Everyday life puts us in a very peculiar position – it puts us in the peculiar position of having to support, maintain and promote a proposition that is astonishingly dumb, astonishingly lame, astonishingly ‘not worth the effort’. We are obliged to continually ‘talk the situation up’, even though we’re on the losing side. We’re fighting for a cause which we shouldn’t be fighting for, a cause which we know (deep down) to be against our own interests, and yet we are somehow trapped in this position. We’re ‘self-sabotaging’, we’re ‘going against ourselves’ in just about everything we do…

We are trapped in this preposterous position and so – one way or another – we have to make the most of it. We can’t ever point out that the emperor has no clothes; we aren’t allowed to laugh out loud as a child would – instead, we have to be all serious about everything and act as if the ridiculous lie we’re not a ridiculous lie. We have to do the ‘adult’ thing – we make sure that we always ‘stick to the official story’ (even though we might doubt it). We have to keep up the pretence because we’re afraid of what might happen if we don’t. We have to keep on protecting what isn’t actually worth protecting at all; we have to keep on protecting the idea of who we are, even though this idea is completely arbitrary, and supplied to us by a system that gives us no choice in the matter.

Being trapped in a preposterous situation means that we can’t afford to have a sense of humour! To have a sense of humour means that we’re prepared to see things in more than one way (it means that we are able to see things in more than one way), and when we are in what we might call ‘Functional/Purposeful Mode’, we’re not prepared, we’re not able. If we were able to see things in more than one way then we couldn’t be in Functional/Purposeful Mode since our goals or purposes only work as such when we don’t have the mental freedom to interrogate them, when we don’t have the mental freedom to ‘see the world in more than one way’. The super-important goal is what all of our activity, all of our purposeful doing and thinking is aimed at, and it only gets to be ‘important’ in the way that it seems to be when we make sure never to question its validity. A goal only functions as a goal when we have no perspective on what’s going on, in other words, and this is why it’s better to suffer from schizophrenia in a country like India than it is to suffer from this condition in the West because in the West we’re all about purposefulness, we’re all about functionality. We have no tolerance for people that ‘don’t serve a purpose’, we don’t respect them.

In the West we define ourselves in terms of our functionality, in terms of ‘what we do’, in terms of ‘how we fit into the artificial system,’ and for this reason there’s no place for someone who sees the world in any other way (any other way than the prescribed one). We can’t take part in the mechanical (or ‘goal-driven’) activity that constantly is taking place around us, and which we all value so highly. To be accorded value or respect we need to show to everyone that we are that we ‘excel in obtaining the goal’ – whatever that goal might be. Otherwise, we automatically earn for ourselves the unwanted title of ‘loser’. This is how superficial we are as a culture – everything is about ‘how well we can do with regard to playing the game’ even though the game itself doesn’t really matter, even though the game itself is not a real thing. This gives rise to a situation which can only be characterised is being properly absurd, and this is the situation that we are all partaking in on a daily basis…

Our situation is it absurd but – crucially – we can’t see it. Not in a million years can we see it. If we did ‘get’ it then we would no longer be able to continue to take it all seriously. There is no meaning in the mechanical world, none at all, and were we to see this then the whole thing, the whole endeavour, would come crumbling down around us like a pack of cards. When we don’t see that the conditioned or mechanical world is empty (or ‘sterile’) then this blindness is what gives rise to the absurdity that is everyday life. In one way the ‘cure’ for this might be said to be very simple and straightforward – when we see that we’re what we’re taking so seriously isn’t actually a real thing at all (but that it is in fact only a ‘phantom appearance’) then that’s the end of it, obviously. In practise however, becoming detached (or freed) from our shared delusions is not so straightforward at all – it’s not so straightforward because we ourselves are ‘part of the delusion-package’ and this – as we need hardly point out – creates something of a problem for us. This isn’t just ‘a problem’ of course, it’s an insurmountable obstacle; we just aren’t going to go there, we’re just not going to take this on board. Seeing that our idea of who we are is ‘part of the delusion’ isn’t the solution we’re looking for!

 It is not the case therefore that when we find out that we’re playing a game (or when we find out what we’re doing is meaningless) we stop playing it (or stop doing it) and go and do something more meaningful instead. This isn’t how it works – we don’t have the power we think we do. It’s not that ‘we’re playing the game’, but rather that the game is playing us. We have been consumed by the game. Our sense of who we are is a function of the game and what this means is of course that we’re hardly in a position to stop playing it! That simply isn’t an option – the tail doesn’t wag the dog. We don’t perceive it to be the case that when we stop playing the game we will have the possibility of moving on to something else instead – something more interesting (or less sterile); far from this, we experience what’s going on to be an existential threat of the highest order. We experience ourselves as being in the unenviable position of facing our own demise. Any notion or suggestion that what we are experiencing is ultimately a healthy and wholesome sort of thing (the sort of thing that will benefit us immensely, despite all the fear and dread that we’re experiencing) is conspicuously absent from our heads – we’re just not able to look at things this way. We might have an intellectual knowledge of the principle (and imagine that we’re Ok with it), but if it suddenly became real for us then that would be another story! That would be another story entirely – everything goes out of the window in this case. The act is abandoned. The only thing we care about at such a juncture is going back to the comfortable delusional state that we are so used to. This is where the ‘default motivation’ kicks in and the default motivation is what rules the roost.

The only motivation we know in our everyday lives is the motivation to fight against the process of disillusionment (‘disillusionment’ being the extraordinarily uncomfortable process by which we become aware of what our situation really is). We said earlier something to the effect that we’re in the business of supporting, maintaining and promoting a view of ourselves and the world that is entirely absurd, entirely detrimental. We could also say that we’re ‘protecting the False Self’, that we’re suffering from a thing called ‘Loyalty to our Abuser Syndrome. This is a situation that is both utterly preposterous and utterly perverse, yet it is – all the same – the situation that all of our energy goes into protecting. All of our intelligence, all of our resources, all of our cunning, goes into protecting the false self, protecting the comforting illusion, protecting the system that is oppressing us. This is what we might call the System of Extrinsic Motivation. It is ‘the motivation that comes from outside of us’. Extrinsic Motivation is just about the only motivation we know – it’s the motivation that runs our lives for us. EM – we might say – is the ‘Abuser-Mind’, it’s the ‘Dark Master’ that we unthinkingly serve every day…






Image credit – iseek.international