Psychological growth can’t be forced, the expansion of consciousness – as it used to be called – can’t be done ‘to order’. That’s just not the way things work – whatever else we might be able to force or control, whatever else we might be able to do ‘to order’, it isn’t this. We might be able to facilitate or direct many different types of change – we might say – but not the type of change that involves actual growth (which is the only type of change that actually means something). Anything else is just consolidating our position, and consolidating our position has nothing to do with growth, nothing to do with the expansion of consciousness. Quite the reverse is true.
When we are involved in ‘consolidating our position’ – which is the same thing as ‘optimising our performance’ – then what’s happening is that we are interested in data that relates to our current aims, to our established game-plan, but not at all in anything else. We are biassed, in other words; we have a prior agenda. Clearly no meaningful change is ever going to occur when there is a prior agenda – if the whole emphasis is on ‘sticking to the game-plan’ then of course no change is ever going to take place! What we’re talking about here is ‘Structure-Maintenance’ therefore, and because it’s Structure Maintenance we’re talking about the one thing we absolutely know beyond any doubt is that there is going to be no change…
The protection and maintenance of the established system just doesn’t just seem ‘very important’ when we’re in SM mode, it seems ALL-IMPORTANT – it isn’t, but it definitely does seem that way. When some task or other seems all-important to us then what this really means is that we are being given no choice. We are being railroaded – there is no freedom here. When it’s the activity of SM we’re talking about then there’s nothing else for us to give our attention to – only the question of whether whatever it is we’re coming across can help us with our task, or whether it’s going to hinder us, whether it’s going to put us back. If the datum in question doesn’t fall into either of these two camps then we simply couldn’t care less; in this case we give the matter no consideration whatsoever. We don’t see it – it simply doesn’t exist for us.
Instead of saying that ‘we have no interest in anything that isn’t relevant to the all-important activity of SM’ we could say that we simply don’t have the freedom to take any interest in anything else. Basically – and not to put too fine a point on it – we’re not ‘allowed’. We kept on a leash and our leash is very short. Not to put too fine a point on it, we’re being told what to do here; There are rules to this situation and we have to obey them! We can even say what these rules are – the basic rule (which is repeated over and over again, in various different forms) is an action of comparison-making with regard to whether what we’re coming up against matches the standard that we have been given. If it doesn’t match, then it goes straight into the bin (‘the bin of terminal inattention’) whilst if it does match then we give attention to it and act accordingly. We follow the established formula. The whole process is mechanical therefore and this is another way of saying that there is no freedom in it. Freedom is a profoundly alien concept here.
Where do we talk about consolidating our position or optimising our game it comes down to the same thing it comes down to pure ‘mechanics’, pure ‘logic’, pure ‘rule-following’ and the thing about this is that mechanical or rule-based activity isn’t real change – it’s just what came before being recycled. According to the rules of the game that we’re playing there is the possibility of change but outside of this artificial (or ‘imaginary’) context there isn’t. There is only nominal change – change that exists in name only, change that exists ‘only because we have chosen to say that it does’. When we’re operating in the Self-Maintenance / Structure-Maintenance Mode then we don’t have the necessary perspective to see that the world we’re living in is ‘purely nominal’ in nature (‘perspective’ meaning that there is a type of space there that isn’t predefined, that isn’t organised around an abstract framework, that isn’t resolvable in terms of known categories). For us – when we’re in SM Mode – everything that is has to exist on the one ‘level of meaning’, and this one level of meaning is the nominal level – it’s a closed domain, it contains only what we ourselves have put in it…
Without the flexibility that is provided for us by Unconditioned Space (by the gap in the middle of the wheel we can’t see that the sort of change that’s going on here is only nominal; we’re compelled to believe what we’re told, in other words. We’re not given the freedom to look at things in any other way than the way we’ve been given and – as a result – anything else doesn’t exist for us, anything else has no reality for us. We would – after all – find it totally absurd if someone were to tell us that reality was something that exists outside of all our concepts and beliefs and ideas, and that whatever is to be found within the formal domain of our concepts, ideas and beliefs is guaranteed to be irredeemably unreal. We would find this suggestion utterly absurd; we’d find it absurd because for us it’s the other way around for us. For us only what is in our concepts and beliefs is real. If it isn’t ‘Old Reliable’ (which is to say, the Machinery of Thought) that is telling us the stuff then we won’t pay any attention. If the Thinking Mind – in all its glory – didn’t come out with it then it can’t be true. If it’s not our thoughts telling us the info, then we just won’t listen.
