Collectively speaking, we have absolutely no interest in Being. That’s just not a ‘thing’ for us. This is indisputably true – gaining Being absolutely can’t be a collective endeavour, we absolutely can’t turn it into a task that can be broken down into stages, that can be accomplished in stages. Wholeness isn’t like society in this respect therefore – we can’t break it down into specific parts or roles that need to be adhered to so that certain aims can be achieved.
Collectively speaking, we have to have something that we can agree on before we can start off with any sort of a task at all (this being in the nature of collectives) and so if it were ‘Being’ that we were aiming at (which – as we say – it never is) then we must necessarily agree beforehand on an idea of Being, a standardized representation or image of Being. This is a problem however because there simply isn’t any such thing as an ‘image’ or ‘representation’ of being! If we did hit upon a way of ‘representing being’ (or ‘representing Wholeness’) then that wouldn’t be Being because being isn’t a symbol for something else. Being isn’t a ‘second-hand’ type of thing! Similarly, there can be no such thing as a ‘short-hand notification for the state of Wholeness that is somehow whole itself (even though it is only a notification)’ – that is clearly a joke. This is clearly ridiculous – since when was the word ‘water’ wet?
Being itself isn’t our thing however – the idea of it is what we’re into, the idea of it is what we’re all about. We’ll talk about it till the cows come home, but that’s all we’ll ever do. We’re just a bunch of old wind-bags – if the thing itself came along would die of shock! ‘Talking about being’ is an avoidance of being, therefore. It is by only ever dealing with our second-hand ideas about Wholeness that we avoid the thing itself, and this is easily done – all we have to do is have some sort of short-hand, standardized reference to ‘Reality’ and then conflate the reference with the thing. All we have to do is allow ourselves to get lazy in our thinking (so that we never actually bother to look beyond the convenient convention that we have hit upon) and then the next thing that happens is that our ‘convenient notation’ takes the place of the real thing. In effect, what’s happening is that we’re letting our subjective world shrink to the size of our ‘generic signifiers’ and at the same time as not registering it (so that our laziness is hidden, so that our laziness is invisible to us). This is how the corruption sets in!
When it’s groups we’re talking about then all we can ever do is pursue ideas -nothing else is possible. All we can ever do is ‘chase ideas’, and ideas are generic things (which is to say, the ideas that we pursue so doggedly (i.e., ‘the goals’) are the same for all of us). We all subscribe to the very same mental representations of the world – which is to say, we all ‘agree’ on them – and this means that we can never go beyond them. That’s our cage right there, therefore. If we did go beyond our ideas (of whatever) then this would no longer be a meaningful thing as far as the Collective is concerned. It would be a ‘non-thing’ – a thing that cannot (and will not) be spoken of, a thing that will immediately get buried under the colossal weight of our collective indifference (which is the indifference that we have towards anything that we don’t already know about, anything that isn’t part of our established system).
What this means, in practical terms, is that just so long as we continue to describe to the Consensus View, the Agreed-Upon View, then we’re turning our backs on life itself (since the thing itself has nothing to do with our generic ideas of it, our crude ‘pictures’ of it). We’ve gone down entirely the wrong road here – we’ve gone down a road that doesn’t go anywhere (since the only ‘where’ we recognize in the Consensus View is the ‘where’ that has been specified in advance by the system). What we’re looking at here is a straightforward choice – either we’re open to finding out the truth about our situation or we aren’t, either our loyalty is to the truth (whatever that might turn out to be) or it is to the official story, to the truth that we have all formally agreed upon, and cannot now go back on. The movement towards the CV is an irreversible one, we might say; the CV is the Hotel California – we can book in anytime we please but ‘checking out again’ is simply not an option. The Generic (one-size-fits-all) Mind is a one-way trip to an unreal destination.
If we are to believe what everyone else believes then we must necessarily believe in a thing that does not exist. Things that are true don’t need to be ‘believed in’, after all, if – as Michel de Montaigne points out – where is belief involved then there must also be doubt. Belief is doubt turned inside out! No coercion, no moral pressure, no safeguards, no rational straitjacket, is needed in the case of truth, however. We don’t need to ‘talk on behalf of the truth’ because the truth speaks for itself. It is – we might say – the willingness to let go of demonstrably untrue things that produces the sovereign individual, whereas if it’s a matter of stubborn loyalty to whatever the official line might be that we’re looking at, then we can be perfectly sure that this orientation will lead in the opposite direction. It is ‘the love of truth’ that is the indispensable prerequisite if one is to become ‘the individual that one already is’, as Alan Watts puts it; without this love (which of course always leads us into dangerous waters) we will inevitably perish, we will inevitably get ‘Devoured by the Amoeba’.
‘Loyalty to the group’ is another way of talking about ‘loyalty to the lie’, therefore. The bottom line is that there can’t ever be such a thing as ‘a group that isn’t held together by lies’ – groups are lies, society is a lie. This is ‘as clear as clear can be’ once we see it – the things we agree on to facilitate group cohesion aren’t chosen because of their ’eminent veracity’, but simply because this is what we need to do in order to facilitate the group. It is the production and stabilization of the Collective Mindset (of the Generic Mind) that is the important thing here, not anything else. Nothing else matters a damn. We can see therefore why it is that the Cathars – the bon hommes or bonne femmes – roundly denounced all institutions (including the Christian Church) as being inherently evil in nature; institutions are, in their very nature evil (or ‘abusive’) because they [1] Cover up the truth, and because they [2] Punish anyone who looks like they might be thinking about exposing this fact.. As Jean Hardy says,
With awareness come the knowledge that all power is a source of alienation… all institutions, laws, religions, churches and powers are nothing but a sham and a trap, the perpetuation of an age-old deception.
