The situation of being trapped in the Mind-Created Polarity is a truly remarkable one, for all that we never see it. What could be rarer than seeing the Mind-Created Polarity for what it is? When we spend our lives within the logic loop which is the MCP then the one thing that we will never do a spot our situation for what it actually is.
Only two things exist within the pseudo-world of the MCP – one is YES and the other is NO, and YES only exists when we assume the existence of NO, just as NO only exists when we assume the existence of YES. And yet (within the system) YES and NO are all that we can never know! Nothing else exists for us…
YES and NO are a ‘mutually conditioning’ pair. They are ‘mutually arising’, to use the Buddhist term. Winning can only ever be meaningful from the point of view of losing, and losing can only ever be meaningful from the point of your winning. From outside of the MCP, neither YES or NO, advantage or disadvantage, winning or losing mean anything at all, however.
YES and NO are just like two magnetic poles – we are pulled strongly towards one and repelled violently by the other. To say that we are ‘pulled strongly’ (or ‘repelled violently’) is not giving a correct account of our situation however. The magnetic attraction/repulsion becomes our will, it substitutes itself for our will, and so the absence of freedom which is the positive compulsion becomes my desire, it becomes ‘what I want’!
In the same way, the absence of freedom which is the ‘negative compulsion’ also becomes our will, only in this case it is ‘negative will’, or ‘fear’. Fear controls us just as desire does therefore, the only difference being that desire promises us an outcome that we see as’ good’, whilst fear threatens us with an eventuality that we unequivocally understand to be ‘bad’. It’s no good anyone telling us is no such thing as good or bad because good and bad as all we can understand when we are living within the MCP. These are the only terms we have. Moving towards the ‘good outcome’ produces the state of euphoria therefore, just as the perception that we are moving towards the feared (or ‘bad’) outcome induces the state of dysphoria.
Another way of putting this – a way which is possibly less familiar to us – is to say that going along with that ‘positive compulsion’ that is desire creates the illusion of the self (i.e. it creates the illusion of ‘the one who desires’), and resisting the ‘negative compulsion’ that is fear creates also creates the illusion of the self. The self gets created both ways therefore! Desire, when we ‘jump on board’, creates the illusion of ‘the one who desires’, just as fear, when resisted, creates the equally compelling illusion of ‘the one who is afraid’. There are only two directions to go in the MCP and going in either of them will create the self!
The reason we can use the word ‘illusion’ in this connection as emphatically as we do is because the belief that ‘one is this self’ relies on the perception we have autonomy or free will. What kind of ‘self’ doesn’t have autonomy, after all? How can it be considered worthy of the name without it? That’s what ‘autonomy’ means – it means that I am driving the car, not someone else. If I have absolutely no free will with regard to what I think or do, then how can I be said to be truly ‘myself’? I’m ‘someone else’s’, when it comes down to it! If I do not have any genuine input or influence of my own and am merely the passive or compliant facilitator of instructions that are given to me then what sort of ‘identity’ is it that I’m claiming? A genuine sense of autonomy cannot be based on ‘obeying rules’; unless there is freedom then there is no manifestation of who we truly are…
If I’m completely controlled, completely determined by ‘external factors’ (which is to say, if these external factors ‘say what I am’) then – very clearly – only the external factors exist, not me. We cannot say we exist unless we are wholly independent of all external factors, and so when we are trapped in the MCP then we are in no way independent. There is nothing of our true nature in this picture at all since our true nature is not that of a Mind -Created Polarity.
Our situation – then – when we are trapped in the MCP (as we always are trapped in the MCP) is that this ‘polar context’ completely defines us. It completely defines us because we have no way of knowing anything beyond it. It completely defines us because we have no way of seeing the world except in polar terms. It’s our very basis for seeing everything and so of course we can’t see beyond it! We ourselves are being defined in terms of ‘a polarity’ – the polarity of ‘self’ and ‘other’, the polarity of ‘me’ and’ you’…
In a way, everything that we have just said is just ‘so much talk’. It can be rationally-processed, just as everything that happens can be rationally processed – but if we did this then we would be missing the point! It’s as if someone were to walk up to us and say the most shocking thing that we have ever heard in our lives – the most shocking thing we could ever hear. The point is not to walk away and think about what we have just heard! What is thinking but resistance, anyway?’ Thinking’ – in this situation – is just us trying to find ‘a legal loophole’, a ‘way out’? But there’s no ‘way out’ from awareness – no legitimate way out, at any rate!
There may be no legitimate way out (or escape) from awareness but there is an illegitimate one – and that is to allow ourselves to be completely swallowed up by the Mind-Created Polarity!
So then we are in this situation where we are we are in this world where there are only two things: the advantage and disadvantage, the good outcome and the bad outcome, and where the advantage only exists in relation to the disadvantage and the good outcome only exists in relation to the bad one! Your desire to gain the advantage and avoid the disadvantage in this situation has nothing whatsoever to do with you – it’s simply the inevitable mechanical consequence of the polar situation that you find yourself in!
We have been subsumed therefore within a preposterous illusion within which we have no free will but instead are provided with a thinly disguised parody of the same which we – because of our absolute lack of curiosity regarding ‘the self and its wishes’ – have assumed to be our actual real genuine authentic volition in the matter. We never doubt that the ‘extrinsic motivation’ is the same thing as our own will! This is, in effect, the same as someone ordering us to do X, Y and Z and yet somehow thinking that it was our idea all along. We have been very effectively manipulated, in other words; we have been manipulated by the illusion! Nothing the concrete self says or does or thinks has anything to do with us really – we are merely ‘hitching a ride’ as a passive passenger!
But what kind of ‘ride’ is this? It’s got to be the dumbest ride going! We are being mechanically bounced from one mutually-arising opposite to the other, over and over again ad infinitum, whilst imagining the whole time that we doing this of our own volition, because we ‘want’ ‘X’ and we ‘don’t want’ ‘Y’! The pseudo-entity that we are calling ‘the concrete self’ is itself created entirely by the identification that we have made with a positive component of the plus/minus compulsion pair that makes up the MCP. We identify with the movement in the positive direction (because it is the euphoric direction) and we fight for all we’re worth against the movement in the negative direction, even though this movement is every bit as much ‘the MCP’ as the positive one.We’re just as much negative as positive, in other words.
The thinking mind leads us to believe that there are two possibilities – one advantageous beyond imagining, the other disadvantageous beyond imagining. Both possibilities excite us beyond measure – one excites our greed, the other our fear. Yet they AREN’T two possibilities here at all; there isn’t even one – there are precisely zero possibilities within the MCP! There are zero possibilities in the MCP, and infinite possibilities in Non-Dual Reality, which is the only sort of reality there is…
Image: Taken from Surreal Circus Zone in sonicfanon.fandom.com
