When everything is all about ‘fidelity to the image’ then the one thing we can be sure of here is that there is no humour. There’s either ‘getting it right’, which is rewarded, or there is ‘getting it wrong’, which is punished. There is no humour either way. There is no irony, no sense of lightness about the proceedings!
When everything is all about authority then the same is of course true – humour can’t exist under the shadow of authority (which is why there’s no humour in the Old Testament, for example). There’s nothing light about authority at all, there is only obeying and disobeying and neither of these are in the least bit funny! The desire for the reward isn’t ironic and neither is the desire not to be punished. There are no laughs to be had here, no laughs whatsoever. There is no freedom here, just endless drudgery.
We are talking about one and the same thing, clearly – the image is the authority, and fidelity (or loyalty) to the image is obedience. No matter how free spirited we might like to think we are, every last one of us are obedient to the images that we have in our heads. We are totally under the power of these mind-created images; the thought of disregarding their authority never occurs to us. We might ‘take against them’ but we won’t ever disregard them (which is to say, we won’t ever stop taking them seriously, we won’t ever laugh at them). Laughter is the one thing authority cannot stand…
Our lives are based upon the principle of automatic (or ‘unreflective’) obedience to these mind-created images – that’s how the mechanical world works, that’s how we get to have a sense of ‘who we are’ and ‘what stuff is all about’. We orientate ourselves in our daily lives via our rational understanding of things and our rational understanding comes down to thought and the opaque images it mass-produces.
We have an image of the world and an image of ourselves, and we live in obedience to these images. The possibility of disregarding them, of laughing at them, simply doesn’t exist for us. That would be like disregarding or laughing at the world, since the world – for us – is made up of thought’s images. To live in the Image World is to live in the world that is forever under the shadow of authority, therefore. The Image World is a world without freedom, without humour.
In the world of images ‘fidelity to the given template’ is everything. ‘Fitting in’ is everything, to faithfully copy (or repeat) the sacred template is everything. This is the only thing that matters; this is in fact ‘the measure of us’ – our standing in the world depends upon how faithfully we reproduce the image (or how little we deviate from it). To try to faithfully replicate the template and fail is to be ‘a loser’, to disregard this task entirely – on the other hand – is to be a dangerous heretic, a criminal, a deviant whose influence has to be swiftly curtailed…
It doesn’t seem to us that this is what we’re doing, it doesn’t seem to us that living in obedience to the mind’s images are what our lives are all about. To see that this is the case would come as a tremendous shock to us since to live in a world of authority is to live in a world with no freedom in it, and a world with no freedom in it is a meaningless world. Where is the meaning in doing the same thing over and over again, after all? Where is the meaning in being a mere ‘repeater’ (as Krishnamurti puts it)? If all I can do is repeat what came before me (repeat what was given to me repeat) then this means that my existence is entirely redundant.
In the scenario that we are describing here the status quo (the established system) is all that matters – if we are to be assigned any worth or value at all then it is only because of how well we reflect the glory of that system, it is only because of how well we uphold it, how well we serve it. We can only gain status or credibility in this setup if we echo its values, and echoing – which is to say, promoting – the values of the established system means suppressing everything else. As in the story of Cinderella, everything is about the ugly stepsisters, who want all the limelight for themselves (despite not being deserving of it). They claim a virtue they do not possess, whereas Cinderella herself (who has virtue) is treated as a person of no worth at all – the only value she has lies in her ability to be of service to the ugly stepsisters.
Cinderella – in the context of what we’re talking about here – represents free consciousness, which is to say, consciousness that isn’t attached to anything, consciousness that isn’t in the service of any mind-created images. The system of thought doesn’t value consciousness for its own sake (as it actually is in itself), it only values consciousness because of the uses which it itself can make of it. Reality itself contains no images, no pictures, no statements about ‘how things are’; reality doesn’t hold any authority over us, in other words. It doesn’t tell us what to do or how to be. As we read and the Dao De Jing –
The great Dao is universal like a flood. All creatures depend on it, and it denies nothing to anyone. It does its work, but it makes no claims for itself. It clothes and feeds all, but it does not lord it over them.
In contrast, the system of thought very much does ‘lord it over us’, as we have been saying. Thought’s images (or statements) control us so tightly that we don’t even know that we are being controlled. It controls us so tightly that we never get to know that there even is such a thing as freedom. Freedom – for us – means that we are allowed to do what thought tells us to do without impediment, without anything arising to prevent us from doing it. For us, freedom has become just another word for slavery, in other words, and this – obviously – is a profoundly perverse situation. Situations don’t get any more perverse than this. We have sworn our allegiance to a master who is going to oppress or deny or abuse us every step of the way – a master who has no interest whatsoever in our own well-being, a master who simply doesn’t value us.
Instead of us being ‘clothed and fed by the Dao’, we are in the situation of having done a deal with the False God which is the System of Thought, a deal which gives us the illusion of security, the illusion that ‘everything is OK’, at the cost of being totally disconnected from ‘what is real’. Belief in illusion is always purchased at the price of disconnection from the real – needless to say! The term ‘What is real’ might sound somewhat vague and unsubstantiated to us (it certainly sounds vague and unsubstantiated to the rational intellect) but ‘what is real’ (or ‘what is true’) is simply what we see when we no longer take the images that have been created by the thinking mind seriously.
When we no longer take the thinking mind’s images seriously then this means that there is no spurious authority anymore and when there is no authority anymore then we are free to see reality as it truly is.
Image credit – imagine.art
