What’s the point of ‘trying to make things be what they aren’t’? This might seem like a stupid question but there’s a lot in it. There’s actually a whole world in it, albeit a virtual one, albeit a make-believe one.

The point is that we don’t have to face up to the fact that ‘we can’t make things be what they’re not’. Very obviously we don’t have to face up to this – we don’t have to face up to anything! We can very easily convince ourselves that it is quite possible, perfectly possible to do this impossible thing.

As soon as we convince ourselves of this (which, as we have indicated, doesn’t take much doing) we feel good. Straightaway we feel that we are ‘onto a winner’ and this is a great feeling. We have created a good feeling for ourselves and we haven’t even done anything! Or rather we have done something, but what we’ve done is not a legitimate thing, not a real thing.

The first step in the creation of the virtual world (which is very soon to become the only world we know and can know) is that we have to create this ‘good feeling’, therefore. This is the ingredient that we start off with, and everything proceeds from here. Instead of ‘let there be light’, we have ‘let there be euphoria‘…

‘Let there be euphoria’ is the demiurgic fiat, the great ‘let it be so’ that precedes everything. This is the good feeling that comes when we convince ourselves that we can achieve the goal we have set ourselves (even though this goal is ultimately no more than our own mental projection that we can’t see to be such). It is the good feeling that comes when we attain the goal and it is also the good feeling that comes when we are convinced that there is actually someone there to achieve the goal!

What we are talking about here is ‘the euphoria of believing that we are a self’, therefore. This is very much like starting off in a game of Monopoly – we start off with $200 in our pocket and we can’t wait to run off and spend it! We can’t wait to spend the gold. We are going to buy a whole load of property for ourselves and start up our own business empire and boy does this feel good!

The thought of all that we can do and that all that we can experience and all we can achieve is a profoundly intoxicating form of excitement; this is heady stuff indeed – no wine was ever as potent an intoxicant as this! Once we get drunk on this particular wine we can’t see straight at all – we can’t see anything for what it is. Crucially, we can’t see how impossible it is to ‘make things be what they are not’. We could say that this is ‘the wine of the imagination,’ or ‘the wine of fantasy’, therefore.

There is more than just the ingredient of ‘euphoria’ in the game that we are playing however. That wouldn’t work at all. That would be like playing a game of Monopoly which you are guaranteed to make money no matter what you do, or it will be like playing a game of Snakes and Ladders where there are only ladders! The game will not work like this – they must be losing in order for winning to mean anything. There must be an UP for there to be a DOWN – that’s just how duality works!

Euphoria never exists alone, in other words – without the counterpoint of dysphoria it means nothing. So we start off with the (unexamined) conviction that we can change things to be what they’re not and this feels great, and where the bad feeling comes in is when something gets in the way, when something obstructs us in our progress towards the imaginary goal that we are aiming at. Then, when this happens, fickle euphoria ‘turns around’ for us and instantaneously becomes its opposite.

When things are going well then we are all jolly and happy, but the other side of the coin is that when things aren’t going well then our smile gets immediately turned upside down to become a frown. That’s how fickle our smile is – it’s actually nothing more than a frown waiting to happen’! Our smile (or good humour) doesn’t mean a damn thing, therefore.

This is true for all mental states when we are playing the game of believing that we can make things be what they are not – all our mental states are smiles or frowns of one description or another, and each one of them can flip around in an instant to become its opposite.

This is a remarkable thing to consider – that all states of mind (when we are playing the game of believing that we can make things be what they aren’t) come down to various shades of euphoria or dysphoria. But how could it be otherwise? When we playing this particular game then whatever mental state then what other mental state could we ever possibly being? In order to experience another mental state we would have to stop playing the game, and the problem with this is that we just don’t want to stop playing the game. We absolutely don’t want to. And it’s not just that we don’t want to stop playing the game, our resistance to stopping playing the game is such that we won’t even allow ourselves to know that we are playing a game in the first place.

