We almost never know free consciousness in our everyday lives – all we know is the ‘trapped variant’ of it, the ‘distorted version’ of it. ‘Free consciousness’ is consciousness that isn’t attached to a story (or consciousness that isn’t defined by a story) and that hardly ever happens. All we ever know is ‘consciousness-with-a-story’ and this is a different type of thing altogether. It is a different type of a thing because consciousness-with-a-story is consciousness that is ruled by a factor that exists outside itself. It is ‘consciousness that always obeys an external mechanical force’. It is trapped consciousness.
It has often been said that how we feel depends upon how we perceive our circumstances. ‘There is nothing good nor bad, but thinking makes it so’, says Shakespeare in the second act of Hamlet. Another way of putting this is to say that how we feel is determined by how we think our story is going. No matter how we feel however (whether we feel good or bad, hopeful or worried, confident or afraid) this is not free consciousness. This is something else entirely – this is consciousness determined by an external factor, this is consciousness intertwined with an ongoing narrative structure. The crucial point we are making here is this: there is nothing the ongoing narrative can ever tell us – no matter how ‘positive’ it may sound to us – that can ever free us from the narrative…
We could also say that there is nothing the narrative (or ‘our thinking’) can tell us that can make us feel at peace. Peace comes from within, not from some factor that exists outside of us. Peace cannot come about because of the existence of rules that tell us that ‘we must be at peace’, in other words. We cannot be free because we are instructed to be free, or at peace because we are told to be at peace, or happy because our orders are to be happy and all the narrative can ever do is ‘instruct’ or ‘tell’ or ‘order’. Consciousness that is intertwined with the ongoing narrative of who we are and what is going on with our life can never be at peace therefore and this is a terrible thing to consider. It is a terrible thing to consider because – as we have said – the only form of consciousness we know is conditioned consciousness. Because it is the only form of consciousness we know we are prepared to ‘make do with it’ (we don’t really have any choice, obviously) and this means that we shall never know peace. And because we will never know peace, we will also never know joy or happiness since there is no way to know joy or happiness unless we can first know peace. Instead, we will have to make do with the conditioned version of freedom and peace and happiness (and so on), which is where the thinking mind tells us that we are free or unfree, at peace or not at peace, happy or not happy…
The external factor that is the mind-created narrative is our master therefore and as such it determines whether we are going to feel good about ourselves or feel bad. We are completely dependent upon this ‘master’ and this means that we are dependent upon illusion to feel good rather than bad, safe rather than unsafe, validated rather than devalidated, etc. Being ‘dependent upon illusion’ for how we feel about ourselves (or how we feel about life) is another way of saying that we are fundamentally disconnected from anything real. We only value illusion. Because we are fundamentally disconnected from anything real we cannot ever truly feel at peace, or truly happy, as we have just said. So not only are we dependent upon something ‘outside of ourselves’, we are dependent upon ‘something outside of ourselves that isn’t real’, and not only are we dependent upon something outside of ourselves that isn’t real, what that ‘external factor’ provides us with (instead of happiness and peace) isn’t ever going to be real either…
The mind-created narrative provides us with polarities – it provides us with the polarities of good and bad, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, and so on. This ‘oscillation between opposites’ is what we have to make do with instead of reality. The mind-created narrative is always polar in nature – it can never be ‘not polar’. The narrative is polar because it is to do with the self that is the subject of the story and this ‘self’ is fundamentally polar. The self is polarity itself. Saying that the self is fundamentally polar is just another way of saying that it is fundamentally biased, prejudiced or ‘partisan’ in its outlook – it can never be non-partisan or unbiased no matter how it tries. This is what ‘self’ means – it means that there is an essential bias there! There is ‘me’, and there is ‘you’, and the two are not the same. There is ‘me’, and there is ‘everything else’ and the difference between the two is as big as any difference ever could be. This taken-for-granted difference between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is what fuels all my purposeful activity in the world. We might imagine that there can be such a thing as a ‘moral self’ which can behave in a fair and unbiased way but this is simply ridiculous – the self can be infinitely ingenious in the disguised that it puts on but what lies underneath the disguise never changes, as Alan Watts says. No matter what masks we wear, and how well we wear them, this is never going to alter the ‘wearer of the mask’, not by one jot. Pretending to be moral never makes us moral – actually, it has the reverse effect!
The fundamentally biased nature of the self means that the narrative which it spins around itself is always going to reflect this bias; that’s what makes the narrative interesting to us, after all. Saying that the narrative which we embed ourselves in is ‘polar’ means that it can always go in one of two directions – it can go in the direction of ‘things getting better for us’ or it can go in the complementary direction of ‘things getting worse’. Things can go well or they can go badly, as we all know. The polarity that we are talking about here is perfectly illustrated by our very great interest in this thing we call ‘luck’; luck comes in two basic forms, as we all know – there is the good type and the bad type! We never hear any talk about luck that is ‘neither good nor bad’… The capacity of our personal narrative to go in one of two directions totally fascinates us; it never ceases to soak up our attention. Yet what we’re fascinated with here has nothing to do with life (even though it may look that way) – what we’re fascinated with is ourselves!