Extrinsic reality is an inversion of the original article, therefore. Conditioned Space is ‘space turned inside-out’. We could also try to explain this point by saying that whilst there is zero freedom in Extrinsic Reality (or as we might also say, Extrinsic Space) intrinsic space contains nothing else but freedom, nothing else but possibility. It is precisely because there is no freedom in Extrinsic Reality that we get to believe so fixedly in the literal statements that make up our world; it is because there is no freedom in the World of our Thoughts that we are so gullible, so uncritical, so programmable. A thought comes along and – straightaway – it becomes a reality for us; we just don’t have the freedom not to take it seriously. We’re ‘caught on the hook of our conditioning’. In the Conditioned Life there is no perspective, no space, no mobility, and so we aren’t able to see that the story thought is telling us is ‘true on only its own terms’ (the terms which it itself invents). Thought tells us that we are free and so we believe it, thought tells us that we are ‘getting somewhere in life’, that we are ‘progressing’, and so we never question this – if we did start to question whether our life-activities, our hopes and fears, really are as meaningful as thought tells us they are then people might suspect us of being depressed. Folk are going to say that there’s something not right about us, they’re going to say that we’re being unduly pessimistic. There are possibilities for the Conditioned Self we are told; there is a great future lying in wait for ‘the-self-thought-says-we-are’, so we are given to understand…
‘Depression’, we might say, is when we start to see through the story that thought is telling us, which means that we’re going to feel very deflated indeed – we were after all relying 100% on the Thinking Mind’s narrative in order to feel good about ourselves, so when it lets us down we have nothing else. If I articulate my perception that my life is a ‘hollow sham’, and that I am ‘a fake person with nothing to offer the world’ then I’m definitely going to be diagnosed as suffering from clinical depression, but the thing about this is that we are invertedly seeing what’s going on here as an illness, a pathology, when the truth is that we’re seeing something that, however grim, is an actual reality (albeit a reality that we have all collectively agreed not to address). Instead, we adhere religiously to the mind-constructed narrative, to the script produced for us by the machinery of thought. For whatever reason, we’re starting to come to ‘come around’, we’re starting to wake up to our situation, and what we’re seeing is extraordinarily difficult to come to terms with. The Mind-Created Virtual Reality contains no psychological work (it can’t do since nothing ever changes here) whereas reality itself, as JG Bennett says, doesn’t just ‘contain’ work, it is work. Unconditioned reality doesn’t ‘contain’ flow, it is flow. Never having known conscious work, we put all our energy into fleeing or avoiding instead, which might seem to work for a while, until we run out of road (which we absolutely will do since the road we’re driving down is an illusion).
We can summarise the above by saying that the reason Extrinsic Reality can function as a reality for us is because genuine change has been substituted for by the description of change, and psychological work has been replaced by ‘automatic mechanical processing’, by ‘following the rules’. We can say that we are (when we’re in this modality) completely dependent upon the illusion of movement, the illusion of freedom, the illusion that we are getting somewhere meaningful, somewhere real. That illusion that there are legitimate possibilities for us. This particular super-important illusion – the illusion that we’re progressing, the illusion that we’re not stuck in a fictional artificial world, the illusion that there are genuine possibilities that are open to us, is essential for us. That’s where our sense of well-being comes from, our sense that our existence is meaningful and not hollow. We are totally dependent on the system that is running the show for us, that is running ‘us’ for us. In the event of major system malfunction, in the event of out-and-out game failure, we are left very much ‘in the shit’, so to speak. We’re going to be ‘hung out to dry’. Within the framework of meaning that we are habituated to, this corresponds to the Ultimate Disaster, the outcome we absolutely have to try to avoid. The machine that maintains the illusion has broken down, and as a result we are left waiting for a’ validation’ that will never come.
Image credit – variety.com
