The conditioned life – which very much tends to be the only life we know – is lacking in something that is absolutely crucial to our well-being, an ingredient that we really can’t do without. Because of this, we are obliged to spend all our time making up for this lack (or deficiency) in whatever way we can. Our main project in life – although we don’t see it like this – is ‘compensating for the deficit’, therefore.
Even though our Number One Agenda (when leading the conditioned life) is always about compensating for that crucial missing element, we don’t see that this is what we’re doing. Far from seeing that this is what we’re doing, we perceive it to be the case that our compensation-type activity is actually the ‘main business’ in life, that it is legitimate in its own right and the only thing we need to be concerning ourselves with. We celebrate our compensatory mechanisms as if they were ‘an actual value on their own account’. What we’re essentially doing here therefore is that we are confusing our modalities of distracting ourselves from life for life itself (which is of course the most confused it is possible to get). We are in fact terminally confused, but we just don’t know it.
Our basic way of distracting ourselves is simply by striving to succeed within the context of whatever game it is we might have available to us. To not succeed in the game that is being played is to remain – most ignominiously – in a state of inauspicious blankness, dullness, irrelevance, non-worth and general valuelessness, and so – in consequence of this bad start and the haunting fear of not ever being able to escape from it – we strive mightily to better ourselves, improve ourselves, consolidate ourselves, redeem ourselves, distinguish ourselves, and so on. We strive to win, in other words, and winning means everything to us. ‘Not winning’ is not an option. When we strive – and at the same time perceive ourselves to be ‘approaching our goals’ (or ‘conforming accurately to our standards’) – then this – we might say – equals euphoria and the state of euphoria is our substitute for actual being, or actual reality, which is the important ingredient that is missing in conditioned existence.
There is a price to be paid for this trick however, and the price is that the pleasurable surrogate for being is created at the same time the painful one (just as the crest of a wave cannot be created without at the same time creating the trough). The ‘euphoric analogue for reality’ isn’t really that great a thing at all, therefore. It isn’t really the super-great product that it is being promoted as being since it can only get to exist as a thing’ when its ‘annihilating opposite’ is created at the very same time. This is – therefore – a very obvious cheat! Instead of being, what we have instead is a kind of subjective time-delay between the ‘positive surrogate for reality’ and the ‘negative one’ (or as we could also say, between the ‘affirming statement’ and the ‘denying one’.)
In the game, therefore, there is no being whatsoever, no reality whatsoever. It’s an entirely abstract (or virtual) realm – a ‘made up’ sort of a realm that doesn’t exist, but which we believe in all the same. We don’t perceive its non-existence because we are too busy straining to ‘secure the positive, euphoric analogue of reality’ whilst avoiding its feared dysphoric counterpart. Our attention is all caught up (like a hapless fly in spider’s web) in our negative or positive projections and – as a result – there’s none left over to do any actual ‘reality checking’ (as we might say). This is the inevitable effect of excitement – excitement means that we have already (irreversibly) jumped to the conclusion that either something very good is going to happen, or something very bad. If it’s GOOD then we’re going to be looking forward to it with euphoric anticipation and if it’s BAD then we’re still going to be looking forward to it, but with dread, with negative excitement, with fear.
If we are looking ahead, either euphorically or dysphorically, to the good or bad event that is about to happen then this means that we can’t have any attention left over for the present moment. It’s the future we’re excited about after all, not the present! The present is disregarded in favour of what we think is about to happen; it has become nothing more than a stepping stone either to the outcome we desire, or to our hopefully successful avoidance of one that we don’t like, the one we don’t desire. The demands of the future cause us to cannibalise the future (we could say); only it’s not really ‘the future’ that’s taking precedence over the present moment but – of course – our thoughts about the future, which we have – as we have said – become absolutely convinced by. Reality is thus subsumed (and consequently degraded) within the Virtual Reality Realm of our ever-proliferating thoughts.
When we’re in the throes of super-intense purposefulness (i.e., when we’re going flat out in our efforts to deliver on all our goals) then what is happening here is that the present moment is being ‘magnetised’ by our ideas about the future; our motivation is being provided for us by our thoughts therefore, and this is Extrinsic Motivation, ‘the motivation that comes from outside of us’. When we’re working on the basis of EM then the only elements in the world that we are interested in are those that can be used to help us fulfil thought’s agenda, those elements that can be pressed into service of whatever idea it is that we have been magnetised by. The result of this ‘utilisation of the present moment by thought’ is that we live in a profoundly impoverished world (albeit an impoverished world that we are oblivious to since we are so busy chasing or running away from projected outcomes, since we are so excited by whatever thought pattern it is that has mechanically magnetised our attention).
