The thing about living in a one-sided way is that we can have no awareness of the absurdity of the so-called ‘life’ that we are leading as a result. We have zero awareness regarding the absurd nature of our existence – on the contrary, we take our absurd existence very seriously indeed and because of this we’re tied into protecting it. ‘Equilibrium values’ must be maintained at all costs; rules must be obeyed at all costs. This is the only thing that matters when we’re ‘living the one-sided life’ – not upsetting the boat, not upending the apple cart, not letting things get out of hand, not letting the whole precarious illusion go ‘pear-shaped’. The one-sided life is a life that is lived under compulsion, therefore…
To be living in an absurd manner without having any awareness of the fact is to be in the psychologically unconscious state – on the face of it everything is calm (peaceful even, since everything is so well regulated) but when we look beneath this surface level calm we discover a big can of worms, a whole big can of worms that – if we open – we won’t ever be able to close again. Humpty Dumpty – which is to say, the Equilibrium World – must be safeguarded every step of the way since no one can put him back together again if he falls (even the greatest psychotherapist in the world won’t be able to do that). Once you see through the trick you can no longer fall for it in the way that you once did – ‘what you see you can’t unsee’. Once you start down this road (the road of questioning the rules) then you go can’t go back (which means of course that you’re better off not asking any questions in the first place, if comfort is what you want). Curiosity killed the cat.
The ‘absurdity’ that we’re talking about is the result of us being in total denial of the truth – to be in total denial of the truth (or of reality) is to be ridiculous, is to be absurd, and when this is the case there isn’t anything we can do to redeem ourselves from it (since the only thing that would free is the one thing that we won’t ever do). Just as long as we’re in denial of the truth, and cling stubbornly to illusion, then of course everything we think and say and do is going to be absurd – it’s just that we won’t be able to see it. As Krishnamurti says, we are unable to perceive illusion directly. When I myself am a ‘projected reality’ then naturally I can have no capacity to see projections for what they are. A fake person is fundamentally unable to see their world as being fake (which is to say, to the player of a game the game is not a game). A player in the game has lost sight of the fact that there is any such thing as ‘a game’.
The absurdity is therefore precisely this – we are unreal beings living in an unreal world, doing a whole bunch of unreal stuff, and we’re taking it all very seriously indeed! Or if we may put this in a slightly different way, we spend our lives acting as if a whole bunch of limitations were real when they absolutely aren’t (and somehow believing as we do this that we are ‘living our best lives’, that we are ‘living as we should be’). We even take pride in what we’re at – we parade our ludicrous prejudices up and down the street, we go to war on their behalf. Our entire existence thus revolves around some arbitrary bit of nonsense that we have – in effect – pulled out of the air (which is of course a perfect example of absurdity). To spend our entire lives acting as if a bunch of unreal restrictions were real is to spend our lives in a pointless dream, in a sterile fantasy.
‘Truth is whole and cannot be broken into parts’, says Parmenides. This however is exactly what we do do with it – we break it up into parts. We insist on breaking it up into parts. Thought works by treating one side of a boundary (a boundary which it itself has imposed) as being different to the other. It is quintessentially one-sided in its approach therefore and the problem with this is that there are always two sides, never just the one, and this means that we are forever only seeing only one half of the picture. We are ignoring the other half of the picture and this ignorance of ours is an actual force, a mechanical force which is going to bring all sorts of unwanted consequences into play – consequences which we will then proceed to deal with in the same ignorant manner that we deal with everything! This is a kind of ‘chain reaction of problems’ that we are creating for ourselves – this is the wide-open doorway to a world of misfortune, misadventure and misery. Krishnamurti keeps reiterating this point: out of thought comes nothing but conflict. When we ‘break the Truth up into parts’ then what we end up with is this thing called Psychological Time, regarding which K says –
When one functions in the realm of time one is bringing about a contradiction and hence conflict. Psychological time is conflict.