The personal narrative might be endlessly fascinating but it isn’t real; it has nothing to do with reality. It is no more real than this thing we call ‘luck’ is. The narrative that we are so obsessed with can’t be real because it is at all times fundamentally orientated towards a central point which isn’t real – this central point (or pivot) being the concept that we have of ourselves. We are of course perfectly free to have a concept of ourselves, a concept of who we are, but that doesn’t mean that it actually exists. The very fact that it is us ourselves who have the ideas or concepts that we do have shows that they aren’t real – they belong only to us, like our facial expressions or hairstyles. Or to put this another way – it is precisely because we are free to have ideas about who or what we are that these ideas aren’t real. These two things – the idea we have about ourselves and the personal narrative – are of course one and the same thing. The personal narrative is the self and the self is the personal narrative and so if one is unreal then so is the other. We can’t have a real narrative about an unreal self-concept! The personal narrative is as fascinating as it is to the self that is spinning it because that narrative is (of course) all about it and the narrative-spinning self is – quite frankly – fascinated with itself.
What we are talking about here is therefore a clear-cut case of 100% narcissistic self-engagement. There is no free consciousness here in this situation because there is no relationship with anything real, anything outside of the self. There’s nothing going on but ‘self-adhesion’ – the unreal self is compulsively engaged with (or obsessed by) its own un-owned projections. Whatever you might like to call this situation, the one thing we can be sure of is that it doesn’t have anything to do with ‘being conscious’. There is – it is safe to say – no prison as absolute as the prison of narcissistic self-engagement. It’s like getting a sticking plaster and folding it neatly in on itself so that it forms a sealed inert unit – a self-contained package that is forever sealed off from the world. This sealed inert unit is ‘us when we’re fully engaged, fully absorbed, fully fascinated in our own story of ourselves’. The glue that keeps us stuck to our own story of what is happening to us is, what did happen to us, and what might happen to us is ‘the glue of attraction/aversion’ and the key thing that we need to understand about attraction/aversion is that there is absolutely no freedom in it. Attraction-versus-aversion creates a completely compulsive, completely coercive situation – we are powerless not to chase what attracts us just as we are powerless not to run from what repels us.
And not only are we ‘powerless not to chase or run away from whatever either attracts or repels us’ we are also powerless not to believe that it is our own motivation that advises us to either chase what attracts us or flee what repels us. There’s no such thing as free motivation (or free will) in the realm of attraction/aversion, however. Not only are we ‘being controlled by something that isn’t us’ therefore, we’re also unable to see that we are being controlled – we’re unable to see that when we either like something or dislike it these reactions are not truly ‘ours’ but are forced upon us by the narrow coercive world that we have adapted to. The system tells me what I like and dislike, in other words, and I am so habituated to being told what to do by some external agency that I think it’s coming from me. The external set of compulsions (i.e. the mechanical system) ‘lives my life for me’ and I never know it. As we have already said, there simply couldn’t be a more absolute prison than the prison of involuntary narcissistic self-engagement – which is the situation that we’re all caught up in just as long as we’ve got a ‘story of ourselves’ running in our heads.
‘Free’ consciousness is consciousness that is not attached to a story, and this is the only sort of consciousness there is. Either consciousness is unconditionally free or it is not consciousness. When consciousness gets attached to a story, a narrative, a rational account of ‘what is going on’ then consciousness becomes identical with this story, this account. There is only the story then. We become the rational mind’s definition of us and we inhabit a world that has been created for us by the same rational mind that has defined who we are. We are never more than ‘our own thoughts about ourselves and the world’, in other words. The rule-based definitions are ‘who we are’ and ‘what the world is’ and ‘what life is all about’ become limits that we never go beyond, yet none of these definitions are true. ‘The story’ simply isn’t true, therefore. ‘The story’ is duality and duality is a construct of the thinking mind with all its opposing categories of ‘right and wrong’, ‘winning’ and losing’, ‘existing and not-existing’, ‘me and you’…
If we wanted to know who we really are, and what the world really is, then the only definition we can ever have is a negative definition, which is to say, all we can ever say is that we are NOT what our thoughts say we are and that life is NOT about what the official story says it is about. The story – whatever it may be – is guaranteed to be false, and that’s the only thing we can know for sure. The ‘story’ regarding what life is all about (i.e. the central all-determining narrative that the rational mind (or society) keeps spinning) is always fundamentally distorted. We can see this very easily if we just consider that the whole point of ‘a story’ is that it is always belonging to someone. Life isn’t a story however precisely because it isn’t happening to anyone!
I think that life is something that is ‘happening to me’ but all that’s really happening here is that consciousness is being enslaved (or imprisoned) by an illusion. ‘All there is is life happening’, as Tony Parsons says. There is no limiting ‘story’, there is no ‘one to whom everything is happening to’, and this ‘lack of a limiting story’, this lack of an ‘isolated ego or self to whom everything is happening to’ equals free consciousness….