To be adapted or adjusted to the institution is to be alienated from everything that is real and being alienated from everything that is real isn’t going to work out well for us (obviously enough). We’ve chosen the wrong side to throw our lot in with! The real world genuinely does exist (i.e., it’s not some something we made up in order to suit ourselves) and so when our self-serving fantasies let us down (as they can be relied upon to do) then it’s still going to be there to contend with. The truth ‘stands all by itself’ whilst the institution (or the collective) is a sickly, perverse creature that needs constant support. It needs its own dedicated life-support machine; it requires that we sacrifice everything that matters in life just to keep it going. [It’s a vampire, in other words.] The group is an idea in our heads and nothing more; it’s an empty notion and yet we act as if it were the only thing that matters – we simply don’t care about anything else. Truth and what we are calling Being are synonymous – the generic modality, which is that modality in which we are prevented from seeing the truth (which is that modality which can only exist if we are effectively prevented from seeing the truth) is also the modality in which we have no Being. The only being we have in a group is in the imaginary version, the type of ‘Being’ that exists only because we all say (in chorus) that it does. This is pseudo-being, therefore – it’s the type of pseudo-being that we tend to call by names such as ‘fame’ or ‘success’ or ‘wealth’ or ‘social standing’, and so on. When we get to be ‘someone’ (within the terms of the social hierarchy) then this is pseudo-being, this is the tainted prize that we are all madly scrambling to attain (not that it will do us any good when we do attain it).
To say that ‘pseudo-being is a different kind of a thing from the genuine article’ is a major understatement – the latter nurtures whilst the former poisons (which is just about as big a difference as it’s possible to get). If we were picking mushrooms in a field then no consideration could be more important than this (i.e., the question as to whether it will nourish me or put me in hospital) and yet when it comes down to how we live our lives, or what it is that we make our lives be about, then it’s clear that we don’t care about this particular consideration any weight at all. It’s like the matter of ‘belief’ and the vexed question of what particular belief one might subscribe to – this is evidently super-important to us (it’s the most important thing ever, we will claim) – and yet when it comes to it we will make do with whatever it is we have been given. When it comes down to it one belief is as good as another, despite what we say. When it comes to pseudo-being we don’t acknowledge that there is any difference between <wholesome> on the one hand being and <poisonous> on the other – just as long as the box is ticked and there’s something there that can act as a surrogate for authentic being then we aren’t going to consider the matter any further. If we have anything at all there to hold fast to then that’s ‘good enough’ for us – we certainly aren’t going to go poking around at it. This is one can of worms we aren’t about to go opening…
We don’t need to go into some long-winded argument as to why Being is nurturing or wholesome, and so on – a tasty meal that exists only in our fantasies clearly can’t compete with an actual meal, after all. No one is going to argue against this (especially if they are starving to death). We can’t say what Being is (it’s too big a thing for that) but we can say that it is Everything, which means that if we are alienated from it – so that it simply doesn’t exist for us – then this isn’t going to work out too well for us. We can think in terms of the ‘Privatio boni theory of evil’ advanced by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, where evil isn’t seen as ‘a thing in itself ‘but rather the horror that inevitably ensues when the good is denied, and has therefore no practical existence for us. According to the Wikipedia entry on ‘Evil as the absence of good’, this position is also taken in the Baháʼí Faith, where it is said that ‘Evil consists merely in non-existence’.
Pseudo-being stands in place of being – it functions as a substitute, a stand in, the problem with this however is that Being has no ‘substitute’, has no convenient ‘stand in’ that can take its place if necessary. Pseudo-being is only a functional substitute (or valid copy) of Being in its own biased account of things, it is only a ‘worthy stand in’ for Reality because it promotes itself as being so, and where all this self-promotion falls down is when we remember that this thing we’re calling ‘Pseudo-being’ (and using as a trustworthy standard) never actually existed in the first place. This is a point made by the presocratic Greek philosopher Parmenides; in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy we read the following:
Parmenides’ philosophy, wholeness and indivisibility are essential properties of Being (reality). He famously argued that true reality is a single, continuous, and eternal “One” that cannot be fragmented or divided.
Non-existence doesn’t exist, Parmenides tells us – ‘Being alone is and nothing is altogether not’. There is only ‘the One’, there is only the Unus Reis, and no matter how hard we strain we can’t make the one into two – ‘two’ is another way of talking about pseudo-being, we might say – ‘multiplicity’ is maya, in other words. ‘The street of love is very narrow, two can’t pass through it at the same time,’ says Kabir.
When we are ‘in love with the official story’, the story that everyone (including us) has jumped on board with, then that means we’re in love with pseudo-being rather than Being, and pseudo-being is ‘the emperor with no clothes’. We – on the other hand – are the crowd of onlookers who have been bullied into ‘rejecting the evidence of their own senses’ (as Orwell puts it). To be in love with the official story (which is maya, which is the ‘simulated version’ of reality) is to be browbeaten into turning our backs on everything that actually matters in life, and to say that this ‘is not going to turn out to be to our advantage’ is of course not really making the point strongly enough…
Image credit – hpi.uq.edu.au
