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Bending Reality To Suit Ourselves

The ‘me’ bends everything to make it be about it – this is the distortion that is created by the self. The world isn’t all about the ‘me’ however and so what happens later is that this distortion – because of the energy stored in it – ‘snaps back’ on us later on (so to speak) and causes us suffering, causes us pain. We can’t avoid suffering of the rebound pain that comes from distorting the world to make it suit us until we see where it comes from, and what we are doing to bring it about. We need to be able to see the connection between our activities in the world and the rebound (or ‘neurotic’) misery that is afflicting us.

 

 

We try our best to find a remedy for this rebound pain but because we don’t make the connection between ‘us personalising the world’ and ‘this personalization rebounding painfully on us later on’ nothing we do makes any difference. We come up with various ideas and theories about where all this mental distress comes from, and we try to come up with efficacious therapies on this basis, but nothing works for us. Nothing works for us because we don’t have any insight into what’s actually going on – our psychological insight is non-existent and so our therapeutic protocols only serve to make things worse. Until we do gain insight into the matter we’re going to continue trying to simultaneously have our cake and eat it, and getting frustrated because this isn’t working out for us.

 

 

The ‘me’ can’t actually help itself from bending its perceptions so that everything seems to be about it – there’s no way it can stop doing this. The conditioned sense of identity can’t not bend its perceptions of the world because this is the mechanism by which it is gets to exist in the first place! The everyday sense of being exclusively this ‘self’ comes about – and can only come about – as a result of a ‘bias’ being introduced into the way in which we see reality. The bias means that we always see things in relation to a hypothetical centre point, the hypothetical centre which is the ‘me’, the ‘self’. This sense of being at the centre of everything is a contrived one (which is to say, it doesn’t exist of itself, but rather only seems to exist as a result of the self-centric way that we’re seeing things). We look at the world in a consistently narrow way, as if there were a centre or self, and thus this particular illusion is conveniently created for us.

 

 

What we’re talking about here is ‘taking things personally’, therefore – whatever it is that’s happening gets to be seen as if it’s happening to me (when the truth of the matter is that it isn’t happening to me, when the truth of the matter is that it’s simply happening). We live in an Impersonal Universe, a universe which has nothing to do with us (even though we think it does). When something happens and we take it personally then the effect of this personalisation is to either make us feel good or feel bad. Either we’re flattered or we’re insulted, either we’re personally gratified or we’re annoyed, irritated or angry, either we’re ‘pleased’ or we’re ‘displeased. Being either ‘pleased’ or ‘displeased’ is what the life of the ego is all about; it neither knows of anything else nor does it care to know. Either you are part of the problem, or you are part of the solution, we say glibly (not realizing what a remarkably dumb thing to say this is).

 

 

We personalise the world by using the vantage point of our established viewpoint as a universal measure or standard, therefore. We make sense of what’s around us by comparing the incoming data with our standard, with our measuring stick, and just as soon as we do this the process becomes ‘automated’, or mechanical’ – the standard (or reference point) that we’re using – which is ourselves – becomes unquestionable to us, which is to say, it becomes ‘100% taken-for-granted’). We can no longer see the process which results in the picture of the world that we are being presented with – it’s a black box, in other words, and what this means is that we don’t realise that what we’re dealing with is only an artefact, is only a construct. We see what our taken-for-granted angle shows us, what our assumed viewpoint shows us, but we can’t see (or be aware of) the angle itself. We therefore live out the course of our lives in a ‘conditioned reality’, in a world that is nothing more than a straight projection of our viewpoint and we never suspect that it is only ever a conditioned reality, a reality that automatically agrees with what we expect to see. We never see the way in which the picture of the world we believe in is actually mocking us (just as flatterers mock the target of their flattery)…

 

 

All we know is the personalised view, therefore; all we know is the conditioned reality, the reality that is a reflection of our narrow viewpoint, and so the idea that we are bending our perception of the world to make a version of reality that’s all about us (or ‘all about our chosen viewpoint’) is incomprehensible to us. We simply can’t see that the world we relate to on a daily basis isn’t the real one but – rather – that it is merely the output of a process which operates ‘on the basis of a bias that we have no way of knowing about’ (or – as we might also say – ‘in accordance with a set of prejudices that we don’t suspect ourselves to have’). We experience a all-pervasive sense of familiarity, and yet we don’t see where this tell-tale familiarity comes from. We don’t see that it derives from the essential self-referentiality of our (so-called) existence – it’s familiar to us because it is us, in other words.

 

 

What we’re looking at here is the Principle of Inversion, which is the principle whereby ‘the unreal becomes real and the unreal real’. When we use a standard in order to map out the territory, when we use an agreed upon reference point to give ourselves a means of categorising or analysing the world around us then what happens as soon as we do this is that we turn the symmetrical into the asymmetrical. We break symmetry, we divide the world in two. When we relate everything to a reference point (which is to say, when we make sense of the world in terms of it’) then straightaway we have right and wrong, allowed and disallowed, true and false, etc. Whatever makes sense in terms of our criterion, our measuring stick, becomes real whilst whatever doesn’t make sense (whatever can’t be related to our reference point) becomes unreal and we lose sight of it entirely. We have zero interest in it and so it doesn’t exist for us.

