The self is always kept prisoner in a prison made -up of its own prejudices – it has to be kept there because there’s nowhere else it can survive. That’s the only way it can work – the conditioned self cannot exist anywhere outside of the cage which is made up of his own conditioning, obviously enough!

 

 

 

The conditioned self is it’s conditioning – there’s nothing in it that isn’t also in the cage of conditioning, and there’s nothing in the cage of conditioning that isn’t also in it. The self is its prejudices – take away the prejudices and you take away the self. Our prejudices (i.e., our biased way of looking at the world) are what enables the self to be the self.

 

 

 

If the self is to exist then it has to exist within a prison, in other words. There’s no other place for it – to bring freedom to the self would be to bring it a present of his own ultimate dissolution and this – needless to say – is not a present that it is in any hurry to accept. Existentialists have long noted that freedom is the very last thing we want, and this is why.

 

 

 

This doesn’t mean that there is any fun to be had by the self as it languishes in the prison have its own prejudices – the conditioned can never have any fun. Fun is a function of freedom, after all, nothing else. We are free to have fun if we are free and if we’re not free then there’s absolutely no way that we can force ourselves to have fun. No cajolery – of whatever type – can ever compel us to actually ‘have fun’.

 

 

 

‘Fun’ means being light-hearted and carefree and there’s none of this when we are serving a life sentence in the prison of our own unacknowledged prejudices! On the country everything is very serious. Everything is very serious because we are continually engaged in fooling ourselves, continually engaged in deceiving ourselves, and there’s no humour in that. There’s no humour in denial and denial is the name of the game when we’re prisoners in the prison of our own unacknowledged prejudices.

 

 

 

We are in denial of the fact that we are in prison – we are in denial of the fact that we will never find freedom no matter how hard we try, no matter how well we behave, no matter how much kudos we garner, and this is what makes us so very serious, so very driven. This is what causes us to be so obsessed with our goals, so preoccupied with our planning and scheming. Our goals represent freedom to us and that is why we’re always straining to reach them.

 

 

 

When the attainment of our goals fails to bring the freedom that we yearn for then we transfer our attention to the next set of goals and try our luck there instead. We ‘try, try, and try again’, as the saying has it. This is why we extol positive thinking as much as we do – because we don’t ever want to be confronted with the truth of our situation! ‘Positive thinking’ is just the socially acceptable way of talking about denial, that’s all. It’s a euphemism.

 

 

 

Denial is the only way forward when we want two mutually exclusive things at the same time. Denial is the only man for the job in this particular situation! The two mutually exclusive things we want are [1] to be free and [2] to continue being a prisoner of our own unacknowledged prejudices. We are obliged to keep on being the prisoners of our own prejudices because if we’re not then we can’t continue to be this static self. We’d have to kiss it goodbye. Freedom brings change – if it didn’t then it wouldn’t be freedom – and change is the one thing we absolutely don’t want.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image – wallup.net