Mindfulness Doesn’t Come From The Mind
The mind’s version of meditation isn’t really meditation, it’s just a cheap copy. It’s not the same thing at all. The mind only deals in systems and meditation isn’t a system. Meditation isn’t a system and the state of meditation doesn’t come about as a result of adhering to a system. ‘Adhering to a system’ is in fact the antithesis of meditation; conformity is the antithesis of meditation. The meditative state is that state in which we don’t adhere to anything. We’re not trying to obtain anything (or get away from anything) and so we’re not invested in any methods or approaches designed to facilitate that happening.
What we’re talking about is the ‘non-routine’ (or ‘unproduced’) state of being, therefore — it is that state of being which is fresh and unsullied. It is a state of being that does not ‘follow on from the past’, as Krishnamurti says. It isn’t a development or embellishment of anything else, and it certainly isn’t ‘something that happens as a result of following the appropriate rules or methods’! The non-routine and unproduced state of being isn’t a result of ‘something else’ (some external factor) happening because there just isn’t anything else — anything else is just stuff that seems real to us because we can’t be bothered to look into it, because we are habituated to believing in it. ‘Anything else’ is our own invention — only the unconstructed is real. Meditation that has been intended (meditation that serves a purpose) isn’t real.
This is a remarkably hard thing for us to understand, however. In our culture everything has to be accounted for within the framework of thought — which means that there has to be a method for it, a procedure for it, a system for it, and so on. Everything has to take place within the thinking mind’s scheme of things and — as we have just said — the meditative state doesn’t have a place in the thinking mind’s scheme of things. If it did (if it was something that could be routinely registered by the TM) then it would be ‘just another thought’, ‘just another mental construct’, ‘just another regular, repetitive state of being’. If it’s not on the map then, as far as we’re concerned, it simply doesn’t exist — if it’s not on the map (if it’s not part of the official description or dogma) then this categorically proves that it doesn’t exist. It can’t be argued against.
There just isn’t any way for us to go beyond this system of ‘what we already know’; there just isn’t any way to leave behind the way that we have organised the world for inside our own heads, and the reason for this is that the only ways we understand are the ones that we ourselves have invented. We only believe in our own thoughts. When we try to free ourselves from our own patterns of organisation then we just make the tangle worse; our attempts to escape from the pattern are part of that pattern, in other words. Our attempts to free ourselves from the suffering of neurosis are a manifestation of that neurosis. The attempt to exit the game is a legitimate move within the game, which means that we’re caught in a loop of logic.
The question is therefore, how do we escape from the trap of being mechanical the whole time? How are we to escape from ‘the prison of having to do everything on purpose on purpose, because that’s what we want? This is what it all comes down to — how do we escape from the trap when escaping from the trap is part of the trap? What we’re looking that’s here is not a science or technology — much as we might cling to the notion that it is, and that there is a ‘method’ for it. It’s what we might call ‘the Art of Living’, which is something that doesn’t get taught in schools. What does get taught in school (and in all other areas of society) is simply obedience and being obedient is hardly an art. There’s no art to obedience at all, obviously! Obedience is merely obedience — it’s simply a matter of reflecting back the template that we have been provided with. If we reflect or transmit the template correctly then we’re rewarded, and if we don’t then we get punished or penalised. No matter what anyone might say, no matter what ideas we might have to the contrary, this is what the conditioned life is all about. It’s as simple as this. Repeat (or reflect) the official story faithfully or else you will get what’s coming to you. Do anything else and you will feel the ‘cold shoulder of humanity’. No one will want to be your friend…
The Art of Living isn’t something that can be taught — we can’t be trained in it, according to some curriculum that has been decided by the government. It has to be independently acquired — the whole point of life (inasmuch as life can be said to have a point) is that we don’t let anyone else tell us how to live it. The whole point of life (we might say) is that we work it out for ourselves rather than reading from a script or copying it from a ‘official standard’ that we have been conveniently provided with. It has to be ‘original to ourselves’ (rather than being some generic product that we have bought off the shelf along with everyone else in the country). The art of living is simply the art of being the original that we already are, and so of course no one can tell us how to do this. No matter how highly trained and experienced an expert might be, they are no more qualified to teach you how to be original or authentic to yourself than the most uneducated person in the world. We can be (and we are) trained to be like everyone else, but it doesn’t work the other way. We can’t be trained to be an individual — there are no methods to producing a ‘one off’, there are no procedures or protocols that can enable us to become unique and not ‘just like everyone else’.
No one can train us or educate us to be who we actually are — that’s not what training is for. No outside interference would be needed in this case, obviously. To bring everyone into line however (to correct all the errors, to bring back all variations to the prescribed equilibrium level), can be achieved by using a specific formula — we apply the relevant formula and then compel everything to be the way this formula says it should be. That’s how it’s done. This is the process known as conditioning and we’ve been experts at this for thousands of years. The point is therefore that the process of training or conditioning only works the one way — we can impose normative values on ourselves, we can induce a state of bland uniformity, but there’s nothing we can do to bring back the diversity that we’ve lost. As we keep on saying, there is no formula for uniqueness, no formula for individuality.
Training the mind, being educated, being conditioned by society, adapting ourselves to the system, etc., all happens very easily; reversing this entropic process is another matter entirely, however. ‘Easy is the descent…’, says Virgil in The Aeneid –
Easy is the descent to Avernus, for the door to the underworld lies open both day and night. But to retrace your steps and return to the breezes above — that’s the task, that’s the toil.
The Equilibrium Realm — which is the only reality we can know about when we obey all the rules, when we never look at things in any way other than the way we’ve been provided with — is the Realm of Forgetting. It is — we might say — the ‘graveyard of consciousness’. It’s the graveyard of consciousness because only the individual can be conscious, because only the individual can be aware. Who we pretend to be but aren’t (who we mistakenly think we are) can’t be conscious any more than it can be sincere, or have actual honest-to-goodness integrity. The conditioned self — which is who the mind tells us we are — can’t be sincere; it can’t be sincere because it’s being constantly controlled without knowing that it is. This is of course also the reason why the conditioned self has no actual integrity — if I can be controlled the whole time without knowing it then naturally my word means nothing at all. Only real people have integrity. As a conditioned being, I’m not a real person — I’m just the image of one, I’m just a ‘cardboard cut-out’ of one. I’m ‘a fake person’…
To say that the conditioned self — the self we mistakenly think we are — can’t be aware is the same as saying that, although it might go through the routine or methodology of meditation such as watching the breath, etc, it is — all the same — fundamentally incapable of meditating. Meditation means ‘letting go of control’ and a device (or construct) that is made out of rules or reflexes can’t let go. Machines can obey instructions, for sure — if these instructions are pragmatically possible — but there’s no way ‘letting go’ (or ‘refraining from controlling’) can happen as a result of following instructions! The conditioned self — being a construct, being something that has been designed and held in place by intention — cannot let go of itself; this is a mechanical impossibility since the obeying (or the attempted obeying) of the instruction to let go is actually an act of control, an act of manipulation (or at least an attempted act of control or manipulation) to obey the rule <Do not obey the rule > is to disobey it, which is of course a manifestation of the Cybernetic Paradox, which no one ever talks about…
