The universe’s ‘job’ – according to the mystics – is to continuously provide us with a situation that is optimum with regard to us ‘waking up’. It hands us this situation on a plate every time. Our ‘job’ – on the other hand – is simply to refrain from automatically resisting the situation that the universe has created for us.
If the universe were to ‘do its job’, and if we were to do ours then everything would be fine and dandy, but this isn’t how things play out in practice, however. It isn’t how things play out because we don’t want to play ball – the very last thing we want is to play ball! The thing about the universe is that it always does its job (it never lets us down in this regard) and so it is up to us to ‘do our bit’. The universe provides ‘the optimum situation’ (if the utterances of mystics such as Meister Eckhart are to be given any credence at all) and ‘our bit’ in this is simply that we refrain from resisting it.
This doesn’t sound at all right to us however – it most certainly doesn’t sound right when we look at things in the conventional or prescribed fashion. As far as we’re concerned the mystics are talking a lot of nonsense and always have been! Mystics are renowned nonsense-talkers, we will say, and so we (being hard-headed realists) will always go in the contrary direction to the one they advise. We would therefore say that our job isn’t to ‘refrain from resisting’, but to resist to the hilt! We must ‘take the fight to the devil’, after all; it is our moral responsibility to ‘resist Satan and all his works’, as all right-thinking people will agree. ‘Not resisting’ doesn’t come into it at all – we must keep on fighting and never give up.
This is the basic message that we have been subjected to for very many centuries and so even though we might think this kind of old-fashioned Christian formula is ridiculously laughable and doesn’t apply to us, it does. It applies to us now as much as it ever did, if not more. We believe very firmly that we have to be ‘successful controllers’ in this world and that our happiness and well-being depends upon this. A ‘loser’ is therefore someone who isn’t able to control what happens to them. Losers are victims and we have no sympathy for victims; we have no sympathy for victims because it’s always their own fault. This is what we are pleased to call our ‘hard-headed realism’.
The subliminal message we are constantly being given is that unless we can successfully impose our will upon the world then our lives will be unfulfilled, wretched, ignominious, etc. What we’re essentially talking about here ‘conquering nature’, achieving mastery is the big, big thing for us – we’re full of talk about conquering this or conquering that. We’re ‘battlers’ – we’re fighting the good fight every day and we want a medal for it. We admire the heroic battlers with their die-hard attitude and their gung-ho slogans just as we look down our noses at the ones who have – as a result of their own reprehensible weakness – failed to dominate.
This deeply unreflective ‘gung-ho viewpoint’ – which is the viewpoint that almost all of us adhere to – is the perfect antithesis of the one we started off talking about; it is of course the mirror image of it. What this essentially comes down to (as we have just said) is imposing our will, our ideas, our intentions on the world, thereby ‘calling all the shots’ ourselves. The world we subsequently inhabit is therefore a reflection of our will. Naively, we might not see anything suspect about this, we might not have a problem with it, we might not smell a rat. We might say that this is a good thing (because we’re ‘in control’ and ‘being in control’ is always a good thing) but there are problems aplenty here, no matter how incapable we might be of seeing it. There are problems here we can’t even begin to imagine…
A world that is a reflection (or manifestation) of my will is me and so what I’ve done with my controlling is to create a sealed-off narcissistic bubble to exist within; I have achieved a state of narcissistic encapsulation! Via my staunch and systematic programme of resistance I have created an ‘apparent reality’ which is actually an extension or projection of myself and within this unrecognised extension of myself (within the ‘pseudo-world’ that is made up of my own half-baked thoughts and assumptions) there is absolutely nothing to challenge us. Obviously enough, since our thoughts confirm our biases rather than falsifying them, there’s not going to be much in the way of ‘challenging’ going on here! When we live in a pseudo-world that is actually our own construct in disguise then ‘our biases’ become indistinguishable from ‘the truth’ and so we are – as a consequence – well and truly lost…
When we live in a world that is made up of our own biases this is not optimal for our ‘waking up’, therefore. On the contrary, it is optimal for ‘staying asleep on a permanent basis’! By ‘staying asleep’ we simply mean remaining oblivious to that basic reality of our situation, and the basic reality of our situation is – as we keep saying – that we are actually living in a pseudo-world which is composed of our own half-assed expectations reflected right back at us. ‘Waking up’ – we could therefore say – simply means being aware of this. To see illusion is to move away from it, as the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment tells us; to be aware of the lie is to be free from it. Fighting is not necessary, fighting only ever perpetuates what we are fighting against…
Image – alchetron.com
