Any action that proceeds on the basis of a fixed centre (any action that happens out of a definite position) is always going to come back to where it started. What this means therefore is that if we start off from a definite position or known location then we can’t ever leave it.
There are surprisingly few certainties in this world, but this is one of them – the assurance that we have that any movement which proceeds from a fixed position is always going to come right back to where it started. This is – as we need hardly point out – a profoundly challenging statement. It challenges everything we believe in; it challenges the very core of our understanding of the world. It doesn’t just ‘challenge’ our customary understanding of things, it annihilates it.
Our entire culture is a celebration of goal-orientated action – there’s nothing we admire more than effective purposeful action. The ability to control successfully – the ability to effectively get what we want – is what it’s all about as far as we are concerned. The pursuit of power is what it’s all about. This being the case, the insight that all purposeful action is ultimately self-defeating is not one that we are open to. This is most definitely not the message we want to hear.
This isn’t to say we should just give up trying to do stuff entirely and simply sit around waiting to die from starvation or dehydration or general predation (or whatever else) – this is a psychological principle that we’re talking about here, which is a lot more subtle. It’s a subtlety we’re generally not at all familiar with. Self-maintenance is necessary to live, but this isn’t to say that there isn’t more to life than the mere need to maintain oneself, as has often been pointed out. In addition to the humdrum business of physical survival there is also the matter of psychological growth and this is the point that we as a culture always ignore. Self-improvement gets a big yes from us, but growth gets a definite no. Growth involves the sacrifice of what or who we used to be, whereas self-development builds upon it. From the POV of the Paradigm of self-development ‘letting go of the self’ would be the worst thing ever. The whole point of everything is to make sure that the self doesn’t get sacrificed, doesn’t get side-lined, not on anyone’s account.
From a psychological point of view, the definite position / fixed point is of course the ego, or ‘defined identity’ and it is therefore the ego that we keep on coming back to. It is the self that we can never get away from with all our striving, with all our regimented purposeful behaviour. Saying this puts a different complexion on things of course because as we’ve just said we don’t want don’t generally want to get away from it. In the general run of things, we are strongly motivated to preserve the self, benefit the self, progress in life on the basis of the self, and so on. We don’t want to get away from the self but rather we want to perpetuate it. We’ll do whatever we can to keep it; we want to bring it with us on all our journeys, as if it were some ‘special thing’ that we must make sure never to leave behind. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we are happy with who we are, or the way that we are, but the thing about this is that we want to improve the imperfect or undeveloped self, to upgrade it, to learn skills and accumulate knowledge, and this is a very different thing. In this case we’re trying to ‘get somewhere on the basis of the defined identity’, we are trying to get somewhere via our purposeful behaviour, in other words. We’re trying to ‘get somewhere on purpose’ and the thing about this, as we keep on saying, is that this just doesn’t work since our goal-driven activity is merely the projection of our identity into the future.
Our goals, aims, purposes etc, are – psychologically speaking – extensions of where we already are. Even if we were hypothetically able to achieve every last one of our goals, every last one of our targets in life, we still wouldn’t have got anywhere different. It’s a ‘null action’. Realising our dreams doesn’t help in the least in this respect since our dreams are us. We are our dreams and our dreams are us. Our dreams are our projections and – pretty obviously – no one ever got anywhere by chasing their projections! Being wholly occupied in either chasing or running away from one’s projections is – on the contrary – an infallible way of getting stuck. To be fixated on one’s own projection (as if it were nothing to do with one) is to fall into the Narcissus Trap.
Absolutely every idea we have or ever could have is a logical extension of our present way of looking at things. There’s simply no way for us to’ deliberately escape from our current viewpoint’ and we’re being ridiculous if we say there is. We’re either insane or a CBT therapist. Any strategies that we put in place – including those strategies which are specifically geared towards improving ourselves – serve only to reinforce the validity of the way of looking at the world which gives rise to them. Purposeful behaviour is a self-reinforcing tautological loop of logic and – as we might imagine – a self-reinforcing loop of logic isn’t the sort of thing that’s ever going to get away from itself. It’s exactly the sort of thing is never going to get away from itself.
Self-improvement equals self-obsession and self-obsession does not equal self-transcendence – the Uroboric Serpent does not become free from itself by ceaselessly devouring itself. Again, we might ask why it would be so important for us to ‘go beyond ourselves’? There’s certainly no logical necessity here – there’s no rational reason or explanation why we shouldn’t spend all our time acting out the self or ego, why we should even give this possibility any consideration, but that’s simply our ‘blind-spot’, that’s the ‘dark pit of ignorance’ that is necessarily associated with the defined identity. That’s Plato’s Cave. If there were no such thing as ‘a movement that takes us beyond the self’ then life would simply not be possible; life isn’t possible when all we can ever do is project ourselves ahead of ourselves – what we have here is ‘a suffering-producing parody of the real thing’ which everyone involved insists actually IS the real thing.
