Where there is attachment there is unconsciousness. Attachment means that we hope for something good to happen, and at the same time we are watching out in case something bad happens. We’re on the look-out for the favourable outcome and we’re also on the look-out for the unfavourable one, and we’re all geared up accordingly. We’re prepared either to be pleased or disappointed…
Favourable outcomes and unfavourable ones are projections, which is just another way of saying that they don’t exist. How can they exist – they’re only favourable or unfavourable in relation to me after all, they’re not ‘favourable’ or ‘unfavourable’ in themselves! To put this another way, when we personalize the world (i.e. when we see it in terms of ourselves, in terms of our likes and dislikes, our desires and fears) then we don’t see the world as it is in itself at all. We only see our own unreal projections superimposed on it, which we don’t see as being unreal. We don’t see the world we perceive as being ‘personalized’ – we just see it as ‘the world’.
If we’re not aware of the world as it is in itself, but only in terms of the private meaning that we are superimposing upon it, then very clearly there can be no consciousness. ‘Consciousness’ implies some sort of relationship with reality! If I’m not relating to the world but only to my own unrecognized projections then I am not conscious. I’m trapped in a loop, trapped in a blind loop of conditioned consciousness that is forever reacting to itself and this ‘blind or self-referential loop’ has replaced reality. It’s there instead of reality.
Attachment means that I am living in a world that is made up of my own hopes and fears reflected back at me; I am living in a world made up of hopes and fears, advantages and disadvantages, favourable outcomes and unfavourable ones, and this world does not exist. How could the world be made up of ‘advantages and disadvantages’ after all? What a ridiculous way of looking at things! The advantages and disadvantages which tie up my awareness so thoroughly are purely a function of my greedy / fearful way of looking at the world. They are the result of me making the world all about me, when it isn’t. My hopes and my fears are of course all about me (who else do they belong to?) and this means that I am living my life in a claustrophobically closed little universe that is made up of nothing but myself. As Jung says,
Projections turn the world into a replica of one’s own unknown face.
When I’m looking for favourable outcomes in the world around me, when I am preoccupied with possible advantages / disadvantages, then I am abstracting something out of the world that isn’t really there. If I am thinking about any sort of outcomes at all then I am ‘skipping ahead’ – I’m ‘skipping ahead’ because those outcomes don’t actually exist in the present moment. I have an image in my mind about this outcome and the impact (either pleasant or unpleasant) it would have on me and I am focussing all my awareness on this projected image. I am focussing exclusively on this image (or idea) because it is so very important to me that I should have a pleasant experience and not an unpleasant one! It is my aversion to discomfort and my attraction to comfort that causes me to be obsessed with outcomes the whole time, therefore. This aversion / attraction, this lack of equanimity, is what causes me to be forever skipping ahead and not staying in the present moment…
If I were to stay in the present moment then advantages and disadvantages would not come into it – there are no advantages to be had in the present moment any more than there are disadvantages to be avoided! The present moment isn’t about advantages versus disadvantages. Or as we could also say, there is no ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ in the now! There’s no winning or losing because winning and losing are all to do with the narrow little world of the self and the thing about being in the present moment is that this represents an expansion of consciousness beyond the claustrophobically-closed universe made up of ‘nothing but me and my projections’. The present moment is always an expansion of consciousness. Oddly enough (as it may seem) the present moment – which is of course the only reality – has nothing whatsoever to do with the self and its concerns. To be present in the moment is to be absent from the self – to be present in the moment is to be absent from the self because there is no self there in the present. It has no foothold, in influence here… It cannot spin its web there.
