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The Master Lie

The Master Lie, according to Greg Tucker, is whatever it takes to prove that what is happening right now isn’t part of the Mind-Created Dream. Clearly, therefore, the Master Lie is big business! If we were to think about this for a while, we might start to wonder how much of what we do isn’t part of the Master Lie! Is there anything left in our world that is honest and wholesome?




The problem is that when a lie gets too big it becomes all-consuming and the Master Lie, without any question whatsoever, is the great granddaddy of all lies. No lie could be bigger or more all-consuming than the Master Lie. This presents us with a very interesting question therefore, namely – ‘What proportion of our activities in this life is not about propping up the Master Lie?’




For most of us, for most of the time, it is the case that there is always at least some small portion of our daily activity that is not in service of the ML. We must surely hope that this is the case, at any rate. Otherwise, what a futile waste our lives will prove to be! And yet, when we look into it (if we are actually interested enough to look into it, that is) we find that it is a frighteningly tiny part of our lives that has not been taken up by the all-consuming needs to prop up the ML.




Every time (for example) we walk work towards attaining some kind of concrete goal we are propping up the ML. Concrete facts and literally-understood goals only have any meaning within the context of the ML, after all. Concrete facts and literally-understood meanings are the ML! When we see this then we realise that almost everything we do and think is orientated towards proving that what is happening right now is not part of the Mind-Created Dream. How much of our activity isn’t orientated towards concrete goals and literally-understood tasks? How many of our thoughts are not concrete ones?




Our minds run in the literal mode; this isn’t because of any choice we have made – it’s just how the thinking mind works. In no way should we be dismissive or disrespectful to the everyday mind on this account therefore – it is only doing what it’s supposed to do to be doing and it’s doing it perfectly well. Just because this is the way that the TM works doesn’t mean that we are obliged to take our rational output at face value however – the only one saying we have to do this is ourselves!





As James Carse says, ‘there’s no rule saying that we have to obey the rule’ – it’s just that it suits us to do so. It suits us only too well not to question the rule in other words, even though our essential nature is to be curious, is to question rules. Whenever we find that we are not questioning rules (even though we probably won’t notice it) this means that we have been shut down in some way. There is this machinery of thought that is running all the time and if we were true to our own nature we would be intelligently interested in the workings of this machinery, rather than falling over ourselves to do what it says, rather than foolishly taking everything it tells us at face value. As P. D. Ouspensky says, obedience is the worst of all our vices…




There could only ever be one reason behind this strange behaviour and that reason is of course FEAR. Fear is what causes us to shut down our consciousness, fear is what lies behind our dumb obedience to the machinery of thought, fear is why we are always so very keen to do our very best to prop up the Master Lie. The Master Lie is all about ‘closing everything down’, it is all about saying that ‘everything only is what it is said to be’. The Master Lie is all about bringing the story to an end as soon as it begins in other words, and saying – very aggressively – that there is nothing else. The bigger picture is ‘ruled out’ without anyone knowing that anything has happened. The ML is that there is no ‘bigger picture’.




Our way of looking at things is such that any proposition stating that ‘what is going on now is part of the Mind-Created Dream’ sounds very ‘negative’ to us – it sounds frighteningly negative, in fact. Of course we going to resist such a proposition with everything we’ve got, of course we’re going to strive mightily to prove the opposite proposition. ‘Too many possibilities’ is exactly what terrifies us because too many possibilities means that the very meagre ‘solidified’ possibility that we are trying to say is ‘the one and only reality’ will slip from our desperately clutching fingers to vanish forever. What we’re clutching onto isn’t anything in itself, but it does serve the function of preoccupying our attention so much that we never actually have to look beyond it. The lie may not have any truth in it, but it does have the undoubted function of effectively preventing us from seeing the truth…








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