There are two ways to be ‘orientated’ in this world – we can be orientated towards <self> or we can be orientated towards <other>. ‘Other’ doesn’t just mean other people, it means whatever isn’t the self, whatever it is that is outside of what our own personal viewpoint shows us (the ‘bigger picture’, we could say). We could also call this second type of orientation curiosity and say that we’re either ‘self-absorbed / incurious’ or ‘free from the self / curious’. We can either be: [1] Curious about this business of ‘being in the world’ or [2] Not in the least bit curious about this unprecedented fact.
What we’ve just said needs a bit of qualification, however. To be ‘orientated towards the self’ isn’t to be interested in it – it’s not that at all. When we’re in this mode we’re not interested in the self but rather we are interested in promoting or defending this position without having the slightest curiosity about why we’re doing this, about what it is we’re promoting, about what it is we’re in the business of defending. This is the Unconscious Mode of Existence, therefore – the mode in which we take everything for granted and live our lives in a supremely superficial way…
The motivation behind the Unconscious Modality is the motivation of control, the motivation of forcing. There are rules that need to be followed, in other words, rules that absolutely need to be obeyed. This ‘sets the tone’ therefore – this is the heedless, heartless, ruthless motivation the underpins the mechanical world. The important thing in this type of existence isn’t ‘curiosity as to what’s really going on’ but ‘making sure that what is supposed to happen does happen’, no matter what the cost, no matter how absurd (or perverse) this may be.
Not caring (not being in the least bit questioning about why they are these rules) but only caring about the fact that they are there, and that they have to be obeyed because they are there, is the mark of it mechanical existence. We are all about the ‘how’ and not at all about the ‘why’, in other words. We laugh scornfully at people who talk about the ‘why’ – how foolish and impractical they are! We laugh in their faces; we make a big joke of it and we are the majority, we’re the ones who are running the show and the show is all about obeying the rules (whatever the hell those rules might be). The show is all about ‘not rocking the boat’, we might say. ‘Rocking the boat’ (or ‘letting the side down’) is the worst thing ever, as far as we’re concerned.
This is how it seems to us when we are in the ‘Towing the Line’ Mode, anyway – everything is about maintaining the established values, protecting the established way of doing things. We’re looking at an Equilibrium-Seeking System here therefore, we’re looking at ‘a system that is forever trying to approximate a particular abstract value’. This work never comes to an end because the measure that we’re trying to approximate is ‘an abstract notion’ – ‘a thing that doesn’t actually exist in reality, but which is only a notion, only an idea’. This abstract idea is never going to become real for us (no matter how hard we try to approximate it) and yet this is – in effect- exactly what the E-system is trying to do. An Equilibrium-seeking system is – in effect – ‘trying to make the unreal real’. This – we might say – is the Principle of Simulation.
When we talk about Equilibrium-seeking systems we’re describing the self or ego, therefore – the self is an abstract or unreal value that we are constantly trying to approximate with all our planning and scheming, with all our goal-orientated activity, and we are engaged in the never-ending task of trying to make it be real by constantly reiterating it, by constantly copying out (or reproducing) the abstract template for it. Needless to say, we never stop to consider that this is what we’re doing; instead, we would say that we are improving (or trying to improve) ourselves, that we are trying to get things in our life to be the right way rather than the wrong. We would say that we are on a quest or mission for something or other, some ‘special state of being’. We would point to some grand ‘ideal’, in other words, and the thing about this is that ideals are never real…
This implicit claim of ours just isn’t true however – we’re trying to reify an abstraction here, we’re trying to create ‘the abstraction which is the self’, not ‘improve’ it and this is the key point that we always fail to see! We obey the rule that instructs us to keep on reiterating the template (and ignore whatever we come across that doesn’t match it) but this rule that we’re following – this rule which produces the self-construct – isn’t ‘serious’, it’s just something we can go along with or not go along with as we please. We say that it’s ‘serious’, but it isn’t – it’s ‘a game’ (which means that it’s only serious because we say it is. This is like the thing that people say about ducks (i.e., that they might look as if they’re not expending effort as they sit there on the surface of a fast-moving river, but underneath the surface its feet have to be working away at full speed. The game needs to be maintained, but it needs to be maintained invisibly.
The everyday self is a game and so it is the very same situation we’re looking at here – there’s no rule saying that we have to obey the rule, but we put ourselves in this position nonetheless (we put ourselves in this position where we are acted on by the rule but can’t see that we have put ourselves in this position ourselves). We’re so ‘up close’ to the rule (which is to say, we’re so much in its gravitational field) that we can’t see that there isn’t ‘a rule saying that we have to follow the rule’. We’ve fallen down a black hole, we’re Trapped in Positive Space and so we’ve lost the perspective that we would have needed to see that…
A game only works when we can’t see that it’s a game, and – similarly – the game of the self only works when we don’t see that this situation has been ‘freely entered into’. We need to veil our own freedom from ourselves in order to play (as James Carse notes in Finite and Infinite Games); when we have been disconnected from our intrinsic freedom (so that we no longer know that there is, or could be, such a thing) then we are able to ‘enjoy’ the experience of being the ego, experience of being the Extrinsic Self, which is the self the system (or game) says we are. We will then able to have the (null) experience of ‘being unfree without knowing it’. The condition for playing this game is simply that we never get curious about the Big Picture, therefore – we can do whatever the hell we want just as long as we don’t get curious. That’s the room we’re not allowed to enter.
To play the game we must be ignorant of the fact that we’re doing so, but this also means that we’re now in the position of ‘going nowhere but being unable to see it’. Clearly we’re not ever going to get anywhere when we’re proceeding on the basis that ‘we are what we aren’t’ (or on the basis that ‘things are what they aren’t’, or that ‘something is happening when it isn’t’). Nothing ever comes out of a game – game doesn’t have to go anywhere but when we’re in this in curious self-promoting self-defending modality will never confront this singular fact. Instead, we’ll just keep ‘motoring on’ in our terminally short-sighted way. We’re locked in at this stage – we’re ‘locked in’ because if we were to start to take an interest in ‘what’s really going on then what would see would be highly unpalatable to us. What we would see would be horrific for us. No one would want to hear about it – we’d make ourselves extremely unpopular if we were to try to talk about it! On the other hand, the benefit of getting curious about the world (instead of being obsessed with the self and its sterile games, instead of perpetually ‘spinning around on the hub of the obscene ego’, as DH Lawrence puts it) is that the world then opens up for us. We discover that there’s more to life than just the little circular game of denial that we’re playing – something that we never expected…
The world only ‘opens up’ for us however when we pass through the Narrow Gate of the Shadow (in Jungian terms) and that is of course precisely what we don’t want to do. We would have to be interested in ‘seeing ourselves as we really are’ to pass through the Narrow Gate and when we’re in the self-orientated mode we’re not – what we’re interested in is not seeing this and thus we exist in a state of chronic dishonesty, we exist in a state of what we could call ‘compulsive ‘reality-denial’. Being in the self-orientated modality means that we’re orientated strictly towards the projections of the self and since the self’s projections are the self this means we are completely ‘encapsulated’. This is the ‘Nullification Trance’. To be ‘orientated towards the self’ is therefore to be 100 per cent absorbed in the game of ignoring reality (and at the same time ignoring the fact that we are ignoring anything); to be interested in ‘the other’ – which is to say, interested in ‘non-equilibrium stuff’ – is thus to be ‘orientated towards reality’ and – when it comes down to it – there isn’t anything else that we could be meaningfully orientated to…
Image credit – bluelabyrinths.com
