All Thought Is Conjecture

Posted on by zippypinhead1

The most basic ‘error’ that we make in life is to our base our sense of well-being on our thoughts. We allow ourselves to feel good on the basis of our thoughts, and we also allow ourselves to feel bad on account of them – we can’t really have the one without the other! So – just to give a simple example – suppose I am about to sit an exam: I can think to myself that the exam is ‘in the bag’ that I’m going to ace it, in which case I will of course feel great, or I can think that I am definitely going to flunk it and fail miserably, in which case I will of course feel correspondingly bad.

 

This is such a commonplace example that we will in all probability think nothing of it. Of course some thoughts make us feel good whilst others make us feel bad – what of it? The point is however that this is completely ridiculous; thoughts are conjectures, they are guesses about what is going to happen, or what is happening, so how can we possibly feel good or bad on this basis? We’re actually being very lazy here – we’re jumping to the conclusion the thought is the very same thing as the reality and we’re not even bothering to notice that we have made this assumption! We’re jumping to conclusions without noticing that we’re making the jump. What we’ve done is that we have flagrantly ignored the uncertainty that is inherently involved in everything, and at the same time we have ignored the fact that we are ignoring it.

 

The uncertainty that we are ignoring so happily as the difference between ‘reality’ and ‘the thought about reality’ and this is a very big difference indeed. What bigger difference could there be than the difference between ‘the description of the thing’ and ‘the thing itself’? To assume that there is nothing in the thing that is not in the description of it our description of it is very lazy indeed; to be completely and uncritically accepting at the veracity of our own conceptualization of the world is what we might call ‘a terminal lack of curiosity in life itself’, and this is, of course, what ‘laziness’ (that innocent sounding word) ultimately comes down to.

 

The ultimate form of laziness is – we might say – where we fail to differentiate between the formal description and the thing that is being described, where we fail to look beyond the conventional labels that we have for things and what these conventional labels actually refer to. We fail to look beyond our thoughts, in other words, and – by default – take our thoughts to be synonymous with what is being thought about. This is like a deep dark hole that we fall into, and what happens when we do fall into this hole is that all the intrinsic uncertainty goes out of our life, and all that we are going to be left with are various dull shades of ‘certainty’, various shades of grey.

 

The black-and-white nature of this grey world (which is the conjectural world that thought has created for us) gives rise to various corresponding states of feeling. The type of concrete conjectures we make about the world (without realising that we have made a conjecture) conditions us to feel a particular way – either ‘good’ to a lesser or greater extent or ‘bad’ to a lesser or greater extent. The important point to note here is therefore that we wouldn’t feel ‘automatically good’ or ‘automatically bad’ in this way if we did know that we are reacting to pure conjecture. If there is some ‘reflex reaction’ of either feeling good or bad about the concrete reality that is been identified by thought then what this means is that (on some level) we have lost sight of the fact that ‘thought’s conjecture is only conjecture’. Our reactivity shows that we have ‘gotten lazy’, in other words!

 

When we fall into this hole of ‘forgetting about intrinsic or irreducible uncertainty’ (which is the same as ‘forgetting that our thoughts are only conjectures’) then we have to get everything out of the conceptual/concrete world that thought produces for us. There is nowhere else to look and so of course everything has to be bought in this one shop. The only ingredients are the ingredients that can be found in this pantry and if the pantry is limited then there’s nothing we can do about it! We just have to cook up a meal with limited ingredients… As far as we’re concerned the concrete, thought-created world is the only world there is and this necessarily makes us very concrete too. Our emotional reaction to the world becomes ‘jerky’ in nature – we are constantly either ‘going up’ or ‘going down’ depending on whether the situation we are in is deemed by thought ‘favourable’ or ‘unfavourable’, ‘advantageous’ or ‘disadvantage us’. Thought pulls the strings and we jump this way or that accordingly.

 

There is no peace or stillness to be had in the concrete/conceptual world therefore – we are always either ‘heading in a positive direction’ or ‘heading in a negative direction’ and there is no possibility of us ever finding ourselves in a situation where we don’t have to be either constantly ‘seeking the advantage’ or ‘avoiding the disadvantage’. That just isn’t going to happen. The rational mind always has to be on duty, in other words; everything always has to be controlled, everything always has to be regulated. ‘Controlling’ is a job that never comes to an end; there is no question of us ‘controlling so successfully that we never have to control again’ – we think that there is this possibility, but there just isn’t!

 

The one thing we will never find in the mind-created world is peace, therefore. There simply is no peace, no stillness to find there and to be searching for peace (as we are, whether we know it or not) with no chance of ever finding it is a fundamentally unhappy sort of an existence, no matter which way you look at it! Not only is it unhappy because we are always (whether we know it or not) looking for the one thing we can never have, it is also ‘an unhappy existence’ because how we feel about ourselves and the world is always being determined by our thoughts, by the thinking mind, which we have very unwisely put in charge of our (perceived) well-being.

 

If thought sees us as ‘gaining the advantage’ then we automatically get a feel good, and if it sees us as ‘incurring a disadvantage’ (or ‘being at risk of incurring a disadvantage’) then we feel we automatically get to feel bad. What kind of a ridiculous situation is this however? How on earth can life be reduced to a matter of always seeking the advantage in everything we do? How can life be reduced to just a game in this way? The full gamut of neurotic pain arises from this grimly mechanical orientation of ours; as we have just said, what we are essentially doing here is putting ourselves at the mercy of the thinking mind and asking that very unforgiving mind what it wants us to do so that it will be pleased with us and reward us with a good feeling. We are assuming that there is a way of ‘pleasing the thinking mind’ however, and there isn’t! The mechanical mind is a complete and utter tyrant, and what’s more – it is a tyrant that (in the long run) is never going to be pleased. In this respect, the everyday mechanical mind is more like a bully than a straightforward tyrant – the more we give in to it and try to please it the more cruelly and ruthlessly it will bully us. Anyone who has ever had any experience of neurotic suffering knows this.

 

The ‘cure’ for neurotic pain (which is the meaningless pain of always trying to please the machine-mind which is in charge of us) is simply to stop believing in everything it tells us. The default situation is for thought to tell us something and for ‘the way we feel about things’ to change according to what it has told us. We are emotionally coupled to our thoughts, in other words. We bob up or sink down, we perk up brightly when a ‘positive thought’ comes along and then we get knocked back down again by a ‘negative one’. Our strings are pulled and we respond obediently, we respond automatically. Nothing we think can change this and this is something that’s very hard for us to understand (naturally enough, since we are so habituated to using the thinking mind to solve everything); we see thought causing us to feel bad when there is no need for us to be feeling bad, and so we try to use thought to correct this error, in a nice logical way, and we don’t see any problem with this. But in doing this we are of course handing over responsibility to thought even more and this is the very last thing we should be doing! We’re still trying to please the bully – we’re still trying to please the machine-mind. We haven’t ‘got it’ yet….

 

There is only one helpful thing that we can do and it’s a lot simpler than falling into the treacherous morass of ‘using thought to correct thought’. There is only one helpful thing we can ever do and that is create some space the between us and our thoughts’ so that we have some degree of independence from them. This is the space between stimulus and response that Viktor E. Frankl speaks of in this well-known passage –

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

This is the gap that gives us back our autonomy and peace of mind – without it there can be no possibility of either! Cognitive restructuring is no good to us because every time we use thinking we ‘close the gap’, obviously! The only thing that brings about this gap, this life-giving discontinuity between consciousness and thought, is paying attention. Not ‘paying attention with a view to fixing anything’ (which would mean that our ‘noticing’ is serving the master of the rational mind) but ‘noticing for no reason’, or as we could also put it – simply being aware. Actually, simply being aware (or ‘noticing without an agenda’) is the very same thing as the space between stimulus and response that Viktor Frankl is talking about. That space is consciousness.

 

To simply be aware means not being pulled in by the urge to fix (the urge to correct) all the time, and this is at root nothing more than fear. We are afraid to let things be. This is also the reason we always are always so quick to make guesses about the nature of reality and instantaneously forget that our guesses are only guesses. This is the concrete manifestation of fear – fear makes us want to fill up all the available space and when it comes right down to we don’t really care what type of nonsense it is that we are filling it up with! This is what fear is – it’s the overwhelming desire to fill up all the available space. Fear is the overwhelming need to ‘run away from space’. We’re driven by the urge to ‘shut down space‘; we’re afraid of space because space equals irreducible uncertainty – ‘space’ is another word for the intrinsic uncertainty which allows for the unfolding of all things. Intrinsic uncertainty is (we might say) like a blank page – a blank page is ‘uncertain’ because it hasn’t been written on yet! We like the thinking mind’s concrete conjectures because then we can just get on with the ‘matter-of-fact’ task of accommodating ourselves to the script that has been given to us. The script that the mind gives us is ‘already finished’ – everything has already been decided and so all we have to do is ‘get on with it’. We don’t have to relate to the Bigger Picture (which is always uncertain), we don’t have to ‘ask any of the big questions’. All we need to do is ‘act out’ the script; all we need to do is ‘follow the stage directions’. All that is required is for us to ‘do what the script tells us to do, say what it tells us to say, and feel what it tells us to feel’. That’s all we know of life, all we need to know!