We’re talking in terms of ‘the magnetising effect of the future (or rather of our ideas about the future) but the same thing holds good were we to speak of in terms of ‘the magnetising effects of our thoughts in relation to the past’. Thought degrades whatever it touches. To quote Alan Watts,
Memory never captures the essence, the present intensity, the concrete reality of an experience. It is, as it were, the corpse of an experience, from which all life has vanished.
Whether we strive to repeat or perpetuate the standards and values that we have inherited from the past, or whether we are busy trying to project our idea about ‘how things should be into the future’, it comes to the very same thing – under the ‘pressure’ of some magnetising idea, some magnetising picture or image of reality, we are allowing thought to define our reality for us. This is of course a very familiar tactic in the domain of politics; it’s also very well known to us in terms of folklore, in terms of the mythological motif of ‘selling one soul to the devil’. Our heads are turned by what the guy in the suit is selling us (obviously enough) but – at the same time – we are (equally obviously) never going to get our hands on what we’ve been promised. That’s simply never going to happen. The devil wouldn’t be the devil if he didn’t cheat us, after all – on the contrary, he would be a decent guy, a friendly entity who is helping us out…
We are nothing if not super rational with regard to our attitude in the 21st century of course; we are quintessentially rational-minded creatures and we don’t like any talk of ‘the devil’ or ‘the devil’s work’ or ‘possession’ or anything like that. We’re trying to separate ourselves from the superstitions of our unscientific past, not rekindle them. We don’t need to be so frightened by the word however – the devil, and this business of selling one soul to him, is entirely metaphorical, entirely allegorical. The ‘devil’ is a way of talking about the thinking mind; Krishnamurti’s ‘favourite joke’ about the devil going for a walk with his friend one fine morning couldn’t be clearer in this regard.
The Thinking Mind is ‘the devil’ because it sells us something that we don’t need, something that no one needs (and this is also something that doesn’t exist and couldn’t exist) and then – in the process of making this improbable deal – persuades us to pay the highest price we could ever pay for it! We hand over, in a most unseemly hurry, the overflowing bounty of unconditioned (or unconstructed) reality itself for a bunch of empty dreams, for a handful of dust, for a well-signposted and well-advertised superhighway that – despite all the endless hype – goes nowhere. There is the idea that it goes somewhere, the story that it goes somewhere, but that is all…
We ought to respect the devil for this extraordinary achievement (as far as scams go, it is quite extraordinary in its audacity (given that there was nothing there to sell in the first place) but we don’t. We would be much better off if we did respect the devil of course, but we don’t. Instead, we are consumed by an entirely false sense of our own cleverness, our own unsurpassed potency as efficacious controllers. We are possessed by hubris (or hybris) in other words, which is defined by Carl Jung in the following way –
In general, hybris is the naivety of the person who pursues his courses of action in an attitude of idolatry for his own decisions.
‘Idolizing our own decisions’ comes down to ‘being taken in by the trick’ (the trick in question being to persuade us that we’re playing the game and not vice versa). Instead of having a sense of justified and prudent caution with regard to the Devil and his infernal trickery, we rush in like fools – convinced that all our Christmases have come at once. You couldn’t tell us otherwise. We rush ahead just as fast as we possibly can, encouraged all the more by the sight of everyone around us during the very same. It’s a full-scale stampede and no one wants to get left behind. It is – however – a full-scale stampede to nowhere – we’re like a horde of lemmings leaping unaccountably to their deaths, or like the brainwashed initiates of some Generic Death Cult hastening to follow the insane dictates of their beloved guru. If we are left behind (if we’re rejected by the cult and miss out on its dubious benefits) then this is felt to be ‘the worst thing in the world’ and we will be left in an utterly dejected state. To ‘not be hypnotised by thought’ (and thus to not spend our whole life under its malign spell) is – ironically – considered by the world to be a total calamity!
What’s missing from the Conditioned Life (or what’s missing from ‘The Game that we’re Playing without Knowing that we are) is quite simply anything that is actually real, anything that is actually true, anything that isn’t totally fake, and the outrageous thing about this is that we – in practise – pass this lack off as a minor inconvenience. We dismiss the conditioned life’s ‘fundamental lack of actual content’ as being completely inconsequential, completely unimportant, as being something that we simply don’t have to concern ourselves with. Despite leading lives that are completely lacking in the core ingredient of actual bona fide reality, we are – all the same – utterly cocksure, utterly convinced that ‘we know best’, utterly convinced that we already know everything that needs knowing. We’re so very sure about this that no one in a million years could every tell us anything different – our minds are shut tight like clams…
Image credit – encirclephotos.com
