison’ – that’s not the way we like to see things at all. Just as we see the act of choice as empowering us, so too do we see the process of thinking as empowering us. If you were to go around saying that thought is a prison people will straightaway think that you’re crazy, so not only is thought a prison therefore, it also makes us see everything upside-down. Thought is the prison we can’t see to see to be such – it’s a box that we can’t see to be a box. It’s a box that we take to be the whole world! There are lots of consequences to spending our lives in an abstract box and the most straightforward way to talk about them is to say that we always going to be unsatisfied, the matter how well things might seem to be going for us. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we are always going to be separated from life after all, that that’s the most fundamental form of frustration that there is. It’s like being stuck in a jam jar wherever we go – we can see, but we can’t touch!

 

The problem is that thinking can’t genuinely relate as to the real world, any more than this it can genuinely relate us to ourselves. Thought can’t connect us with reality (that was never its job, anyway) – all it can ever do is connect us with its ideas about reality, and thoughts’ ideas about reality are only an extension of itself, a projection of itself. So no matter where we go – we’re always going to be completely contained within the abstract ‘world that thought has made‘. We can’t escape from the box because thought itself is functioning incapable of leading us out of it. This brings us back to what we were saying earlier – that we can’t ‘choose not to think’ because ‘choosing’ is thinking. What else would it be, after all? We’re sifting through our mental categories, as always, and our mental categories – by their very nature – aren’t real. They’re about reality, they aren’t reality themselves.

 

No one is saying that we shouldn’t ever think about anything, or that there is no value in thinking, or anything like that – all we’re saying is something to the effect that “Wouldn’t it be great to leave all our thinking behind every now and again, so that we could experience a genuine ‘honest-to-goodness connection’ with the world, and with ourselves?” Wouldn’t it be great – in other words – not to be contained absolutely all the time within our thinking, as if there were actually some benefit or advantage to be had in this peculiar (and very frustrating) state of affairs? Who on earth is ever going to argue that there is any benefit to be had in being trapped in our thinking 24/7? Who is going to say that it’s a good thing to spend our entire lives ‘stuck in a box’, ‘stuck in the jam-jar of thought’?

 

No one would ever be ridiculous enough to say this of course, but what we do instead is to implicitly deny that this is the truth of our situation, when it most clearly is. There is no mention in society of the very great danger or drawback that is posed to us by runaway thought, just as there exist in society no pathways by which we can develop those other aspects of ourselves, those aspects which have absolutely nothing to do with the thinking mind. We value one thing and one thing only in this world of ours and that is the faculty of rationality, the faculty of reason. Our whole educational system is geared towards turning us into ‘better and better thinkers’, as if this will something solve everything, as if thinking itself were not the curse. What is actually being valued here is our ability to control or manipulate the world, because that’s what thought does. We have as a result become a very controlling, very manipulative, very insincere society – we are always beavering away to try and get things to be the way we think they ought to be. We’re always working away – like so many termites – in creating an artificial world for ourselves to live in and – ludicrously – we assume that this will be a good thing’! The fact that our world is getting uglier and uglier and meaner and meaner every year (as well as becoming less and less sustainable), doesn’t seem to impact on our core belief here at all.

 

Every socially accredited expert in town will swear blind to us that we doing are doing fine. Every government minister will tell us that we doing fine. Society itself  – through all its various mouthpieces – will tell us that we doing just fine, and it’s hard to argue against the totality of ‘society itself’! If we do try to disagree with the consensus then our point of view will be automatically dismissed on the grounds that ‘we don’t know what we’re talking about’ – obviously we don’t know what we’re talking about because we aren’t ‘experts’, because we haven’t been officially accredited as having the right to say anything. We’re wrong straightaway therefore simply because we’re not agreeing with everybody else! The fact that the only reason everyone else agrees with each other is because there’s ‘safety in numbers’ (and no one wants to run the risk of being collectively ostracised) doesn’t seem to detract from the strength of official argument in the slightest! This is the unassailable logic of the Monkey People spoken of by Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book – “We all say it so it must be true!”

 

What we usefully can do here however is point out the key problem associated with being trapped in the thinking mind 24/7. As we started off by saying, the ‘key drawback’ with this state affairs is that when we are ‘contained by thought’ we can’t know what the world really is, or who we really are, but only what the apparatus of thought tells us on the score. We can only ‘know’ what we have labelled the world (or ourselves) as being, in other words, and that’s not really saying anything! We are ‘fatuously correct’ of course – we are correct in terms of the empty game that we have decided to play, but what’s so great about that? We are as far as our little pointless game is concerned, but what good will that do us? Not knowing who we really are, but only knowing our fatuous labels or designations for ourselves constitutes what we might call ‘the frightening abyss of ignorance’ and this frightening abyss of ignorance is all that our educational system is ever going to provide us with. It can’t impart actual wisdom to us because wisdom doesn’t come out of the thinking mind.

 

What society (which as David Bohm says is the product of thought) does is to separate us from who we really are by demanding that we put all of our energy and attention into adapting ourselves to the artificial world that it has created. This artificial world has nothing whatsoever to do with our actual nature and so the more we allow ourselves to be defined and controlled by it the more alienated from ourselves we become. The more ‘civilised’ we are, the more insane we are, as Foucault says. We might stand to gain all sorts of ‘materialistic benefits’, as the advertising industry keeps telling us, but none of these ‘benefits’ will help us get back in touch with ourselves, obviously. Their function is quite different – their function is to compensate us for what we have lost, although this will never be directly stated. Naturally it will never be directly stated – if it were to be then the deal we’re being offered would lose its appeal immediately!

 

If you were informed that you were expected to live in some kind of a way that fundamentally separates you from the essence of who you really are, but that you will be amply compensated by all sorts of banal daftness, by lorry-loads of ‘fancy fripperies’, how is this ever going to look sound good to you? That’s not how it’s done, however. It doesn’t work like that. No one ever tells us that the price of social inclusion is alienation from our true spontaneous nature and no one ever will! First we are alienated, and then we are ‘drawn in’ with all of these products and commodities that promise (in some vague way) to make us feel less alienated (or less ‘ridiculous’) and our continued attempts to fix or improve ourselves in line with the way that society says we need to be fixed or improved constitutes our whole way of life! That’s the whole package right there. And then – to cap it all – the clownish socially-accredited experts come along in their droves and dare to talk to us about our mental health and advise us on what ‘strategies’ we might avail of in order to improve it!

 

 

 

Art: Madness Returns’ Dollmaker’s Workshop, from gamesradar.com