Nothing that is done deliberately can be authentic. We are all about deliberation, we are all about control, but nothing that is done deliberately can ever be authentic. We don’t see things like this of course, but that’s how it is. We’ve actually got things the other way around – our deliberate actions and behaviour disclose our true selves, we say, whilst whatever comes out accidentally is generally discounted because we didn’t intend for it to happen. If I didn’t intend to do or say something, then how can I stand behind it? How can I claim authorship? There’s no glory to be had unless we ourselves can take responsibility for it.

This is how we see things, any rate. The truth is however dramatically different – the truth of the matter (which we could see for ourselves if only we would look into it) is that it is only the unimportant things in life that we can do purposefully. We can give sincerity as an example – no one’s going say that the capacity to be sincere isn’t important, and yet it’s demonstrably impossible for us to be sincere on purpose. The more I strain to be sincere the more insincere I’m going to come across as being (the less sincere I am) and the reason for this is that true sincerity (as opposed to play acting) comes about all by itself. There’s no need to try because ‘trying’ means that we are attempting to make something be different from the way it actually is! Trying (in the psychological domain) is always pure fantasy, in other words – the ego is attempting to call into being its own projections, which can never happen.  

This is the same sort of thing as ‘trying to be honest’ (or ‘trying to be peaceful’): there’s no trying in it, you’re either honest or you’re not; either you’re at peace or you’re stuck in a state of conflict, trying your hardest to make things be what they’re not. If we are locked into a state of conflict (trying to get things to be what they’re not) then no amount of struggling can get us out of this fix! This is the loop we’re trapped in. I can’t simply ‘stop controlling’ since controlling something equals control. This is a glitch no one can fix; what we’re looking at here is The Prison of Purposefulness (i.e., once we start controlling then we’re not able to stop).

When we’re unhappily confined within the Prison of Purposefulness then the only currency is ‘controlling’, the only currency is ‘making things happen the way we want them to’ and just so long as we’re content with this situation then that’s fine – everything’s fine because we don’t know that we’re in prison. To see that we’re ‘trapped in purposeful doing’, and gain insight into the inherent contradictoriness of this situation (which is a formidably tough insight to take on board). We very rarely gain insight into this situation and what generally happens instead is that we displace the feeling that we have of being trapped and the way this displacement manifests is in terms of fixing some (extrinsic) problem or other. Instead of feeling that we are hopelessly trapped in purposefulness the discomfort /angst is relocated so that it shows itself in terms of a sense of urgency with respect to a specific problem that urgently needs to be solved. The original problem (the pain of which we are displacing) can’t be solved, but the surrogate problem can be and this is what is so very attractive to us. When we find that the supposedly soluble (and therefore harmless) surrogate problems paralyze us and fill us with nameless foreboding then this is ‘game failure’, this is because we’re starting to see through them to become aware of what it is that we’re trying to distract ourselves from.

Acting on this displaced and unrecognised pain / angst means that – far from curing the problem – we’re feeding the source of it (since the source is what we might call ‘the Engine of Automatic Reacting’). The more we invest in purposeful activity the more we set the Flywheel of Samsara in motion and the faster this Great Wheel spins the more suffering it grinds out. When things close in on us enough to start making things unbearable hard for us then the need to do something about the displaced pain turns into pure compulsivity, forcing us to keep on treading the mechanical wheel. This is the Neurotic Hell Realm – the more pressure there is to fix the problem the more compelling the game becomes and the more compelling the game becomes the more trapped in it we are. Paradoxically, however, what we’re playing for is to be released from the game (which is symbolised by the idea of ‘winning’). No matter how hard we put our feet on the accelerator however, nothing authentic comes out of it – the more driven we are the less authentic we are, after all.

