We stretch everything we can stretch, hoping thereby to get the maximum amount of ‘good’ from it. We keep on stretching it (or ‘milking it’) until we can’t stretch it anymore, and that’s when things start to go pear-shaped on us. That’s when it all gets very dark. When we’re doing the stretching then we don’t know that we are – we assume (in effect) that we’re utilising some kind of ‘infinite resource’, which means that we take it totally for granted that we can carry on this way forever. This is merely our psychological naivete, however – it’s the type of naivete that comes from carrying on doing what we always do and not bothering to pay attention to anything else, anything unrelated to the task at hand. It is therefore the type of naivete that comes from being completely ‘heedless’…
The truth of the matter is that there is no infinite resource for us to contentedly keep on milking forever. That’s our fantasy, of course, but there’s a big gap between our fantasy and the actual reality of our situation. There isn’t even a finite resource out there for us to exploit – what we’re latching onto is an illusion, pure and simple. The dimension that the extension is taking place in is an illusion in the first place, and so too therefore is the technical operation that we are referring to as ‘stretching’ or ‘extending’. Whatever we do in this dimension is an illusion, and if there’s one thing we can’t see in life it’s this! What’s really happening as we extend our basis (as we heedlessly milk it in the way that we always do) is that the illusion in question – which was already terribly thin – just keeps on getting thinner and thinner, and we don’t notice this incremental degradation occurring. We don’t notice this ‘degradation of the illusion’ taking place because our ability to pay attention is being degraded at the very same rate. We’re existing in what we might call a ‘self-re-enforcing delusion’ and just as long as we don’t take any notice of anything other than what this viewpoint shows us we’ll carry on (doing whatever it is that we fondly imagine we’re doing) in this deluded state quite happily.
Things get thinner and thinner as we keep on extending our unreal starting-off point, but so too does our power of attention, so too does our ability to be present with what’s happening. This is the entropy slope – we’re rolling downhill in an irreversible kind of a way (irreversible because we can’t see what we have lost, because we can’t remember it, because we automatically forget about all about it). To slide down the entropy slope is to forget, therefore – we don’t notice ourselves sliding inexorably downhill because we don’t have access to any information that would tell us about it, any information that would let us know ‘where we have come from’. Our memories are all false – extensions of our current degraded way of seeing the world. As far as we’re concerned everything is fine and dandy, therefore; everything seems fine and dandy but – notwithstanding this reassuring perception – our lives keep on getting more and more superficial, more and more trivial (as we have just said, we don’t notice the degradation process taking place because our awareness is being degraded at the same rate as our environment . Entropy is a measure of the information that is there but which we have no ability to access and so no matter how big our entropy debt grows we will still know nothing about it. We’ll know nothing about it until it all goes pear-shaped, until the over-inflated balloon finally (and shockingly) bursts.
Although we have just said that we can go on exploiting the virtual resource of our ‘imaginary starting-off point’ indefinitely (since no laws are being violated) in practise issues develop and these ‘issues’ grow and grow until the whole thing becomes unworkable. Holes (or ‘cracks’) start to appear in the fabric of our illusory existence and then the next thing is that it all goes pear-shaped – the over-stretched elastic band abruptly snaps and that’s the end of it. We then have to ‘go back to the drawing board’ and this – because we’ve invested so much in the illusion – is experienced as being the ‘ultimate disaster’. This is ‘as bad as it gets’, as far as we’re concerned. Even before the cracks start to appear, there is a sense of foreboding, a sense of dread – an irrational feeling that something very bad indeed (some utterly unsuspected, utterly inconceivable catastrophe) is about to happen. People might then laugh at us and tell us that there are no rational grounds for our intimations of imminent catastrophe; they might pat us condescendingly on the head and tell us to cheer up ‘because it might never happen’ but no matter what reassurances we receive we will not be able to put that ominous sense of doom to bed. We might be embarrassed that we can’t dismiss it as we are supposed to, but somehow rational explanations don’t get to the root of it.
From the point of view of our ‘collective consciousness’, our ‘agreed-upon outlook’ on things, this deep-rooted sense that something unimaginably terrible or disastrous about to befall us is clearly the purest nonsense; we therefore see the mind state of anxiety as being a type of sickness that we can presumably be cured of. This is the position we collectively take on the matter – those of us who happen to be suffering from the condition known as chronic anxiety are given no credibility whatsoever, our voices are muted, the urgency of our message ignored. Like Cassandra, we have to live with the burden of never being believed despite the terrible urgency of what we (intuitively) feel to be true and want – therefore – to tell other people about. Our ‘sin’ – as anxiety suffers – that not that we have allowed ourselves to somehow succumb to a distorted or erroneous way of seeing the world (which is what we are invariably told) but that we can no longer stay as superficial as everyone else and are therefore causing a disturbance. The same is true for depression – we have every reason for feeling that our lives are ‘hollow’ or ‘fake’, but the collective will not hear of it. The collective will value ‘positive thinking’ over risky introspection any day…
The Social Life is a life that has to be lived within very narrow parameters, within very narrow limits. It is – we might say – a state of ‘enforced superficiality’; as mystics and philosophers always say, if we are to function in society then we need to make sure to ‘keep it superficial’. We need to make sure to act as dumb as possible, and then some. ‘Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups,’ says George Carlin. There is never any depth to collective living (which is to say, the version of life that takes place wholly within the agreed-upon framework) any depth of awareness would reveal just how cheap and fake our world is, and that insight would then spoil our taste for it. There are no deep thinkers in society, only apologists for a system that doesn’t work and never will, and the inevitable result of this repressive regime is that those who cannot help seeing something of what’s going on, those of us who for whatever reason can’t keep it shallow (and therefore can no longer embrace the life that we have been provided with by society) are told that there there’s something wrong with us. Our distressing insights into the nature of our situation as it really is are going to be held up as ‘evidence of pathology’.
