Being ‘addicted to thought’ means being ‘addicted to control’ and being addicted to control means that we’re forever going to be going around in circles. Thought can never depart from the basic assumptions that it is founded upon, control can never depart from the Framework of Reference that it operates within. The irony is that the thing that ‘leads us on’ when we’re caught up in thinking is the constant feeling that we are getting somewhere, that we are getting somewhere new and exciting. The thing that’s keeping us ‘hooked on controlling’ is the belief that when we do achieve perfect control (which is to say, when we can ‘get our own way’ without anything being able to gainsay us) then this will be a tremendous step forward. We are flatly convinced – in such a way that no one can talk us out of it – that once we are ‘in control’ then all our problems will come to an end, and there is nothing more attractive to us than this. This promise (the promise of having ‘no more problems’) is the siren song that unfailingly lures us on to our doom. This is what Extrinsic Motivation is all about – it’s the irresistible magnetic pull that comes from the belief that – if we try hard enough – we can ‘permanently end all our problems’ (and the ‘irony’ is that it is this belief that is creating our problems in the first place).

 

 

When we imagine ourselves to be travelling in the direction of this end (which equals ‘winning’) then we feel good and this rewarding feeling incentivises us to double down on our efforts. This is the feeling that we’re addicted to therefore – the feeling that we’re travelling in a straight line and that this straight line is taking us away from where ‘we don’t want to be’ and towards some kind of ultimate fulfilment (the nature of which we never examine too closely, despite the fact that we believe in it so strongly). The perception that we’re ‘progressing’ in this way is intoxicating – we can’t get enough of it… There is no ‘progress’ in a circle however and thought – as we started off by saying- can do nothing else but ‘travel in circles’. We can’t for the life of us see this however – our faces would go perfectly blank if you were to try to tell us this – but our lack of receptivity or appreciation in this regard is only to be expected, given the fact that all we know is thought and thought is necessarily blind to its own nature. We say that it’s ‘progress’ to live in ‘the world that is made by thought’ – the fact that we get to design our own environment, design the world that we live in, seems to us like the ‘supreme advantage’ to us – being in control of things, being in control of what’s going on, is of course an advantage as far as we’re concerned. Being in control is the ultimate advantage from the perspective of the rational mind, the rational outlook. Being in control is ‘the be all and the end all’ – it’s the only thing that really matters.

 

 

For the thinking mind, control is not just ‘a good thing’, it is essential. Not be not to be in control is a potential disaster – who knows what might happen then? Thought is control; it is control because it it is the evaluations or judgements that it makes is what lies behind control. To think is to evaluate; ‘Every thought is a judgement’ (to paraphrase Eckhart Tolle) and without that judgement, without that evaluation, control as a concept has no meaning whatsoever. Control is the enforcing of that judgement and if there is no ‘black-and-white picture of the world’ then the notion of control simply can’t arise. Firstly, we think about how we want things to be (in order to ‘gain the advantage’, in order to ‘secure the best possible position’) and then – on the back of this analysis – we do what is necessary to bring that optimum situation about. When we control successfully then the situation we obtain as a result faithfully reflects our thinking therefore (which means that the other way of putting this is to say that the situation which we bring about as the result of our activity IS our thinking). Thus, David Bohm states that the System of Thought isn’t just this abstract process of logical analysis, extrapolation, problem solving etc, etc, but that it is also the environment we bring about as a result of that process. The SOT isn’t just ‘the thinking’, it’s the products of that thinking. The Designed World and the thinking that created it are one and the same thing and when we are in that system then we have no independence from it – we have no possibility of ever seeing the world in any other way than the way that it has imposed on us.

