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Prisoners Of The Projected Realm

When we straightaway believe what we think, or act on what we think, then we create the determinate reality which is the projection of what we think. When we always believe in what we think, or always translate our thoughts into action, then we create the Projected World, the world which is seamlessly made up of our thoughts. When we are in this world then there is no logical/rational way out; there is no way to purposefully exit from the Projected World, and yet when we inhabit this world logic, rationality and purposefulness are all we know.

 

 

There exists – so we believe – a gap or discontinuity between ‘our thoughts’ and ‘the acting out of these thoughts’. There seems to be a whole world there. The two certainly don’t seem to be one and the same thing, which is what they absolutely are. Between the one and the other (between the trigger and the response) there is space for possibilities to unfold, or so it seems. This – as far as we are concerned – is the proper order of things and it is not something to be questioned or probed into. And yet there is no space (and therefore no possibilities) in the rational continuum, no gap between our thoughts and the acting out of our thoughts (or the believing of our thoughts); the thought and the enactment of that thought make up a logical continuum, a linearity within which nothing new can ever happen. The idea and the concrete realization of that idea constitute an unbroken straight line (no matter what we might think) and so obviously there isn’t any gap between them. No gaps exist in a logical continuity and that is what makes it a logical continuity.

 

 

No freedom-containing gap exists within the continuum of thought and yet we imagine that it does, and we go on to base our lives on this completely untrue premise. What – we might ask – does this mean for us, therefore? What are the consequences – if any – of this misapprehension of ours (and there is no doubt at all that it is a misapprehension, for reasons that we will go into)? Instead of talking in terms of a gap or space in the continuum of thought we could just talk in terms of freedom – the COT contains precisely zero freedom and so what we’re looking at here is the situation where we have no freedom at all and yet imagine that we do. Straightaway therefore, we have arrived at an excellent description of everyday ‘conditioned life’, which is the only type of life we will ever get to know, for the most part. We live our lives on the basis of this ‘imaginary freedom,’ on the assumption of a freedom that we just don’t have, a freedom that just isn’t there.

 

 

This awkward situation gives rise to what we might call the Great Perversity. The Great Perversity can be explained by saying that it is the inevitable result of us acting on the basis of an imaginary freedom: if we are acting on this basis (or living on this basis) then it necessarily follows that we must value this Imaginary Freedom (we value it because without it our conditioned existence comes to an abrupt end) and because we value it this means that we have to repress or deny the genuine article. The genuine article has at this point become a deadly poison for us since if we did have any genuine freedom (the freedom that comes when we are ‘outside of thought’) then we would have the freedom to see that we’re not free at all. This would make the game (the game that we are free when we’re not) impossible to play. The game is all we know and believe in and so we’re not really in any hurry to see this; we are attached to the game and being attached to the game means not seeing that it’s only a game. If we want to carry on playing the game then awareness is strictly off the menu, in other words. To recapitulate what we have just said then, the Great Perversity comes about because of the way in which we value our imaginary freedom over the real thing. Our IF is the only type of freedom we know about and so we don’t want to have it taken away from us, we don’t want to see it threatened or potentially compromised in any way. What this means in practical terms is that we spend just about all of our time protecting and securing our imaginary freedom, and methodically fighting against any incursion by the genuine article, despite the fact that what we are calling ‘imaginary freedom’ or ‘the game’ is the very situation that is suppressing and denying us every step of the way. Anything that isn’t part of the system of denial seems ‘strange’ to us and because it is strange we feel that we have to fight against it.

 

 

To cherish and protect false freedom is to turn our backs on actual freedom, which is – needless to say – the only place where our well-being or mental health can ever be found. We are acting against ourselves every step of the way and yet we see what we’re doing in terms of pursuing worthwhile or helpful goals. For us, mental health means (when we pare it right down) ‘living happily or contentedly in a situation that is oppressing and denying us’ and this doesn’t actually make any sense at all. All of our efforts in the world of mental health provision are based on this self-contradictory premise and this There’s no such thing as what we call ‘good mental health’ – what we call ‘good mental health’ boils down to living in such a way that we don’t spot the self-contradiction in what we are trying to do. Very obviously, there’s no such thing as ‘living happily in an environment that oppresses or denies us’ (or ‘living contentedly in a prison that we can’t see as such’) and so as a result our existence becomes all about ‘searching for something that doesn’t exist’, which is of course a search that never comes to an end.

 

 

The Projected World (which is the imaginary world that has no freedom in it because it doesn’t really exist) is pure torment, when it comes down to it. Nothing exists in this world apart from the ongoing torment of ‘trying to do what we never can do’ or ‘trying to achieve what we never can achieve’ and the only reason we carry on gamely in the way that we do is obviously because we don’t see this, because we are able to successfully fool ourselves into believing that ‘a happy outcome exists and can be found if we persevere in the Impossible Task with sufficient determination’. This foolish belief generates bucket-loads of euphoria, the influence of which blinds us still further; there is nothing more intoxicating (and nothing more blinding) than euphoria because we are receiving confirmation that what we so desperately want to believe to be true actually is true.

 

 

This is flattery in other words and just as skilfully-applied flattery is ‘music to our ears’, so too is the confirmation or validation of our cherished illusions which the conditioned world provides us with. In our day-to-day lives we never look any further than the confirmation of our cherished illusions. What more could there be than this, after all? Anything more than this would be downright worrying for us – anything more than this would spell trouble. We’d rather have imaginary freedom than the real thing because real freedom is the freedom to see that flattery is only flattery. Or as we could also say, to be free is to be free to see that our delusions are only delusions, and because these delusions are so very important to us we want freedom just as about as much as we want a hole in the head.

