The laziest way of life is simply to copy what everyone else is doing, so that we don’t have to work anything out ourselves! Everyone copies what everyone else is doing and – as a result – no one actually knows what they’re doing. The only way we have of ‘knowing what we’re doing’ is by comparing it with the template that we’ve all have tacitly agreed upon and seeing how closely we are ‘conforming to the ideal’. If we conform closely enough then we know that we’re being successful, and if we ‘miss the mark’ then that tells us that we’ve failed, it tells us that we are failures at whatever it is that we’re supposed to be doing. This meaningless mechanical competition to be the best at what everyone else is doing becomes ‘what it’s all about’. Being successful rather than unsuccessful at the task we’ve been given becomes ‘the meaning of life’; successfully rather than unsuccessfully playing the social game (so that we can garner approval rather than disapproval becomes ‘the meaning of life’…
To recap what we have just said – mechanical competition is that situation where ‘what has gone before’ is taken as the gold standard of how things are supposed to be, and the consequence of this is that the only type of activity that’ s going to be considered legitimate by the closed system that is thus being created is optimization-type activity, which is to say, it’s activity that’s all about trying to accord with an agreed-upon standard (the standard in question simply being whatever it is that we have all – by default – agreed upon. The closer we come to agreeing with what has already been decided the more we are rewarded, the more we are validated. To copy whatever it is that we’re supposed to be copying with 100% accuracy, with 100% fidelity is to obtain maximum reward, maximum validation, and this is what we are striving for when we’re living in a ‘heteronomous’ (or ‘other-directed’) fashion. Nothing else matters to us – being validated by the system that we’ve adapted ourselves to is the only thing we care about when we are operating in heteronomous mode.
The reason we can say that this type of activity is ‘meaningless’ is because it hasn’t really got anything to do with us; we say that it does but doesn’t – it’s all entirely abstract, it’s ‘divorced from reality’. The ‘guidelines’ telling us what we should be trying to achieve (and how we are to go about this) are perfectly clear and unambiguous – there’s no problem at all on that score – but the price we pay for this neat and tidy set up is that by focussing on it we have become profoundly alienated from anything real – ‘the real’ having nothing whatsoever to do with ‘the ideal’. Were we to achieve 100% fidelity in reproducing the situation that we are supposed to be reproducing then this – as well as being ‘the best possible thing’ in terms of the game that’s being played – is also the point at which the meaninglessness or sterility of what we’re doing becomes total, becomes complete.
We can look at this in several ways – we can (for example) say that being in Heteronomous Mode means – in essence – that we’re trying to be the best we could possibly be at being who the external authority says we are – success means that we have severed ourselves completely from the basic ground of our existence (so to speak). ‘The basic ground of our existence’ is the Unitary State, which is simply ‘the way things are’. In utter disregard of ‘the way things are’, we set up this artificial situation where there is ‘this versus that’ and we use the framework of ‘this versus that’ in order that we might be able to play the game of ‘better and worse’, the game of ‘hit and miss’, the game of ‘winner versus loser’… In order to set up that situation where we can be free to play these games, we must however first block out (or ‘obstruct’) any awareness of the ‘non-artificial’ (or ‘natural’) world. Alternatively, we could say that ‘to orientate ourselves exclusively to the projected framework is to lose sight of our Intrinsic Freedom’ (i.e., we can say that ‘to be absorbed in polarities is to lose sight of our Intrinsic Freedom’)…
This is of course inherent in the word ‘artificial’ if a situation is artificial then it won’t ‘happen by itself’; it can’t hold together by itself and so it needs to be propped up. The way we prop up the artificial situation (within which we can play our never-ending games of ‘improvement versus unimprovement’, ‘better versus worse’, etc,) is by putting ourselves in a position where we’re simply not able to see how things really are. This is of course inherent in the nature of game-playing – in order to play a finite game (to use James Carse’s term) we need to fundamentally misrepresent the nature of reality to ourselves. In order to play a finite game – whatever that finite game might be – we first need to make up our own absurdly oversimplified version of reality, which is ‘a version of reality that has nothing whatsoever to do with the genuine article’. Frameworks – which is to say, ‘Extrinsic Order’ – has nothing to do with freedom (which is – we might say – ‘Intrinsic’ in its nature’). This is all very good and we can get away with it, if that’s what we want) but there are consequences for our reality avoidance – there are always consequences to reality avoidance!
