The nature of all phenomena is inherently tranquil, so the Buddhist sutras tell us, and yet this is a tranquillity that we very rarely perceive in everyday life. Instead, the world as we know it is full of strife and commotion and – we say – in need of correction or management. The world – Shakespeare notes in Hamlet – is full of sound and fury, and he doesn’t mention any other. In the Lotus Sutra however, we come across the line, ‘My pure land is indestructible, yet men see it as consumed by fire, filled with sorrow, fear and woe, a place of countless troubles.’ (which indicates that there are two, superimposed realities going on). The world we daily perceive is very different from what it is in its essence, so different in fact that we have no way to guess that there is such a thing as ‘an essential reality that does not at all look like the outer (or grosser) reality’. The question arises as to how these two sides to reality (the stillness and the relentless grinding back-and-forth oppositional activity) can exist at the same time, and why it is we so rarely get to see what lies behind all the constant cyclical strife and commotion.

 

 

The answer to this question couldn’t be more straightforward – what makes the world seem like a place of conflict, a playground for brutally clashing forces, is ourselves, our own state of mind (or, as we could also say, what makes the world as conflicted as it is is our own rampant aggression bouncing back at us). This observation lies at the heart of Chogyam Trungpa’s psychological account of the state of hell (which is where the violence of the situation goes off the scale); in Chogyam Trungpa’s account, what happens in the hell state is that our own aggression gets reflected back at us and because we don’t recognise it as our own aggression (but think that it is coming from somewhere else) we react against it with more aggression, with extra-intense, super-escalated aggression, which then gets reflected right back as us in a classic positive feedback spiral. Where this out-of-control positive feedback spiral (where we react to our own reacting) leads to is the psychological state of hell.

 

 

In the state of hell we suffer from ourselves therefore – we are ‘fighting against our own fighting whilst imagining that it is some kind of external enemy’ and this closed loop of aggression takes us to a place of unimaginable suffering. If we take a step back from the closed world of the hell state – so as to catch a glimpse of the bigger picture (i.e., what lies outside of the pseudo-world that is created by our ‘reacting to our own reacting’) – we can see that this business of ‘not recognising our own projections’ (or ‘not recognizing our own doings’) isn’t some kind of exotic aberration of human psychology but the general way of things. Our ‘non-recognition of what is our own output’ is key to the whole business of unconscious living – if we did start to twig it then we’d have to ‘wake up’, we have to ‘give up the thing that we’re doing’, and that’s exactly what we don’t want to do. What we want to do is preserve the status quo at all costs…

 

 

The everyday, run-of-the-mill type of life (which is the only life we know) is – as Chogyam Trungpa notes in his commentary to the Tibetan Book of the Dead – life in a Distraction Realm – it’s a domain in which all we really care about is distracting ourselves from seeing the truth! We have different styles of self-distraction (corresponding to the lower worlds or lokas) but it all comes down to the same thing, which is distracting ourselves from becoming aware of what’s really going on. We are continuingly sending all our attention off on ‘fools’ errands’, thereby preventing making sure that a state where our attention is not divided distracted never arises. It’s one thing after another after another until the final bell rings and we’re all out of time. We never encounter reality, but only our own mental productions, only our own ‘pre-programmed expectations’ which we can’t see as such.

 

 

What keeps us insulated from being aware of the actual reality of our situation is this basic mechanism whereby we keep on failing to recognise our own mental projections / extensions for what they are. It is through continuously confusing the opus proprium with the opus alienum that we create a concrete reality within whose unyieldingly strict boundaries we can live out the preprogrammed course of our conditioned lives; this misapprehension of the OP for the OA is the only way we can create a positive reality for ourselves. Outside of the game we’re playing there is no ‘positive reality’; the notion is entirely meaningless. As the great physicist Erwin Schrodinger has observed, ‘The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; It is not real’. In order for us to continue generating the illusion of there being a concrete or positive reality (a concrete or positive world of which we ourselves are an integral part) we cannot allow ourselves to see that there is – ultimately – no such thing as plurality. Plurality is a figment of our fevered imagination…

 

 

We’re dancing around a bit here, saying the same thing in a number of different ways. What we’re essentially saying is that when we don’t recognise our own projections as being projections (our own productions as being productions) then the appearance of plurality is lost. If I am kept busy ‘reacting automatically to my own automatic projections’ then I can be assured of perceiving the world in a positive way. I then will be – as James Carse puts it – ‘a finite game player in a finite game’ (the thing about a ‘finite game’ being that when we’re playing it we never have to encounter any unfamiliar territory). The domain within which finite play takes place is ‘familiar territory’ from beginning to end! A closed system (or finite game) has a particular property – we might say – and that is the property of ‘never including anything new’ (or ‘never including anything that disagrees with or contradicts our basic assumptions’). This is what makes the system closed – the fact that anyone who isn’t on the list of invited guests is automatically excluded. These excluded guests aren’t just ‘excluded’ either – as far as we are concerned they simply don’t exist. For us, only the ‘invited guests’ are real.

 

 

What happens when the closed system starts to leak, when it starts to let in stuff that it shouldn’t let in, is that all of our absolutes (and thus the global concrete reality that they go to make up) gets to be relativized. It gets relativized because now we know that we don’t know anything about the Big Picture, and if we don’t know anything about the Big Picture then we can no longer make definitive statements about any part of that picture. We can no longer make definite statements about anything – definite statements just aren’t a ‘thing’ anymore.  We’ve moved into a universe that is indescribably bigger than we can ever know, a universe without limits, a universe without enclosing boundaries, and as a result our comfortable little finite games no longer hold water. Our mental categories no longer hold water. The bulwark against radical uncertainty which is ‘the Positive Reality’ has been well and truly breached and once this happens then there’s no possibility of ever putting it back together again (not even with the help of all the King’s horses and all the King’s men). If we DON’T paper over the whole world with our patented projections then ‘what’s out there’ (which also equals ‘what we are in denial of’) will start to impinge on our awareness, will start to make itself known, and that spells the end of a private, personal little reality bubble.

 

 

What lies outside about personal private little reality bubble is ‘the State of Unity’ – the Unitive Sate (or ‘Oneness’) may not sound too scary (we tend to gush about it in the most glowing of terms) but that’s only because we haven’t got the faintest clue as to what we’re actually talking about, and have turned Openness into some kind of ridiculous romantic notion. In reality ‘Oneness’ is our Greatest Fear, the Ultimate Unspeakable Terror – it is the thing whose very existence we cannot allow ourselves to ever suspect. There’s nothing can cosy or convivial about Oneness! ‘God isn’t nice, God is an earthquake.’ What we do to shield ourselves from whatever it is that lies outside of our unreal / imaginary private reality bubble is to ‘make two where previously there was just One’ and how we do this (as we keep saying) is by not recognising the positive world as our own doing, our own device. We ‘make the One into two’ by mistaking the opus proprium for the opus alienum, we do it by treating our own shadow as if it were an independent or unconnected reality.

 

 

 

 

Image credit – Humpty Dumpty by Dan Ferrer, in isupportstreetart.com