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Otherness

If we are quiet enough (or still enough) in ourselves then what we find is that an uncanny sense of otherness creeps into our lives – ‘otherness’ being a way of talking about the vast reality which is out there that has nothing to do with us and our lives, nothing to do with the world we think we know. In The Realm of The Other the self we think we are (and the world we think we know) are not only missing but also profoundly meaningless. Our thoughts about the world and us in it are profoundly meaningless just as all our thoughts about anything are. The Realm of Otherness might alternatively be referred to asThe Realm That lies Beyond Thought, therefore. There is no otherness (not even the tiniest hint of it) in the world that thought creates for us.

 

 

Normally, the very last thing we want to be aware of is ‘a sense of otherness about things’ and we avoid all awareness of it by being ‘noisy instead of quiet’, by preferring dramas to stillness. When we’re noisy then there’s no sense of otherness at all (the very idea of it is foreign to us) and so we miss out on the otherness without even knowing that there ever was such a thing to miss out on. With our noisiness (or with our aggression) we have created the Positive (or Stated) World and when we’re subsumed within the Stated World then – for us – it is, without any doubt at all, the only world there is. When we are adapted to life in the Positive World then this explicit/stated reality is both ‘the beginning and the end’ and so whatever it is that we might want or need we must look for it here. No other possibilities exist for us.

 

 

When no sense of otherness can find its way into our personal bubble then what this means is that we have become completely cut off from reality; we have excluded ourselves from reality and at the same time we have excluded ourselves from knowing that we have. If we could tell that we had become disconnected from reality then we’d still be in it. To be aware of being distracted is to be not distracted, as Krishnamurti says. In this inverted world of ours otherness can never therefore be seen for what it is; it cannot be seen as being the very essence of reality itself, but rather we can only perceive it as some kind of nameless, unmentionable enemy – an enemy which is so disturbing and so dangerous that is existence cannot even be admitted to. This puts us in the position of having to fight a battle whilst the same time as not being allowed to see that this is what we are actually doing.

 

 

We wage our ongoing War against Otherness (which is the same as the War against Strangeness) by continuously making noise, by being ‘serial offenders in disturbing the peace’, so to speak. The noise in question is terribly tiresome, terribly banal, terribly tedious, but at the same time it has the very great benefit of being deeply familiar to us and therefore not ‘other’ (since being aware of a sense of otherness is extraordinarily disturbing and distressing for us). Our motivation to never stop making noise is thus a very strong one; creating an ungodly racket all the time naturally becomes ‘the thing to do’. Thinking all the time becomes the thing to do, playing finite games the whole time becomes the thing to do – this is how we wage war on the sense of otherness that is constantly threatening us. The reason this sense of otherness is such a huge threat to us is because otherness is all there is, which means that we stand no chance of ever being able to escape it. Otherness is all there is and so of course it’s a threat to us; it can’t not be a threat, seeing as how our existence (purely subjective as it is) depends upon our ability to successfully deny its existence.

 

 

This – needless to say – is rather a peculiar thing. If otherness is all there is then what can it be a threat to? Who is it that is being threatened by it? This is the paradox that lies at the very heart of our lives – conditioned existence is a conflicted one, it’s an ongoing unwinnable struggle that doesn’t make any sense at all. Put most succinctly, it is the struggle of the unreal against the real, and we’re on the wrong side. We – as conditioned beings – are always on the wrong side of this particular conflict. Our whole civilization is an ongoing (futile) exercise in trying to vanquish the sense of otherness that lurks deep within our own souls. We wage war against the subtle with the gross, we defend ourselves against the profound with the crassly superficial, and the whole time we do this we honestly believe or perceive ourselves to be on the ‘right’ side. We see things invertedly, right up to the very end we will never have the faintest clue as to what’s really happening.