 

 

The SOT is synonymous with control; what we call ‘control’ is where everything is being brought in line with the template of thought (which we aren’t allowed to question) – it’s where ‘all errors are corrected’. Control is ‘the correction of errors’, it is ‘the bringing about of the right outcome’, and once the correction has been successfully carried out then we don’t have to bother about it anymore. It has become thoroughly invisible to us, which means that we can now happily move on to the next thing. Anomalies show up (and why wouldn’t they when reality itself is an Anomaly, an Enigma) and then we automatically correct for them, we automatically ‘smooth them out’ so as to make them go away (and thereby convert them into ‘the non-nuanced reality). The ‘non-nuanced reality’ is another way of talking about the Linearity, (which is to say, it’s another way of talking about ‘the abstract straight line that doesn’t actually go anywhere’). This smoothing out (or ‘damping’) happens beneath the level of conscious attention – it is the everyday automatic function of the rationalising / categorising mind which mechanically collects preselected samples from the spectacular multi-hued waterfall of incoming information which is ‘Reality’ (whatever that means) in the rusty old buckets that it holds out (and simultaneously disregards what it doesn’t collect, disregards what doesn’t fit). There is a veritable Rainbow of Information there, appearing miraculously from beyond the remit of space and time, but we’re only interested in the one very narrow band. We disregard all else with the indifference of a machine, with the utter disregard of something that does not live, something that ‘neither knows life nor cares to’…

 

 

Control is the manifestation our ‘utter indifference towards reality as it actually is’, therefore. It is the senseless violence of the machine that ‘converts everything into itself’ without ever seeing (or caring) what it is doing, without ever questioning anything about the process which is itself. Questioning isn’t its style. We have ourselves long since been ‘converted’ (we have long since been devoured by Rumi’s Dragon) and we’re part and parcel of that machine – we’ve been mechanised, automatised, digitalised, formalised…. We’ve been ‘processed by the Processor’ and so we’re now locked into the Machine World, part and parcel of it, units or cog wheels within it, and so we can’t see it for what it is. We can’t know it for what it is – its indifference is our indifference, its violence our violence. We serve it in all things and as a result of our unquestioning service we have become it. We say that ‘control is what it’s all about’, we say that ‘control is the only thing that guarantees the right outcome’; we believe that if we don’t control (or fail to control successfully) then this is the ultimate ignominy, the ultimate shameful failure. No one will respect us then and we won’t respect ourselves either; no one will want to have anything to do with us, and so on and so forth. We’re pressurised on all sides to conform to the horror that has overtaken us (and which we will steadfastly refuse to see).

 

 

This is our culture, this is what we’ve been brought up on, and yet what it all comes down to is the nullification of reality itself. What it all comes down to is ‘playing our part in the process where everything gets perfectly homogenised, where ‘everything is being converted into ‘slop’. Whilst we’re engaged in this task it feels that we’re doing a something truly great – we’re carried along on the crest of a wave of pure euphoria. We’re partaking in the glory – just as long as we’re succeeding in the task, we are bathed in every kind of validation. Our excitement knows no bounds – we can’t wait to get to the promised destination, and yet the whole time we’re heading en mass (like human lemmings) for the cliff edge. Once we do get to finish the finish line, once we do succeed in the Great Task, then there’s nothing there but ‘the Great Let-Down’; after the euphoria fades (as it always does) we discover – both on the personal and the collective level, that the whole time we were pursuing our own Doom, which great dedication and perseverance…

 

 

We have created the Grey World, the Hollow World, the ‘world that has been built on lies’. The Consensus Reality that we have so diligently set up for ourselves (at the expense of anything that’s actually interesting, anything that will feed our souls) is actually a Vacuum of Meaning and the only thing that prevents us from seeing this is our ‘ongoing purposeful activity’, our ongoing ‘goal-seeking behaviour’. The real problem isn’t the Vacuum of Meaning but our cowardly refusal to see it.  We fix problems in order to distract ourselves from witnessing the utter terrifying sterility of the whole endeavour – the crime is ‘ongoing’ but witnesses there are none! Just as long as we’re ‘struggling to make things better’ we can live in hope, we can live in expectation of ‘receiving the prize’ and this is Extrinsic Motivation (i.e., the motivation that comes from outside of us, the motivation that is supplied for us by the Machine). We’re racing along in a straight-line track imagining that there is a pot of gold at the end of it, the pot of gold that is – as Alan Watts says – ‘always just around the corner’. This is the illusion fostered by the linearity – we’re passenger in a train hurtling towards an imagined destination that will make it all worthwhile. ‘Straight lines’ don’t go anywhere, however – logic never takes us anywhere, it goes around and around in the same meaningless loop forever and this is the thing that we can never bring ourselves to see….

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – rockpapershotgun.com