As long as we’re still able to keep on stretching it (as long as we’re still able to ‘keep the game going’) then we’re going to remain ‘utterly heedless’ – we live in a world full of heedless people (people who ‘as heedless as heedless can be’) and this ‘extreme heedlessness’ is what we call mental health. If we do start to take heed of the other side of the story (the story that we’re not supposed to know about) then no one wants to know us! Socially-conditioned folk will talk to us (or listen to us) only when we have agreed to denounce our own perceptions and are prepared to engage in the therapies or medications that have been prescribed for us. The social game only works when we are heedless (‘heedlessness’ in this context meaning ‘unreflectively rejecting anything that doesn’t tie line up with the official narrative’) and so just as long as we are able to continue to do this then we are said to be ‘mentally healthy’. We’re not ‘letting the side down’, in this case. In this ‘reversed perspective’ way of understanding things, to be well is when we can live in such a way that we can remain undisturbed whilst living in a situation which really ought to disturb us. The sign of a healthy, social-adapted person is to when we carry on in a perfectly unperturbed (or ‘oblivious’) way even though the system we are operating within is fundamentally abusive.
As we have said, this is how games work – games work by replacing reality with some kind of gimmick, some kind of cheat, some kind of cheap and nasty trick that we can’t see to be cheap and nasty just as long as we continue playing the game, just as long as we continue to adhere to the official narrative (and therefore continue to unreflectively reject anything that isn’t that narrative, no matter how impoverished and distorted the narrative in question might be). When ‘unwanted outcomes’ start to pop up out of nowhere (as they will) then we will take it that this is because we’re obviously not playing the game well enough, seriously enough, dedicatedly enough, and so on. The fault can never be in the game itself! When the system is enacted correctly and yet things still don’t ‘go to go to plan’, when errors appear on our feedback screens, then we don’t link these errors to the system itself, we simply can’t see the shortcomings of the system from the point of view of that very same system, and so when the errors that are inherent in the system show up on the scene we use the same system that caused them to try to clear them up again. The system is the error therefore, and so when it tries to ‘fix the error’ what’s happening is that it’s really just reproducing itself (or duplicating itself). The solution is the problem in disguise, in other words.
There’s nothing ‘healthy’ about this ubiquitous stretching business; stretching is actually FEAR – fear is the only reason we’re so super-keen on stretching as the (supposed) ‘solution for everything’, So what exactly is ‘wholesome’ about this? Frayed of what might happen here. The reason extending the known equals fair is because we’re afraid of what might happen if we stop extending it and extending it, if we let it ‘come to an end’. If we were to stop extending the Domain of the Known (and carrying on and on and on with it until we can’t carry on any longer) then – by definition – this would spell ‘the end of the known’, by definition we ‘won’t know what will happen next’, and – as Krishnamurti says – this is precisely what we are afraid of. The end of the known is what fear is all about and so of course we’re ‘hooked on stretching’. We can’t stop – we have to stretch. We have to stretch, stretch and keep on stretching – that’s the rule behind the Fear World. When you can’t stretch it anymore then you are in trouble. The rule we are obeying tells us to ‘hang on to the bitter end’, therefore…
The inevitable result of this tactic is what we call neurosis, is what we call neurotic suffering – neurotic suffering is what happens when our habitual practise of ‘drawing upon the unreal resource’ becomes painfully visible to us (whether we like it or not) because of the way it is no longer working for us. Game failure is what makes the game visible (where it wasn’t before). This means that we’re ‘waking up to the painful reality of our situation’ and – needless to say – this waking up to the painful reality of our situation isn’t much fun. It’s actually no fun at all. There’s no pleasure, no fulfilment, in it and conditioned existence doesn’t work when there is no possibility of achieving whatever it is we want to achieve, when there’s no possibility of getting some kind of ‘euphoric uplift’ that allows us to believe we have gained something. There’s no ‘gaining’ when it’s the stretching game we’re talking about – there’s no gaining because the so-called ‘stretching’ that we’ve staked all our money on isn’t real…
When we start to feel the pain of neurosis in earnest then we naturally double down on our efforts to consolidate our position, to get back on track, to get back into the game, etc, but it turns out that we’ve reached what generally gets called ‘the end of the line’ – the Law of Diminishing Returns has finally caught up with us and we find that we have to keep putting more and more effort in for ‘less and less results’. What’s more, the more we try to fix the problem the more pain this causes us; the more we try to ‘get back on track’ the more vicious the ‘rebound’ is. Eventually – whether we like it or not – we’re going to have to let go, but we’re not going to do this willingly. Our fingers are eventually going to release their grip, not because we want to, but because the pain of holding on becomes too great for us to bear any more. ‘Letting go’ is simultaneously the easiest most natural thing in the world and – from the point of view the one who’s doing the stretching – it’s the ultimate nightmare. It’s the final, irrevocable disintegration of the persona. Letting go would mean the undoing of the very fabric of our world, and thus the end of us within it. It’s ‘the outcome we least want’ (it’s ‘the ultimate bad result’) and – at the same time – it’s a blessing far greater than we can ever understand.
Image credit – walesonline.co.uk
