The good feeling we get when we pick up a bargain in the local supermarket has nothing to do with a consideration of the benefit to our personal finances. That’s the way we understand it – that’s the way it appears on the surface – but that’s only the ‘optics’ of the situation. That’s only the cover story. We say that we feel good for legitimate reasons, not because we’re secretly evading our greatest fear (or anything like that).
The real reason getting a bargain (no matter how small or how trivial a bargain it might be) feels good – in the special way that it does – is because it reifies us, because it allows us to believe that this two-dimensional, cartoonish idea of who we are is actually a real thing (reis equals ‘thing’ in Latin. This feels as addictively good as it does feel because we’re on the run and so to believe that we really are this ‘token identity’ (that we really are this dumb-ass generic ego) is a decisive ‘step forward in terms of running away’, so to speak. We don’t actually know what it is we are running away from because we’re much too busy running away from it!
We don’t know that we’re running away from anything and – what’s more – we don’t want to know (obviously enough). We’re running away from our own running away, we’re trying to escape from the awareness that we are trying to escape. We don’t want to know what we already know. Instead, we perceive ourselves to be advancing, we perceive ourselves to be progressing in life – we have all sorts of ‘indices’, all sorts of ‘milestone events’ to demonstrate this progress. The generic, one-size-fits-all social life is the standard we measure ourselves against to prove beyond any doubt to ourselves (and everyone else) that we’re living life in the correct way (and that we are therefore not ‘failing’ (whatever that might mean). We want to know for sure that we’re ‘doing it right’ – that validation is very important indeed to us…
Our officially-prescribed ‘journey into the world of the socially-conditioned adult’ equals our ‘escape from having any awareness that we are escaping’, therefore – we evade reality by flipping everything over so that our so-called ‘progress’ in this regard (our progress in running away from the actual reality of our situation) becomes ‘personal advancement in some kind of (supposedly) objectively verifiable kind of way’. It becomes ‘progress’ within some agreed-upon context, within some arbitrary game. What we see as progress or personal advancement is a measure of our degree of adaptation to the artificial environment which is society and so – from this perspective – it might be said that we really are progressing. We are ‘progressing relative to the given framework’ and since we don’t see the FW as a ‘FW’ this makes the game very serious, very real to us. Our unawareness delivers us therefore into a world of absolutes.
Jung makes the point that organised religion is our way defending ourselves from the awareness of God; in a similar way, it could be said that the system that society provides for us is our escape from having to work out for ourselves what our existence means (so to speak). Our keenness to avoid having to painfully work out our own relationship to life is the same thing as our unwholesome keenness to ‘play the meaningless game that has been offered to us’, and the reason ‘playing the game’ equals ‘running away from what is real’ is because to play a game is to not know that we are. The reality of our situation has been evaded therefore – we have utilised a super-effective type of trick or gimmick. We have pressed the big red AVOIDANCE button and that’s the end of it…
The way James Carse puts this is say that if we veil our inalienable freedom from ourselves then we won’t know that we don’t actually have to play the game. To not know that we don’t actually have to play the game is to not know the game to be a game (and the other way of putting this is of course to say that self-veiling – as Carse calls it – makes the game seem like it isn’t ‘a game’. It makes the hollow game we’re playing (all games are hollow) into the world itself. The denial of intrinsic freedom means that we’re in the mind state of FEAR therefore and when we’re in the mind state of fear escape isn’t just ‘our priority’, it’s all we care about! Escaping is what the Fear World is all about, clearly. The unquestionable need to escape (utterly and ridiculously impossible though this is) doesn’t just ‘underlie’ everything we do in the Fear World, it is everything we do.
What we’re talking about here is therefore is this thing called Samsaric existence! We would probably think of samsara (if we were to think of it at all) as that ubiquitous mode of being in which we are ‘ruled by desires’, and not such much as ‘that modality in which we are governed entirely by fear’. ‘Desire’ and ‘fear’ are the two sides of the same coin however – the only reason we experience desire (and are driven by it in all we do) is because playing the game (which means ‘trying to succeed within the terms of the game’) is how we escape. In the Samsaric Realm everything is about escaping therefore, everything is one form or other of ‘running away’ (the only qualifier here being that there’s nowhere to run to). What we’re talking about here is thus futile striving – striving that never gets us anywhere and never will. The striving isn’t meant to yield the results we’re led to believe it will, it’s meant to distract us, and this it does very well.