In order to experience a real state of mind (i.e. in order to be conscious rather than unconscious) we would have to care about something other than ‘making things be what they aren’t’. It’s as simple as that. We would have to relax in our efforts, we would have to take a break from the impossible task. If we were able to take our attention off the ‘impossible task’ then we be able to care about be able to care about something else. We would actually be able to take an interest in reality!

The snag here is, as we have just said, that we don’t want to take attention off this ‘task’; that’s the whole point of what we doing – the point is that we have to keep on pushing for the imaginary goal, no matter what! This is the one thing that we can’t drop, after all. The one thing that we can’t ever let go of is ‘the hope that we can one day make things be what they aren’t’.

Even when we’re in the depths of despair (which is one of the flavours that dysphoria comes in) we haven’t let go of the hope that we can one day make things be what they’re not; we’re still convinced that this ought to be possible, we’re still convinced that it would be ‘the best thing ever’ (or the ‘ultimate advantageous outcome’) if we could do this. But how could this be a good thing’? But by what stretch of the imagination could it be a good thing to ‘make things be what they’re not’, even if that were possible? What benefits do we think can come from this folly?

What we don’t see is that ‘trying to make a thing be what it isn’t’ moves us lock, stock and barrel into the realm of fantasy, into the world of imagination and ‘success’ in the particular endeavour is always going to work against us therefore. Because our goal – the thing we are aiming at – is nothing other than our own projection this means that what we are ‘aiming at’ is simply ourselves. I am my own goal.

This doesn’t seem to make much sense. How can the goal that I am aiming at be myself? But the thing is that it’s not so much that ‘we are aiming at ourselves’ but rather that in attaining ‘the goal’ what we are really attaining is ‘the inferred reality of the attainer of the goal’. This is something that we can’t just come right out with; I can’t just say ‘I am striving to attain the inferred reality of the attainer of the goal’) because this would straightaway be an own-goal. We can’t say this – very obviously – and so we have to be indirect in our approach.

We started off this discussion by asking what the point of trying to get something to be what it isn’t could be. On the face of it, there would seem to be no point ; we could also answer however that the point is to create a virtual world, a virtual world that we can take to be ‘the real thing’. We could surely say that that this is ‘a point’, after all!

When we go deeper into it however we find that there still isn’t a point – even within the terms of the conditioned reality that we have magically conjured up. The virtual world that we have created is after all only a vibration and a vibration doesn’t go anywhere. We keep charging at the goal (which, as we have said, is our own projection) and the same thing keeps happening – we get caught up in a neverending oscillation between positive and negative. When we tilt at this particular windmill what happens is that we first obtain the intoxicating euphoria that comes then we ‘prove’ to ourselves that we exist, and then the next thing is that we experience the backlash that comes when we get negative validation instead of positive. What gets validated must also be devalidated and this is a Law that no one can escape from!

Both positive and negative validation come down to the same thing – both are affirming statements, both are statements that say ‘the self exists’. One half of the vibration says that we exist and this is ‘right’, whilst the other half says that we exist alright, but in some kind of ‘wrong’ way. We exist as a loser not as a winner. The positively affirming statement gives rise to pleasurable type of existence, and the negatively affirming statement gives rise to a painful type!

Outside of the virtual world that is created by this vibration there is no positive or negative, no right or wrong however. Positive and negative don’t exist on their own – they have to refer to some kind of ‘thing’. Right and wrong don’t exist in their own right – there has to be something that is either right or wrong. Euphoria and dysphoria don’t exist on their own either – they have to refer to a self, they have to refer to ‘me’. The ‘me’ is a thing we are trying so hard to say exists, the self is the point we trying to prove, but outside of the vibration there are simply are no things, just as outside of the vibration there is no ‘me’. The ‘me’ is the vibration….






Art : Fauna In La Mancha, Vladimir Kush