There is one, very good reason why our prized psychological therapies can’t ever work and – what’s more – it’s a reason that’s perfectly easy to understand. The problem isn’t that we’re not able to grasp it, the problem is that we don’t want to. If he looked into the real reason why our nice neat rational therapies don’t work then we would discover something that we absolutely don’t want to discover. We’d uncover something that no one wants to uncover, we’d know something that we’d prefer not to know. No prizes are going to be awarded for this discovery, no careers are going to be made…
The ‘secret’ that we don’t want to know about has to do with the Executive Centre (which is the part of us that makes decisions and then acts upon them in a purposeful or directed way). Our cultural bias is to regard this part of us (which is in reality merely an adjunct or accessory to the psyche) as being the whole of who we are and not just some sort of ‘add on’, not some sort of secondary modification of something else. We identify with the Executive Centre – we think that this is ‘who we are’. We identify with the thinker, we identify with the decider, we identify with purposeful doer, and when we do this we necessarily end up in a world that is made up of ‘good choices versus poor choices’, ‘successful outcomes versus unsuccessful outcomes’, and this isn’t actually a world at all. It’s merely a projection. It’s a projection of our thoughts upon the world and our thoughts – when it comes right down to it – don’t mean a damn thing. Our thinking on the subject doesn’t make any difference. As Jesus says in Matthew 5:27,
Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
When we identify with the executive centre then everything turns into an empty game, in other words, and it doesn’t matter how many good choices we make, or how many successful outcomes we obtain, we’re still going to be in that same empty game. Playing the game doesn’t translate into ‘graduating from the game’, no matter how well we play it. Identifying with the executive centre turns everything into a game because this isn’t who we really are and so everything we gain or lose, achieve or don’t achieve, on the basis of ‘who are we not’, is hollow, is meaningless, is not a real thing. It would only be a real thing if we truly were who were pretending to be, and we’re not.
It isn’t just the case that we ‘aren’t who we’re pretending to be,’ either – this isn’t a matter of what we might call ‘ordinary’ pretending. We don’t have any insight into the fact we’re only pretending – it feels very real to us. It feels that what the executive centre wants is also what we want and that what it is averse to we’re averse to as well and this simply isn’t the case. The EC doesn’t actually ‘want’ anything in the sense that we ordinarily use the word – there’s nothing and no one there in it to want. The EC isn’t a volitional agent in the way we take it to be – on the contrary, it’s just a hollow mechanism. It functions according to mechanical rules in other words and if it obeys mechanical rules in all things (as it does) then there is absolutely no way then it can be said to be a volitional agent. There’s no way it can be said to make choices. If everything it does is based on rules – which is to say, instructions that it receives and cannot disobey – then there is no chooser, no doer there, only the obeying of rules, only the automatic working out of a predetermined pattern.
There can’t be two ways about this – where there are rules there is no volition and where there is volition there are no rules. It’s one way or the other. We don’t see this because we want to obey the rule, because we have elected to follow the rule, because we are identified with the rule. If I am playing a game then I am obeying the rule that says ‘you must try your best to win’ (or ‘I must fight hard not to lose’) but I don’t see myself as conforming to an external directive – were I to see that I’m obeying a mechanical rule then this awareness of my mechanicalness would entirely spoil my fun. The contrary is true – I will absolutely insist that I want to genuinely DO want to win (whatever ‘winning’ might look like). I will perceive myself to be acting out of my own genuine volition when the truth is that I am being externally determined every inch of the way. I don’t do anything without a rule telling me to do so! This is the crux of the matter, therefore – I am mistaking a rule that is acting upon me from the outside as my own true will. Or – as we could also say – I am perceiving it to be the case that attaining the goal is very important to me personally, when actually it’s what the rule wants, not me, and the rule isn’t free expression of my will but rather an imposition on it. I am mistaking the rule that controls me for who I genuinely am, which is just about as absurd as you can get.