 

 

In order to continue enjoying our imaginary freedom as if it were the real thing we cannot allow ourselves to see that ‘thought’ and ‘the acting out of thought’ are one and the same thing. We are obliged to believe that ‘acting on the basis of thought’ can take us beyond our thoughts and bring us into the ‘wide-open arena of reality itself’ (so to speak) but the truth of the matter is that we never do leave our thoughts behind. Whenever we relate to a world that is ‘known and certain’ we are living in the world that has been made up by our thoughts. Whenever we act on the basis of our goals (or whenever we engage in purposeful behaviour) we are living in the world of our thoughts. There is no ‘moving beyond thought’ here at all therefore – that never happens. The only way we could ‘move beyond thought’ would be if we were to start to relate to the world that we don’t and can’t know, and stop being so wretchedly purposeful the whole time. Otherwise, we’re Prisoners of the Projected World, restricted for no good reason in the redundant world of our own unfounded assumptions. To not see that our assumptions are unfounded (or untrue) is of course to be very effectively trapped in ‘the world of our assumptions’, but exactly what sort of a world is this?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • alain

    No freedom containing gap! Do you mean by this that ‘gaps’ are where you will find freedom?

    Gaps in themselves are interesting beast, in gaps, there is ‘nothing’, no objects or even how could I say; presence of a self-presence being present to’ or no awareness of ‘anything’ in particular; nothing specific is being ‘reflected/projected’. But I would hesitate to say that it is where we will find freedom, not that it is not ‘freedom’, but that there is no-one there to see (being aware of) this freedom.

    Freedom we tend to see as related to ‘objects’, when for example we say we are now free of what oppresses us, or I now have some free time. Those are all free from something, which makes that freedom dependent on the absence of what used to ‘hold us’ back. And so to be free of something is ‘relative/relational freedom’, not absolute freedom.
    True freedom, as true joy and true love, is without reason, object. You are not free because; it is objectless freedom; pure freedom, pure joy, pure love without reasons.

    There is a writer whose name is Hubert Benoit, who said that freedom is complete acceptance/compliance to determinists; to rules, laws, cultural patterns, share understandings, etc. So in some way, what he is saying is that within what ‘holds us, what keeps us ‘prisoners’ is complete freedom. Sounds contradictory/opposite to what we tend to believe. In total compliances is where you will find freedom.

    Another man said; it is like a hole in a sheet of paper, you cannot say it is of the paper, and yet you cannot deny the hole in the paper, by which he means that we are ‘of this world/not of this world’. As we are of this world, we suffer and suffer the suffering, we are under the influence/determinism of our projections (which are deeply cultural/societal) in which there is very little actual freedom. As not of this world, well none of all of this concerns us, for we are freedom itself, untouched by it all. Those aren’t ‘new’, those are a different way to say: ‘form is emptiness’ or ‘ Nirvana/paradise is samsara/day after day misery on earth’, or ‘everyday way is the way’ or ‘This earth where we stand is the pure lotus land’. They basically convey the same ‘message’ and are highly contra- intuitive to our ‘normal’ way of thinking things out. There is a knot here, for all of those seem to say hell on earth is paradise. It is often said that there are at least two different ways to looks at things, most of which deepens our perspectives, but what happens when we have to deal with two different ways/perspectives which have equal status, all the while being totally contradictory/antagonistic/polar opposites one to the other? To me, that is the human dilemma; one face says ‘you are free’, the other says ‘life is suffering, life is a permanent struggle’, life is unjust. One face is saying you are of this world with all its difficulties, its dissonances, its deeply mechanical and conditioned aspect and the other face is saying you are not of this world, you are freedom itself, deeply at peace, unconditioned, furthermore, it always have been this way. Those ‘two’ have equal validity, equal status.

    All of this is ‘complicated’ for our ‘normal’ quite lazy mind, especially if we tend to hold on too strongly to Aristotelean logic which tends to exclude contradictions. How do we view our life on this planet? As permanent bliss? I don’t think so, especially as we get older and that we experience fatigue, sickness, death of loved ones and that we know for sure that within a few years, time will be up for us too. We have kind of an idea of what life and a good life means, and it is not death, suffering, sickness, fatigue. In any way whatsoever we define this life, we also define what it is not simultaneously; that is the trap. As we (explicitly) draw the contour of one (the what it is), we (implicitly) simultaneously draw the contour of the other one (the what it is not). We fail to see that WE do the drawing. We split in two what cannot be split. Our projections/representations of what something is, simultaneously generates/creates an antagonistic projections/representations of what it is not. That is how nirvana gets to be separated from samsara, form from emptiness, life from death, of this world from not of this world, good from bad, etc. We thus define what it means for example to be of this world, and as we do this, we simultaneously draw the contour of what it does not mean; not of this world. And the whole thing gets to become frozen thru language, words, becoming antagonist, polar opposites, and thus the perpetual and unsolvable conflict. As one draws the contour of one (the what it is), one simultaneously draws the contour of the other one (the what it is not). In fact, it is the only way by which we can achieve any kind of ‘what it is’, we have to exclude, spell out this what it is not, isolate, push away, and as we do this, we create this twoness; this what it is on one side and this what it is not on the other. So simple, maybe too simple, how do achieve at defining what is right/good? By drawing the contour of what this good is not; the bad. They are simultaneously complementary and antagonist. You cannot think of one without the other, the boundary of one, or the end of one is the beginning of the other. The end of the northern boundary of the USA is the beginning of the southern part of Canada. As you create one, you simultaneously create the other one. How do you define an American? By what it is not; not Mexican, not Canadian, not Russian, not Chinese, etc. What something is, is (also and perhaps more importantly) what it is not generatively speaking.

    January 22, 2022 at 11:21 am Reply

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