Out of fear we try to make everything happen the right way, but fear also ensures that this can never happen. Out of fear comes control and control falsifies everything. Control distorts reality itself.
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Control can never <\/em>do anything else apart from falsifying reality. That doesn’t mean that if we ever control anything we will straight away create a false or simulated reality – if I move a stone from one place in the garden to another this is control but it’s not but it is hardly sufficient to create a phoney reality! A single thought cannot harm us but when we join all our thoughts together then we create a system that will enslave us. Similarly \u2013 then – when we join up all our acts of controlling then we create an illusory world that is made-up of the thinking that informs this controlling. Control almost always<\/em><\/strong> comes all joined up, however \u2013 that\u2019s how it comes. We don’t experience ourselves to be engaging in \u2018joined up controlling\u2019 (or \u2018controlling without a gap;) but actually our whole world is made up of this type of \u2018total control\u2019.<\/em> If the control ever wavers then everything would start to crack up straightaway, much to our consternation. Generally speaking – as a kind of \u2018psychological rule\u2019 – this is the only way<\/em><\/strong> we ever get to know about the secret role of controlling and it isn’t a pleasant way to discover it. The awareness is forced <\/em><\/strong>upon us, so to speak, and it comes as great shock. The world we ordinarily living is a very narrow, very limited, very incomplete <\/em>kind of a world \u2013 it is the world of our ideas, the world of our thoughts. This is the world that comes into being when our thoughts are all \u2018joined up together\u2019 so as to block out everything else. This closed ring of thoughts needs to be maintained<\/em> however, just as everything <\/em><\/strong>with boundaries needs to be maintained and so this is where the need to control on a full-time basis comes in. Control is a deceptive kind of a thing because although we feel that we are controlling for our own sake, and that it is therefore an expression of our free well, the truth is that we are being compelled<\/em> to control by our fear of what will happen if we don’t. The ring of joined-up thoughts is the real<\/em> boss not us; thought is the tyrant overlord who keeps us slaving away on its behalf fulfilling its projects not ours. Everything we do for the sake of the Tyrant of Thought therefore – we have no life other than this life of slavery. Joined-up thought and joined-up controlling go together therefore – we can’t have the one without the other. We’re trapped by our fear of what will happen if we fail to keep everything under control; nothing <\/em>frightens us more than this prospect but the truth is that this is a disaster for the Tyrant of Thought not us! The so-called disaster is that the joined-up controlling will no longer be able to stay<\/em> joined-up – the disaster is that gaps or breaks or cracks or discontinuities will appear, allowing the light to enter, just as Leonard Cohen says\u2026 The catastrophe we live in fear of is the catastrophe of freedom,<\/em> therefore. The scenario that terrifies us is the scenario where the tyrant loses his power over us and – as a result – we find ourselves in a world that is far stranger, and far larger, than anything we could ever have imagined.<\/em> The world that has been constructed by our thoughts, on the other hand, is never going to be even a little bit strange, and it\u2019s always going to be exactly the same size as our expectations or assumptions, and when fear is our master then this is just the way we like it<\/em>. This gives us this is a snapshot of the reversed<\/em> (or \u2018negative\u2019) perspective on clinical anxiety therefore. Our normal (which is to say \u2018positive\u2019) perspective is to see the type of worries that we have in anxiety as being legitimate in the sense that they \u2018make sense\u2019 but illegitimate in the sense that they are nevertheless entirely unrealistic. Anxiety is legitimate in the sense that the sort of things that we see as problems everyone else will see as problems too \u2013 our anxious ideas are conventional in nature rather than bizarre or exotic, in other words. Another way of putting this is to say that the worries we have when we are suffering from anxiety are understood by mental healthcare workers literally<\/em>, on their own terms, rather than being seen as a metaphor for something else, something which isn\u2019t<\/em><\/strong> so conventional. This is ‘straight out of the textbook’ – this is \u2018the Official View of anxiety\u2019… The negative view on anxiety, on the other hand, would be that the outcomes which we are so alarmed about are not at all what they purport to be, but are indeed metaphors for something else. It\u2019s not hard to see how our failure (or the threat of our failure) to complete a task correctly can be a metaphor \u2013 this is a simple matter of displacement! If I am able to control in some small way (by achieving the outcome that I