Life isn’t what we take it to be (or what we might be told it is) – life is a trap. This tends to come across as a rather nihilistic thing to say; the general view is that we ought to be grateful for the gift of life. We’re told that it’s important to cultivate gratitude and be ‘positive’ in our attitude. In another way however, saying this isn’t new; it is after all not too different from what Christianity, in common with the other monotheistic religions, have been saying for many centuries, which is that we have to be very, very careful (super-careful, in fact) not to be led astray by Satan, which is something that can all too easily happen if we’re not vigilant enough. If we’re not vigilant enough and (either advertently or inadvertently) allow ourselves to be influenced by the Great Adversary, then the outcome for us is going to be utterly disastrous, it’s going to be disastrous to the nth degree…
There is no worse outcome than Eternal Damnation (obviously enough!) and so in this sense life can be regarded as a trap. The trap might be blamed on the devil (it is blamed on the devil) but it’s a trap all the same. In this case – according to orthodox religion – life is a very dangerous business (it’s a very dangerous business if we don’t unquestioningly obey the instructions that have been benevolently provided for us by the Authorised Officials of that religion, that is). And as far ‘authority’ is concerned, it obviously doesn’t come any higher than this! God Almighty is at the top of this power pyramid (or at least that’s what we’re told) and salvation from damnation (the Church informs us) can only be obtained if we unconditionally accept God’s authority. It’s OK to do this the logic goes because the Lord thy God is a benign tyrant (as well as being a jealous one) and has our own best interests at heart (not that it would make any difference if he didn’t of course since it’s not possible for anyone to oppose the Creator anyway). The disaster which is personal damnation is all too real, we’re told, but it CAN be avoided if we obey God’s commandments. It is Satan who’s trying to trap us, the monotheistic religions always say, but we can be saved from this trap if we accept the benign authority of God’s representatives on earth.
This isn’t how God’s message is usually relayed to us of course, but this is the gist of it all the same – obedience to the Almighty’s laws is the only way we can be saved from the ultimate pitfall which is hell. It isn’t too hard to see through this message when we express it in this ‘bare-bones’ fashion, of course; a tyrant is ‘one who takes away people’s freedom away’ and there is, therefore, no such thing as a benign tyrant – the notion is frankly absurd. What we’re looking at here is actually the perfect inversion of the truth – it is ‘the true situation only turned upside-down’. The message which says ‘by accepting the authority of the Creator of All (as represented on earth by the Holy Church) we can escape Satan’s trap (which we would otherwise inevitably fall into)’ is truthful, only it’s the truth turned on its head. It’s the Church and it’s arbitrary authority over us that’s the trap, and the way to avoid falling into it is to simply to call its bluff and risk what it is threatening us so ominously with.
The trap is the warning against the trap; the trap is the authority that frightens us with all this talk of eternal damnation into obeying its rules. To put this another way, the trap is the method that has been given to us by the ‘agent’ to enable us to escape the trap. This is a glitch in reality – it’s like a computer virus that invades your hard drive and then simultaneously informs you [1] that your system that your system has become dangerously infected and [2] that this catastrophic situation can be fixed if you engage its services. The message is that something truly awful is about to happen to your computer unless you hand over a substantial amount of money. This is an inversion of the truth of course – the danger isn’t that I do nothing and thereby allow the virus to infect and cripple my system, the danger is that I will get frightened by all this talk of danger into seeking refuge in the jaws of the Predator! The real catastrophe is when I try to avoid the so-called ‘catastrophe’ by calling upon the services of the Predator, in other words.
The danger the con man is warning me about isn’t the real danger, the real danger is when I believe what he’s telling me and give up – without realising it – the freedom that I had previously had to see the situation in other ways than the one it tells me to see it. What we’re talking about here is simply FEAR, therefore; acting on the basis of fear is what causes consciousness to shrink rather than expand, acting on fear is what causes us to run bleating like frightened little lambs into the arms of the Tyrant / Saviour that is the External Authority. The EA promises to save us from the fear we are feeling but in order for it to be able to do this we first have to accept its terms, and ‘accepting its terms’ means giving up the freedom that we previously had to see the world in an unlimited number of ways (i.e., the freedom we had to see things from all possible directions. We have to relinquish consciousness itself therefore – we have to wave goodbye to it, and then – having waved goodbye to consciousness – we immediately forget that there ever was such a thing. That’s what waving goodbye to consciousness means – it means incurring Cosmic Amnesia, it means that we ‘say goodbye to what is real’ without knowing that we’re saying goodbye to anything. It means that we incur the ‘Invisible Disaster’.
Fear means that consciousness gets imperceptibly and irreversibly degraded into a mere mechanical process. The reason Cosmic Amnesia comes into it, is because within this mechanical process the ‘thought-moderated version of us’ (i.e., our concept of ourselves) understands itself to be conscious, whilst – actually – it’s merely being told by thought that it is. [Thought ‘gives us the information that we are free’, etc.] We’re not able to know any different because we no longer have the capacity (as we’ve just said) to see things in any other way than the way that it has provided us with. These were the terms that we accepted in order to avail of the Tyrant’s offer to save us, after all. We’ve accepted the deal and the fact that we have no awareness of having done so makes no difference at all as far as the terms of the agreement are concerned! Accepting the Tyrant’s deal was the Great Catastrophe, there is no catastrophe other than this. ‘Buying into the virus that says it’s going to save us from the catastrophic infection we’re told we’re about to incur’ is the real catastrophe.
This then is the ‘trap’ that we started off talking about, therefore. The trap is ‘being suckered by the virus’. Life itself isn’t the virus of course, but in strictly pragmatic terms it turns into one; it turns into one because we get hoodwinked by the virus every single time. We never don’t get hoodwinked by it – we don’t know what ‘not getting hoodwinked by the virus’ looks like. What we could call the Principle of Cosmic Deception is variously personified as Ahriman, Maya, the Demiurge, etc, wins every time. It’s ‘no contest’. As contests go, this is as boring as it gets – one side always wins! It’s like ‘watching paint dry’, as they say, only it’s got the added ingredient of being a lot more tragic. Consciousness appears (very briefly) on the scene and then it gets gobbled up by the Dragon, by the Predator, by the Great Amoeba. End of story – the book slams shut right here and anything that happens (or rather seems to happen) from this point on it’s ‘merely a fantasy’, ‘merely a simulation’. It always comes to nothing, just as Shakespeare says – it’s ‘a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing’. It’s a tale told by the Nullity. Although even the Bard himself – it appears – has been widely misunderstood on this particular point. We just can’t seem to get what he’s saying. The Nullity cunningly ‘misrepresents the truth’ and we fall for it time and time again. The Nullity ‘speaks with many voices’ and if we don’t fall for it one way then we’ll fall for it in another. If we don’t fall for the priest, we’ll fall for the politician; if we don’t fall for the demagogue then we’ll fall for the businessman, the teacher, the psychologist, the therapist, the ‘whoever it is’…
Image credit – touchstonemag.com
