We’re all addicted to the \u2018special experience\u2019 that the system of thought provides us with – that very special experience which we take for granted every day of our life. This is the experience of \u2018being whoever it is that we happen to think we are\u2019!
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Being whoever it is we happen to think we are is a \u2018special experience\u2019 because it has to be arranged in advance. It won’t be the way that it is by itself, in other words – it has to be contrived. This creates an odd situation for us because we don’t, in everyday lives, feel the experience of being whoever it is that we think ourselves to be is entirely artificial<\/em>, entirely rigged<\/em>, and yet it is. We are skating on very thin ice, therefore. This constitutes an odd situation because – for the most part – there is no awareness of the thin ice that we are walking on, and so this sensation of freedom, ease and flexibility that we have is a total illusion, a made-up thing. It\u2019s a smokescreen designed to cover up an uncomfortable truth. What we like to regard as our well-being or mental health is a made-up thing, therefore; it\u2019s an substantial phantom and nothing more. When we’re anxious however then we do<\/em> feel ourselves to be skating on thin ice, the perverse thing about this however is that we collectively de-validate the experience of those undergoing anxiety as being an aberration, as being without any basis in reality. It\u2019s \u2018irrational\u2019, we say; people who aren’t suffering from anxiety will conspire amongst themselves to tell us that we aren’t seeing reality right, whilst they (of course) are.<\/em> This puts huge pressure on us to move back into that contrived modality of being that we say isn\u2019t <\/em><\/strong>contrived; to move safely back into the state of denial in which we don’t see the thin ice that we\u2019re skating on as being thin ice at all. We treat people who are suffering from anxiety in order to try to bring them back to that state in which our sense of ourselves is artificial or made-up, but where – crucially \u2013 we don\u2019t have any insight into this truth<\/em>. The comforting illusion has to be reinstated, in other words and the all-important business of reinstating the illusion is dignified by the term \u2018therapy\u2019! Given the evident fact that we don’t <\/em><\/strong>see our regular state of consciousness as being contrived (and because of this, precarious, brittle and in need a constant maintenance) there is no other way which we could<\/em> understand clinical anxiety. The only way to really<\/em> become free from anxiety is to honour our insights, however disturbing they might be, rather than demonising them in the way that we do, which leads us to repress them either with medication or rational therapies. This is of course not in the least bit easy, but what we’re looking at here is nevertheless a natural process<\/em> rather than an artificial one, and as such it is one that will happen by itself if we let it. Attempting to go back to the prior state of affairs where we didn’<\/em>t have any insight into our true situation has to be artificial – there is nothing \u2018organic\u2019 about it at all. Even if we were<\/em> able to temporarily move back into denial it would only ever be \u2018a postponement of the inevitable\u2019. If we weren’t<\/em> addicted to the special experience that thought provides us with then there’s no way that we could become anxious about losing what it is that we are addicted to (which is to say, losing the story of ourselves as is told to us by our thoughts). We would have cut the problem off at root. Naturally we don’t feel <\/em>ourselves to be anxious as a result of living our lives on an entirely false or artificial basis – that’s far too big a thing for us to get our heads around. Instead of perceiving what\u2019s really going on, we experience this insight in all sorts of displaced (or disguised) ways. We become distressingly consumed with surrogate issues<\/em>, so to speak. Essentially, we don’t see that we are full of fear about the impossibility of maintaining the artificial situation that we’re addicted to, we just get the feeling – on a gut level – that something very bad is going to happen, something very bad which we can’t do anything about. We sense that there is a catastrophe coming our way in the pipeline that we cannot do anything to avert. The catastrophe we fear is true in one way but the perception is a distorted one; what we live in dread of it isn’t really a \u2018catastrophe\u2019 – we only see it as being such because we believe that we are the artificial version of ourselves that thought has created.<\/em> The impending catastrophe is real in a kind of a way<\/em> therefore, but it is a<\/em> displacement.<\/em> It\u2019s not being seen in the right way. Anxiety can be displaced onto various specific aspects of life or it can be displaced into the air as a cloud of generalized worry, but whichever<\/em> way we displace it (this sense that \u2018something very bad which we can’t explain is going to happen\u2019) it\u2019s still only ever a smokescreen. The true cause of the anxiety that we are experiencing is our allegiance to the pattern that the machinery of thought has generated, the thought-moderated story which we believe to be us. In essence, we’re addicted to having the experience of being this person that the thinking mind tells us we are, as we started off by saying. This doesn’t mean that the experience in question is necessarily anything wonderfully great<\/em> – the experience itself is actually pretty wretched. Is the same with all addictions, of course – we start off with the honeymoon phase and everything is super-great<\/em>, and then very quickly it all becomes a kind of a rigmarole that we just have to go through. It doesn’t even feel particularly good anymore, even though the whole point of the rigmarole is to bring about some legendary state of bliss, some feeling of great release. When it all comes down to really is that we’re keeping the mechanical rigmarole going on the basis of promises that are never going to come true. We\u2019re chasing a dream that isn’t real, and this goes on forever. The \u2018special experience\u2019 that thought provides us with is actually very constrained, very limited. It never goes anywhere new, being made up of habits and routines, habits and routines which are driven by dreams of fulfilment that can never come to pass. Our dreams of fulfilment – whatever form they may take – are all equally absurd, as we could plainly see if we looked into them enough. They are all equally absurd because they could only ever mean something if the person we think we are were actually real, were actually us, which isn’t the case. We\u2019re chasing the dreams of who we are not, just as we are fleeing on the basis of the fears of who we aren’t and that’s as close to actually living<\/em> as we can get. This is a peculiar, second-hand version of life, therefore; it is a distorted reflection of life which is enacted in a room made up of mirrors. What we\u2019re talking about here is life as it would be if we were<\/em> who we aren’t, which is the image that is continuously being generated by thought. As with all addictions, once the intoxication associated with the honeymoon phase is over, it’s not the content<\/em> of the experience that keeps us hooked, but the fear of losing it.<\/em> We don\u2019t believe there\u2019s anything else. We’re not holding on to the idea of ourselves for any good reason but simply because we are afraid of seeing what will happen next, if we do<\/em> let go of it. And thought feeds our fear every step of the way by telling us, in no uncertain times, that what is going to happen next what will happen next if we let go is going to be unreservedly bad. The \u2018special experience\u2019 we\u2019re addicted to is only special because we\u2019re too frightened to see what other<\/em> possibilities there are in life, therefore. We\u2019re \u2018afraid of the new\u2019 because the new isn\u2019t part of the script. Or as we could also say, we\u2019re addicted to the experience of \u2018being who we are told we are by thought\u2019 because we don\u2019t trust that there could be anything else\u2026 We’re all addicted to the \u2018special experience\u2019 that the system of thought provides us with – that very special experience which we take for granted every day of our life. This is the experience of \u2018being whoever it is that we happen to think we are\u2019! Being whoever it is we happen to think we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3526,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[18,35,194],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/artificial-intelligence-technology-futuristic-science.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3524"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3528,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524\/revisions\/3528"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Image – wallpaperflare.com<\/a><\/strong>
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