When we have an idea of what’s going on then what this means is that we’re disconnected from the reality of what’s going on. When we know who we are then we’re alienated from who we really are. The conceptual is the falsification of the actual.
This is contrary to the way we imagine things to be – we imagine that we can’t be properly engaged in life unless we know ‘what’s going on’ and for this reason we permanently surround ourselves with an artificial bubble of so-called ‘knowing’. This has the unwanted and unsuspected effect of disconnecting us from the real world, therefore.
Our thoughts and conceptions don’t relate us to reality (no matter what we might believe) but rather they very effectively insulate us from it. ‘Thought is a screen, not a mirror; that’s why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by reality.’ says Anthony de Mello. The point here of course is that we don’t know that we’re living our lives ‘in a thought envelope, untouched by reality’. We’re not just ‘insulated from reality’, either – we’re insulated from knowing that we are insulated.
The insight that we’re going around – during the course of our day-to-day lives – in the doubly-insulated sort of way isn’t just unsettling to us, it knocks everything we thought we knew right out of the ballpark. One minute we’re going around feeling perfectly confident, perfectly sure that we ‘know what’s what’, the next we’re exposed in all our helpless nakedness – all of our taken-for-granted ontological security (all of this stuff we imagine know) has vanished into thin air, and that’s no joke!
It’s not a joke that we’re able to appreciate when it happens to us, at any rate. If we weren’t so busy taking the loss of ontological security personally – which we can’t help from doing – then we would appreciate the joke (because it’s a good one) but because of the way in which we have been lulled into a state of unwarranted confidence (by the double-insulation that we didn’t know about) there’s no way that we’re going to see the funny side of what has just happened. We are quite humourless in this regard.
Without realising it, we’ve chosen to play a game and the object of this game is to make sure, by whatever means possible, that we never have any awareness of what is actually real. The rule behind this game is nothing if not straightforward, therefore – the rule is that we should avoid the truth at any cost. When we’re successfully engaging in the game then we are not going to know it, we’re not going to know anything about it, and so whatever we think we’re doing, we aren’t. We think we’re doing X, Y or Z (and you can fill in the blanks yourself) but what we’re really doing is that we’re ‘avoiding the truth’. That’s the real significance of our activities, not anything else.
If the covert reason for ‘doing whatever it is that we are doing’ is that we’re trying to keep reality at bay (nothing more and nothing less) then what we are doing (or rather, the official story of what we’re doing) is nothing more than a distraction – it might be super-glossy, super-dramatic, and all the rest of it – but the point of it all is simply to take our attention away from anything real. The thing about this therefore is that whatever it is we’re flagging as ‘an important issue’ can’t have any connection with anything that might be actually true. Otherwise, instead of distracting ourselves from the truth we will remind ourselves of it; instead of ‘sending ourselves safely to sleep’ we would end up waking ourselves up.
Whatever the show is therefore (the cheaply-manufactured show that we devote all our attention to) it absolutely can’t have anything to do with the real world. Aside from this one stipulation, anything goes! To keep us completely insulated from reality turns out to be not such a problem after all, even though we might think that it ought to be. Turning a blind eye to reality turns out to be something of a doddle. There are two ways in which we are very effectively able to keep reality at bay – two ways which are actually the same way. One is to represent the world to ourselves exclusively in terms of literally understood concepts – concepts that have no connection to anything outside of them – and the other way is to relate everything that’s happening (the whole world, in fact) to an unreal observer, an observer who isn’t really there. Both methods work superlatively well.
If I only ever see the world as it appears to ‘the false idea of who I am’ (the false idea of who I am which is continuously being generated by my thinking), then the world I see is real only to this particular vantage point, real only in relation to this frame of reference, and so if that viewpoint, that frame of reference isn’t real then neither is the world it gives rise to. The whole thing is just a kind of a ‘bubble’ that gets to exist in a virtual sort of a way by feeding on itself. The mechanism by which the ‘bubble’ that is the Virtual World is created by ‘taking the false idea of who we are seriously’, but we could also look at this the other way around too and say that the false idea of who we are is created by taking the Virtual World seriously. It works just as well both ways.
What this means is hard for us to take in – we can almost get it (perhaps), but then it slips out of our grasp again. It’s hard for us to break out of the ‘disconnected loop of logic’ that is the only world we know. What we’re essentially saying here is that in our everyday lives we have no connection with anything that is independently real – we can only relate to ‘that which we ourselves have invented and then forgotten that we ourselves have invented’ (which is where ‘the disconnected loop of logic’ comes in). The default state which we all find ourselves in is therefore to be disconnected from the reality of what’s going on. In place of reality we have what we could call fantasy – fantasy serves the same function as reality (we might say), but only in the most superficial of ways…
Image credit – Seph Lawless/@seph_lawless on Twitter
