Our normal form of consciousness is one in which we are endlessly fascinated by trivialities of one sort or another. We are lost in trivialities, we are lost in endless, all-pervading superficiality. This is ‘conditioned consciousness’ – it is awareness that has had certain conditions put on it (so that it no longer is consciousness). What this way of being comes down to is simple – our connection with ‘the Whole’ (which is to say, ‘the Big Picture’) is amputated, blocked, cut off, re-routed, etc., depriving us thereby of any perspective whatsoever. Awareness without perspective is no longer awareness – it has become something else, something that is purely mechanical in nature.

 

 

When we have been deprived of all perspective then the most trivial of trivialities (the most superficial of superficialities) immediately becomes utterly fascinating to us, immediately becomes hugely important to us. “A fool is excited by every word.”  [Fragment 60. Heraclitus]. (Also translated as, “A fool loves to get excited on any account.”) What’s happening here is that we are being controlled by these super-trivial issues; we are in perpetual orbit around them. What we control (or try to control) controls us and so to be ‘excited by trivialities’ is to be trapped by them. This is essentially a state of hypnosis and when we’re ‘under’ (so to speak) then we perceive ourselves to have free will whilst in reality we absolutely don’t. In reality, we are being hypnotically controlled by mental images (or ideas). If our sense of having ‘agency’ or ‘volition’ is being hypnotically induced, then – by the same token – so too is our sense of being the supposed entity which is exercising this volition.

 

 

‘Delusional volition’ and ‘the delusion that one is this volitional agent, this self’ are one and the same, therefore. It’s a delusion that we can’t exit, that we can’t escape from. “My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop. I exist because I think . . . and I can’t stop myself from thinking.” – Jean-Paul Sartre]. The illusion that ‘I can do’ and the illusion that ‘I am’ are inseparable – it is through its striving for goals that this ‘striver’ gets to feel that it is a real thing. Striving creates the striver.   By desiring whatever it is I desire, I create ‘the desirer’. Contrary-wise, by fearing whatever it is I fear, I create ‘the fearer’. We might call this phenomenon ‘tautological self-creation’, basically – the self or ego bootstraps itself into existence by thinking. The thinker is an illusion brought about by thought (or – as we could also say – thought automatically produces the illusion that there is a thinker thinking the thought).

 

 

The truth that we find it so very hard (if not impossible) to see is that the thinker and thought are not separate, which is a message that Krishnamurti reiterates time and time again –

 

The thinker and his thought are a unitary process; neither has an independent continuance; the watcher and the watched are inseparable.

 

Just as long as we are ‘hypnotically fascinated by the trivial’ (and therefore automatically averse to any hint of the bigger picture within which the trivial is revealed as being what it is) we’re never going to see anything that is true and that’s the way we like it in the conditioned realm. We police our ignorance fiercely – everything is upside down in our minds and so as far as we’re concerned we are ‘on the side of the angels’. We’re ‘resisting Satan’, we’re ‘fighting the good fight’, we’re ‘sticking it to the man’, and all of that kind of stuff. In this inverted world what’s good is bad and what’s bad is good and what the resulting ‘inversion of will’ means is that genuine change is only ever going happen in opposition to what we want. Genuine change is only ever going to happen against our wilI – if it happens then it happens despite us and not because of us. We’re totally against that kind of thing (not matter what we might say to the contrary) …

 

 

What we want – when we’re in this peculiar ‘fascinated’ state of being, this curious state of being in which we are being 100% ‘controlled by the game’ – is always the same – we want whatever the game wants us to want. We desire what the external authority tells us we desire. There’s no such thing as ‘a type of volition in the game that hasn’t been supplied by the game’ and the one thing the game is never going to provide us with is the volition to not play it. That’s not on the menu. A rule cannot give us the freedom for us to ‘not do what it itself is telling us to do’ (it can’t contradict itself). The game doesn’t contain the possibility of not playing the game, and the other way of putting this is to say that conditioned consciousness only ever has trivial goals and it never wants to go beyond them. The Rule is that we can’t go beyond them. Conditioned consciousness loves the closure that obsession with trivial goals brings, and it fears the open-endedness that comes when we don’t have goals to preoccupy ourselves with.