 

‘Ignorance is bliss,’ in other words, although it isn’t really any sort of ‘bliss’ at all but simply ‘ongoing drudgery’ – the ongoing drudgery of believing that the thinking mind’s unexamined conjectures are a ‘concrete reality’ that we have to adapt ourselves to. Who doesn’t know this drudgery? We are promised great things at the end of it all of course but that’s merely a cheap trick that is being used to incentivise us. What ‘great things’ could ever come about as a result of us forgetting that the rational mind’s conjectures are only conjectures? The ‘Great Thing’ that we’re looking for is to be found in the intrinsic uncertainty of life itself (which is synonymous with what we have called the ‘Big Picture’) not in what the dogmatic old ‘machine-mind’ has to say on the subject…

 

 

 

Art: Graffiti by Achilles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chasing Being

Posted on by zippypinhead1

In this world we try to construct our being out of our doing – that’s the type of world we live in. This is the type of message we have been given right from the word ‘go’. We are encouraged to ‘do’, we are (to some extent or another) given support for our ‘doing’; we are on the other hand given zero encouragement to ‘be’, we are given zero support for our ‘being’. We’re actively penalized for ‘being’, since to be is to drop out of the social game that we are all playing, and ‘dropping out of the game’ has never been encouraged by any society.

 

‘Doing’ is very highly valued in the Western world – the implication is always that it will lead to something great, the implication is always that it will definitely need to some marvellous state of being. This is precisely where our error lies, therefore. Successful doing can of course lead to a highly desirable socially-constructed identity (just as being unsuccessful can lead to another, rather ‘less desirable’ type of socially–constructed identity), but ‘identity’ is not at all the same thing as being. It is a substitute for it, but it is not the same thing.

 

There is no being in identity! This is the same as saying that there is no being in a label, or no being in a mask – of course there isn’t! What could be hollower than a label or a mask? To chase after an identity as if this were the same thing as being is therefore the road to nowhere. No matter what sort of identity we obtain as a result of our efforts it’s not going to do it any good – all identities are the same, all identities are hollow. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a socially-approved identity or a socially-disapproved one, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a highly prized ‘winner identity’, or a not-so-highly-valued ‘loser identity’ that we have obtained for ourselves – it is hollow either way.

 

We never really look at this idea, the idea that says it is possible to be someone as a result of ‘successful doing’ (which is the idea that the idea that we can somehow find being through our doing). The pain caused by our lack of being drives us unrelentingly; it causes us to put that special emphasis on our goal-orientated activity. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with goals therefore, only that if the goal we are chasing secretly stands for our ‘missing being’ then the effort we are putting into this endeavour is always going to be wasted effort’. We are busy chasing an illusion in this case. Whenever we get too serious, too driven in relation to our goals this is because we are – unbeknownst to ourselves – trying to obtain ‘being’ as a result of our ‘successful doing’. Whenever we get humourlessly fixated in this way, then it is inevitably the case that we are actually trying to find our ‘missing being’. We are looking for it in a place there it isn’t, in a place where it never can be. How can our ‘missing being’ be tied up with the realisation of some concrete goal? Or to put this another way, how could we ever make a goal of finding our ‘missing being’ when we don’t have the faintest clue as to what this missing being is, or what on earth it would look like even if we did find it? How is this endeavour ever going to work out for us?

 

We don’t of course know that we are trying to find our missing being as a result of our tightly-focussed goal-orientated behaviour. If we knew that then we would be on the right track! We don’t know this at all – we don’t have the faintest clue as to what our real motivation is, we don’t actually have any reason to suspect that it isn’t what it declares itself to be. Our situation – therefore – is that we unconsciously believe that we can make up for our inner, invisible deficit (the deficit that comes with identifying with the mind-created image of ourselves) by engaging in the correct type of goal-orientated behaviour; a more conventional way of expressing this would be would simply be to say that we believe that we can ‘fundamentally or radically better ourselves’ on purpose, by pure effort of will.

 

In one sense (admittedly a very superficial sense) this assumption is true – by exercising and taking care of our physical body and eating well and adopting what is generally called a ‘healthy lifestyle’ we can indeed ‘improve our situation’; in terms of what really matters in life however – which is (we might say) ‘to reconnect with who we really are’ (or ‘re-engage with the authentic inner life that we have long-since forgotten about’) there are no logical/purposeful steps that we can take to bring this about. No one can make a goal of remedying their inner deficit (or rather we can do but not in a meaningful way) – no matter what goal it is we come up with, it’s never going to be more than an extension (or projection) of our own unconsciousness. Who we really are can’t be made into a ‘goal’ and so there can be no such thing as ‘the right type of goal-orientated behaviour that can somehow bring it into being’.

 

Goals are doing (just as theories and strategies and the actions that arise out of these theories are ‘doing’) and being can never come about as a result of doing! Not even the most determined, assiduous, high-intensity doing that there ever was can bring about actual being – if there isn’t any actual being at the beginning of things then there can’t be any at the end. Unreality can’t be turned into reality no matter how hard we labour at it! It is actually a deficit in being that drives all our overvalued purposeful activities – if we felt complete or full on the inside then of course we aren’t going to be ‘overly goal-orientated’. We would no longer be so very hungry, so very needy… As the mystics have been saying for thousands of years, it is the ‘unconscious or unacknowledged perception of a lack of completeness’ causes us to crave completeness without knowing what it is that we are craving. and it is this ‘craving’ that accounts for most of the everyday activity we see around us. This type of ‘displacement-motivation’ is what drives the economy – we’re looking for ourselves in the wrong place!

 

So within the mystical/spiritual traditions it might be said that we are ‘grasping at illusions’ and that it is this misguided activity that brings us so much unhappiness. This – quite possibly – may not make very much sense to us – we may object for example that that what we are busy grasping at are real things, not illusions! Who is attracted to illusions. after all? The point is however that we are not so much grasping for the things themselves but what they represent to us without us even realising that they are representing anything! The things we are grasping at, are trying to obtain, hold an extra degree of attractiveness to us because they seem to be promising us some special, magical ‘X factor’ that we can’t help being magnetically attracted to. We’re attracted but we don’t ever wonder why we’re so attracted. We just know that the object of our desire is promising us ‘something great’ and that is good enough for us! We know on some level or other that there’s ‘something good out there in the world’, something good that we don’t have, and so we are very keen indeed to get our share of the special thing (or magical quality) that we feel we are missing out on! Everyone wants a slice of the pie after all, and that’s what consumerism is all about.

 

This is why ‘doing’ is idolised to the extent that it is in our world therefore. Nothing inspires us as much as ‘the myth of the supremely successful doer’ and all we can do is to try to approximate that myth as best we can in our own lives. All we can do is try to get some of that special action kudos to work for us! We’re too fast off the starting block though – we’re too fast off the starting block because we’ve got things the wrong way around – we don’t produce being out of doing, but rather being produces doing.

 

We have put the cart before the horse and things just aren’t going to work this way! There is a parallel to this idea in Taoism and the philosophy of Eastern martial arts where it is said that action is only effective when it comes out of stillness. Very much along similar lines, D. H. Lawrence writes: “One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.” Stillness is where our good sense lies (our wisdom rather than our intellectual smartness) and if our actions don’t come out of stillness they’re not just going to be ‘ineffective’, they’re going to be painfully counter-productive (or self-defeating).

 

This is actually a pretty fair assessment of what’s going on in the world around us, the world of human affairs – lots and lots of doing that hasn’t come out of ‘stillness’ (or ‘wisdom’) at all! Our doing has become extraordinarily ‘clever’ (‘clever’ in a superficial sense, that is) and this of course makes things worse for us not better. Mankind has been self-defined as ‘the tool-using animal’ and our tools are becoming ever more sophisticated – they are in fact becoming ever more sophisticated at an exponentially-increasing rate. And the result of this is that we are now living in a world that has been created as the result of the invisible assumptions that lie behind our tools being played out (or concretized) in the form of the concrete environment within which we live. It is as if our tools bring with them unwanted side-effects that define us and our world without us even being able to see how we have been defined. We didn’t see the ‘side-effects’ coming, and we don’t see them when they arrive either – we don’t see them when they arrive because it is the ‘side-effects’ of our tool-use (which is to say, the conditioning effect of the invisible limitations inherent in our assumptions) that determine precisely what we see and cannot see.

