Moving Away From the Platform

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Humour can only come into play when we move away from the platform of thought. That’s the only time it will ever come into the picture. As long as we are stuck on the platform then there is never going to be any humour. Whatever other stuff there might be going on, there will be no humour…

 

The same goes for creativity – there’s no way we can be creative and yet sit comfortably on the platform. It’s just not going to happen. Anything we produce whilst sitting comfortably on the platform will be generic, which is to say, anyone could have produced it. Whatever we produce when we’re sitting on the platform will be both generic and humourless, which is of course the usual way of things. When we look around us that’s what we see. We see a world that is both generic and humourless – we see in other words in the world that is produced by the ubiquitous thinking mind.

 

The designed environment (which is generally all we know) is a dry and humourless kind of a set up and it is not in the least bit conducive to creativity. Creativity actually has no place in the designed environment – following the rules does. Playing the established game does. Being like everyone else does. If we want to do something that is genuinely creative (something that only we could have done) then we are going to have to move away from the platform. This is the only way that it’s going to happen. When we move away from the platform then we’re ‘out there’ – we’re in a place no one else is, in a place no one else has ever been. We’re making our own journey rather than being on a bus with everyone else. The thing about being on the bus with everyone else is that it isn’t really going where we want to go – it’s just going on its allotted route around the platform. The only thing it has going for it is convenience – the route is already established and mapped out and the means of transport is well organized and reliable. All we have to do is hop on and then hop off again. The public transport system has a proven track record and its approved by the authorities and we all know where we are with it. It’s the system, it’s the agreed way of seeing things, doing things…

 
It’s not just that the platform is ‘convenient’ of course – there’s more to it than just this. The platform of thought has an immense magnetic pull to it that causes us to stick to it like glue. The platform has the crushing power of precedence behind it. According to the platform the platform is the only thing there is, the only show in town. It’s like a fundamentalist religion that denies the existence of any other way, any other viewpoint. Not only does the fundamentalist religion aggressively deny the existence of any other way, it persecutes the hell out of anyone who show the slightest sign of wandering away from ‘the one true path’!

 

The platform is also like an institution – it’s the only way of doing things that we know and we have been so long doing it that we’re mortally afraid of trying anything else. We’ve lost our curiosity about the possibility of doing things any different way a long, long time ago. Now, the routine is king. Now, anything else equals fear. We’re now defined in every aspect of our being by the institution and so to move away from it is to lose our sense of who or what we are. We lose the safe and secure ‘generic self’ which has been provided for us by the institution and which is the only self we know! When we lost our curiosity about any other way of being, then we lost who we really are. Now there is only the institution, which exists both outside and inside of us.

 

The thing about the bus that everyone climbs onto is as we have said that it isn’t actually going where we would like to go – we might have the idea that it is, the belief that it is, but that just plain isn’t the case. The reason that it isn’t the case is because the bus isn’t going anywhere! Where can the generic self, the institutionalized self ever go to? The generic can never leave the generic, the institutionalized can never leave the institution. Nothing ever comes out of the generic apart from an endless series of copies of the same thing. The generic can never give rise to the unique no matter how long we wait for it to happen. That is the one thing it can never do and this is why we say that the bus (the public transport system) isn’t actually going anywhere. The only journey that really is a journey is the journey away from the regular, the generic, and for this we have to get off the bus and make our own way…

 

Getting off the bus means ‘braving existential terror’. We have to brave the terror of leaving the generic self behind. We have to risk the unknown, we have to risk ‘being who we’re not’. Whatever we achieve in life without this quintessential act of bravery taking place will always turn out to be nothing, no matter how much effort we put into it. If we don’t find within ourselves the courage to let go of the generic self (which is all we know) then even if we put an absolutely huge amount of ‘muscle power’ into whatever we’re trying to do the point remains that whatever we produce as a result, anyone else could have equally well produced it. We’re not really in it at all. This means in other words that we didn’t actually have to have been there at all – there was just some kind of mechanical process taking place which we had somehow imagined has something to do with us. We had fallen under the spell of the mechanical process and had imagined that ‘we were doing it’ when actually ‘it was doing us’!

 

I had imagined that I was an ‘I’, and that I was doing whatever it was I had imagined that I was doing, whereas the reality of the situation was that the mechanical process was doing itself and at the same time as it ‘did itself’ it was also creating a false impression of a ‘me’ who I falsely believed to be in charge of the process! Thought tells us that we are free, in other words, and we believe it. Thought creates the puppet self who supposedly is free and not a puppet creation of thought at all. If this isn’t funny then what is? It is of course only funny if we see it. If we don’t see it – and usually we don’t – then it isn’t funny at all. It’s far from funny – it’s deadly serious and you shouldn’t laugh!

 

When we don’t see it then we’re stuck in the generic, stuck in the humourless. It’s actually very funny to be stuck in the generic, stuck in the humourless. It’s like meeting someone who is absolutely devoid of any sense of humour, absolutely devoid of any trace of irony about themselves. That’s actually a pretty funny thing. It’s good comedy material – although not for the person themselves because they don’t get it. It’s the fact that they can’t get it (when it’s as obvious as the nose on their face) that makes it such good comedy material. People who take themselves too seriously are funny without meaning to be, funny without being able to see that they are, but it is the fact that they don’t mean it and don’t see it that makes it funny.

 

When we’re ‘stuck in the generic’ then humour doesn’t come into it. There’s no room for humour here, any more than there is any room for creativity. As we have said, humour can only come into the picture when we step away from the platform and move out into the ‘non-equilibrium realm’ – the realm in which nothing can ever be measured or defined since there are no measuring sticks or templates to measure or define with. There CAN’T be any measuring sticks or templates since that is precisely what we are moving away from when we move out of equilibrium, when we move away from the platform of thought…

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