Systems are always perfectly ‘null’, always perfectly ‘hollow’, but this is the one thing we will never see (or never suspect) from the inside of the system, as it were. We can’t see things ‘as they are’ from inside the system. We can’t ‘know the truth’ from within the system. If we saw the set-up from the outside then we’d see it for what it is immediately, but the trouble is that we never do see it from the outside. We don’t know there is ‘an outside’. We only ever see them ‘from the inside’, which means that we don’t see them at all. We don’t know that we’re existing within an artificial system, or that there even is such a thing.
When we have become adapted to the system (which is to say, when we – by default – let the system define everything about us) then being able to see what it is that we’ve adapted to is going to be the very last thing that’s going to happen! It’s actually not going to happen. Aligning ourselves with this system is how we make it invisible to us and so then we’re being controlled without being knowing that we are, we’re slaves who do not know ourselves to be slaves. We’re the unconscious self-deluding servants of the False Creation. We’re prisoners inhabiting a world that was designed for us to inhabit, but which is no world at all. We’re termites living out our lives in the termite mound which is the Black Iron Prison.
This is the Great Trick, therefore – the trick that gives rise to Samsara. Every logically-consistent system – without exception – has this capacity to co-opt us, to absorb us, to subsume us, so that it then becomes the whole world for us, so that it becomes ‘the whole of what is possible’. When we’re ‘on the outside’ then we can see it for what it is and because we can see it for what it is there’s no question of us getting stuck in it. There’s nothing there to get stuck in, after all. What we’re calling ‘a system’ is a situation where nothing can ever happen apart from what has been prescribed in advance by the rules; it’s a very tight, very rigid, very regimented, very controlled situation therefore and yet the rules that govern this virtual world (like any rules) are entirely arbitrary (which is to say, they have been freely entered into). ‘It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely’, says Carse. There is never any compulsion outside of the rule to take that rule seriously, but once we do put ourselves within its domain, within its power, within its rightful remit, then we have no choice but to take it seriously.
When we’re on the outside (when we’re not playing the game) then all there is is freedom (it’s freedom all the way, freedom with no limits, freedom with no qualifications) whilst when we’re on the inside then there’s no freedom to be had there at all – there is the complete absence of freedom. The ‘complete absence of freedom’ is a curious thing however – it’s not at all what we might expect. It’s not like the stereotypical image we might have of it – we don’t go around groaning and moaning that someone took all the freedom away. The curious thing about the State of Zero Freedom is that we can’t spot it for what it is. Somehow, we continue to be absolutely convinced that we’re still free, we continue to be absolutely convinced that everything is fine and dandy ‘freedom wise’, or ‘autonomy wise’. The reason for this is that we have been provided with an artificial form of freedom, a theatrical (or make-believe) form of freedom, and we’ve forgotten that there was ever anything else. Or – as we could also say – we’re not free to remember that we used to have a different kind of freedom (which is to say, the real kind, the kind that isn’t a lie). We have complete amnesia about this.
The type of freedom that is provided for us by a logical system is ‘the freedom to obey whatever rules it is that we have been given to obey’! We run along the grooves that we have been given to run along, in other words – we are ‘determined from the outside’. If I was able to see that my life is being spent running down some arbitrary groove or other (in blissful ignorance that there is a world outside of this constrained form of existence) then I would be able to see that there is such a thing as genuine (or unconditioned) freedom, and I would also be able to see that I don’t have any, which would constitute an extraordinarily troubling awareness for me to have to deal with. This would constitute a painful awareness of my ‘alienation from everything that is real’ and this is -needless to say – not going to be an easy awareness to sit with. More than being just ‘difficult’ or ‘demanding’, this is an awareness that makes conditioned existence impossible. As Krishnamurti puts it, ‘Once you see something as false which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human, then you can never go back to it’.
The type of freedom available to us in a logical system is ‘theatrical not real’; if we go along with it without question, without ever looking into it any deeper, then it feels just like the real thing. If I do whatever you say as soon as you say it, without asking any questions, then very quickly it will seem as if I am doing what I want, not what you want. This is the mechanical process of identification, which is where we dispense with whatever freedom (or responsibility) we have and follow what some external source of authority tells us to do in a perfectly ‘unreflective’ way. We become mere ‘obeying machines’. When we do this then we cease to exist as the individuals we are and become the authority source ourselves – we become the structure so that all there is is ‘the structure’, so that all there is is ‘the system’. As extensions of this system – when we automatically do what the system demands we should do, when we automatically do what the rules say we have to do, then this feels just like freedom to us. This state of ‘conditioned slavery’ is what we understand as freedom…
So here we have the situation that we’re in: from ‘the outside’ – when we’re not identified with the set-up in question then the set-up (the game) doesn’t even exist. We have to agree that it exists, we have to go along with the idea that it exists (and then never look at the fact that we’re going along with an idea as if it weren’t just ‘an idea’, as if it were ‘the things way things are’.) Once we do this (once we ‘opt in’ to the game), then we experience the other side of the coin, we experience ‘what it’s like to be on the inside of a virtual world without knowing that we are on the inside of a virtual or provisional world, without us even knowing that there is such a thing as a virtual or provisional world’. We experience the conditioned life – which is where everything about us is defined by an external authority – and yet at the same time we don’t know that we are ‘experiencing the conditioned life’ since we’re passively identified with that system, with that structure, with the mechanical agency which (with ultimate authority) is telling us ‘who we are’ and ‘what life is all about’.
We don’t experience the situation that we’re trapped in ‘as it really is’ therefore, but rather we experience ‘the situation as it appears to be to us to be when we’re in a state of passive identification’, when we’re in ‘the actual situation of being completely controlled by an external mechanical agency without knowing that we are’. Our so-called ‘experience’ isn’t anything at all therefore; it’s the most phantasmagorical type of experience that there ever could be – it’s ‘the imaginary experience of an unreal life as lived by fictional entity, a purely notional entity, a projected entity that now has no more existence of its own than a shadow on the wall does. In a superficial way we can say that the shadow is there, that it is evident on the wall as ‘a thing of contrasts’ (as ‘a play of black and white’), but the thing about shadows of is of course that they are the projection of some ‘interruption to the light supply’ (an ‘occlusion of the light at its source’, as it were). Take away the obstruction (or interruption, or occlusion) and the shadow is ‘revealed’ as never having been there in the first place. Such as the nature of our this conditioned existence of ours, which is the virtual experience we are provided with – the virtual experience of ‘existing’ that we have been given by an authoritarian system or set-up which is entirely ‘null’, which itself does not exist. Its one thing being ruled over by cruelly abusive tyrant overlord we can’t do anything about, and another thing entirely to be imprisoned by a tyrant we ourselves invented.
Image credit – peakpx.com