 

 

We can of course put on an act of wanting to be liberated from our conditioning (which is to say, released from our ‘trivial, attention-absorbing concerns’) and we can be very good indeed at this act, fooling even ourselves (fooling especially ourselves), we can put on an Oscar-winning performance – but all of this is only ever going to be ‘necessary camouflage for the unfree self that fears  freedom’. ‘The self we think we are’ is constitutionally incapable of having any interest in freedom, no matter how hard it tries to fool itself to the contrary. The mind-created self is a machine, a construct, and a machine or construct – by definition – has no free will. A machine only ever does what it is designed to do, it can only ever ‘seek the goals that it has been programmed to seek’. When we observe the conditioned self or identity then we are watching a show. We’re watching a show and the show is only a show – there is no one there, there is no one ‘in it’. We very rarely find ourselves in the position of observing the self, however; instead, we end up (by default) in the situation of being utterly and helplessly immersed in the game (i.e., we find ourselves in the situation where ‘the game plays us’) and this means identify with ‘the player of the game’ as being ‘who we really are’ and experience ourselves – on this account – as possessing genuine free will of our own. In the show we are said to be free, in the game we are scripted as being ‘an actual bone fide volitional agent’ but that’s only the way the game is played. This is how games are played, the only way they can be played.

 

 

Our assumed identity is part and parcel of the story that is being told – it’s ‘an act’ (as we have said), but we have thrown ourselves into it so wholeheartedly, so unreservedly that we fully believe ourselves to be who we are said to be. We no longer have the perspective to see that the script is not the reality, the perspective to realize that the instructions which we are following so slavishly are only ‘instructions’ (and that we are therefore entirely free to utterly disregard it at any point in the proceedings). Instructions are always optional – there is always the possibility of radical freedom – ‘radical freedom’ being ‘the freedom do not obey instructions’ (which is to say, ‘the freedom not to be subsumed within someone else’s story’) and this is a freedom that the game (which is to say, the Mind-Created Virtual Reality) can never contain. Freedom can never be a goal since goals are the Mind-Created Virtual Reality…

 

 

‘Lack of perspective’ means that there is no SPACE between us and the script, us and the narrative. There’s no space between us and the rules that are telling us what to do and as a result of this absence of space we can’t see that ‘the rules are only rules’. We can’t see that the instructions (which we are adhering to as if they were Holy Writ) are actually only optional. There is no space in ‘conditioned consciousness’ between us and our thoughts, with the result that we are incapable of realising that we don’t have to buy into them, that we don’t have to elect to operate in the world in the way that the external authority of thought says we should. Having no perspective on things means having no freedom, therefore. Freedom (or perspective) is what undoes the whole setup – any capacity that we might have to see the world in any other way than the way we have been told to see it would be to throw a great big spanner in the works. Machines can’t be allowed any ‘essential leeway’ or else they would no longer be able to ‘go ahead and do the tasks that we require them to’. Why would a machine conform to our wishes in this way unless we corralled it and thereby took all other options off the table, unless we forced it to carry out the task by cutting off its freedom to do anything else?

 

 

This ‘spanner’ in question is space – any space at all and the whole thing falls to pieces. Conditioned reality relies on there not being any other way to see things other than the way than the one which the package itself supplies. The package – which is to say the System of Thought – isn’t just built around this specific operational parameter – the operational parameter of having ‘only the one way to see things’ – that’s the whole deal right there, that’s the beginning and the end of it. The beginning and end of the System of Thought is Zero Freedom. That’s all there is to it and so the pertinent point that we need to address here is that zero freedom does not exist. Zero F is only a hypothetical situation, a shiny ‘mind toy’ that we can play about with (if we want to). [“Whoever has to play cannot play.” – James Carse] For the sake of the game we say that there is such a thing, but the reality is that there isn’t. It’s impossible for there to be such a thing. The reality is therefore that we are in orbit around a hallucination – this is what conditioned life is all about, this perpetual ‘orbiting of the unreal’ is ‘what the life of the unfree self’ is all about…