 

Enacting the age-old principle therefore, ‘the tool usurps the user of the tool’; the servant/instrument overthrows the master and no good is ever going to come about as a result of this. This very simple principle is illustrated by the fairy tale of the Magic Porridge Pot, which can feed the hungry if it is used properly, but which will drown the whole village under six feet of run-away porridge if there is no one there who actually knows how to use this valuable tool. ‘Knowing how to use the tool’ means knowing how to stop using the tool when the job is done, and if we don’t know how to do this (as we don’t) then disaster is only just around the corner. This motif is also echoed in such tales as Why the Sea is Salt (and ‘The Master and his Pupil’). A more modern variant of this theme is of course the well-known science fiction motif of ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, typified by the Terminator series of films (see for example, ‘The Rise of the Machines’). ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ is our own ‘disconnected cleverness’, which is directly analogous to what we have been calling ‘doing without being’.

 

On a personal/individual level, we might say that this comes down to ‘reacting’ rather than consciously responding (or not responding, as the case may be). It is perfectly possible – if not more-than-just-possible) to go through the whole of our lives ‘running on reflex’, reacting mechanically without ever questioning our own reactions. Without a shadow of a doubt, this ranks as the most ‘suffering-producing’ way of living that they ever could be – we ricochet from one painful situation to another in the most senseless way imaginable, and we call this ‘living our lives’. This is after all the only type of life we know; as far as we’re concerned there is no other type and all we can do is endure it as best we can. On the collective level, it may be said that we have ‘externalised our mechanical reflexes’ and turned them into an entire environment which we inhabit – a conditioned environment which defines our lives for us. This is of course no better than the first scenario we mentioned, which is where we allow our internal reflexes of thoughts or behaviour to run our lives for us, as if there is actually some sense inherent in them!

 

Ultimately, both the internal reflexes and the external ones (i.e.the ‘Machine Environment’) are one and the same thing, which is that thing that David Bohm calls ‘the system of thought‘. The remedy either way is simply for us to learn how to turn the machine/servant off, so that it doesn’t run our lives for us. The horse needs to be put before the cart again, if the natural order of things is to be restored. Instead of ‘doing–without–being’ (or ‘disconnected doing’), we need to bring being back into the picture again. This is of course easier said than done but it is a perfectly natural process that we are talking about here (rather than some sort of artificial imposition) and all we need to do in order to work with this natural process (instead of against it) is to see how we have got everything back to front, to see how we have put the cart before the horse. We can’t stop all of this heedless, runaway mechanical doing (all of this ‘disconnected cleverness’) on purpose (‘by force’, or by ‘will power’) but what we can do is allow ourselves to see that ‘being can never come from doing’, and when we can clearly see this we will inevitably stop putting all our money on a horse that can never win. We’ll still put some money on this horse of course – we will continue to invest in our automatic behaviour patterns to some extent – but ‘the heart will have gone out of it’, so to speak. We will no longer believe that we can create being with our frantic competitive doing and so we won’t be ‘lost in that doing’ in the completely immersive way that we were before. We will start to separate ourselves from our rational thinking and our purposeful doing and it is this process of separating ourselves from the illusion-seeking behaviour (which is sometimes called ‘the process of disidentification’) that brings about our actual being, or actual presence in our lives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Formulaic Approach To Anxiety

Posted on by zippypinhead1

There is a huge amount of misinformation and obfuscation about anxiety going around – the self-help section in any bookstore in town is pretty much guaranteed to be full of it. All of our approaches to anxiety suffer from the fault of being far too superficial; they suffer from the fault of being ‘superficial to the point of being entirely useless’ – and this is a rather curious thing. Why do we feel compelled to treat anxiety in this way? Why can’t we just be straight-up about it when this would obviously be ‘the helpful thing to do’? Why are we always so damn trivial when it comes to ‘the psychology of anxiety’? Søren Kierkegaard, writing over a hundred and fifty years ago, was able to take a ‘non-trivial approach’ to anxiety, so why can’t we? What’s wrong with us?

 

The ‘misinformation’ or ‘obfuscation’ that we’re talking about here comes down to the idea that if we are anxious and we do ‘X’ – whatever the hell ‘X’ might be (and it could be anything at all) – then this will help us. We are given the idea (in a very authoritative way) that there is a formula that can be used to free us from anxiety and although the formula in question may vary from authority to authority (as is usually the way) the idea that there is, or should be, a formula is constant. We are always being told that there is a formula, that there is ‘a thing that we can do’ or ‘ a method we can follow’. This is ‘misinformation’ because it’s simply not true – anything we deliberately do in order to ‘free ourselves from the anxiety’ is the anxiety, and if we can’t see this then we can’t see anything!

 

There is a very good reason why – culturally speaking – we seem to be so insistent on spreading this facile ‘formulaic approach’ to anxiety and that reason has to do with what Alan Watts calls ‘the taboo against knowing who you are’. The idea that there is a societal taboo against knowing who we are sounds very strange to us – we all go around after all constantly saying who we are, making confident and definite statements about our identity. Aren’t we just delighted with all the labels that we have accumulated saying ‘who we are’? Isn’t that what life seems to be all about – proudly saying who we are, and what we are all about?

 

All of that takes place in our public life, however – this kind of ‘identity-affirming’ stuff is no good at all when we are thrown back on ourselves and have to relate to what’s really going on with us. Labels and designations aren’t going to provide any satisfaction or validation here, obviously. So straightaway we can see that there are two domains here – there is the domain of public life which is the theatrical world of how we are seen and how we want to be seen and there is the inner world that is not on display for everybody else and which is not a ‘mere societal construct’. The taboo that we are talking about is the taboo about against knowing anything about this inner world therefore. It’s not just the case that this is something that we know we mustn’t bring up in polite conversation, but rather it is a world that we are not supposed to give any credence to at all. It doesn’t take too much in the way of philosophical reflection or introspection to see that we live in a world that is very much all about ‘the outside’ and not at all about ‘the inside’. Who could possibly deny this? One would have to be very foolish indeed to say that this isn’t the case!

 

Our everyday life is therefore dedicated to the ‘outer man’ or the ‘outer woman’ – this is unquestionably what our culture celebrates, to the complete exclusion of any other more profound type of life! We celebrate ‘the generic life’ (which is the life that ‘doesn’t really belong to anyone’) when it comes right down to it. It doesn’t belong to us and so whatever we do or don’t do is of no consequence outside of this theatrical realm. It’s all pure time-wasting, in other words! It’s ‘time-wasting’ because it’s not about what matters to us as the individuals we are, but rather it’s about those concerns and interests that are foisted upon us by the ‘overvalent generic mind’, if we can put it like that. The ‘overvalent generic mind’ puts thoughts into our heads a thousand times a day and we then think that these thoughts are ours, and if this isn’t ‘time wasting’ then what is? We have become ‘the tool of thought’ rather than vice versa. The ‘outer life’ is that so-called life which intrudes upon us from morning to night and which is basically selling us issues to ‘take seriously’, issues ‘to worry about’ that are actually completely and utterly spurious. In our normal state of being we are unable to spot these thoughts for what they are and as a consequence we spend most of our waking hours being preoccupied by them, one way or another.

 

In psychiatry we talk about ‘intrusive thoughts’ – which are distressing thoughts or ideas that burst in on us – and it could be said that all of our everyday thoughts are like this, albeit to a lesser degree. It could be said that our whole culture (the ‘positive’ or ‘defined’ world that we have built up around ourselves) is like this – it is ‘extrinsically originated’, forceful, brash and entirely ‘lacking in soul’. It’s all appearance with no content, action with no poetry, mechanical motivation or impetus with nowhere real to go to. This is the world of the glossy image with nothing behind it, the world of the pretence that has long since left reality far behind! To understand this is to understand something very important about anxiety: anxiety, on an essential level, has to do with defending an image of ourselves, defending a ‘role’ we are playing but which we don’t know ourselves to be playing, rather than defending or securing who we are behind all that. We don’t know who we are behind the role or act – all of our awareness is hooked onto the coat-hanger which is the rational mind’s concrete version of us.

 

When we allow ourselves to be defined – and therefore ‘narrowed down’ – by the profoundly unpoetical rational mind (which is the same thing as allowing ourselves to be defined and ‘narrowed down’ by society, society being an extension of that mind) then we gain in terms of how certain (or ‘solid’) we feel our existence to be, but we lose in terms of how real we feel. Instead of real we feel ‘solid’, and this is the trade-off that we are making. As a result of making the trade-off ‘solid/definite/concrete’ substitutes itself for real, which thus comes to mean the same thing to us, even though it isn’t at all. Solid/definite/concrete is not the same as ‘real’ because none of these terms have any application whatsoever to reality. Reality as it is in itself becomes unknown to us therefore and we trade on ‘concreteness’ instead, trying to squeeze whatever good we can out of it.

