The more ‘psychologically unconscious’ we are, the more impatient we are, generally speaking. This is the infallible ‘rule-of-thumb’! We are impatient – very obviously – because we think someone (or something) is standing in the way of ‘the good thing happening’. We are ‘psychologically unconscious,’ therefore, because we are living entirely within the territory of the thinking mind. We are living entirely within the territory of the thinking mind because we think that ‘the good thing’ is somewhere in the future, rather than now.
It is of course true that ‘now’ could be a very painful and unwelcome time but it still ‘the good thing’ – so speak – because it’s the only thing that’s real. It’s the only place anything can ever be, so it has to be ‘the good thing’! There’s nowhere else it could be.The future isn’t real, it’s only an idea and if we are ‘waiting for our idea to become real’ then we will be waiting forever. We’ll be waiting forever because ideas never do become real, no matter what we might think to the contrary. If we start off playing ‘the waiting game’ – i.e. waiting for ‘the good thing’ to happen in the future because we don’t think that it’s in the present – then we will be playing this game forever. We can’t pick and choose when it comes to being open to reality – if we are going to be open then we are going to have to be open to everything. When we play the waiting game then in effect we’re ‘waiting for life to happen’ and that’s an exercise in self-deception; we always have to ‘start now’ – there is no other time to start. “The present may not always be beautiful but it is always beautiful to be present.” says Robert Earl Burton.
‘Living entirely within the territory of the thinking mind’ is like jumping onto a moving walkway or travelator. We jump on because we want to get where we’re going quicker (obviously enough) and this is exactly what the thinking mind always tells us – it tells us that if we want to ‘get where we going’ (i.e. ‘achieve our goal’) then we better ‘jump on board’ the travelator. If we want to achieve our goal then we need its help, in other words! The invisible problem here however is that we’ve been suckered without knowing it – we’ve been suckered into ‘waiting for life to happen when the conditions are right’. This sort of ‘conditionality’ is a very big problem because (as we know) conditions are never right! They are never ‘right’ as far as the thinking mind is concerned, anyway…
The root of the problem (as we keep saying) is that we are living entirely within the territory of the thinking mind– the thinking mind is a very useful tool for very many things but when we let it ‘take over completely’ then it replaces life with its idea of it, its model of it, its theory of it. Instead of relating to the world as it actually is we relate to our concept of it, our mental representation of it. This might sound rather far-fetched and hard to swallow but it is – nevertheless – what almost always happens. It’s ‘a given’ that this will happen. We are in no position to notice the ‘replacement of the real by the image of the real’ because we are so very used to it. We have listened to thought’s story of ‘what reality is’ for so long that we no longer know that it is only a story. We eat the menu every day of our lives thinking that it is the meal.
We started off this discussion by saying that the more ‘psychologically unconscious’ we are, the more impatient we are. Unconsciousness manifests itself in terms of impatience, in other words. We can expand on this statement however and say that impatience comes in a number of ‘different forms’. It could come in a pleasurable form, for example – impatience could be (in a manner of speaking) when we ‘can’t wait’ for the good thing to happen but the anticipation (in this case) is enjoyable rather than frustrating. We definitely know that we’re going to get the good thing so although we are in a great hurry to skip ahead in time and get to where we’re going, this is still an enjoyable type of ‘not being able to wait’.
The ‘mirror image’ of enjoyable anticipation is fearful or anxious anticipation. Either we are anticipating a bad outcome and we are living in dread of it, or we are fearful that the good outcome that we want to happen isn’t going to happen, so we living in dread of that outcome. We have a ‘relationship’ with our own mental projection of what we think is going to happen and in this case this ‘relationship’ is causing us to experience dysphoria rather than euphoria. When we are ‘living entirely within the territory of the thinking mind’ then we are always going to be either facing into ‘the right outcome’ or facing into ‘the wrong outcome’. Only those two possibilities exist in the territory of the thinking mind and so this means that we are always going to be experiencing either ‘the unrelenting pressure to obtain the right outcome’, or the equally unrelenting pressure to avoid the wrong one. We’re ‘under pressure’ no matter what…
This ‘poverty of possibilities’ is the very thing that gives rise to ‘the fundamental impatience’ that we have been talking about; the pressure to obtain the right outcome and avoid the wrong one is a very impatient, very intolerant kind of thing – there’s no slack to be had here! What we are looking at here is a rule and rules are characterised by the fact that they have no space in them. No possibility is tolerated in other words other than the possibility of ‘achieving the specified outcome’. No other possibility is valued and that single-mindedness is what makes the rule into a rule. What’s more, if we place ourselves somewhere on the timeline that exists between ‘where I am now’ and the specified endpoint which is ‘where I want to be’ (or rather, ‘where the rule tells me that I have to be’) then we can very easily see that the rule doesn’t value ‘me as I am right now’, but will only value me when I get to be the way that the rule says I should be.