want to achieve) then this symbolizes my \u2018ability to control\u2019. It\u2019s not the small thing going wrong that is the real problem, just what this denotes therefore \u2013 it denotes a \u2018failure to control\u2019 on my part and that\u2019s what I am afraid of. The mechanism of anxiety means that I can\u2019t consciously see this and so the anxiety registers with me in relation to the surrogate<\/em> problem, not the original one; the original problem is \u2018the problem of freedom\u2019 and this is not something that can be understood conventionally (since we imagine that we are all in favour of freedom, this being a necessary illusion of the conditioned self). The negative perspective goes against our common sense (since common sense is all about the conventional way of seeing the world) but this is of course true for all<\/em><\/strong> our investigations into natural world \u2013 the natural world of which we are of course a part. The deeper reality can be relied upon to confound all our expectations (and thus confuse the hell out of us!) and this is why we are \u2013 for the most part \u2013 more than happy never to venture into this domain. We like<\/em> the world that we can readily understand by rule-of-thumb methods and we\u2019re quite content (or so we believe) in sticking to the shallows (where common sense prevails) rather than taking a plunge into the deeper waters. As Joseph Campbell indicates, the Call to Adventure<\/em> is something that most of us put a lot of energy into ignoring <\/em><\/strong>and so if we were to allow ourselves to see that the root of our anxiety is \u2018the fear of entering deep water\u2019 this perception itself would would<\/em> constitute \u2018deep water\u2019 for us\u2026 In reality<\/em>, everything is \u2018back to front\u2019 (in true Alice In Wonderland<\/em> fashion) to the way we think it is – we\u2019re anxious<\/em><\/strong> about the threat of freedom whilst being attracted to the comfort of the \u2018known situation\u2019, even though this \u2018known situation\u2019 isn\u2019t real, even though this \u2018known situation\u2019 is something that we have invented for ourselves out of our fear of the depths. Perversely, therefore, we are attracted to the thing that brings us misery, and averse to the thing that could help us \u2013 which is to say, freedom from our life-denying illusions. The \u2018nameless catastrophe\u2019 that we live in fear of in anxiety is therefore the best thing that could ever happen to us, <\/em>but who is ever going to believe that? From the identified<\/em><\/strong> viewpoint mental health – the genuine article that is, not the conditioned analogue of it \u2013 is always something to be avoided, something to be shunned, something to be denied, something to be fought against tooth and nail. The reason for this is because we believe ourselves to be <\/em>this unreal construct of thought, this \u2018abstract ego-identity\u2019, and from this artificial vantage point the truth is of course something we really don’t want to know about.<\/em> Essentially, we are \u2013 in the conditioned life \u2013 forever locked into the thankless (and fruitless) task of protecting an illusion.<\/em> Our anxiety exists in relation<\/em> to this illusion therefore and the deep-seated fears we feel about being able to protect it (or rather about NOT <\/em><\/strong>being able to protect it!) and this is why we can only understand it in a \u2018backwards\u2019 kind of away. Seen in this backwards <\/em>way, anxiety as a process is conceived as being wholly inimical, without any redeeming qualities at all; our only interest in anxiety is in getting shot of it, therefore. We can\u2019t question the status quo (because we\u2019re too invested in it) and so any disruptive influence straightaway has to be labelled as malign \u2013 this is the default response of any machine whose operation is under threat, naturally enough. It is our<\/em> default reaction when we are in the unwise business of protecting and defending illusions, the \u2018illusion\u2019 in question here being the notion that the way the thinking mind says <\/em><\/strong>things are (or ought<\/strong><\/em> to be) actually means anything at all\u2026<\/em> Out of fear we try to make everything happen the right way, but fear also ensures that this can never happen. Out of fear comes control and control falsifies everything. Control distorts reality itself. Control can never do anything else apart from falsifying reality. That doesn’t mean that if we ever control anything we will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[18,39,268,267,269,230],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/the-machine-god.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3626"}],"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=3626"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3633,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3626\/revisions\/3633"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intrinsicspace.me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Image – The Machine God. playgroundai.com<\/strong><\/a>
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