 

This is where the problem lies however because – ultimately – we can’t squeeze any good out of the concrete because there is no good in it to be squeezed out! There’s nothing there at all actually, either ‘good’ or otherwise. There’s nothing in an image, nothing in an act, obviously. That’s why an image is called ‘an image’, that’s why an act is called ‘an act’. What we do get out of the concrete surrogate for reality is (of course) ‘a sense of ontological security’. This sense of security substitutes for reality, in other words, even though there is no such thing as ‘security’ in the real world. What we’re doing comes down to a trick therefore – we get intense reassurance from the ‘concrete representation of reality’ and we like that a lot (obviously) but the other side of the coin is the ‘negative reassurance’ that occurs when we find ourselves face-to-face with a concrete representation of reality that we don’t like. It cuts both ways, in other words. It’s impossible to obtain the good feeling that we like from the concrete representation of reality without at the same time putting ourselves directly in line with a corresponding bad feeling that we don’t like which can just as easily be supplied for us by the conceptual mind. ‘Definite’ always comes in two flavours, we could say – either positive or negative, either ‘definitely like’ or ‘definitely don’t like’, and it can’t come as one without also coming the other. This is abundantly clear once we take the trouble to reflect on the matter.

 

So the first thing we can see from all this is that opting for the security of the concrete representation of reality that the thinking mind provides us with sets us up for an endless sequence of up-and-down, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. We go ‘up’ only to be taken ‘down’ again later on and yet we see ‘up’ as being the best thing ever! We see ‘up’ as the best thing ever, but really it’s just ‘down’ in disguise. Another way of expressing this is simply to say that ‘attachment brings suffering’ which is a very familiar formula to any student of Buddhism or Vedanta. If we look deeper into what is going on here we can also gain an important insight into how anxiety arises. We don’t just have the euphoria/dysphoria cycle to contend with in unconscious living, we also have fundamental anxiety! One way to look at anxiety is to say – as we did earlier on – that it comes about as a result of us defending the image or idea of ourselves. Although the image is very definite (and therefore reassuring for us in an ‘ontological-security sense’) it is at the same time entirely hollow, entirely lacking in any actual reality. Although we can’t directly see this (we can’t see it because we are, as we have said, taking ‘definite/concrete’ as an indication of the presence of reality) we nevertheless have an indirect awareness of this disconcerting lack of reality, this disconcerting lack of any genuine basis, and this indirect awareness is what we call ‘ontological insecurity’.

 

In the normal run of things we don’t perceive ontological insecurity as being what it actually is (i.e. we don’t perceive it as a ‘grasping for a type of reassurance that just doesn’t exist in the world’); we don’t perceive this at all but rather we perceive it ourselves to be ‘striving positively after legitimate values in life’. So, is to give a very simplistic example, we could build a seven foot wall all around the house because we feel that there is an actual danger out there rather than because we feel inherently unsafe in ourselves. Being orientated to concrete goals appears to be meaningful stance to us not because of our insecurity or uncertainty about life in general, but because of some supposed ‘positive value’ that exists in the goals themselves. When we displace our insecurity effectively then the anxiety inherent in our situation will not show itself; as long as we can ‘trick ourselves effectively’ via this displacement mechanism we will not feel anxious, in other words. The thing about self-deception however is that when any awareness at all does start to come back into the picture (which it is bound to sooner or later) then we will start to feel ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘unsettled’ in a very particular way, we will start or feel uncomfortable and unsettled in that ‘very particular way’ that we call anxiety.

 

When we are anxious and we try to solve anxiety by carrying out some action (no matter what that action might be) then the essential nature of what we are doing is in no way different from what we do when we engage in everyday unconscious displacement activity – we’re ‘trying to get away from what we are afraid of’ in both cases! The only difference is that in the second case (which is where we try to ‘manage’ our anxiety) then we know that we are anxious but at the saying time we are still legitimizing our activity by saying that we are ‘doing something positive’, so to speak. We are not running away from something that we are afraid of; we are on the contrary striving to fix a problem that needs to be fixed. The thing about this however – as we have just said – is that there is no essential difference in what we doing. We are only imagining that there is a difference! If it was the case that it were possible for is to ‘do something’ (i.e. for us to purposefully enact some specific type of behaviour’) that would reduce our levels of anxiety in a long-term way, then what we are doing would of course be ‘entirely legitimate and above board’. It would be legitimate in this case but the only thing is that there no way that ‘doing something to get rid of the anxiety’ is ever going to bring about the result that we are looking for! Just as ‘running away from the fear is the fear’, so too is ‘trying to overcome the fear’ nothing but that same fear.

 

The only ‘legitimate’ stance we can take with regard to fear is no stance, just as the only legitimate (or ‘helpful’) response we can make to anxiety is not to make a response. If we do make a response then no matter what tour responses is it will be the response of the narrow, fragmented sense of self that we think we are, and since it is this narrow, fragmented (or concrete) sense of self that is at the root of our anxiety, doing this is not going to help us any! To act on behalf of an illusory, suffering-producing ‘concrete image of the self’ is to perpetuate that self, and not only is it perpetuating this self, it is of course also perpetuating the suffering that comes with it. All that is needed for us to grasp this is to understand that we are not at all we think we are, and that it is possible to be absolutely convinced that we are this concrete sense of identity, and yet for this not to be true at all! This very simple insight is all that’s needed for us to be free from anxiety!

 

Of course, this ‘simple little thing’ that we need to grasp just happens to be the most unlikely thing that we are ever going to see. People can understand all sorts of intellectually challenging stuff, but even the smartest professor in town won’t understand this. The man or woman with the highest IQ in the whole country won’t understand this point! Yet even though there is an intellectual element to this awareness (which can be discussed and analyzed by the thinking mind) – what we’re talking about here is a very practical, down-to-earth thing rather than any sort of high-flown ‘attainment’. When we say that someone is ‘kindhearted’ or ‘generous’ or unselfish’ (or whatever word we might want to use) this obviously isn’t something that happens as a result of a particular intellectual understanding that they have developed about themselves or the world. It comes about, on the contrary, as a result of their actual genuine nature showing itself. It’s a natural as a tree putting out leaves. This is what in Buddhism is sometimes called ‘the good mind’ – the good mind being the mind which is naturally concerned with the well-being of others rather than being exclusively concerned with its own advantage.

 

This almost inevitably sounds like an issue of morality, which in turn automatically jinxes it for us. We are so used to being bombarded with messages that tell us to be good and not bad, unselfish rather than selfish, kind not mean, patient not cross, virtuous and not sinful, and so on, that we have become completely numb to it. We switch off when we hear it. The problem arises – as P. D. Ouspensky says somewhere – in the fact that we are never told how we might go about following these lofty moral instructions. Our ‘moral development’, so to speak (and this seems to be particularly true in the Christian world) consists of us being given rules and then being put under pressure to obey them. ‘Successful obeying of the rules’ is what is needed if we are to satisfy the overarching moral code. This is a complete jinxes us however because – as we have already indicated – the narrow or concrete sense of identity cannot become ‘wider’ or ‘more inclusive’ as a result of following rules or procedures. Anything we do on the behalf of the ‘fragmentary-or-isolated self’ perpetuates that self. We cannot ‘redeem ourselves’ as a result of our own willed actions, no matter how hard we push ourselves.

 

Anxiety is in inevitable corollary of living life on the basis of the concrete identity which is ‘the act we put on without knowing that we are’. We’re trying to prove a point that can’t be proved; we’re trying to say that we are what we aren’t! Because of the ‘switchover’ that has taken place when we accepted the rational mind’s dubious offer of ‘ontological security at any price’, ‘certainty’ is seen as being synonymous with reality itself (as we have said) and so we are effectively ‘wedded to certainty’. Being ‘wedded (or addicted) to certainty’ means that we are ‘trapped in the vibration,’ it means that we going to be going up-and-down, up-and-down (with respect to the perceived well-being of the concrete self) forever. It also means that at the very heart of things (at the very heart of ‘he unconscious life’ there is always going to be this terrible anxiety – the anxiety that comes from saying that ‘the unreal is real’ and basing the whole of our lives upon this flagrant inversion of the truth. The concrete sense of self, for all its ‘obviousness’, is a castle built in the clouds, and there’s no way that we can inhabit it in the firm belief that it is built upon solid ground, without incurring anxiety. Anxiety is simply ‘the truth that we are repressing’ coming back at us in a very disturbing way. We absolutely can’t control or rationalise our way out of this predicament, there is no ‘logical exit route’ out of the trap. There’s more to us than mere logic however, and when we tap in to the ‘Wider Reality’, into ‘the reality has not been produced by the conceptual mind’ (which we never have much interest in), then we find something there can help us in an entirely illogical (or ‘irrational’) way!

 

 

Image – free images on pixabay.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Relating To The Present Moment

Posted on by zippypinhead1

Nothing the thinking mind does or can do is any help in freeing us from anxiety. We can’t think or strategise our way out of anxiety. We can’t utilise any ‘tools’ to help us overcome it – the reason for this being that the attempt to overcome (or ‘solve’) anxiety is itself anxiety. Trying to solve (or fix) anxiety always ‘feeds right back into the loop’, therefore. It tightens the loop and makes it more painful.

 

Anxiety = ‘the runaway fixing activity of the mind’ and if we try to fix this runaway fixing activity then we just spin the wheel of the mind even faster! If we try to figure out what’s going on (= ‘analysing the problem’) then we just spin the wheel faster. Any activity of the thinking mind always spins the wheel faster. There’s a huge iron fly-wheel spinning around and around and any attempt to fix the problem which is this ‘spinning flywheel’ just puts more momentum into that wheel.

