There is a state of mind in which everything becomes all about ‘gaining rather than losing’. This is – needless to say – a state of mind that we’re all very familiar with. It’s perfectly legitimate to be concerned with this matter of gaining versus losing, on and off, now and again, from time to time, whenever it is considered appropriate to do so. This is called ‘utilising the rational-purposeful mind’! Utilising the rational-purposeful mind isn’t detrimental to our psychological wellbeing (which is to say, ‘tipping in and out of the purposeful mode’ isn’t injurious to our mental health) but when everything is deliberate, when everything is about ‘gaining versus losing’, then a catastrophe in mental health has taken place.
What we’re talking about here is a complete collapse of consciousness, which is clearly no small thing! When a collapse in consciousness takes place – which is to say, when we become completely mechanical in ourselves – then we might be forgiven for thinking that there’s no way that we can claim this to be ‘a state of mental health’ (even if the mechanical mode of being is the default, which it is). The fact that the mechanical mode of being is the default means that we as a culture do try to claim that being rational and purposeful all the time is the gold standard in mental health, but this claim is of course perfectly absurd all the same. It doesn’t matter how many people testify that something is true if it isn’t! The only way we can continue to take our absurd idea about what constitutes ‘mental health’ seriously (and not laugh out loud at it) is by treating our approach as a dogma (the thing about a ‘dogma’ being of course that it must never ever be questioned).
It is absurd to treat life as if it were all about ‘gaining versus losing’. That’s just a trivial game – it’s a convention that has nothing to do with the actual nature of reality (which is not lacking, which is ‘complete in itself’). This whole business of ‘plus and minus’, ‘more and less’, ‘good and bad’ is our own arbitrary imposition on the situation, which has itself absolutely nothing to do with any of our mind-created dualities. When everything DOES become all about ‘gaining versus losing’ then what this means is that we have – unbeknownst to ourselves – slid over into an oversimplified version of reality (an artificial copy or simulation of reality) which is all about ‘more versus less’. This simulated world (which is to say, the Continuum of Logic) is a world that absolutely doesn’t exist anywhere apart from in our own minds and yet as far as we’re concerned this is the only reality there is. As far as we’re concerned nothing else exists apart from this ‘construct that we cannot see to be a construct’ and so we have no other option but to try our very best to obey all the absurd demands it makes upon us. We are controlled by these demands.
What we’re talking about here isn’t just ‘a little bit of pressure’, it’s absolute brute compulsion. When we ‘slip imperceptivity into the virtual world that has been created as the backdrop to the activity of the thinking mind’ we end up in a domain that is 100% unfree, a domain that is governed entirely by rules. The oversimplified version of reality (or ‘oversimplified version of life’) is the Virtual Compulsive Environment, therefore. It’s ‘the VCE’ because: [1] It doesn’t exist outside of our thoughts, and [2] There’s absolutely no freedom in it. These qualifications shouldn’t sound too strange to us – they shouldn’t sound too strange to us because the situation that we’ve just defined is better known as ‘a game’ and we’re all very familiar with games. Everyone knows what it means to ‘play a game’, but none of us appreciate just how playing a game works (or what ‘a game’ is all about). We don’t understand that when we get immersed in the game then – despite how it may feel – the game is playing us.
We’d never say that ‘a game is a situation with Zero Freedom in it’ – we would rather say something like ‘games are based on rules’ (even though this is just another way of saying the same thing). When we’re playing a game then losing is something we can’t have anything to do with – ‘Failure is not an option’, we say. We’re not ‘free to lose’ in other words, and if we’re not free to lose then this means that’s where not free to win either! We’re compelled to win and if we can’t then that failure is simply unacceptable. To say that ‘failure is not an option’ is the same as saying that striving to win is a compulsion (or that it is ‘compulsory’) which indicates that we have no freedom and so this naturally doesn’t sound so good to us. We’re not able to feel good about this – we’re not ‘heroes’ after all, merely slaves, and that’s rather a big difference. We pretend to a dignity that we just don’t have, which is the dignity of being autonomous beings.
If we never question whether we are ‘free to refrain from trying to win’ (or whether we are not free to do this) then it wouldn’t occur to us that we’re ‘not free not to try our hardest to win’, and that’s nothing more than slavery, no matter how much we might like to talk it up. Compulsory striving is always slavery. Very simply therefore, this is the mechanism by which we trap ourselves – we trap ourselves by never questioning whether we’re actually free to stop striving. Or as we could also say, we trap ourselves by automatically obeying (or trying to obey) whatever mechanical impulses come our way. Not questioning this situation is the only reason we don’t realise that we’re not free – if we questioned it then we’d straightaway see that we aren’t. Our natural curiosity – which is inseparable from who we are in our essence – has to be completely repressed and if ‘that which is inseparable from who we truly are’ has been completely eliminated from the picture, completely repressed, then what do we imagine is going to be left? How is this going to work out for us?