 

 

We human beings have no interest in the truth and we never have done – having an interest in the truth isn’t part of our psychology, it seems. We have no interest whatsoever in the truth, strange as that might sound (to most of us, at least); all we care about is our own version of the truth, which is a thing that we call our ‘belief’. Belief is a big business of course – we’re all about our beliefs and if there is one thing that causes no end of strife in the world it is this thing called ‘belief’. Naturally enough, there is potential for great confusion on this point – as far as I’m concerned – my beliefs are of course the very same thing as the truth itself. We say that our beliefs aren’t arbitrary ten-a-penny ideas about the world but that they are – on the country – the absolute super-serious truth. If we examine this assumption of ours we can of course see that this is patently ridiculous – how can everyone’s belief be ‘the one at only absolute truth’? Only the deluded, self-deceiving ego could say something like this. If we could be bothered to reflect on the matter we’d see that no beliefs are true, that all beliefs are delusions, that all beliefs are the banal projections of the insecure ego. We can clearly see other peoples’ beliefs as ridiculous delusions (if they don’t happen to concur with our own) but when it’s us that we’re talking about then it’s not a delusion but the sacred truth.

 

 

When we say that human beings aren’t interested in the truth (and that we never have been) this is the same as saying that we only care about our own beliefs and that we are – ultimately – motivated solely by the need to defend or promote them. In a nutshell, the great fondness we exhibit towards our beliefs is the same thing as our aversion towards (and orientation away from) the truth. The picture that we have of the world – no matter what type of a picture that might be – is always going to be a decoy, a red herring, a diversion from what is actually true – that’s the game we’re playing, after all. We’re playing the Distraction Game, and we’re playing it for all we’re worth. The only thing we’re interested in is ‘diverting our attention from ever seeing what our situation actually is’ (which we could therefore refer to as ‘the State of Inverted Curiosity’). This is our ‘not-so-noble quest’ and so it is of course not in the least bit surprising that this isn’t how we understand ourselves and our activities. It’s not in the least bit surprising that we – by and large – see ourselves as being cast in the awesomely splendid Heroic Mode rather than ‘the wretchedly avoidant one’.

 

 

We are (in our everyday mode of being) fundamentally averse to knowing anything about the truth, despite all our self-serving bullshit, despite our strenuous protestations to the contrary. But what exactly is it that we absolutely don’t want to see, we might ask? We’ve already answered this question, however – the truth that we are fighting so hard against seeing is the truth of otherness. Otherness is what we don’t want to see. Having an awareness of something that we can’t know about of is what we’re calling otherness; otherness is precisely what we can’t know – it is ‘other than what we can know’, ‘other than what we think or believe’. Instead of saying ‘my belief is true’, we would have to acknowledge that the actual truth of things is radically other than what I believe, completely other than I what I always think or say it is. This is so beautifully simple and yet at the same time it’s far too much for us to ever take on board. We won’t ever take it on board – the extraordinary simplicity of the ‘otherness’ which is the State of Perfect Symmetry is just too terrible for us to behold.

 

 

Otherness is that vast impersonal reality which has absolutely nothing to do with our ideas, thoughts, beliefs and theories. It also has absolutely nothing to do with who we think or believe we are (since ‘who we think we are’ or ‘who we believe we are’ is inextricably linked with the tangled web of our ideas, beliefs and theories). It’s not just that my identity is inextricably ‘linked’ with my thoughts about the world (or with my thinking in general) but rather that I am my thoughts about the world, that I am my thinking in general. To quote Krishnamurti –  ‘And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.’ The corollary of this is that just about everything we do in our lives (which is to say, everything we do that is rational, everything we do that is narrowly purposeful) is taking us further and further away from what actually matters. The rational/purposeful life that we promote so fanatically, because it is based on us flat-out denying the truth of otherness, is a guarantee of disaster, but we just won’t hear it. This is the thing we can’t get our heads around – the scale of the denial that we are committed to as a culture is just too massive for us to be able to take on board. We are told on all sides that taking the exclusively rational approach to life is the responsible, mature, intelligent, sensible thing to do and that anything else is escapism, but this message is 100% false, 100% misleading – taking an exclusively rational approach to life is – as we have just said – an absolute guarantee of disaster. We may look as if we have got a good quality of life going for us in the rational-materialist West (and we promote the idea that we do so that everyone else wants to join us in our folly) but on the inside (which is where it counts, of course) we are living in absolute poverty

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – Jacqueline de Montaigne, becauseartmatters.com

 

 

 

 

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