Whether we say that ‘purposefulness is a prison’, or whether we say that ‘it’s impossible to be deliberately authentic’ it comes down to the same thing – the essential root of our suffering in the Neurotic Hell Realms is our inauthenticity, our alienation from our actual nature. We aren’t who we say we are (any more than we don’t want what we say we want) and the type of goal-orientated striving that we automatically engage in in order to try to escape this pain has the effect of alienating us from our true nature all the more. It’s very easy for us to say that the answer to our malaise to find our authenticity, to reconnect with who we really are, and so on, but this is where things get confused – things get confused because the only currency we know is the currency of ‘purposefulness’ and as we have been saying this simply doesn’t work. Freedom is not a goal. In anxiety, for example, the more activity we engage in the more we suffer and the more we suffer the more we struggle to fix things (or think of a way of fixing things) and so – ultimately – this becomes self-limiting. Eventually, we learn (on a non-intellectual / visceral level) that purposeful doing only makes things worse, which is something that the rational intellect just can’t understand, since not-doing (or Wei Wu) isn’t ‘logical’. What we’re learning here therefore is to ‘see through the rational-purposeful mind’, and this turns out to be the hardest thing there is to learn.

We started off this discussion by saying that nothing worthwhile, nothing real, nothing authentic to us can ever come about as a result of deliberate action. We then gave the example of sincerity and we said that we can’t be sincere on purpose. The more we adapt to the system of logic the less sincere we necessarily become but we substitute fanaticism (or ‘goal-orientedness’) for sincerity so that we don’t see what we’ve lost. Fanaticism means (as we all know) that we assert our beliefs very strongly and don’t tolerate any opposition whatsoever. We justify the forcefulness (or ruthlessness) of our actions on the grounds that what we’re fighting for is ‘right’ – the more right (or true) something is, the more violence we are justified in being. This is seeing everything backwards however since if what we were asserting were actually true then there will be no need for us to be so obnoxiously aggressive about it! The law here is that the more assertive we are the less true whatever we are asserting must be. ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’, as Shakespeare says.

On the other hand, if we’re acting out of the truth (rather than acting out of our idea of what the truth is) theory of what the truth is then no forcing is needed no forcing would be needed; no forcing is needed here because we’re not trying to make anything be different from the way that it actually is. No goal-orientated action is needed because it’s not possible to make a goal of being sincere or authentic or peaceful (or any more than it is possible to make a goal of ‘being free). There is a very substantial difficulty here however (as we keep saying); the difficulty being that we can’t stop being assertive / violent / aggressive / forceful on purpose. ‘On purpose’ means forcing, after all. When it comes down to it – and this is something we simply can’t see in the daily run of things – we are flatly terrified of letting go of our goal-orientated striving (which is to say, our resistance) and the reason for this is that our striving is what gives rise to the perception of there being ‘a striver’. As Alan Watts says somewhere, if we were to completely relax then that would spell the end of the road for the chronic knot of tension which is the everyday (resistant) self. We say that we want to ‘finish the job’ so that we can let her hair down and relax, but this absolutely isn’t the case. We’re addicted to the striving because we’re afraid of what might happen if we stop. When we say that we want to ‘bring whatever it is that we’re doing to a conclusion’ this is merely code for our unacknowledged goal of ‘wanting to escape from reality’.

The purposeful self isn’t who we are and the pain (or despair, as Kierkegaard puts it) of ‘not being who we are who’ has the effect of driving us even deeper into purposefulness – it has the effect of driving us even more into the state of false identification with the random mental construct which is ‘the conditioned identity’. Out of this unconscious state of being comes nothing but violence, frustration and suffering; the only possible way out of this suffering-producing conflict would be for us to let go of our sense of identity therefore, but this is the precisely the thing we don’t want to do. This is right at the top of the list of things that we don’t ever want to happen. We are – in effect – frightened of growth, we’re frightened of the inconceivably bigger world that we would find if we went beyond our conception of ourselves. In the end we opt for the to be inauthentic or insincere in a world that isn’t real (rather than being authentic in the real world and yet at the same time not knowing who we or what that world is). When we give up everything it all comes back…






Image credit – critic.co.nx