Addicted To The BS
No matter how much rational bullshit we throw up into the air, we can’t alter the bald truth of our situation, which is that life comes down to one thing and one thing only, which is risk.
We do anything rather than admit this to ourselves however, and this is why we live such convoluted and complicated lives. This is why we’re ‘addicted to the thinking mind’s bullshit’. We can’t allow ourselves to see things in a simple way because that could be dangerous for us.
We’re ‘addicted to the thinking mind’s BS’ because that BS is all that stands between us and the terrifying spectre of irreducible uncertainty. If we were to see through the dense fog of rationality then what we would be seeing is that life always comes down to risk. There’s nothing else it can come down to!
Were we to look honestly (or straightforwardly) at life we would see that there’s nothing to it apart from risk, apart from uncertainty. Anything else is stuff that we have invented ourselves to make ourselves feel comfortable, anything else isn’t life at all but only some kind of infinitely fatuous ‘Mind-Produced Narrative’.
What’s happening here is that the MPN is dominating our awareness so much that we don’t know anything else but it and what this means is of course that the MPN (the ‘official story’) has taken the place of reality. It’s a classic ‘switch’, a sneakily substitution job. ‘Reality’ is no longer a thing.
It may sound rather alarming to say that life, in its essence, is nothing but pure, undiluted risk. It absolutely does sound alarming. To our usual way of thinking, this comes across as a bad thing. It’s worrying news. If true, that would mean that there’s no solid ground beneath our feet in the way that we always assume there is. It would mean that we’re poised precariously above an abyss that we don’t want to look at, that we don’t want to know about.
It is of course because we always assume that there’s solid ground beneath our feet (a ‘ground-that-will-never-let-us-down’) that we find talk about life being irreducible risk so very worrying. We’re so worried that we won’t even let ourselves know about it. To have our deepest, most unconscious assumptions suddenly overturned is guaranteed to be majorly disturbing. If believing in the solidity of our so-called ‘basis’ equals ‘sleep’ then having this called suddenly into question in a super-dramatic way equals ‘waking up’. Sleep is sweet and waking up bitter, says Gurdjieff.
Waking up to the actual truth of our situation is incalculably disturbing — it’s incalculably disturbing because we are dependent upon this particular illusion for our sense of well-being. We’ve invested everything we’ve got in that sense of well-being (precarious though it is). When illusion is seen for what it is then we have nothing left for us to depend on, and we don’t know any other state of being but ‘the state of dependency’.
As we were saying earlier, we are addicted to the BS, we’re addicted to the bullshit of the mind created narrative. Being addicted to something in a very thorough way and then — all of a sudden — being unable to obtain what we are addicted to is never going to be a pleasant experience. We’re never going to look favourably upon such an eventuality. We can’t blame reality for this either, but only ourselves for allowing ourselves to become addicted in the first place.
Risk isn’t really such a terrible, awful thing — risk simply means flow (or movement). To exist in reality (as opposed to existing strictly within the terms of the mind-produced narrative) is to be part of this flow. More than just being ‘part’ of the flow, it is to be the flow since the Cosmic Flux — (i.e., the Holomovement) has no boundaries, no limits, no edges. The universe is ‘one whole, unbroken movement’, says David Bohm — there isn’t anything anywhere that isn’t this whole, unbroken movement, in its completeness. It’s all the one thing and it can’t ever not be — Wholeness can’t be divided.
We might say that ‘living’ means being able to continually ‘let go’ therefore. We are all able to ‘let go’ — that’s intrinsic to us, that’s part of our inherent nature — the problem is however that we have developed ‘the habit of holding on’, ‘the habit of resisting the flow’. What compounds this problem is that it is culturally reinforced — we are encouraged to hold on in other words. We’re led to believe that this is the right way do things — the one who can hold on the tightest wins.
‘Continually letting go’ doesn’t mean that we have to keep on telling ourselves to let go, instructing ourselves to let go; that would be ridiculous, as Alan Watts says somewhere in relation to this thing called ‘acceptance’ — we have a tendency to think that this involves continually having to make lots of little acts of acceptance, as if acceptance were a purposeful or deliberate action, which is of course the very opposite of acceptance. Accepting risk simply means that we aren’t constantly looking for a security (or ‘sense of purchase’) that isn’t there. Or to put this another way, it means that we are ‘genuinely interested in what happens next instead’ instead of ‘always trying to control what happens next’.
Being ‘genuinely interested in what’s going on’ is what it means to be alive — if we aren’t interested then we aren’t alive. Life is when we spontaneously (not calculatedly) engage in the ongoing river of change that is reality; ‘Holding on’ (or ‘fixating’ or ‘identifying’) is — on the other hand — nothing more than fear. It’s not just that we’re ‘not interested’ in what’s going to happen next, we are fearful of it, we’re neophobic. We are infinitely averse to ever encountering the new, the uncharted, the unprecedented. We’re averse to finding out ‘what happens next’ and that’s why we stick with the thinking mind’s sterile construct of reality rather than the thing itself…
