The self can only exist within an environment that validates it, an environment that supports and facilitates it. Outside of this special environment, there can be no self. The self or ego is a function of this environment therefore – it is a function of the logic behind this environment. It is ‘the output of a machine’, in other words.
When we say that this self or identity can only exist within an environment that facilitates it this isn’t a reference to the world of trees and rivers and fields and oceans, and so on – it’s not the natural world we’re talking about here but the artificial (or designed) one (the ‘artificial world’ basically meaning society). Society is an artificial world because it is all about following arbitrary rules – arbitrary rules that grant us no leeway, no freedom at all. This is the way artificial systems always are and it’s also the way the natural world absolutely never is.
Instead of talking about ‘the artificial world versus the natural one’ we could speak in terms of ‘the simulation of reality versus the actual thing itself’. The simulation runs along established tracks – there’s nothing else to a system but ‘a set of established tracks’ – and so nothing ever goes anywhere unexpected, nothing ever does anything unexpected. It’s all a foregone conclusion and the impression that we have of the field as being open – which is to say, of things not being preordained – is a trick, a cheap gimmick. It’s a cheap trick that transforms the sterile simulation into an actual world – a place that we can live in, a place that we can inhabit on a full-time basis without suspecting that we’re missing out on something vital. Without the trick, without the illusion, it wouldn’t work at all! Far from working, the mind-created simulation would be revealed as an utter horror, a type of ‘living death’…
The natural world doesn’t facilitate the conditioned perception that ‘we are this isolated ego’ and because of this lack of support for the mind-created sense of self it’s not a comfortable place for us to be in; it’s not a safe place for us (at least, it isn’t a safe place when our secret agenda is to be able to cosily identify with thought’s construct of who we are). Reality isn’t a safe place for us to be in in this case and it’s not just that it isn’t a safe place, it’s a profoundly inimical situation for us. It’s a scenario to be avoided at all costs. Reality (whatever that might be) is our most deadly enemy and so we have to be constantly striving to escape from it, we have to be constantly distracting ourselves from seeing the truth of what’s going on. The simulation is a place of constant striving therefore – it most definitely isn’t a place where we can relax and ‘be ourselves’ in. All we can ever do here is try as hard as we can to be who (or what) we aren’t…
Nothing is represented honestly in the mind-created simulation (which is another way of talking about the ‘conditioned reality’) – we can’t, for example, see the true significance of what we’re constantly trying to do (which is to say, escape from the perception of how things really are). Instead, this escapist- type activity is seen in a backwards way as us ‘striving to achieve authentic external values’; we’re not trying to escape from reality at all – we are – on the contrary – heroically striving to engage with it. We’re ‘doing the responsible thing’, we’re ‘doing what is right and proper for us to do’. We’re doing what is honourable, we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re doing what everyone understands to be ‘serving a legitimate and worthwhile purpose’ and so where’s the need to go dragging doubt into this situation? Where’s the need to start questioning things? The system can’t understand any way that different from its own way – it can’t accept anything but itself – and so there can be no ‘doubt’.
For the most part we automatically approve of anyone who conceives of a goal and then seeks to bring it about; we automatically approve of this type of thing because it’s progressive rather than passive, because it’s affirming ourselves as being purposeful, as being ‘self-determining autonomous beings’, and so on. Aside from the strictly pragmatic side of things (which is to say, when we need to obtain an outcome that is practically necessary for us such as food when we’re hungry or somewhere to sleep when we’re tired) overvaluing goal-orientated activity is kudos to the isolated ego-identity. It’s kudos because it enhances the fiction that it genuinely does have ‘a life of its own’, and that therefore it isn’t merely ‘a function of its environment’ (i.e., the result of some causal process that has nothing to do with it). Successful controlling (or – indeed – any attempt at controlling) allows the conditioned sense of self to feel that it is an actual entity in itself, rather than being a manufactured thing, a show that is being ‘put on’ (so to speak) by the machine.
‘It really is me that’s doing this!’ I say excitedly, but the truth is not so much that ‘I am doing’ but that ‘I am being done’. The sense that ‘I am doing’ is being done. I’m not ‘the one who is controlling’, but rather I’m ‘the one who is being controlled’. I am not the producer but the product, I am not the actor but the act, and so on. To quote David Bohm, ‘Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it.’. We think that we’re ‘thinking’, and that this is a volitional act, whilst the reality is that the perception of the process being volitional is something that that the thinking process itself creates for us. The ‘perception of agency’ is a product of the machine of thought. That’s the trick we’re always so busy trying to buy into…
The illusion is that ‘I am thinking this thought’ (which is what gives rise to the conditioned perception of me being the thinker) whilst the truth behind this thin illusion is that there is no separate ‘thinker’ (any more than there is ‘a doer’). There is no thinker that is separate from the thinking, there is only the mechanical process itself, chugging away day and night as it manufactures and maintains the fiction that there is an independent agent at work who is volitionally (or ‘freely’) doing the thinking. In short, the thinker is only just another thought. To quote Krishnamurti,
The thinker and his thought are a unitary process, neither has an independent continuance; the watcher and the watched are inseparable. All the qualities of the watcher are contained in his thinking; if there’s no thinking, there’s no watcher, no thinker.
We might think that it is eminently reasonable for us to be creating an environment for ourselves that supports and validates us – it makes perfect sense that we should do this. Our environment should serve us, after all! If I construct a living space for myself then (naturally enough) I will make sure that this space fulfils my various needs – a chair to sit on, a table to eat off, a bed to sleep in, and so on. But when we say that the self can only exist within an environment that validates its existence, an environment that facilitates and supports our existence, this is not at all what we mean. What we’re getting at here is something entirely different – we’re not talking about ‘an environment that obediently reflects our wishes,’ but an environment which conjures up the illusion that there actually is an autonomous agent there to have wishes, an independent entity that can make its own choices and then control the situation in accordance with them…
If the ‘conditioned sense of self’ is dependent upon the system within which it is bound to have its existence (since without that system there could be no CSOS) then this means that the boot is very much on the other foot, clearly. Any perception of ‘autonomy’ here is a pure hallucination. When I am an adapted member of society (for example) then I can say – without fear of contradiction – that I am being ‘supported and facilitated by that system’ (which is of course our perception) but if it is the case that my sense of identity has been provided for me by the social system in the first place – which it absolutely has been – then it is not really true to say, as we do, that society is ‘serving us’. That’s the illusion right there. Society – like any system – is serving itself. That’s all it ever does…
Image credit – action.ai
