The direst reality is the one we create for ourselves. There simply couldn’t be anything direr than this, and yet we don’t see it. We can’t ever see it. When we ‘do the dirty’ we do it to ourselves and it has always been this way. We save the worst for ourselves – we always save the worst for ourselves…

 

 

 

The direst reality is the one we create for ourselves. There’s none direr! The reason the reality we create for ourselves is so dire, so inimical, so uninspiring, is because we make it for ourselves. We make our own reality and yet it’s not truly us who makes it – it’s the impulses that live within us, the violent mechanical reflexes to which we are hosts. We make our own realities before we find out who we are, and who we’re not. The strongest, loudest, most aggressive voice wins out and the strongest, loudest most aggressive voice is not us! This is the voice of the bellower, the voice of the false creator, the voice of the ‘violent institution’, as Philip K Dick says.

 

 

 

We listen to the loudest, most frightening voice, and then we build the reality that this voice tells us to build, and this was always the way! We build ‘the institution’ for ourselves, and then we live in it. We always build ‘the institution’ for ourselves – we make it and remake it wherever we go. It’s all we know how to do. All we know how to do is create a world that denies us, a world that prevents us from ever knowing ourselves for who we actually are. This is all we know how to do and this is all we ever do – we build and rebuild the violent institution, this institution that rules over us by force. We give our power to ‘the authorities’.

 

 

 

This institution is society, in all its aspects. What else is society but a system of oppression, a system that thrives and grows fat on our oppression? No institution can exist unless it gets to define who or what we are, and how we should behave. No institution can exist unless it puts its needs first and our needs second. An institution is the same as a group, in this respect – unless we conform to the norms that have been established for the group then there can be no ‘group’. When individuality comes first then there is no group – there are only is only a collection or assembly of free individuals! All groups are tyranny, therefore. Groups mean conformity and conformity means denying oneself for what we see as a ‘good cause’. Conformity means betraying oneself – again, for what we see as ‘justifiable reasons’.

 

 

 

The direst reality is always the one we create for ourselves and what could be more ironic than this? Our intention is always to arrange things so that we may reap an advantage from that arrangement. This is the very mechanism of our existence – we look for what will give us the advantage, we look for what will benefit us, according to our understanding of what is meant by ‘advantage’, what is meant by ‘benefit’. We do what makes sense for us to do, from our particular point of view, from our particular ‘model’ of reality. What else could we do, after all? How else could we behave? We will always try to secure what seems to us to be the most helpful outcome.

 

 

 

We wish to create the version of reality that suits us best – there is no more basic statement of our psychology. We seek the advantage, we seek our own well-being, we try to secure our own happiness, as best we can, making the best of our circumstances – whatever they may be – and this is the way in which we deny ourselves…

 

 

 

And yet we can’t do otherwise! To be what we are is to do what we do – the two things are the same thing. We do what we are, and what we are is our viewpoint, our model of reality. We cannot help – therefore – from creating the direst, the meanest, the most impoverished, the most violent and oppressive of realities for ourselves; that is a function of our (conditioned) being. We enact our limiting models. We are slaves of ‘blind thought‘. We cannot help ourselves from creating the institutions that violently prevent us from ever seeing our true nature. We are powerless not to build our own prison walls, powerless not to construct the prison-planet, powerless not to create the very environment that is best suited to denying us…

 

 

 

 

Art: Emy Mariani,  taken from hiveminer.com