We can project anything we want onto undifferentiated reality – that is our prerogative – but this doesn’t mean anything. The Projected World doesn’t have any meaning outside of the meaning that we ourselves have said it has, and this means that it has no meaning. If everything is true then nothing is true; ‘where there is choice there is no truth,’ we might say (paraphrasing Krishnamurti). Anything we project isn’t real – if I project something then by definition it can’t be real. The PW is a tautological restatement of our current position that implicitly claims to be ‘other’, that implicitly claims to be ‘something different’. If the projection were ‘other’, were ‘something completely different’ then it would indeed be real but although this is the claim that is implicitly being made, there’s simply no truth in it. It’s an empty claim – the projection is mine and there’s no getting away from that! The system of thought can disguise itself in innumerable ways, but its nature remains the same. I can invent a game in which there are many and varied possibilities, but at the end of the day all of these ‘possibilities’ exist only in the game. This collection of supposedly ‘different’ possibilities is the game…
The pragmatic experience of being this self, of being this ego, comes about when consciousness identifies with a rule or mechanical impulse therefore, and the key thing to understand about a rule, the key thing to understand about a mechanical impulse, is that there is no freedom in it. This is precisely how a rule gets to be a rule – by having no freedom in it, by the ‘abolition of freedom’. Our experience of being this self, being this conditioned identity, is however that we ARE free, that we ARE able to do whatever it is we want to do (in theory, at least), whilst the underlying truth of this situation is that we are free to want whatever the script tells us we should want (which isn’t really the same thing). Because we confuse our conditioning with who we are, when we strive to do what the conditioning in our heads demands we do we experience this as ‘us trying to fulfil our goals. This is therefore a perfect inversion of the way things actually are. The truth of our situation has been turned upon its head and as a result we are living in this upside-down version of the world, this upside-down version of the truth.
Coming back to what we started off talking about in this discussion, we can say that if the executive centre (or ‘rational module’) – along with the sense of ‘being this purposeful doer’, which is the subjective / psychological side of things – is a purely mechanical or rule-based phenomenon which can never do anything other than ‘what the rules says it should,’ then the idea that the executive centre can learn various strategies by which it can hopefully free itself from neurotic patterns of thinking (strategies which can be officially designated as psychological therapies) ceases to make any sense. The proposition dissolves into sheer absurdity. The EC can’t free itself from anything since it is never any more than the resultant of rules and rules can’t ever lead to freedom. The problem isn’t whatever we think it is from the point of view of the conditioned sense of self, the problem is that we have become helplessly identified with this arbitrary viewpoint. Trying to fix the problems as they appear to the Mind-Created Simulation of Who We Are only serves to reify the delusion that I am ‘the striver’, that I am ‘the one who wishes to solve the problem’, etc.
‘The seeing is the doing’, says Krishnamurti. We can’t engage in purposeful doing without first assuming a frame of reference and to ‘assume a frame of reference’ is to fall down a hole without knowing it. To assume a FOR is to incur a colossal entropy debt. Before we can even start to change things in a purposeful way – which is to say, before we can start to change things in a way that is in line with how we think it should be they should be – we first need to have some kind of ‘context of meaning’. How would we even know that things needed changing unless we had a context of meaning to tell us this? Once we have assumed a FOR, once we have assumed a particular context of meaning, then that FOR, that COM becomes the whole world to us. Our self-referential context of meaning becomes the whole world to us whilst the world itself – the real world, the world which isn’t a function of our limited way of seeing things, the world which isn’t based on a self-referential (and therefore spurious) operation, is entirely lost from view. It no longer exists for us. Assuming a FOR very effectively disconnects us from reality.
Any attempt to ‘change what’s going on’ is always going to disconnect us from reality therefore and yet purposeful / targeted action – action which is based on us having some sort of idea about the world we’re living in – is the only approach we have any time for. We want to be in charge, in other words. We want to be the boss, we want to be the one who says what’s going to happen and what’s not going to happen (even though beneath this hubris of ours we simply don’t have a clue). We absolutely don’t have any clue whatsoever about what’s really going on; all we know is the private reality bubble that we have created for ourselves via the procedure of ‘assuming a context of meaning and then collapsing into it’. What this means is that everything we do comes down to hubris and hubris – although we can’t see it – comes down to fear. Hubris is fear. We’re so afraid of being aware of our own ’not knowing’ that we’d rather pretend that we know, even though this is an utter farce, even though this makes utter fools of us.
The ‘farce’ that we’re talking about here comes about (as we have already said) because of our fear of becoming aware of our own not-knowing – we’d rather pretend to ourselves that we know what’s going on than honestly confront the abysmal depths of our ignorance and this is what gives rise to ‘the show’. The farce is – we might say – ‘the farce of our helpless identification with the Mind-Created Virtual Identity’. Fear is thus what lies behind our glorification of the Executive Centre, what lies behind our ‘overvaluing of the thinking mind’. We glorify the EC by saying that it is who we are (i.e., by saying that nothing else matters apart from what it either wants or doesn’t want) and we overvalue thought by believing that it can tell us anything real about reality, and by believing that it can provide the MCVI (which is who we wrongly think we are) with the means to escape from the viciously neurotic self-defeating self-contradictoriness that is inherent in its very nature (which is the nature of thought). Thought fools us into believing that we are its version of us, its crude token of us, and then it fools us into further believing that it (the author of our misery) can show us the way out of this mess….
Image credit – iStock/Artystarty, on technologyandsociety.org