We avoid reality by oversimplifying it and the way in which we oversimplify it is by ‘redefining our situation’ (so to speak) by saying that it is all about how well we can fit into a given framework. We don’t put it like this of course; we put it in a completely different way – we say something to the effect that ‘life is all about taking up our responsibilities’ (or more colloquially, we say that life is all about ‘copping on’, or ‘getting with the programme’). Talk like this is sneaky however, it’s sneaky because no one actually knows what our responsibilities are (or what exactly it is that we’re supposed to be ‘copping onto’). There is no ‘programme’, in other words. The unacknowledged assumption is precisely that we do know (that everyone knows) what it is that we should be ‘copping onto’, what it is that the so-called ‘programme’ consists of. Once we do assume this then naturally life straightaway becomes much more straightforward, it becomes much easier for us to know what it is required of us. The only problem with this gimmick however is that it’s all bogus – there’s no way it can’t be bogus because – as we’ve just said – no one does know ‘what it’s all about’. The universe doesn’t come with an instruction manual…
This is the thing we are obliged to gloss over, therefore – we have to gloss over the fact that no one does know what it’s all about, and this is exactly what we do do. This is exactly what we do all the time, across the board, under all cicumstances. This is the ace up our sleeve, this is the universal gimmick that we human beings have been using since day one. This is the ‘oldest trick in the book’. Life becomes very simplified indeed when we pull this stunt; essentially, we just have to ‘do what we’re told’, and what’s not to understand about this? It’s so very easy to understand what’s required of us here that we tend to get outraged when we come across someone who appears not to understand it. What we’re doing here therefore is that we’re putting some kind of ‘impregnable authority structure’ in place and once this has been done then it’s all plain sailing from there on. That’s all that’s needed. Authority is absolutely key here – once there is authority in place (authority being that organising principle which shapes the world but which is itself not shaped, which is itself not influenced by anything, then everything works like clockwork. There’s a very good reason why we’re all so addicted to authority structures, after all; it’s not for nothing that we spend our whole lives playing ‘power games’. The ego can in fact only exist in relation to whatever power games it is able to play – when it stops controlling it evaporates.
Theistic religion provides us with a perfect example of this principle. The cosmic scheme of things that we are presented with in traditional religious teachings is unashamedly authoritarian – God’s role is that of ruler, or monarch. He is the ‘king of kings’, the ‘boss of bosses’, the ultimate authority figure. The only way to live life in this scheme of things is for us to submit unreservedly to that authority (which means ‘taking it completely for granted’) and in this way we get to know our place in the world. We get to be orientated according to the established ‘hierarchy or being’. Our utterly unreflective ‘taking for granted’ of this authority or that authority is what creates the sense of security that we are so desperate to attain, which means that we have absolutely no incentive to dig any deeper, no incentive to actually pay any attention to what we say we believe in. To believe in God – or anything else, when it comes down to it – is to never question the matter, to never even be aware of the possibility of ‘questioning the context within which we are operating’. We can only have a nice secure box to exist within when we ignore everything outside of the box, and the same time ‘ignore our ignoring’. The idea that God or the Divine Principle is an authority and that the world (or life) works by slavishly obeying that authority is farcical however – this is simply us thinking that the universe runs in the same way that our mechanical minds do. What would be the point in God creating a universe which He absolutely controls? The fact that we accept this notion so easily shows how remarkably crude our understanding of the world (and ourselves) is.
The ‘oversimplified’ meaning of life is therefore simply that ‘we should adapt ourselves to the given framework’, and – as we have said – in order for this to work for us it is crucial that there can be no examining of that framework, no awareness of it. The FW has to be inviolate, in other words. Once the set of rules at his governing our behaviour is inviolate then it ceases to be a framework, it ceases to be a set of rules. Instead, it simply becomes ‘the way things are’, which is then not something we ever need to think about or reflect upon. When the framework has been made inviolable then it ceases to be ‘a mere framework’ and it becomes the world itself. It becomes ‘all there is’, and ‘all that ever could be’. An inviolable (and therefore all-determining) framework is what we have been referring to as the Extrinsic Order, therefore. The thing about this however – as we have pointed out earlier – is that the world ‘as it actually is’ -which is to say, Intrinsic Order (or Intrinsic Reality) – is not at all the same sort of thing as what it is being replaced with. Everything in the Extrinsic Reality is located, everything in the ER is in its right place, has been officially pinned down or catalogued, whereas the situation in the Intrinsic (or ‘Uncreated’) Reality is that there simply are no places for anything to be in – ‘places’ (or ‘locations’) simply don’t exist in the Original (or Symmetrical) Situation. There is no convenient ‘External Authority’ there for us to use in order to determine how things ‘are’ (or how they ‘ought’ to be). The Framework (or External Authority) operates by laying down the law’, by ‘telling things how they must be’ (or ‘where they must be’) and for this reason we can say that there is no freedom here, not even a whiff of it. The whole point of the Abstract Framework (or of the EA) is that there’s no freedom in it. Intrinsic Reality – on the other hand – contains nothing else but freedom and that’s precisely what we don’t like about it…
Image credit – wallpapercave.com