 

When we ask the thinking mind to help us, and ‘hand over the reins to it’ then this means putting even more momentum into the wheel. The wheel is the thinking mind when it has got too much energy in it – how can we ask the runaway fixing mind to ‘fix the problem’ when it itself is the problem? How can we use the thing that creates the problem to solve the problem?

 

We have a dependency upon the everyday rational mind that we just don’t want to examine. We have a lifelong habit of using the thinking mind to feel good about things, to give ourselves a sense of validation or security. Everyone has this habit, and the point here is that when we do this we’re using the thinking mind for a job that it was never meant to do. The thinking mind can’t do this job – it can’t be used to validate ourselves, to make us feel good about our  situation, to provide us with a sense of security or meaning.

 

The reason for this is that the thinking mind always operates outside of the present moment (either in the future in the past) and only the present moment is real. How can we get a sense of security or well-being or meaning out of something that isn’t real, out of something that is only a conjecture, therefore? The sense of security, or sense of well-being, can only ever be as real as the place that it is coming from and ‘psychological time’ (which is where thought is operating from) is not real. It’s only a ‘conjectural reality’, as we have just said. It’s a guess, it’s ‘a shot in the dark’.

 

We are hanging our sense of well-being on a cobweb if we use the thinking mind to get a sense of validation and orientation from. We’re looking in the wrong place. Even when it seems to work well and we feel okay or secure as a result of our thoughts about ourselves and the world, this is only really ‘a disaster waiting to happen’. There is always a crisis waiting in the wings and the reason for this is that the thinking mind is like a sword – it has two edges to it not just the one. Because it has two edges it can ‘flip around’ from one edge to the other at the drop of the hat. The same is true with the thinking mind. The thinking mind can make us feel ‘good about things for an unreal reason’ and it can also make us feel ‘bad about things for an unreal reason’. It can do this just as easily. If we hand over our power to it (so that it determines how we feel) then it can devalidate us just as readily as it can validate us.

 

Why would we want to hang our ‘well-being’ or ‘peace of mind’ on a cobweb? Why would we want to attach it to something is treacherous as thought? How ever did we get into this situation of ‘feeling good about ourselves as a result of what we think’, rather than in connection with what is actually real?

 

One reason is of course because it’s easy – there’s an immediate result. If I anticipate a positive outcome and allow myself to believe (on some unconscious level, of course) that it’s ‘in the bag’, then straightaway I feel good, then straightaway I obtain the euphoria that I’m looking for. This is basically cheating, but who cares? It works on the short-term anyway, and that’s all we care about. ‘Easy’ is a very big reason, therefore! ‘Easy’ accounts for a lot of what we do…

 

The alternative is not easy. If we don’t look for our sense of well-being in the future or in the past, then this only leaves the present moment and the present moment is a tricky place for us to get a grip on! There is no security in the present moment, in other words. Of course there’s no security in the present moment – the present moment is undecided, it’s uncertain. The present moment is ‘the unfolding of the new’ and we can’t say what it is that is going to unfold. We can’t anticipate it, in other words; we can only ‘hang in there’ and see what happens.

 

The ‘present moment’ is a tricky customer therefore – it doesn’t allow us any sense of security. We can’t take anything for granted. We can’t doze, we can’t fall asleep on the job. All we can do is stay with it; all we can do is stay open to the uncertainty of the moment that is unfolding and so ‘security’ (in the context of actual reality) simply isn’t the thing. There’s no such thing as the security we’re looking for.

 

This doesn’t mean that there is no possibility of experiencing well-being or peace of mind, however! There is a different type of well-being to be had out of relating to the uncertainty of the present moment and this is the well-being that we get from relating directly to a ‘non-conceptual reality’, which is actually the only type of reality there is. The well-being we get from relating to the non-conceptual reality is just another way of talking about ‘the well-being of being alive’, since relating to the unfolding uncertainty of the present moment is what ‘being alive’ really means. There is no other type of ‘being alive’!

 

When we derive our ‘sense of ourselves’ from our thoughts, from the thought-created world, then we’re not properly alive at all. We’re not awake. We’re in a dream. We are in a state of ‘psychological sleep’, as all the meditation teachers over the centuries have told us! We’re ‘lost in the world of our own unconscious assumptions’, we are living in ‘a mind-produced image of the world’, not the real thing. We are living in Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Realm of the Hyperreal’, which is ‘the menu not the meal’…

 

As Anthony de Mello puts it –

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.

The present moment is a flowing stream and so there is no possibility of security here! Thought – on the other hand – creates ‘fixed structures’ and so there actually is the possibility of security to be had here. There is the possibility of a ‘sense of security to be had here but this so-called ‘security’ cuts both ways, as we have just said – it is euphoria-producing to the exact same extent that it is dysphoria-producing. Euphoria doesn’t come from ‘relating to reality’ but from relating to our ‘rigid ideas about reality’, from relating to our ‘plans for reality’, and dysphoria (or ‘negative euphoria’) is simply the flip-side of this. Our thoughts about reality can make us feel good when we shouldn’t be feeling good, and they can also make us feel bad when there is no real need for us to feel bad, as every sufferer from anxiety knows!

 

What helps when we are anxious is not more thinking therefore. That’s the very last thing we need! Trying to ‘manage’ anxiety just makes it worse. What helps is not relating to the fixed structures that thought has created (i.e. our ideas about the past and the future), but relating directly and simply to the unfolding of the uncertainty of the present moment. We won’t obtain a false sense of security this way (the false sense of security that puts us to sleep, as Anthony de Mello says) but we will get back a sense of being alive, a sense of being awake. This teaching has been around for a very long time – it’s not some newfangled gimmick! As we read in the Dao De Jing (which was written over 2,500 years ago in ancient China) –

It is by being alive to difficulty that one can avoid it. The sage meets with no difficulty. It is because he is alive to it that he meets with no difficulty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Old Brick Wall

Posted on by zippypinhead1

How can self-observation help us, or free us, when we’re trapped in painful states of mind? This is definitely counterintuitive – when feeling bad in ourselves then the priority always seems to be correct what’s going on, to fix whatever it is that’s making us feel so bad. This is what the logical mind will always tell us. It’s pretty much what everyone else will always tell us as well!

 

The first thing we can say about this is that – as logically compelling as this argument might be (and it is very compelling indeed) – it just doesn’t work. The second thing that we can say here is that not only does it not work, trying to fix ourselves in the way that we have just describe actually makes things worse. Straightaway therefore, we can see that we have two very good reasons not to head off down this particular road! Trying to fix (or improve) painful states of mind is NOT the helpful thing to do…

 

It’s not quite as simple as this in practice, of course. The urge to fix is so strong that we never have a chance to get any perspective on it. The impulse to correct whatever what is going wrong drives us and drives us – the thinking mind tells us that this is the only chance we have of getting free from the pain. The thinking mind is like a megaphone in our year in this regard and it just keeps roaring on and on at us. We just can’t see any other option in other words. And even if we can’t fix our situation (which as we just said we can’t, at least not in the long run) then we analyse the problem instead of fixing. Actually there is no difference between ‘trying to fix’ and ‘analysing’ – they are of course both the same thing.

 

Understanding that we can’t deliberately free ourselves from painful states of mind isn’t a ‘logical’ kind of a thing, anyway. This is not an understanding that comes out of the logical/thinking mind. There is actually no point in trying to tell someone that this doesn’t work until they have learned this for themselves and how we learn it is through the lesson of actual experience, not through a classroom situation or attending a seminar or from reading a book or someone else telling us. We can only learn this lesson the slow way, which is on a level deeper than that of the thinking mind. We have to learn it in our bones, so to speak…

 

So when we have got an intuitive, gut-level understanding that ‘fixing’ (or ‘trying to fix’) ourselves just isn’t going to work (any more than ‘analysing our situation’ is going to work) then this is no longer going to be our ‘number one priority’. The intense compulsion to ‘try to fix’ is no longer going to be totally overwhelming us and blinding us to any other possibilities. We have at this stage become a little bit more ‘psychologically aware’; we are not banging our heads on a brick wall in the way that we used to be and so we can say that things have got better in this way.

 

Even so – even though we have seen through the compulsive fixing (or analysing) reaction to mental pain – it still isn’t necessarily going to be clear how ‘self observation’ could help us when everything else has failed. The question remains – ‘how can self-observation free us from the mental pain and suffering that we are in?’ As always, the first thought that occurs to us is that merely observing what is going on (i.e. observing our own pain) will simply exacerbate our suffering because we now giving it our full undivided attention. Our automatic assumption is therefore that we would be better off distracting ourselves in some way and not focussing on the pain.

 

When we are talking about our actual mental health however, then ‘automatic assumptions’ (which is simply another way of talking about ‘automatic reflexes’) invariably prove themselves to be entirely wrong, entirely counter-productive. Mental health (or ‘inner freedom’, if we want to call it that) isn’t something that can be achieved by ‘acting on our involuntary reflexes’ (which always come down to involuntarily trying to fix the problem). We have to learn not to buy into these compulsive mechanical impulses if we are to free ourselves from the suffering-producing habits of the thinking mind.