The suffering that we’re referring to here is the suffering that comes our way when we live life in a purely rational way and ignore the deeper currents of life (so to speak); it’s the suffering that becomes our lot when our existence becomes no more than the unreal self’s ceaseless attempts to preserve itself, maintain itself, promote and extend itself, and so on. ‘Expect poison from standing water’, says William Blake. There’s no one going to come along and force us to get out of the comfortable – if somewhat soiled – armchair that we’re stuck fast too; this can only happen as a result of us not forcing, as a result of us not trying to make something happen because we ‘want’ it to. It’s not something that can ever happen as a result of thought, in other words. Thinking about change is another way of talking about ‘staying the same’.
There is no rule saying that we have to move away from the arbitrary fixed centre that we have attached ourselves to, there is no logical necessity to move away from the World of the Known that has been created by inverting the fixed centre which we have unconsciously assumed and extending it indefinitely outwards; rules only exist within the Realm of the Known which means that there can’t be a ‘logical necessity’ to move away from that realm. There can – in other words – be no such thing as ‘a rule that tells us not to obey the rules’. There’s no such thing as a rule that can lead us to freedom, much as we might like to believe that there is. Genuine movement doesn’t occur as a result of the application of external compulsion. Or as we could also say – what happens as a result of external compulsion – which is to say, force – is not change at all but only the deceptive appearance of it (which parallels our original statement, which is that any action that proceeds on the basis of a definite position is always going to come right back to where it started).
A ‘fixed position’ and the ‘application of force’ are really one and the same thing, which is something that is far from being immediately obvious to us. On reflection this makes perfect sense however – when we apply force we have to do so from a fixed position or definite location. It simply wouldn’t work otherwise. The force we are applying is the logical extension of this fixed position, it’s not anything different from it; there’s no new information coming into the picture as a result of controlling, we could say, only the re-assertion of the same old status quo. Control (or forcing) can never change anything, can never do anything apart from ‘re-asserting the status quo’. Coming at this from a slightly different angle, if we say that our current viewpoint is a fixed position (which it has to be if it is actually to be a ‘viewpoint’) then applying force means pushing this viewpoint onto everyone around us; If we didn’t have a definite viewpoint in the first place then we could hardly push it on anyone else, clearly! What’s happening here then, is that we’re making sure that everyone else has the same viewpoint that we do. We’re inducing homogeneity. We can’t compel anyone to have a different viewpoint from our own and neither can we compel somebody or ourselves to drop all viewpoints. Dropping all viewpoints corresponds to ‘free movement’ and – as we keep saying – free movement can’t be compelled. If it is to happen at all then it has to happen by itself.
All activity or behaviour that proceeds from the fixed position of the ego equals force, equals aggression – we’re trying to define the world in terms of our own prejudices, our own conditioning, our own arbitrary biases. We try to make everyone else be just like us, in other words. The Great Amoeba wants to absorb everything and remake it in its own image. It is hostile to anything that isn’t it. Essentially, we are acting as a virus, infecting and subverting the world to make it serve our ends. There’s no way that we can act out of the conditioned sense of self without this being aggression, that’s just not possible. The self can never ‘not be aggressive’, just as it can never ‘not judge’ or ‘not control’.
This is The Mechanism of Authority, this is what authority does – it produces a state of uniformity, a state of homogeneity, a state of conformity to the rule. Any fixed position or defined location (or any structure or system) always comes down to the same thing – the enactment of a rule. Once there is a rule then everything has to obey that rule (that’s the rule, after all – the rule is that ‘everything has to obey the rule’). The intrinsic aggression of the system means that everything has to be subsumed within the system – that’s the only way anything can be allowed. This is why Krishnamurti keeps saying that ‘authority’ – of whatever sort – is destructive of freedom. It’s not only destructive of freedom, either – it’s destructive of reality. There is the action of authority then there is no freedom and there is also no reality. There is a secret hollowness behind the mechanism of authority – a hollowness that belies that forbiddingly imposing facade which we all so intimidated by. There’s nothing behind it, in other words – the authority is a put-up job, sham, a hoax, a total bluff, a blatant act of pretence with no legitimacy to it whatsoever…
This is exemplified by every tyranny that ever was – ‘tyranny’ means obeying the rule, it means control, it means forcing, it means lack of freedom, and the result of this control, this lack of freedom, is the state of homogeneity. In a tyranny all we get is uniformity, all we get is the mass production of generic (i.e., heteronomous) ‘token-individuals’ who are in thrall to authority. Authority annihilates true individuality, therefore, and this is why all tyrannies are hollow, this is why all tyrannies are empty facades and nothing more. Only the individual ‘has virtue and responsibility and any ethics whatever’, Jung writes in Mysterium Coniunctionis.Only the individual is real. The group – on the other hand – is nothing, the group is a mass abdication of responsibility. ‘A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one’. [Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul] A person who isn’t an individual is a mockery of a person, a parody of a person; a group of people who aren’t individuals (but only duplicates of a societal template is a mockery of human life, a preposterous parade of masks (or identities) with absolutely nothing behind them. This is crudely obvious in the totalitarian state, in the fundamentalist religion or sect, but no less evident (if we were to take the trouble to look beneath the glossy surface of things) when the tyrant in question is conventional society, when the tyrant or dictator in question is the utterly inflexible machine which we blandly refer to as ‘the thinking mind’.
Image credit – reddit.com
