We become terribly fond of the patterns which we get trapped in. We get so very fond of these patterns that we think they ARE us. We actually are the repetitive patterns that we fall into, for all practical purposes, therefore. Were we to break with the pattern we would at the same time break with ourselves, we would at the same time stop being ourselves, which would be entirely new to us…
Our patterns of behaving and thinking are what provide us with our identity in other words, and it is having an identity that we are so very fond of, so very attached to. A pattern (any pattern) is only ‘a pattern’ however – it’s not a thing in itself and this means that there isn’t really any such thing as ‘the identity’. We are very fond of it to be sure, but that still doesn’t mean that there actually is such a thing! Fondness proves nothing…
Instead of talking about the pattern which we have become fond of, attached to, etc, we could just talk in terms of a habit and say that our identity is a habit that we’re stuck with, a habit that we don’t seem able to give up. The habit is only a habit (which is to say, we could in theory give it up at any time) but the fact that we don’t seem able to drop the habit means that this identity of ours has a certain pragmatic reality, even though it doesn’t exist in any essential way.
Habits – once established – are rewarding for us. We are rewarded for falling in with the habit, for conforming to it – there is a sense of ease, a sense of relief, a sense of being in a friendly and familiar situation. There is a sense of belonging. Anything that isn’t familiar or ‘comfortably established’ for us can feel (will feel, if our motivation is fear) hostile to us, uncomfortable and unpleasant to us, potentially dangerous or untrustworthy. What we’re looking at here therefore is neophobia, the fear of the new, the fear of uncharted terrain. Habits are – by definition – always old, and so we can say that ‘our habits are our defence against the new’; as long as we never depart from our habits we’ll never have to encounter anything new, and that’s just what we want.
If our established pattern of being in the world is a defence against the new and the uncharted then we can see that falling into a familiar pattern, or enacting that pattern, is going to be positively reinforced, whilst being in an unfamiliar or uncharted space is going to be negatively reinforced. Doing what we always do feels good, in other words, whilst not being able to enact our habits (or not being able to get our habits validated) feels very bad. There is pleasure on the one hand and pain on the other. It isn’t as simple as this however because the familiarity which we seek, at the same time as being rewarding, it is also profoundly unstimulating and this total lack of stimulation – if we may put it like this – is itself a very profound form of pain, or suffering so we’re escaping from one form of pain into another. We’re leaping out of the frying pan and straight into the fire.
This is nothing else less than the fundamental existential dilemma of human existence! As far as existential dilemmas go this is top of the list and it always will be. On the one hand there is the pain of not knowing what to do and not knowing how to be (which we can also refer to as the discomfort that comes with not knowing what the ‘right way’ to live life is) whilst on the other hand we have the pain of being stuck, the pain of being confined to a sterile existential cul-de-sac which we can, if we want, call ‘the pain of knowing what the right way to live life is’! ‘The pain of knowing the right way’ comes down to the pain of being trapped in our own thoughts, or the pain that comes our way when we’re able to successfully avoid life. ‘Nothing fails like success’, says Alan Watts, and this applies here more than ever.
On the face of it, therefore, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, but this is only how it appears on the surface, when we don’t look into our situation too deeply (if at all) and when we are motivated by fear we never do look into the situation, needless to say. Not looking into things is the hallmark of fear. Were we to explore a bit, and go beneath the surface level appearances of things, we would discover something. We would discover that the pain of not knowing what the right way to live life is isn’t pain at all. It only seems like pain when we fundamentally believe that there is or should be ‘a right way to live life’, when we believe that there is such a thing as ‘the correct formula to guide us through life’. In this case we really are having a hard time – we are having a hard time because reality won’t match our idea of it.
As soon as we get the insight or awareness to see that it’s our resistance to reality that’s causing us to have such a hard time, and not reality itself, then the whole situation changes – the only thing here being that we can’t get this particular insight until we’re ready to get it and as long as we’re operating on the basis of what we understand to be the right way to be in the world then we’re not going to be ready to receive it. Something has to shift in us; we’re going to have to take up a whole new way of living life, a way where we are willing to stop imposing our game plan on the world all the time. This is therefore just another way of talking about making a leap of faith, which tends to sound like more of an old-fashioned religious notion than a modern psychological one to us. Talking about ‘a leap of faith’ doesn’t seem very scientific to us, after all.
A ‘leap of faith’ may not sound very scientific to us but if it doesn’t then this is only because we have a completely erroneous idea of what science entails, we don’t understand that all logic-based structures exist suspended in a sea of indeterminacy, we don’t see that all rule-based processes occur within a greater context of freedom, or ‘rule-lessness’. When we are operating in the logical continuum then there is a right way for everything – logic is quintessentially made-up of ‘right way versus wrong way’ – there’s nothing in it but ‘right way versus wrong way’, nothing in it but ‘polarity’, but no matter how authoritative it may come across as being, logic is never anything more than an artificial or provisional situation suspended precariously in an unstructured space that has no up and no down in it, space that is immaculately non-polar or unconditioned, and the only way to exist within unconditioned space – which is ultimately all there is – is via a prodigious leap of faith. If this is ‘unscientific’ then so too is reality, therefore!