We can’t ever allow ourselves to gain insight into this of course – that would spell ‘the end of our little game’, that would equal ‘not running away from our own running away’, that would equal ‘us being aware of something we don’t want to be aware of’, and so we keep on telling ourselves (as Alan Watts says) that the long-awaited beneficial outcome is only just around the corner and that if we keep on working at it we’ll get there, we’ll win the big prize, we’ll win a place in Paradise, and so on and so forth. There is a great big social collusion going on to this effect, and we all jump on board with it. We jump on board with this fear-driven collusion without the slightest hesitation. We sign up to the collusion so damn quickly we don’t even realize that we’re signing up to anything…
The Great Collusion means that we’re suckered into taking what has been presented to us by the system as being real and not an artificial construct, not a gimmick, not an empty game. Because of this error, because of this mistaken perception, we end up looking for freedom where there isn’t any. We end up looking for happiness or fulfilment in our ideas about the world, in the assumptions that we collectively make about it, We are thus ‘facing in the wrong direction’ – just as Jung says – and as a result of looking outside rather than within then instead of ‘waking up’, we dream. We dream non-stop, we dream all the time, we dream our heads off every single day of our lives….
This ‘dreaming’ is our escape therefore; we endlessly celebrate this notion of realising our heart’s dreams (which is to say, somehow making our dreams seem real) but what we fail to notice is that whilst we are allowed to chase our dreams as much as we want, we can never actually attain them (and this turns the whole wretched business into nothing more than meaningless circular suffering). What we’re doing here is basically torturing ourselves for no reason. At the same time as being irredeemably tortuous, this is still our way of running away and so – because escaping is the only outcome we’re interested in, because anything else is fundamentally unacceptable to us – we’re going to ignore whatever indications there might be that escaping is not an option. This is of course what we generally call denial. We also call it ‘positive thinking’, which is perennially popular – in one form or another – in our laughably superficial, suffering-producing culture.
There are two parts to the Samsaric situation that we’re talking about here: [1] is the striving and [2] is the successful resolution of that striving, and only one part of this situation (the striving) is real. The second part (or element) is entirely imaginary, entirely hallucinatory. The second element in the mix is pure ‘wish-fulfilment’. If we are to play the game therefore then we need to ‘firm up’ the imaginary stage of the proceedings, we need to do the work ourselves to make it believable to us (or else the whole thing will simply fall flat). Hence all of the endless, overblown toxic hype that we’re subjected to every day of our lives; hence all the interminable braying nonsense that our Samsara-celebrating culture keeps inflicting on us. We are ‘nonsense-worshippers’.
Attaining goals isn’t itself necessarily an illusory affair – we can make changes in accordance with our will in the physical / material world and this is of course a perfectly legitimate thing to do. I can move a stone from Position A to Position B in line with my intentions (at least temporarily, since everything is temporary). The things that we move about in accordance with our will are merely tokens for reality, however – the reason we get all het up about our goal-orientated striving, and so delirious when we achieve whatever it is we wanted to achieve, is because of what this ability to control events, this ability to obtain what we want to obtain, symbolises for us (which is something that we’re not allowed to mention directly). This is ‘unconscious symbology’, therefore. What we’re talking about here is ‘the Game’, and the Game – we might say – exists (like all games) on two levels simultaneously – there is the Overt Level (which is the one we pay attention to, and take as being the only reality) and there is the Covert Level (which is the action that we ourselves are complicit in, which sets up the Overt Level to seem real to us, to seem like ‘the only possible reality’). The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, in other words, and this is how we ‘run away from our own running away’…
The Explicit Level of Description (the ‘show’ which completely captures our attention) is the system that we have created for ourselves, designed for ourselves, whilst the hidden (or ‘inviolate’) LOD is made up of choices that we have freely made and then forgotten about (these are the hidden choices that underpin the system which we are trapped in and cannot see ourselves to be trapped in). We create the Machine to serve us and then the machine turns around and enslaves us, fully occupying us with pointless tasks that we are compelled to take seriously, fully occupying us with meaningless goals that we are obliged to do our very best to achieve (even though this activity of ours is utterly and completely meaningless). This is the ‘Terrible Trivium’ – “the demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit” at work, doing his thing, just as Norton Juster says in The Phantom Tollbooth. We might say that handing ourselves over to the Demon of Petty Tasks (in the way that we obviously do) is deeply perverse and thoroughly incomprehensible (since there’s nothing worse than wasting our entire lives on tedious nonsense) but it all makes perfect sense when we realize that what we really want in life – although we will never admit it – is to postpone ‘seeing the truth’ for as long as we possibly can. Wasting time in meaningless pursuits (that we claim to be supremely important) is how we ‘run away from the world whilst telling ourselves that we’re engaging in life in the proper and responsible way’. The Terrible Trivium (who is a modern avatar of Mara, Lord of Illusion) was working for us (albeit on the sly) all along…
Image credit – mrslittle.com