When we ‘fall in’ with thought’s trick of <drawing a line and then only taking notice of what lies on the inside of the line> then we’re entering into an absurd situation. The One-sided World is a world of absurdity – by pretending that only the stuff on one side of the boundary is real we enter into a state of never-ending conflict, a state of irresolvable conflict (the conflict which is thought itself). When I make a positive statement of some kind (which is how thought necessarily operates) then – without knowing it – I am also (simultaneously) creating the reverse of this statement. I am creating the corresponding negative statement without being conscious of what I’m doing. To put this in a slightly more technical way, I am creating a boundary with [+] on the one side and [-] on the other (which is of course the definition of a boundary). I am creating a boundary with plus on one side and minus on the other only I’m pretending that only one side is real.
What we have here therefore is the situation in which we’re pretending that only one half of a polarity exists. We can’t get away with this pretending of ours, however; we can’t get away with it because what we’re pretending simply isn’t true! The more of my will I put into my rational endeavours (into my ‘positive / definite assertions’) the more potential energy is being put into the nemesis of all that I wish to see accomplished. ‘At the moment of victory defeat is born’, as the Daoists remind us. What this results in therefore is a bipolar situation that continually keeps on ‘rolling over on itself’ in a purely mechanical fashion; what we end up with is the situation where one pole keeps succeeding the other, over and over again ad infinitum in a kind of ‘never-ending null-event’. Emphasising one opposite at the expense of the other in our consciousness (in what we allow ourselves to be aware of) results in an oscillation or vibration, in other words. One-sidedness is what powers the vibration. Ignorance is what powers the vibration.
An oscillation is a simple thing, a thing which is eminently easy to describe, eminently easy to understand. From the point of view of our daily experience when we are living one-sidedly then it’s absolutely not so simple, however –we never do grasp the nature of what we’re dealing with – the polarity (slippery as it is) gets the better of us all the time. We can’t understand the vibration because we’re stuck in this self-defeating business of ‘pretending that only half of the picture is true’. Just as long as we’re only focusing on ‘what’s right front of our noses’ we are only ever going to be continuously ‘rolling over and over on the same spot’, never getting anywhere but being very busy with it all the same, never getting anywhere but being full of plans and ideas for the future nevertheless. All that happens is that we go around in circles. ‘After happiness comes suffering. After suffering comes arises happiness. For beings happiness and suffering revolve like a wheel.’ says Nagarjuna.
We love to imagine ourselves as being as having advanced mightily since the time of Nagarjuna (which was more or less two thousand years ago) but clearly this isn’t the case! We’ve actually devolved. All we’ve done for those two thousand years has become more and more one-sided, more and more fixated on the one spot, and – as a consequence – we have put more and more momentum into that revolving wheel. The Wheel of Samsara is spinning now faster than ever, and that most definitely isn’t good news for us. We may call it ‘progress’ to accelerate the wheel so that it now spins faster than ever but what we’re really looking at is ‘new and improved suffering’. We’ve got a brand of suffering going here in this one-sided, short-sighted, compulsive world of ours that takes it to ‘a whole new level’ and we’re awfully proud of ourselves for that. We’re as pleased as punch – we think we’re well on track to become the masters of the universe…
The reason we imagine ourselves to be so advanced on previous generations is because of our vastly increased efficacy in obtaining our goals. We can now get to where we want to go so much faster, just as Alan Watts says. We’re ‘there before we know it’ (we’re ‘there on a whim’) and that’s how come we know we’re so advanced. The speedier we are in getting to our destination the faster the cycle of course, and the faster the wheel turns the more we suffer. The faster the wheel turns the more mechanical energy there is in it. The more we control (or try to control) the more misery we create for ourselves; we don’t see this because we’re focused so narrowly on closing the gap – we have fixated upon closing the gap between ‘where we are’ and ‘where we would like to be’ so much that we don’t care about anything else. We have so little perspective on what we’re doing that we think closing the gap is the best thing we can do – we are convinced that once this closure has been accomplished (and there is no gap left) then all our problems would have been solved, all our difficulties alleviated. The Great Prize (however we conceive it) will have been attained. We only think this because we’re seeing everything upside-down, however; unbeknownst to ourselves, we’re trying to eliminate space itself, and this is a very grave error because space is all there is…
Image credit – moderndentistry.com
