In the Superficial World nothing means anything; people simply don’t mean what they say – it’s all just for effect, it’s all just for show. That’s what the SW is – a show. We infer that there’s something more behind it but there isn’t. Nothing means anything in the Superficial World; even the most dramatic expression of undying love means nothing – it’s only a pose, a pose that we’re adopting for the sake of whatever narrative we want to present. We don’t see this (because it doesn’t suit us to) but it’s the truth nevertheless. The truth doesn’t support our posturing and so we don’t bother with it. The SW – we might say – is ‘whatever is convenient at the time’; there’s nothing more to it than this no matter how much we might like to believe that there is. There’s no actual meaning in it, it’s a ‘Meaning-Free Zone’. We’re ‘going through the motions’ but the motions are entirely meaningless…
It’s crucial for us that we don’t see this, that we don’t see the Superficial World to be superficial – that awareness would ruin the story that we have going. It would trash what we want to believe and leave us with nothing to hold onto, nothing to hide behind. It would bring us face to face with something we really don’t want to see, which is our terrible hollowness, our frightening fickleness. It’s just not just a ‘lack of integrity’, it’s not just that we are utterly fickle in this way, so too is the world which we create for ourselves, the world which we so unreflectively believe in. Both our presumed identity and the reality this identity takes for granted are aspects of the very same narrative and this mind-created narrative is at all times entirely arbitrary. It only ever has the meaning we want it to – it is in other words our own thoughts reflected back to us as if they were not our own thoughts. This generally works out just fine for us; there seems to be no problem with it but that’s only because we make very sure to always stay superficial. The problem here being that there is no strength in superficiality and so to see the true nature of this world becomes a horror that we simply aren’t strong enough to bear. The consequence of this is that our lives are ‘governed by fear’; the consequence of this is that we’re ‘locked into’ the The World that Fear Made…
The narrative we buy into – the ‘narrative which equals the Superficial World’ – is important to us as it is not because it’s true, not because it means anything, but because it serves a function that we can’t ever admit (which is that it is there purely to distract us). What the narrative distracts us from is ‘seeing that it is only a narrative’; the show exists purely to distract us from seeing that the show which we are being distracted by is only a show. The whole thing is that curious tautology, therefore – if we weren’t attached to the narrative then we wouldn’t need to distract for ourselves from seeing that it is only a narrative. If we weren’t ‘hooked on the show’ then we wouldn’t need to make sure that we never spotted the show for being ‘a show’. As a joke in The Simpsons goes, ‘Duff beer is both the cause of all our troubles and the cure’.
If we weren’t in the ‘attached mode of being’ then we wouldn’t need to distract ourselves from the fact; if we were not living our lives in a world that is 100% superficial then we wouldn’t have to spend so much energy ensuring that we never saw this fact. The covert rule in Game Reality is that we must never see that the game is a game, and just as long as we don’t see this to be the case everything we do will be in accordance with this see all; as long as we can’t see that we’re playing the Game of Denial then we’re going to be controlled by this game, controlled by the system; we can after all never escape from the limitations that we won’t allow ourselves to know about. The law is that when we deliberately avoid or repress an awareness then that repressed awareness owns us. It controls us absolutely.