We might feel that all of this is a bit unfair, a bit harsh. We might feel that we’re not looking for advantages (or scanning for disadvantages) the whole time. Generally speaking, it doesn’t usually seem to be the case that we are. This however is only because we are so very used to the ‘attached’ modality of existence that we take this fundamental orientation as being ‘the only way things could be’. We don’t notice the fact that we are relating to the world almost exclusively in terms of advantage versus disadvantage; we don’t notice the way in which we are relating to our environment almost exclusively in terms of how it can either work for us or against us. Another way of putting this is to say that we’re almost always in ‘control mode’, we’re almost always hoping for things to be a certain way and are holding onto the illusion we can wangle this if we try hard enough or are lucky enough. Yet another way of putting this is to say that we’re ‘addicted to promoting the illusory self’, the ‘self that doesn’t exist in the present moment’. We addicted to promoting the interests of an unreal thing; we’re addicted to promoting the interests of ‘a fundamentally dissociated mental abstraction’…
If we want to know whether we’re stuck in control mode or not (or whether we’re looking at the world in terms of advantage versus disadvantage or not) then all we need to do is to pay attention to whether we’re thinking or not. If we’re caught up in thinking then this means that we’re caught up in control mode because the only purpose of thought is to increase the degree of control that we have (or rather, the degree of control that we imagine that we have). We think in order to gain purchase on the world, in order to get some kind of a foothold in the world. What the pie is we’re not sure, but we do know that it’s good and we want to make sure we want to get our hands on a slice of it and this is the reason we are constantly getting caught up in thinking. Thinking equals attachment, in other words. Thinking means ‘advantage versus disadvantage’. Thinking is the net we spin, the net with which we hope to catch the prize.
If we’re caught up in thinking therefore, then there is no consciousness. Consciousness comes in at the point at which we notice that we’re thinking, the point at which we notice that we’re attached to outcomes. The thinking mind is really just a survival tool, when it comes down to it. It is a survival tool that has come to be over-valued, over-used. The reason we can say that it is over-valued or over-used is because we aren’t usually in a ‘survival-type situation’ every moment of the day. It’s not about survival every minute of the day and yet we’re thinking every minute of the day, so what’s going on? The answer to this is clearly that there is something there that is surviving, or trying to survive. It’s not us however – it’s our idea of ourselves, our image of ourselves that is struggling to survive. Our idea or image of ourselves has to struggle to survive for the simple reason that it isn’t really who we are. The self-image has to keep looking for the advantages and steering clear of the disadvantages the whole time because it simply isn’t real! It has its work cut out for it….
The mental image of ourselves (which is who we believe ourselves to be) is inherently unstable simply because it is a mental image. It is a construct and constructs are by their very nature unstable. Because the construct which we call ‘the self’ (or ‘who I am’) is inherently unstable it needs to be continually propped up. Just as long as we are identified with the self-image we are driven night and day by the conditioned need to maintain it, and the prospect of not being able to maintain it strikes instant fear into our hearts. We’re afraid on behalf of the self-image. We’re not only afraid on behalf of the self-image, we’re also hopeful on its behalf. We control on its behalf, we strategize and plan on its behalf, we make goals on its behalf. When we feel pleased we are being pleased on its behalf and when we are disgruntled we are being disgruntled on its behalf. When we feel comfortable it’s on the self-image’s behalf and when we feel uncomfortable it’s on the self-image’s behalf. When we despair it’s on the self-image’s behalf.
A more subtle way of the self-image staying in control (or trying to stay in control) is by describing the world in accordance with its own language, its own model of the way it thinks things should be. We do this by constantly evaluating both ourselves and the world around us. Evaluation and control go hand in hand: inasmuch as we are perceiving the world we are evaluating it. To perceive without automatically evaluating everything we see (i.e. without thinking, without conceptually processing) is extraordinarily difficult – one would have to be an artist or a poet or a mystic, and these aren’t ways of being in the world that usually occur without being patiently cultivated over a very long period of time. Another way to put this is to say that we can only see reality ‘as it is in itself’ when we are our true authentic selves and practically none of us are our own true authentic selves. From a very early age we’ve had that knocked out of us – we’ve been coerced and cajoled and bullied into seeing things the way everyone else does, and in the process of adapting to the group mind in this way we have lost our true selves. That’s what happens in life – we lose ourselves. We get socially conditioned and to be socially conditioned is to lose sight of both ourselves and reality.