 

Observing our situation rather than trying to distract ourselves from it is therefore ‘going against the grain’ with regard to our habitual pattern of reacting and this is a good thing. We are on the right track if we are not going along with our habitual pattern of reacting, our habitual pattern of thinking. Contrary to popular belief, being gently aware of our situation (rather than involuntarily fighting against it) frees us from the pain that we are in rather than embroiling us in it even further. It is ‘struggling to free ourselves from the pain that we are in’ that embroils us further in it’!

 

Why being gently aware of our situation the situation that we are in frees us rather than trapping us more is because it is our attempts to either ‘fix’ or ‘flee’ the pain that traps us in it. As Carl Jung has said, ‘what we resist persists’. Acting on fear always solidifies the apparent reality of the situation that we are afraid of, just as acting on desire always solidifies (and makes more important) the object of our desire. Our attention gets narrowed down and narrowed down until we can’t see beyond the thing that we are reacting against (either positively or negatively). Acting on attachment (i.e. acting with regard to what we either like or dislike) inevitably reduces our perspective on the matter and the more our perspective on the matter gets reduced the more trapped we get, obviously enough!

 

There is a very deep principle here we never, ever see and this ‘principle’ has to do with what happens when we lose perspective on the way that we have just described. When we lose perspective two things happen (two things that are actually complimentary sides of the very same thing) – [1] is that the yet of false or illusionary picture of the world around us, and [2] is that we get a false or illusory picture of ourselves. This puts us in a very peculiar kind of predicament – that peculiar predicament of having to escape from something that isn’t real on the basis of ‘who we aren’t’.

 

Straightaway we can see that there is no ‘winning’ in this situation – we understand ‘winning’ to mean that the false or illusory picture of ourselves that we have of ourselves gets to successfully escape from the situation that we think this illusionary image of ourselves is in. Apart from the fact that this can never work since the illusory picture of who we are who we think we are is at root the very same thing as the illusory picture of what ever situation it is that we want to get away from (since these are two sides of the very same illusion, as we have just said) it wouldn’t help us any even if our ‘fantasy escaping’ were to be successful since the one who hopes and yearns to escape isn’t who we really are anyway!

 

Self-observation (rather than goal-orientated action) is what frees us from the trap we are in – it’s the only thing that can free us! Self-observation – with no goals, with no hidden agenda – gives us back the perspective that we have lost and it is this perspective, this ability to ‘see what’s really going on’, that frees us. Perspective frees us because it enables us to differentiate between the false and the true, the real and the unreal. The root of the trap that we’re talking about here is, as we’ve said, that we lose sight of the Big Picture and get caught up in ‘sticky’ delusions instead, delusions that we can’t unstick ourselves from. In fact the more we try to unstick ourselves the more stuck we get.

 

Awareness allows us to see who we are not, and this is the key to everything. The only thing that it can ever free us is awareness really, as we keep saying. What else could free us? In the absence of awareness what is ever going to do us any good? We are constantly caught up in all the struggles, all these dramas and all our energy goes into trying to resolve them. As we have said, the more we struggle to resolve the dramas the more we ‘solidify’ them around us. The more we try to resolve the dramas the more real they will seem to us and the more real they seem to us the more we will get caught up in them.

 

Awareness (or self-observation) has nothing to do with ‘resolving the dramas that we are perennially caught up in’. Awareness is just about noticing what’s going on – we see the game rather than playing it. Playing the game just traps in it, and there’s no benefit to be had from this. The game equals pain, the drama equals pain – there is the constant tantalising (but false) possibility of winning the game, resolving the drama, but that’s never going to happen. That’s just a lure which has the function of leading us deeper into the trap. The drama or game is really just a brick wall for us to go on banging our heads against but we can’t see that! As long as we have no perspective on the matter we’ll be banging our heads against this old brick wall forever! We’re wanting something we can never have (we’re thinking that there’s something good to be had there but there’s only pain) and what else is ‘neurotic’ suffering other than this?

 

Awareness (or self-observation) teaches us to see a subtler aspect of the world – a subtle aspect that straightaway becomes known to us just as soon as perspective comes back into the picture. Perspective changes everything! When we observe carefully enough we discover something totally unexpected – we discover that we aren’t who we thought we were. There is this kind of gross identity that we have, the kind of clunky, ‘block-like’ identity that is created for us by the thinking mind. And as G. I. Gurdjieff says, this identity (or ‘personality construct’) is really nothing more than a machine – it’s a machine because all it can ever do is obey the mechanical rules that have been laid down for it to follow. There is no freedom at all to be found here therefore – what freedom can there be in following rules? We’re promised ‘something good’ if we obey all the rules correctly of course (just as true believers are promised an eternity in Paradise) but this is of course just a ruse. It’s just ‘a ruse’ because it would never work – the so-called ‘paradise’ that we are promised is just a mental construct, just as the gross, mind-created identity (or persona) which is supposed to enjoy it.

 

The subtler aspect of the world which we notice when we start paying attention is actually the same phenomenon as ‘the subtle aspect of who we are’ – it is the subtle aspect of reality that does not fit into the thinking mind’s boxes and which does not need to obey any of the rules of the game that thought has set up for us to play. Once we realise that we are not this ‘gross identity’ but are actually something much, much deeper than this then that awareness changes everything by 180°, so to speak. It’s not just some kind of ‘minor readjustment’ that goes on here, in other words! Immediately – just to give one example – we recover our sense of humour and stop being so terribly driven about things. We also recover our gentleness and kind-heartedness and our ability to feel compassion for everyone around us. We no longer feel that we have to fight against the universe and other people.

 

What we talking about here isn’t some ‘exalted’ state of being, either. Some Buddhist texts refer to this subtle nature simply as ‘ordinary mind’. It’s just ‘who we are’; it’s our inherent nature. It’s our inherent nature but we never – in the ordinary run of things – realise this. We never notice our true nature, even though it has all of these wonderful attributes or qualities that our conditioned (or mechanical) nature doesn’t. It’s not just as if ‘we’re not really interested enough to notice our true nature; it actually IS that we not interested enough! We’re too ‘busy’ for that. We not in the least bit interested in being aware of our true nature because we always too preoccupied with ‘the game’, because we’re always too caught up in the ‘mind-produced drama’.

 

 

 

 

The Spectre Of Anxiety

Posted on by zippypinhead1

Anxiety occurs as a result of the thinking mind projecting limits on everything and the thinking mind always projects limits on everything!

 

This is what thinking is of course, thinking is that process whereby we impose limits or boundaries on the world – if we didn’t do this then there wouldn’t be anything to think about! This it’s only when we have partitioned something off within boundaries or limits that we can think about it; it’s only when we have defined something that we can think about it, in other words.

 

No imposed boundaries means no thinking therefore, and thinking is how we gain purchase on the world; it is how we orientate ourselves in such a way that we can make ‘rational decisions’ as to ‘what to do next’. When there are no ‘defined things’ – and therefore no defined outcomes or goals – then it has to be the case that we are not able to make any rational decisions at all. This brings us back to the first point that we made, which is that anxiety occurs purely as a result of the limits which the thinking mind projects on everything. Clearly, if the possibility of making logical decisions exists, then so too does the possibility of making the wrong decision! The polarity of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is inherent in the idea of a decision, after all – whoever heard of a decision without the possibility of right versus wrong?

 

What we’re really talking about here is control and control is all about right versus wrong. Control is ‘getting the right thing to happen rather than the wrong thing’! There’s a psychological component to this, of course – the psychological component in question being that it feels good when we are able to bring about the right outcome and not-good when we can’t. There’s a feeling of security and self validation when we get the right thing to happen, and the converse is of course also true when we can’t.

 

Moving one stage further into ‘the psychology of control’, we can say that what happens with all of us is that we get habituated to the feeling of ‘being in control’ (or ‘being inherently able to control’) and we derive an important sense of well-being from it. The sense of being in control’ is the same thing as what Albert Bandura has called ‘perceived self-efficacy’ and perceived self-efficacy is generally seen as a very healthy thing – it is seen as ‘a thing we all need to have’. To consider perceived self-efficacy (or the sense of ‘having the ability to be in control’) as a healthy – or indeed, essential – part of our psychological make-up is seriously deluded however! The reason we can say that it is a delusion to see PSE as being ‘mentally healthy’ is because PSE (or the sense of ‘having the ability to be in control’) is, at root, the very same thing as anxiety.

 

A sense of being control may not feel like anxiety, but that’s because it’s latent anxiety. It’s anxiety that hasn’t yet been manifested. Perceived self-efficacy is ‘anxiety waiting to happen’ and the reason we can say this is because – ultimately – it is no more than a comforting illusion! At times, we will indeed be able to get things to happen the way we want them to, but this does not mean that we will always be able to do so. It doesn’t mean that we are guaranteed to be able to do so – it doesn’t mean that we can ‘bank on the fact’, which is exactly what we do do, every day of our lives.