My only possible ‘validation’ therefore (when I am living within the territory of the thinking mind) occurs when I am successfully moving towards the specified endpoint. That’s the only way I can get to feel good about myself, in other words. The one thing I can never get to feel good about (when I’m listening to the thinking mind, that is!) is me being ‘where I am’ (or ‘how I am’) when that has nothing to do with the goal, when that has nothing to do with the ‘final outcome’. As we have already said, the rule doesn’t value anything apart from its own specified objective; it doesn’t allow any space for anything other than its own specified objective. Nothing else exists as far as the thinking mind is concerned – nothing else has any value (or any interest). Anything else is merely ‘an error that needs to be eliminated’ and that automatically includes us if we aren’t the way the thinking mind says we should be (or if we aren’t excused by the fact that we are progressing successfully in the direction that it wants us to go in).
Everything we’ve been talking about is of course deeply familiar within the context of everyday human life! We all know what it feels like to be intolerant and impatient within the context of our day-to-day lives and we all know what it feels like to be subjected to this type of ‘heartless or mechanical intolerance’ either from ourselves, or from other people. We all know what it’s like to be completely invalidated either by our own minds or by the minds of other people! When we come across intolerance and judgementalism then what we are encountering is this default state of being that we have called ‘psychological unconsciousness’ and psychological unconsciousness is – as we have said – the inevitable result of being entirely subsumed within the territory of the thinking mind.
When we have been subsumed entirely within the territory of the TM then as we have said we don’t know that we have. We don’t know that we have because we have nothing else to go on! Thought has replaced reality with its own version of it, its own picture or image of it, and we have no way of detecting the substitution because thought doesn’t provide us with a way, and what thought doesn’t provide us with we just don’t have! We have checked into the Hotel California and we can’t check out; we don’t even try to check out most of the time because we don’t know we’re in it. Or to put this another way, we don’t know that we are in the Hotel California because for us it is the whole world! We don’t see it for what it is at all…
We do have one way of knowing what’s happening to us however and that is by paying attention to our own impatience, our own hurry ‘to be somewhere else’. Our true nature isn’t impatient or intolerant or judgemental and so if we notice ourselves being this way (and don’t automatically make excuses for ourselves about it) then we have a very clear way of seeing that we are being ‘operated by the system of thought’ rather than the situation being the other way round. We can straightway see that ‘the tail is wagging the dog’, so to speak. What we have here is a very straightforward way of seeing when we being ‘untrue to ourselves’, in other words, and this type of ‘honesty with ourselves’ is how we ‘do something’ about our situation. That’s ‘our work’.
We could also say that the ‘work’ here is to ‘establish a relationship with the truth of what’s going on’, rather than ‘only ever relating to our own mental projections’). This isn’t a controlling thing – we don’t have to judge or blame ourselves for being false or inauthentic, and neither do we have to come up with some clever ‘plan’ or ‘method’ for fixing ourselves. When we do notice that we are judging or blaming ourselves (or trying to fix ourselves) then straightaway we know that we are being driven or controlled by the thinking mind (which should be a servant rather than our boss) and so this is a helpful thing. We’re being ‘tipped off’! Straightaway we see that the tail is wagging the dog and seeing this is how we start to redress the ‘balance of power’, so to speak. ‘The seeing is the doing’, as Krishnamurti says. When we do notice ourselves judging or blaming or trying to fix or correct ourselves then this is actually a good thing not a bad thing, therefore – we are being tipped off as to our true situation and this is something we need to know about. Our own self-judging, self-blaming, and self-recrimination thus becomes ‘a blessing rather than a curse’, and seeing this softens our attitude to it….