Our understanding of psychology is to say (ludicrously enough) that all our difficulties can be resolved by the correct application of the appropriate formula or method, whilst the truth of the matter is the exact reverse of this, which is to say, that our problems or difficulties are themselves the result of us applying our formulae or methods! There is, in other words, no right way to extricate ourselves from the prison of polarity we are in this case, simply re-applying the very thinking that created the problem in the first place, in the forlorn hope that this dubious tactic will eventually bear fruit. This is more than just a little bit reminiscent of Albert Einstein’s well-known definition of insanity ‘doing the same thing over and over again in the hope of obtaining a different outcome’. If doing this means that we are insane, then insane we undoubtedly are! We stick to our logical procedures like glue, not because they work (how can they) but because we want to believe that they do, because we very much want to believe in the possibility of control. To say that this is ‘important’ to us is an understatement.
In conclusion, therefore, we can say that the great existential dilemma of which we speak isn’t really a dilemma, no matter how much it might seem to be. The option of resorting to a particular viewpoint on the world and then living strictly in accordance with this way isn’t any sort of option at all when it comes down to it because – as we keep saying – that isn’t life. It’s not life, it’s only a mechanical reflex… Living life as an unvarying mechanical reflex is the only way to create the reassuring sense of ontological security that we’re looking for, the only way we can ever feel validated by the external environment is therefore if we establish a particular pattern of existing in the world and then stick to it like glue. This, then, is ‘the Conservative Mode of existence’ and what we are conserving here is the fixed pattern of our own concrete identity. The pattern that I’ve become so fond of (the pattern that I am addicted to repeating) myself, therefore, and this precious thing called ‘myself’ is nothing more than a habit, nothing more than a reflex. It is ‘the habit that is me’.
The Conservative Mode of existence exerts a tremendous attraction upon us, it seems to offer an enormous advantage – it seems like a ‘no-brainer’ in this respect, but the truth is that it’s more like ‘an enormous mistake’. Or – if we were to put this another way – it’s an advantage but not for us; it’s an advantage to the impostor which is pretending to be us. What we are conserving (when we are in Conservative Mode) is the identity, which is a thing which we can never go beyond, the thing that can never let go of itself, and yet what it can never go beyond isn’t really anything. The identity can never go beyond its own label, so to speak, and that label is of course a pure abstraction and nothing more. The identity which we cling to so stubbornly, and promote aggressively at every opportunity, has absolutely nothing to do with us, it’s only just another idea taken from the unreal world of ideas. It has absolutely nothing to do with us and yet we spend our entire lives either feeling good on its behalf, in an utterly absurd sort of a fashion, or feeling bad on its behalf, also in a completely absurd fashion.
Our established way of being in the world is the habit that we are obeying slavishly whilst imagining that we are very much in control, very much in charge, is actually ‘a way of not being in the world’ therefore. It’s a way of not being in the world since the state of identification with an idea or image (i.e., with a mental construct) is the state in which reality itself is excluded, the state in which all traces of our true nature are obliterated. That’s how thought-forms come into existence, that’s how the Abstraction Realm comes into existence – there used to be a fast-flowing river there, never resting for a moment, and now there’s nothing but puddles which – being puddles – aren’t going anywhere! Puddles are of course created by taking away the river – fixed forms are created by taking away the flow of change which is reality. The game we’re playing is the game of identifying with one of these fixed forms, one of these abstractions, and then treating the ungrounded flow of change as the ultimate enemy, which must be resisted no matter what. The point of the game is to exclude all awareness of the true nature of Universal Flux and act as if it doesn’t exist. When our denial is complete then we experience the euphoria that comes with the creation of the false or mind-created self. This is the goal we are constantly chasing – the good, good feeling we get when the self is reified becomes the most important thing in the world to us, even though this reification is what we might call a ‘terminal development’. It seems to be going somewhere but it isn’t – it’s a colossal dead-end.
We are constantly orientated towards this ‘dark’ goal – our striving for it is what brings meaning to our lives. We celebrate or denigrate ourselves according to our level of success in this regard. We don’t represent the struggle to ourselves in this way (needless to say) – we don’t go around saying to the world that ‘we feel good because we have proven ourselves to be real’ (which clearly wouldn’t work) but what we do say is that ‘we feel justifiably good because we have achieved something very important’, without ever saying what that ‘important’ thing is. This is how all games work – we put everything we’ve got into the task and if we get it right then we feel absurdly pleased with ourselves because we have accomplished what we ourselves have said to be ‘a super-important outcome’! That becomes the validation for our whole existence….
We never ever examine why ‘succeeding at an arbitrarily allocated task’ should be so fantastically amazingly important and this is why ‘the need to win’ is our master. Our absolute refusal to question what we’re doing gives us both our motivation and our ‘frame of reference’ and so our refusal to question (or even think about the possibility of questioning) becomes the lynchpin for the whole exercise. We need a focus, a direction to move in, and so to have a goal or a designated task is absolutely vital to us – it’s no wonder we rave about the importance of having goals so much. But because there is no ‘goal’ in reality, because there is no such thing as a ‘officially-designated task’ (since the ‘official version of things’ is always a fabrication) this puts everything on a false or deceptive footing. On the one hand we are very solemn indeed about what we’re doing, about the sacred belief-structure that we are basing our entire existence on, whilst on the other hand we are obliged to manufacture all of that structure ourselves and keep it secret from ourselves that this is what we are doing. Our position is ostensibly one of great dignity, therefore, whilst the actual manoeuvre by which we engineer this position of apparent dignity is itself utterly undignified, utterly squalid, utterly ridiculous. This is the unhappy situation that we create for ourselves by making life be ‘all about identity’; this is the absurdity that is brought about by us valuing form over the Formlessness from which all forms arise.
Art: freep.com