It’s not just a matter of becoming free from social conditioning, either. Even if we did get free from social conditioning we’d still be conditioned by the rational mind. It is impossible to look at the world from a particular viewpoint (which is what the rational mind is) and yet not be biased towards seeing this viewpoint as being the right one. Whatever way we have of seeing the world that is our prejudice and if we are prejudiced (as we absolutely are) then this is the same thing as existing in the state of attachment. We’re attached to the particular arbitrary way which we have of seeing the world. Or as we could also say, operating from the basis of the thinking mind means that we always have an agenda for everything and what this agenda ultimately comes down to is maintaining the status quo and the ‘status quo’ in question is our particular way of seeing things, our particular way of understanding things. Our allegiance is not to reality therefore but to our way of understanding reality – our belief structure, our model or theory of reality. If someone were to try to make this point to us we wouldn’t understand because as far as we are concerned our model or theory of reality isn’t a model or theory at all but reality itself. We don’t know the difference. If we knew that what we were relating to via the thinking /conceptualizing mind was only a representation and not the genuine article then this would be a different matter altogether – that would mean that we are no longer attached to the particular viewpoint that we are operating from. That would mean that we are no longer unconsciously committed to validating our own beliefs or theories about ‘the way things are’. We would no longer be preoccupied with maintaining our taken-for-granted POV no matter what the cost. This unattached state of consciousness is however a very rare thing to come across. This is a pretty big deal (to put it mildly) – it is the same thing as ‘not believing that you are this concrete self’, and how many of us find ourselves in this situation? ‘Had I been free I could have chosen to be not me’ says Robert Wyatt, but the point is that we just aren’t free in this way.
Instead of seeing the world as it is in itself we see it in terms of the structure (or system) that we are taking for granted. Anything irrelevant to the system in question we just don’t care about. It doesn’t exist for us – we are entirely oblivious to it. We couldn’t be more oblivious and this is the state of unconsciousness. The unconscious state – we might say – is the state in which we are fundamentally disconnected from reality itself. We’re disconnected from reality because we not interested in it – we’re only interested in what the rational / conceptual mind has to show us and the one thing the rational / conceptual mind never shows us is reality! We’re only interested in one thing and that is playing the same old game over and over again. The game that we’re playing is very easy to understand – as we have already said, we’re identified with a particular standpoint, a particular set of assumptions, and the ‘game’ we’re playing is the game of pretending that the world which this viewpoint (this set of assumptions) shows us is actual reality. The rational mind equals a particular POV, a particular set of assumptions and the game we’re playing is the game of validating this POV, validating these assumptions. This is attachment in a nutshell – we’re attached to proving that our theory is right, that our assumptions are right, for no other reason than the fact that it is our theory, that they are our assumptions…
The game makes perfect sense from the point of view which it takes for granted – the POV which is itself. This is of course a fairly redundant thing to say – of course the game makes sense from the POV which it itself takes for granted! This is like saying that a structure always agrees with itself, or that a literal statement always agrees with itself. That’s what makes a structure into a structure, a literal statement into a literal statement. From outside of this closed viewpoint however the game doesn’t make any sense at all! It doesn’t make any sense at all because the mechanical structure or system we’re identified with isn’t who we are, and because it isn’t who we are we are under no obligation to validate it or fulfil its needs. We are only obliged to validate it and fulfil the system’s needs when we play the game of thinking that it is ‘who we are’. And not only is this set-up, this system ‘not who we are’, it doesn’t really exist in the first place. It only seems to exist when we take it seriously, when we steadfast ignore everything that doesn’t confirm its reality. It only seems real when we ignore the real world, in other words, and only take notice of the world as it appears to be from our particular arbitrary viewpoint.
The mechanical structure or system that we are identifying with only seems to exist when we are playing the game that it exists. It only exists, in other words, when we keep on furthering its aims, when we keep on obeying the rules that it sets out for us. The more we play the game the realer it gets to seem for us and we play the game a lot! We play the game all the time. We actually can’t help playing this game – we’re terrified not to play it. We play it and we play it and we play it – all in the hope that everything will somehow turn out OK for us if we play it right, if we obey the rules correctly…
What we are essentially hoping here (although we can’t see it) is that going along with our attachments is somehow going to help us get the best out of life. But attachments are really just red herrings – they’re only really there for the sake of keeping us busy, for the sake of keeping us preoccupied. Acting on attachments keeps us caught up in the net of thought, and being caught up in the ‘net of thought’ means that we never actually get to rest in the present moment. The attachments are only there as a distraction from reality in other words; far from helping us, or in any way ‘sorting things out’, acting on attachment is only ever keeping us unconscious. Being unconscious (or ‘being driven by our attachments’) means that we are ignoring what is real and chasing after what is unreal, and this is really just a mechanism for creating suffering…