We are hypnotised by patterns of non-change that appear to be change and the result of this hypnosis is that our consciousness is completely controlled by these patterns. The patterns in question have an absolute hold on us and they determine everything about us. We live in thrall to them.
‘Patterns of non-change that appear to be change’ equal – in more familiar language – vibrations or oscillations. Vibrations/oscillations equal ‘circular change’ or ‘repetition of the same pattern’, which of course equals ‘non-change disguised as change’. We seem to be getting somewhere but we’re not…
Vibrations, when seen from a psychological point of view, equal games. That’s what games are. A game is an oscillation that we ourselves enact; it is a vibration that we ourselves fuel. We enact or fuel the vibration by ‘chasing one opposite and fleeing the other’ – that’s what turns the wheel. Our motivation is to ‘win rather than lose’ and this is extrinsic motivation, motivation that is imposed on us from the outside. EM is generic motivation, ‘one size fits all’ motivation. There is nothing individual here at all and this is what Jung means when he says that by letting the common passions be our master we becoming ‘Everyman’, who stumbles somnambulistically into the ditch in the manner of ‘the blind leading the blind’.
Extrinsic motivation is the motivation of ‘fear-and-desire’. What we call ‘fear’ is much more than we generally understand by the term however – fear is actually a manifestation of ‘the Law of the Vibration’. Or as we could equivalently say, desire is a much more fundamental thing than we usually understand it to be. Fear / desire isn’t merely some kind of useful biological mechanism therefore, but a fundamental physical law. It goes beyond biology.
This means that just as long as the vibration (or the game) is controlling or determining our consciousness, fear/desire is our absolute master and this law will determine everything about us. This law is all. <Fear versus desire> (or <attraction versus aversion>) equals our whole world and ‘our whole world’ equals ‘the vibration’. We are ‘Prisoners of the Polarity’.
When we are living in the vibration of fear and desire then extrinsic motivation (motivation from without) is our rightful master and there can be no escaping it. As long as we identify with the ego-construct <fear versus desire> is our rightful master. Obtaining what we desire or escaping what we fear is the ultimate rule and we can’t go beyond it. The self-construct can never be free from fear/desire – it isn’t interested in freedom anyway. It’s only ‘interested’ in the freedom to chase after its goals, the freedom to follow its desires. It is only interested in the so-called ‘freedom’ to escape from what it fears.
Another way of talking about the vibration is to say that is ‘the old’, whilst the ‘mysterious current’ spoken of by Krishnamurti is ‘the new’. This mysterious current is the unfolding of that which is forever new – it is the movement into the unknown and the unknowable. The vibration is therefore the antithesis of this, the antithesis of the movement into the unknown. The positive is the old and the negative is the old; the positive is the known and so is the negative. There is never any ‘unfolding of reality’ in the vibration.
Life is unbearable without the new, unbearable without change, we might say. Like is not life at all without the new, without change. Without change we are stuck, and how bad does it feel to be stuck? How terrible is it to spend our lives recycling time, to be condemned to the eternal repeat of Groundhog Day? Who we are in our essence is this movement and so to deny the movement (which is ‘the movement of freedom’ or ‘the movement of life’) is to deny our own true nature. It is to deny reality itself.
What the vibration does (what games do) is replace ‘newness’ by the hallucination of ‘the pole where we are not’. We are always straining towards the attractive but hallucinatory complimentary polar opposite, we are always striving to redeem our unsatisfactory situation by ‘achieving’. The ego-construct needs to ‘achieve’ because achieving is its substitute for ‘movement into the new’. It can (and does) project a value or meaning on the achieving of its goal that isn’t there; when the ego-construct achieves its goal (which is its own protection) this means nothing at all however; chasing (or fleeing from) our projections never means anything at all. This is ‘null-activity’, this is ‘Enacting the Nullity’…
Despite this the ego-construct continues to strive for what it thinks is meaningful, it continues to strive for what it thinks will redeem it from its predicament (which is the predicament of itself), and the result of this striving is the enacting of the vibration. Our striving to obtain the good outcome and avoid the bad one fuels the vibration and ensures its continuation. The motivation to win rather than lose (to obtain what is right and avoid what is wrong) is at root the motivation to avoid or ignore reality. The vibration comes into being because of this reality-avoiding motivational force therefore. Or as we could also say, the game is endlessly perpetuated because of our unreflective refusal to acknowledge reality as being real. Instead, what we seek is ‘endless distraction’.