 

Perceived self-efficacy is, when it comes down to it, nothing more than ‘an expectation’, and – what’s more – it’s an unwarranted expectation and so going around basing our sense of well-being on an unwarranted expectation is not in any way a manifestation of mental health! This isn’t a sign of good mental health – no matter what anyone may tell us – but rather it’s ‘an accident waiting to happen’. It’s not mentally health we’re talking about here but ‘us setting ourselves up for a fall’!

 

When we use this illusionary (although comforting) sense of ‘being in control of what’s going on’ in order to build up some sort of a concept of ourselves, some sort of an idea or image of ourselves, then we doing ourselves no favours at all, therefore. What we are actually doing is that we paving the way for the creation of a concept of ourselves that is based on the suspicion or fear that we – in some fundamental way – aren’t able to can control effectively. This is – we might say – the ‘anxious’ self-image, and whilst the ‘confident’ side of the self- illusion is one that is acceptable to us, and highly approved by everyone, the other side of the illusion is one that is correspondingly unacceptable to us, just as it is unacceptable to society as a whole. We promote the one type of illusion, and try to ‘cure’ the other, therefore!

 

This attitude of ours is of course quite laughable. What kind of a thing is it where we – in all seriousness – value one aspect of an illusion whilst regarding the other, complimentary aspect of the same illusion as a regrettable error that needs to be fixed? The fact that we, as a culture, take this approach says an awful lot about us, and what it says is not in the least bit complimentary! Our problem is that we have somehow been railroaded into thinking that the only possible way that we have of deriving a feeling of ‘well-being’ about ourselves is through our assumed ability to control successfully, when this is not in the least bit true. Well-being does not come from the ability to control!

 

Suppose we weren’t able to build our sense of ourselves on our ‘perceived self-efficacy’, on a spurious or illusionary sense of ‘being in control’? What would happen then? How would that work? This turns out to be a very interesting question indeed and it leads us to consider the possibility of an entirely different way of being in the world. Instead of deriving our sense of identity from our assumed ability to control effectively, we could make the experiment of seeing what it feels like when we aren’t trying to be in control the whole time, which is the same thing as ‘making the experiment of seeing what it feels like when we are free from ‘the ever-present need to control’.

 

This isn’t necessarily as easy as it might first sound, of course. Once we get caught up in this business of deriving our sense of identity from our belief in our ability to control effectively (which is easy to do) then we find ourselves in the situation where we need to keep on controlling in order to retain this sense of identity. This is the classic ‘lobster pot’ scenario, therefore – it’s easy to get in, but very hard to get out again. It’s a classic ‘Hotel California’ scenario – we swan in with the greatest of ease and then the next thing is that we stuck there forever! This being the case, then, we had better hope that we like the furnishings in our room because if we don’t then that’s really going to be just too bad! If we don’t like the furnishings then unfortunately we’re just going to have to get used to them…

 

This really is an exquisitely subtle trap – once I have constructed my sense of identity, my ‘sense of who I am’, in relation to my perceived ability to control, then no matter what I do I’m not going to be able to extricate me myself from this sense of identity. I’m not going to be able to extricate myself since whatever I do, it is always going to be ‘just more controlling’. Or if we put this in terms of thinking (which comes at exactly the same thing) then we can see very clearly that if my sense of identity is derived from my thinking, then no matter what I do I’m never going to be able to escape this thought-created identity. I’m never going to be able to escape this thought-created identity because whatever I deliberately (or ‘purposefully’) do, I do on the basis of my thinking. I can’t escape my thinking with my thinking, in other words.

 

Not constructing ourselves on the basis of our presumed ability to control (or on the basis of thought, which comes to the same thing) requires a subtlety that we do not ordinarily possess. Thought and purposeful action are the same thing – the latter being ‘the extension into the world’ of the former – and as we become adults (and get embroiled in the adult world) we very quickly learn to put all our money on thinking, all our money on controlling. This is ‘the sickness we become infected with’, so to speak. We learn to construct ourselves on the basis of our presumed ability to control, and since our ‘presumed ability to control’ comes entirely out of our thinking, entirely out of our thoughts about the world and ourselves, all we are doing, as ‘rationally-minded adults’, is setting ourselves up for anxiety.

 

The way out of the pernicious trap that we have created for ourselves by our unwise reliance on ‘thought as the basis for our sense of well-being in the world’ is for us to start exploring the subtle aspects of ourselves, the subtle aspects of what it means to be in the world, and this comes down to voluntarily experiencing our vulnerability (which is of course the true state of affairs). The socially approved and validated illusion is that we are ‘effective controllers’ (which necessarily means that we are not vulnerable, since the whole point of being ‘effective controllers’ is that by succeeding at this we shall not be vulnerable), and it is, as we have said, precisely because this ‘invulnerable status’ of ours is an illusion that we have set ourselves up to be anxious. It is the out-and-out lie that we tell ourselves about ourselves ‘being in control’, and the fact that we have based our sense of identity on this lie, that creates the menacing spectre of anxiety, and so all that is needed is for us to cease to rely on this pernicious illusion!

 

Something curious happens when we do this, when we withdraw our belief in the illusion of this thing called ‘perceived self-efficacy’, and that is that we find that we aren’t defining ourselves at all. When we don’t base our sense of who we are on the belief that ‘we are in control’ (or on the belief that we need to have this ‘essential ability’ to control) then we aren’t actually constructing any sense of identity at all! We don’t aptly need a sense of having this ‘defined identity’ when we not being governed by the ever-present need to control; we don’t actually need to say ‘who we are’ in this rigid, humourless, rule-based way. The reason for this is very simple – just as soon as we stop projecting limits on the world (which – as we have said – is what thinking is) then at the same time we discover that we are no longer projecting limits (or boundaries) on who we are. When we stop imposing limits or boundaries on our actual nature then we are free – we ‘free from definitions’ on the one hand, and we’re ‘free from anxiety’ on the other hand, since it was only being defined in this way that was causing us to be anxious in the first place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When We Accept Ourselves We Are Free

Posted on by zippypinhead1

When we completely accept ourselves as we actually are (in a conscious way rather than an unconscious ‘taking-ourselves-for-granted’ type of a way) then we become free.

 

It’s not quite right to say this of course – we don’t become free, we discover that we were always free, as the mystics never tire of telling us. We learn of our freedom, which we were previously too obtuse (or too ‘crude’, too ‘crass’ in our perceptions) to see.

 

This is of course counter to conventional thinking, which states that we can only become free by engaging in ‘special types of activity’, special types of goal-orientated activity. Engaging in GO activity is of course very antithesis of ‘acceptance’ and so what this means is that our conventional approach to things is the antithesis of the ‘subtle’ approach that we are talking about here.

 

The ‘subtle approach’ is too subtle! It’s far too subtle for us to get. In the normal run of things, we couldn’t get it in a month of Sundays! We couldn’t get it in a year of Sundays – assuming that we had that long available to us. We are forever looking in the wrong direction; we are forever looking in the direction that thought tells us to look in, which is the direction of ‘improvement’ on the one hand and ‘disimprovement’ on the other. That’s all thought cares about after all; that’s all it can care about – either ‘getting close to the goal’ or ‘getting further away from the goal’. It cares positively one way, and negatively the other. It likes one and dislikes the other. It would be silly of us to expect otherwise since thought – by its very nature – can only ever concern itself with ‘abstract ideals’. We only need to reflect on this for a moment or two to see that this has to be true – how could thought ever possibly concern itself with something that is not an ‘abstract ideal’?

 

Appreciating things what they are in their essence is not the thinking mind’s job! The TM’s brief is to deal with the practicalities, the particularities, the technicalities of life. It’s not built to function as a philosopher – it’s not designed for ‘looking into the ultimate essence of things’. Where’s the practicality in that, anyway? The answer, as we all know, is that there is no practicality in this – there is no practicality in philosophy, no practicality in taking an interest in the ultimate nature of things. On the other hand, if we take no interest in the ultimate nature of things, if we devote ourselves entirely to the practicalities of life, and go helplessly along with the TM like some kind of camp follower, then before long life becomes unbearable. Life becomes intolerably arid when we make ourselves oblivious to the ultimate nature or essence of things.

 

This is – of course – the nature of the dilemma that we find ourselves in: either we take an interest in how things actually are in themselves (which we are averse to since we have absolutely no idea where this will take us and we don’t want to risk it) or we roundly ignore that side of things and concern ourselves wholly with the practical/technical side of life, which means that we will get stuck in the rational purposeful version of life, which is a version that suffers from the profound disadvantage of being completely arid, completely sterile. Our ‘resolution’ to this dilemma is to opt for the rational simulation of life and then use a kind of ‘trick’ in order to ameliorate the suffering that comes with this option. The trick in question is simply that we keep repeatedly utilising the rational-purposeful mechanism in order to distract ourselves from the present reality of our situation.