To live in such a superficial way (with no connection to anything deeper than the so-called ‘truths’ – which are really avoidances – that it suits us to believe in) is pure suffering. There’s nothing in such a life but suffering. Having said this however, we should also note that the dynamics of this system are such that there is built into it the possibility of relief from the suffering, and this detail means that we can create a ‘world’ out of it – a world that is made up of pain as a backdrop, and the possibility, albeit temporary, of relief from that pain as ‘the way to go’ or ‘the outcome to aim at’. This is a bipolar situation therefore – a situation with YES at one end and NO at the other (YES signifying ‘escape from the pain’ and NO ‘failing to escape’). We’re not really talking about a world here therefore but a game – it’s a game that makes itself out to be a world by implicitly claiming to contain the possibility of meaningful change. This claim is what makes it possible to play the game, this is what allows us to become properly immersed in it. Immersion prevents us from seeing that no change can come ever come about as a result of anything we do within that immersed state; it stops us seeing that we can never find anything apart from ‘temporary relief’ no matter how skilfully we play, no matter how obedient we are to the rules of the game (which seem to us not to be rules but reality itself. The way the game remains viable to us (i.e., invisible) is by us launching into it therefore, since when we do this (when we play according to the rules) we can’t help believing that it can actually go somewhere, that it can actually deliver on its implicit promises. The illusion needs to remain intact and the way it remains intact is by us believing everything that it tells us, is by us remaining in the mode of ‘passively identification’. Just as long as we keep on taking the show seriously (which means refusing to see that it is a show, refusing to see that it is merely a series of empty appearances) we can keep on distracting ourselves forever; just long as we keep on drinking Duff Beer we won’t have to experience the hangover that it inevitably brings. Just as long as we keep on ‘doing what we’re addicted to doing’, we can postpone the cold turkey that is inevitably going to be waiting patiently for us at the end of the road. We’re in denial of the very thing that we’re creating by being in denial…
The setup works as well as it does, as perfectly as it does, because relief from the suffering of seeing how superficial, how utterly lacking in integrity we are equals pleasure, equals delicious, seductive euphoria. Pleasure isn’t a ‘thing in itself’, therefore – it’s a temporary cessation from the pain that we can’t ever really get away from. ‘Mania is the denial of despair’, says Johannes Fabricius. Euphoria comes about as a result of us successfully distracting ourselves from the ongoing misery and sterility of our enslaved existence – as long as we maintain steadfast belief in the possibility of finding the pot of gold at the end of the road we can continue, we can find the motivation to carry on (despite the fact that what we’re chasing is an illusion that recedes at the same rate as we approach it). Because we have fallen into the trap of ‘allowing ourselves to believe that the cash is as good as in the bank’ we get to experience the prize of euphoria; the euphoria is our ‘down payment’ on the funds which we imagine to be in the bank, but which aren’t. This ‘unwarranted assumption of success’ is the gimmick that sets up the economy of the game, the gimmick that allows the whole business to keep on ticking over in the way it does. Our incapacity to spot the trick that is being played on us (or that we are playing on ourselves) gives rise to the ‘perpetual motion machine’ (or as we could also say, the ‘eternal repetition machine’) that is unconscious living.
The gimmick – in essence – is nothing more sophisticated than never looking beneath the surface (the ‘surface’ being the unexamined belief that the money is in the bank when it isn’t) – just so long as we don’t ever question this assumption then the game can continue forever. The Wheel can keep on turning forever. All we need to do to bring about the Unconscious State is to ‘accept the presented surface at face value’ and this simply comes down to a matter of obedience, to a matter of ‘obeying the rules that we have been given. The ‘gimmick’ we’re on about is simply obedience therefore, and because can’t acknowledge that we are merely ‘obeying machines’ (without losing the illusion of being this concrete self) we’re stuck in this absurd situation indefinitely. Because we started off with a lie, we’re obliged to keep on with it; because we’re ‘addicted to certainty’ we have to be perfectly compliant with the rules of the game (since it is only in the game that there is such a thing as ‘certainty’) whilst at the same time not acknowledging that we are being compliant with any rules. This is why we have such an intolerance of the rebel, the revolutionary, the one who dares to question the status quo. No crime can be greater than this we say – such a person threatens to bring about disaster; such a person threatens to bring the whole world crashing down. Anything that isn’t 100% superficial threatens to burst our bubble, and that’s why ‘not sticking to the banal superficialities of life’ (which is to say, our ‘scripted dramas’) is strictly taboo in the ‘fake world’ that we have so diligently constructed for ourselves…
Image credit – time.com