 

 

We can understand ‘the reference point’ that we’re talking about here as being either the thinking mind (which needs to anchor itself to a fixed point before it can actually get started with the business of thinking) or we can say that it is the self or ego that we relate everything to. In the first case nothing exists unless there’s a readymade category or class that it can be fitted into, and in the second case nothing exists unless it has something to do with this self or ego (because the ego has precisely zero interest in anything that has no bearing on it its supposed existence). Thought exists in a world that is made up of its own projections and the self or ego (for its part) exists in the world of its own hopes and fears, and its hopes and fears are simply ‘itself’. This is of course what personalization comes down to it comes down to – it comes down to seeing the world in terms of ourselves, which is what we always, always do. We don’t know any different way; we can’t help but understand the world in terms of ourselves.

 

 

As the conditioned self, we can’t NOT personalise the world – if we didn’t personalise or customise the world then we wouldn’t have a self to hang onto, and this is a possibility that is quite unthinkable to us. It is actually 100% unthinkable to us since thought can only ever work within in the context of a closed world, a world that is insulated against radical uncertainty. Far from being curious about this state (which is ‘the State of Selflessness’, ‘the State of Centrelessness’, or ‘the State of Unbroken Symmetry’) we write it off as being completely and utterly devoid of interest and as a result of this super-blank attitude of ours we never give the matter any consideration whatsoever. What lies behind this complete and utter disinterest in what lies ‘outside of us’ (or in what is ‘not us’) is pure fear. It’s not really that we’re ‘not interested’ in the state of no self, in the state of unbroken symmetry therefore, but rather that we exist in a state of Inverted Curiosity, which is where we are ‘very interested indeed in not being interested’. Inverted Curiosity is that state of being in which it is crucially important that we show no absolutely no interest in whatever it is that we have arbitrarily decided ‘doesn’t exist’.

 

 

Just as using a fixed reference point immediately splits the world into ‘allowed’ and ‘disallowed’, ‘sanctified’ and ‘unsanctified’, so too could we say that using the ‘me’ as the measure of all things divides human experience into either approval or disapproval, pleasure or displeasure, euphoria or dysphoria. Everything is experienced in various assorted shades of either elation or despair. Either we are in favour of what’s going on, or we are against it – this is of course what using the ‘me’ (which is simply ‘a random bias’ that has been set up as an authority) as a measure always comes down to. Our sole motivation in life thus becomes to promote everything we approve of, and get rid of what we don’t, and acting on a bias like this is what produces the personalised version of reality that we all take so much for granted. That – in a nutshell – is what it’s all about…

 

 

The personalised version of reality is what everyone wants, this is what we are all aiming at, but it just doesn’t work out for us in the way that we think it should. It turns out that this isn’t the great thing we thought it would be (although we’re loath to admit it). The ‘problem’ – which we can’t for the life of us spot – is that ‘the personalised version of life’ is a version that has no space in it, and space means freedom. It would be no good going around trying to point this out to people however because it makes zero sense to our everyday (conditioned) mode of perception, but lack of space is what’s behind the hell of neurotic symptomology. What we just can’t get is that space – space to live, space to breathe, space to be ‘who we really are’, is the same thing as ‘no self’. When we personalise the universe (as we always do) then we take away every last bit of space, every last bit of freedom out of it…

 

 

In the Personalised World everything has to be about control – we need to either make sure what we want to happen does happen, or what we don’t want to happen doesn’t happen. What’s more, we also need to make sure that things mean what we want them to mean (or what our belief system wants them to mean) and this control (or the need for control) takes away our space. That is of course what control is all about – it’s all about eliminating freedom. There’s no more space for us to be spontaneous and spontaneity is our true nature (contrary to what our addiction to controlling would indicate we are). There is the theatre of who we are, which is produced by conditioning, and there is what lies behind this show, which our preoccupation with the drama prevents us from being aware of. There is the ‘Opaque World of Surface Level Appearances’, and – underneath it – there is the truth that we don’t want to know about.

 

 

We experience ourselves – in this situation – as ‘doing what we want to do’, ‘doing what we freely or voluntarily wish to do’, whilst the not-so-flattering truth is that we are compelled in everything we do. We are compelled by the mechanics of the situation (which is to say, ‘the mechanics of being a concrete self’) to do whatever it is we do, think whatever it is we think, see whatever it is we see, and believe whatever it is we believe. Although we can’t for the life of us see it, personalising life in the way that we have been talking about not only means losing all our freedom (or losing all our ‘space to be’) it also means losing touch with reality.

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – Fernando_Garcia (Shutterstock)

 

 

 

 

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