The point is however that we just don’t care – it is of course of no interest to us that we are that we have lost that essential part of us (the part which is interested in things for their own sake rather than being interested solely in the banal game of ‘gain versus loss’). The part of us that would be interested in the world – which is to say, the real part of us – isn’t there anymore, after all. It’s gone; it’s been disabled. It’s been replaced by a reflex-machine. How are we ever going to be interested in anything after this? No one needs to monitor us, supervise or police us since we simply don’t have the necessary independence of mind to start taking an interest in what’s going on around us in the first place. We’re ‘obeying machines’ – we’re trapped by our own literal mindedness. We have become literal minded and to be literal minded is to be the unknowing slaves of whoever it is that is written the narrative. Literalism means that ‘the narrative controls us’, it means that we are ‘the victims of our own device’.
We could talk about the state of mind in which we ‘can’t help understanding everything literally’ (which is a truly frightening idea, if only we could see it) or we could talk about that modality of being in which life is all about gain versus loss, the modality in which there is nothing but gaining and losing. It’s the same thing – it’s the same state of being that we’re talking about in both cases. That can be no gaining if there’s nothing there to be gained and neither of course can there be any losing. Or if we were to look at this the other way around, we can say that there can be no one there to gain or lose outside of the Literal Realm and the Literal Realm – as we keep on saying – doesn’t exist anywhere outside of our own thoughts. The Literal Realm is our game, in other words.
We could say that the Purposeful Doer only gets to exist within the assumed context (or framework) of our own thoughts, but there’s a bit more (or a bit less, perhaps) to this since what we’re looking at here doesn’t fit our ordinary notion of course-and-effect – we could say something like ‘there’s no gaining or losing without there being a Purposeful Doer’ (which is a statement that makes perfect sense to it on account of it being so nice and linear), but it would be equally true to say that ‘the PD couldn’t exist without the possibility of there being such a thing as ‘gaining and losing’ (which is to say, the self can’t exist without the projection of the kind of concrete and compartmentalized reality within which things can be either gained or lost). We can’t play checkers without first making a checkerboard to play on. The literally understood sense-of-self can’t have the subjective reality that it does have for us without the Projected World that it lives in, and the Projected World that we live in can’t exist for us (in the way that it so definitely seems to) unless we have this this unquestionable sense that we actually are this identity.
The ‘Projector’ and the ‘Projected World’ constitute a mutually-arising pair, in other words. This is what’s called ‘codependent arising’ in Buddhism – the dreamer and the dream produce each other, in a perfect example of bootstrapping. This is ‘the ancient snake’; Jung tells us that just as long as this old snake (the snake that feeds on itself) is not interrupted in its constant swallowing of itself nothing can ever change as regards our essential situation; our essential situation being that we’re going to carry on looping endlessly in an entirely meaningless way. We’re going to continue believing that subject and object are two totally different things, we’re going to continue to believe that our ever-proliferating projections are an independent reality that have nothing whatsoever to do with us. We are going to continue imagining that we’re not part of a tautological loop of logic that is busy devouring itself the whole time (without us ever being able to notice this very significant fact).
This (the snake that keeps on devouring itself) is the ‘catastrophe in mental health’ that we started off by talking about. It’s a catastrophe because [1] It’s completely unreal, and [2] we can’t ever escape from it. We don’t know that we’re playing a game and because we don’t know that we are we can’t ever stop. If the viewpoint that we’re utilizing is the only viewpoint we know (if the concrete, compartmentalized sense of self is all we have to go on) then the only world we will have to go on is the world which is the unconscious projection of that self. If I take a sideways step away from my assumed frame of reference, away from the random vantage point that I have identified with, then I would catch a glimpse of the True World, the world which isn’t our own construct, the world which isn’t merely a projection, but this ‘sideways movement’, this ‘going beyond the habitual viewpoint’ (the habitual viewpoint which is the self) is something we’re just not interested in. Most of the time we don’t even know that it’s possible and on the odd occasion when we start to realise that it actually is possible, we are immediately struck by a very great terror. Going beyond the illusion of who we think we are is the one thing we don’t ever want to do…
Image credit – Shepard Fairey, ‘Alternative Facts’, 2022