 

We don’t pay wholehearted attention to the present moment therefore, but rather we look ahead to some ‘improvement’ that is going to be made. This is our ‘gimmick’ in a nutshell. This is what ‘goals’ or ‘purposes’ are, needless to say – they are ‘improvements to our present situation’! When we think ahead about the improvement that is to come, then straightaway we feel better. Of course we feel better – why wouldn’t we? All we need to do in order to distract ourselves is therefore to think of some improvement that can be made and this in itself will usually make us feel better! The next thing to do is to work out some strategy to bring the improvement in question about, and then work away at implementing the strategy. The motivation to do this comes – of course – from the good feeling that is going to come our way when we successfully bring about the improvement. The euphoria we feel as a result of simply thinking about the improvement is merely a small loan or down-payment taken on the strength of the future improvement coming to pass, so how much better will the actual realisation of our goal causes to feel? The prospect of this satisfaction-to-come is more than enough to motivate us to engage enthusiastically in the strategy.

 

This isn’t to say that strategies of goals are always ‘gimmicks’ to help us avoid the aridity of the present moment, when that so-called- ‘present moment’ exists solely in the rational simulation of life, but rather that it is possible for us to use goals and strategies in this way, for us to use purposefulness in this way. The more legitimate the goal, the better it is for ‘exploiting’ as a way of living in the future rather than the present, when the present (or rather the ‘simulation of the present’) is not a place that we want to be in! So when we talk about ‘being interested in the ultimate essence or nature of things’, this is just another way of talking about ‘unconditionally accepting ourselves as we actually are’. First off, we could observe that this is going to be no benefit to us in purely practical terms since, as we have already said, taking an interest in things as they actually are in themselves doesn’t necessarily help us when it comes to engaging in whatever tasks it is that we are supposed to be focusing on. This is why when employees practice meditation at work this isn’t necessarily good for the corporation they work for since they are very likely to realize that the work in question is meaningless, if not actually detrimental to all concerned! But before we even get to ‘see ourselves as we actually are’ what we going to see is of course ‘ourselves as we are represented within the terms of the rational simulation’, which is another way of saying that the first thing we’ll see is our ‘idea’ or ‘image’ of ourselves, which may or may not be to our liking. Because the ‘mental idea of our self’ exists solely within the remit of the rational simulation (i.e. within the domain of the rational mind) it is always subject to judgement from that mind, be that judgement positive or be it negative. So although we hear a lot of talk about ‘accepting ourselves’ and ‘not judging ourselves’ this can only happen when we know are no longer operating from within the rational simulation (i.e. when we are observing things from outside the rational domain) and this is easier said than done!

 

When we are operating in the rational mode then there is absolutely no question of us ‘not judging ourselves’, there is absolutely no possibility of us ‘accepting ourselves’, and it is crucially important for us to understand this! All we can ever do (in this case) is ‘judge ourselves’, either positively or negatively, and then ‘react to ourselves’ accordingly! We are simply not free to ‘accept ourselves’ therefore and it would be absurd for us to try to force ourselves to do so! There is no freedom in ‘forcing’ after all, and if there is no freedom then there can be no ‘acceptance’. The freedom we do have however is the freedom to see that we have no freedom, the freedom to see the truth, which is that all we can do is ‘judge ourselves either positively and negatively and mechanically react accordingly’. This is the difference between ‘being conscious’ and ‘being unconscious’ in a nutshell – when we see that we have zero freedom to ‘not judge’ or ‘not react mechanically’ then we are conscious, and when we do not see this (which is most of the time if not all) then we are unconscious.

 

Spelling this out this allows us to see something very interesting – it allows us to see that we can actually ‘accept’ ourselves completely being completely non-accepting, that we can wholeheartedly accept the fact that we are completely judgemental and intolerant! ‘Acceptance’ as a subtler thing than we tend to think it is, as we have already said – it has nothing to do with ‘like and dislike’, ‘approval and disapproval’ and – as a result – it has nothing to do with any choices that we might make. This last point is something that we usually have the greatest difficulty in understanding; we persist in imagining that ‘acceptance’ is something that can come about by choice when nothing could be further from the truth. ‘Choosing’ runs on bias – there’s nothing else it could run on after all. There is nothing else it could run on because if we didn’t have some sort of bias there then how we know what to choose? Unless we have some kind of ‘like and dislike’ to draw upon to aid us in our decision then how could we possibly make a choice? Choice is a mechanical kind of thing after all – it’s something we do via the rational or thinking mind. We could of course object to this and say that we are making a decision on the basis of knowledge, not on the basis of subjective preference. We could say that we are choosing a particular option because it is the ‘right’ option to choose not because ‘we like it’. This argument doesn’t hold water however – how did we obtain our so-called knowledge other than by the exercise of bias, other than by the exercise of inherent prejudice? Whatever way of looking at the world we have, we must have ‘bought into it’ at some stage and the reason we ‘bought into it’ was because of our bias towards doing so, our predisposition to doing so. Ultimately, we always choose how we see the world, we can’t (in other words) claim the unquestionable right to see things a particular way!

 

When we say that we choose a particular option because ‘it is the right one, not because we like it’, then we are obviously ignoring the fact that we ‘like’ the right option more than the wrong one! The two concepts of ‘right’ and ‘the act of passing judgement’ can’t be separated and ‘the act of passing judgement’ – no matter what we may believe to the contrary – always comes out of ‘like and dislike’, always comes out of ‘bias’. If I say that something is right then this simply means that I have judged it to be so. Unconditional acceptance, therefore, has nothing to do with any choices that we might make, or any preferences that we might have on the matter. ‘Acceptance’ has absolutely nothing to do with bias and for this reason it has absolutely nothing to do with the thinking mind (since the thinking mind is nothing else than a collection of biases)

 

Just to repeat our key point here – acceptance is at far more profound thing than we always think it is! Acceptance comes out of consciousness, not the thinking mind, which is always superficial. When I see that I don’t have the freedom ‘not to judge’, or ‘not to react’ (to go back to our earlier point) then I am accepting that I have no freedom. This – as we have said – is not a choice. ‘Accepting’, in this more profound sense of the word means ‘seeing the truth of something’ and seeing the truth of something is never a choice. It is quite choiceless, as Krishnamurti says. If seeing were a choice then we would be in control of what it what is true or not, which would clearly be absurd! Seeing isn’t something that can ever happen on the basis of our biases, our preferences, our prejudices; if it did then it wouldn’t be seeing that we are talking about but rather ‘the automatic projection of our own conditioned viewpoints onto the world’. What we would be talking about, in other words, is the perfectly ubiquitous state of unconsciousness and so to use the word ‘seeing’ in this connection would be  completely inappropriate.

 

If we come back to our original statement now we will find that we are in a much better position to appreciate what is meant by it. When we accept ourselves as we actually are going then this means that we are not trying to change ourselves, not trying to control ourselves, and it is because we are not trying to change or control ourselves that we are free! In our normal (rational) mode of being we are always trying to control/change ourselves – we can never stop controlling (or trying to control). As we have said, everything that exists within the ‘rational domain (or, as we have also called it, the ‘rational simulation of life’) has to be controlled – the possibility of not being controlled doesn’t (and can’t) exist within this context. This is a ‘controlled’ (or ‘defined’) reality – unless something is a hundred percent defined it can’t exist in this realm; unless something is completely regulated then it can’t be accommodated within the ‘mind-created virtual reality’, and this is just another way of saying nothing can happen within the domain of the rational mind without it being judged, one way or another. The rational mind IS judging, after all!

 

We are inclined to say that we are ‘accepting ourselves’ when what we really mean is that we have judged ourselves in favourable way, but this (needless to say) doesn’t count because it is an unconscious sort of a thing, completely unlike the  conscious acceptance which we are talking about in this discussion. As we have just said, conscious acceptance has nothing to do with like or dislike, approval or disapproval, right or wrong. Crucially, seeing ourselves in an unbiased way is the same thing as ‘not identifying with the regulated or controlled mental image which is the self-concept’. When we are identified with the self-concept – this arbitrary construct of the mind – then there can never be any freedom for us. Freedom is not possible for the self-concept, as we can very clearly see when we aren’t 100% identified with it! When we are identified with the self-concept (when we look at the world exclusively ‘through its eyes’, so to speak) then this is the very last thing that we going to see. More than ‘the very last thing’, it’s actually the thing we shall never see.

 

Not seeing that freedom is an impossibility for us, we are going to put all of our efforts and ingenuity into ‘striving to be free’, which is what ‘trying to improve our situation’ really comes down to. The possibility of ‘improving our situation,’ is – as we have said – the outcome that the thinking mind keeps tempting us with. When we fall for this temptation (as we always do fall!) then this is the very same thing as what we have called ‘identifying with the self-concept’ and this utterly ubiquitous business of ‘identifying with the self-concept’ is – as we have just pointed out – the precise thing that absolutely guarantees we shall never be free…

 

 

Image: Street Art Phuket Town