We can never obsess about the real, only the unreal. We obsess about the unreal all the time, in fact – that’s how we try to make it real! ‘Obsessing about the unreal’ is just about all we ever do. We might think that we’re doing other stuff, but we’re not…
Sometimes we might think that there is something exotic, interesting or intriguing about the state of obsession, but there isn’t – it’s a purely mechanical business, it’s just a generic action that gets repeated over and over and there’s nothing exotic or interesting or intriguing about that. Machines only ever repeat themselves – there’s nothing else they can do.
When we find ourselves getting a little bit obsessive then what this means is that we’re getting a little bit machine-like, therefore. We are moving from one realm to another. Obsessiveness brings about pleasure and it brings about pain: the pleasure it brings is the pleasure we get when we’re able to believe that our cherished illusions are real; the pain comes about for the very same reason – because we believe that the illusions which we’ve worked so hard to create are real.
Obsession means repeating, and repeating means copying; we’re copying out the same thing over and over and the psychological significance of this, as we have just said, is that we’re trying to make something be real when it isn’t. The principle here being “Say something often enough and it will become true”. We can never get to the point where we can leave off saying it however because the underlying situation is that whatever it is we’re saying is true isn’t true, and this will become apparent just a soon as we stop our spin-doctoring. No matter how much energy we put into the task, it never counts for anything…
This is like being in an argument with someone and having to have the last word – unless I have the last word then I’m not going to be able to go away feeling that I have won the argument, and the reason for this is that my argument doesn’t actually stand up by itself. The only thing that’s going to work for me is to keep asserting my position as strongly as I can, and I am locked into asserting it because the aggressive assertion of my position is only way that it can continue to have any impact. The so-called ‘truth’ of our assertion is the force we put into it, in other words. The more we shout the ‘truer’ our words become…
We’re locked into asserting and reasserting our ideas about the real, our theories, opinions and beliefs about the real; we have to keep on iterating and reiterating them because that’s the only way we can breathe any semblance of life into them. And at the same time as promoting whatever lame version of reality it is we want to believe in, we have to try our best to repress all the other possible versions and this type of activity keeps us busy pretty much all the time. This is a big job, after all – we’re imposing our own brand of order upon the world and it won’t stick unless we keep at it.
When it comes to thought, and the way thought works, we can take this one stage further (we can take the revelation of the absurdity of thought one stage further) by making the point (which absolutely needs to be made) that none of thought’s assertions can ever be true. None of thought’s assertions can ever be true because the only way that thinking process works is by looking at the world in an uneven way, which it does right from the very start. Thought itself is a bias, in other words, and bias can over only ever show us what it is biased towards showing us.
Bias – by its very nature – can never be true, any more than a distortion can ever be true – to talk about a distortion as being true is to talk about the distortion that somehow is no longer a distortion. A lie can never give rise to the truth. There are two types of bias, two types of ‘distortion’, we might say – there is the type which is honest about itself and the type which isn’t. Thought is ‘a distortion which cannot declare itself for what it is’; for though to be honest about itself is an impossibility – it’s an impossibility because, as we’ve just said, thought is itself the bias or distortion.
With thought it’s not just a matter of repetition but also of saturation! Thought – in other words – has to go ‘the whole hog’, has to have ‘a complete monopoly’. If you’re going to be a tyrant then it’s necessary to be a complete tyrant – if you take a break then you’re going to be overthrown in a flash. You are going to be overthrown in flash since the only reason you’re in power is because you’re very careful not to give everyone the chance of acting against you – there are plenty more potential tyrants out there waiting for their chance, as we know. An artificial situation needs input all the time in order to keep it viable; an artificial situation that has to keep up the elaborate pretence of not being artificial even more so.
This is such a bizarre thing however – it’s mind-blowingly bizarre, if only we could see it. The moment we get recruited by thought the whole world flips over for us. We start off with freedom (everything always starts off with freedom, since that’s the only thing that’s real) and then the very next moment we’re seeing everything in a distorted way. We are seeing the ‘Distorted Mind-Created Version of Reality’ as the genuine article and we are seeing our existence in this artificial world being a properly autonomous one. We see it as the type of existence in which we can spend our time pursuing our interests, following our dreams, improving or developing ourselves, and so on.
This is ‘life in the Mind-Created Distortion of Reality’ and it isn’t what it says on the label at all. It’s very far from being what it says on the label – conditioned existence is the ultimate in false and misleading advertising – for one thing the MCDR is not the genuine article (and it’s has no relation to the genuine article at all) and for another thing we aren’t autonomous or self-willed in this artificial world, but – rather – this world supplies us with our so-called identity, our so-called opinions, our so-called interests and dreams. The life of the conditioned self can never exist independently of the conditioned world within which it takes place and yet this conditioned world never really existed in the first place – it was only ever a fiction and so too therefore is our supposed identity, our supposed autonomy.
The nature of the type of existence we’re talking about here is that we are kept hard at work – we’re kept hard at work maintaining the bubble, maintaining the fiction, maintaining the system. The bubble relies on us working non-stop to maintain it; it wouldn’t exist otherwise. And the whole time we’re doing this our conditioned activity is being misrepresented to us as us ‘pursuing our own interests’, us ‘following our dreams’, us ‘realizing our goals’ and so on. These are the hollow slogans that we hear repeated every day of our lives, just about.
We perceive our values and ideals to be objectively meaningful in their own right – we perceive them to be ‘self-evidently true’, in other words well it’s really that simply artifact of the system. What we call objective truth is simply the bias that we cannot see as such, therefore. Are supposedly autonomous behaviour is nothing more than us acting out the bias without realising that this is what we’re doing.
What we’re actually promoting, defending, maintaining etc., isn’t a ‘real thing’ – it’s simply the product of our promoting or defending type activity! It’s a show we’re putting on ourselves without knowing it. We are creating our own reality at the same time that we’re creating ourselves, only the reality we are compelled to create isn’t real any more than the sense of identity is. The world we are compelled by fear to create is a fantasy and so is who we imagine ourselves to be in that world. What’s happening here – if only we could see it – is that we are caught in the trap of having to act out the bias, having to act out the distortion, and it is this ‘obedient acting out of the bias’ – as we keep saying – that makes the illusion seem real to us. What we’re promoting the whole time isn’t real, but we’re too frightened at the prospect of seeing this to ever stop promoting it. It is this fear of finding out the truth of our situation that lies at the root of our unhealthy obsession with the unreal…
Image – letsroam.com
