Pushing back Against The Real
We can live life in one of two ways — we can either live it on the basis of thought, or we can live it directly, spontaneously, without any conceptual mediation whatsoever, without any precedence (or preference) at all. In the first case we never depart from our idea of life, our idea of ‘what it’s all about’, whilst in the second case we don’t have any idea of ‘what it’s about’, we don’t have any mental map of ‘what’s going on’. In the first case we act out of our knowledge of the world, whilst in the second case we just act — we act in an unpremeditated, non-reflex-driven way. Our actions aren’t prefigured by our knowledge. We ‘know that we know nothing’, so to speak — we don’t really ‘know’ anything since knowing means having a map of reality and then taking it for granted that our map is functionally equivalent to what is (supposedly) being mapped. Knowledge means having an idea or theory that we don’t ever question, an idea or theory which we have decided — either individually or collectively — to be ‘true’, to be the ‘right’ one. Our consistent habit of doing this prevents us from seeing something crucial here, which is that our idea of (or theory about) the real world is never true. As the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna says,
All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things.
In our daily lives we absolutely never do see this — we never have any sense or intimation whatsoever that our basic idea about the world is always going to be false, or ‘deceptive’. Instead of ‘questioning our theory’, what we do is to interrogate reality on the basis of our theory and then take and then call the results of our systematic interrogation knowledge. This is how we make knowledge — by ‘not questioning’. This is how it is obtained.
Once we start using our theory or idea about things to understand the world then this turns into a trap — it’s a trap because once we have started doing this then we can’t go back again. There is an irreversibility associated with this mechanism — the mechanism of understanding the new in terms of the old. What we’re looking at here is the irreversibility of the entropic process. This is nothing if not straightforward to explain — because we are using our theory as a measuring stick, as a ‘decider’ with respect to whether a particular datum is true or not, we have put ourselves in a position where we can’t ever be contradicted by the reality that we are supposedly investigating. We’re in this position because whenever our model doesn’t fit whenever information comes our way (whenever it doesn’t agree with our ready-made categories) this disagreement (this incongruent information) gets automatically dismissed as error (which is to say, as ‘not being worth taking any notice of’).
Because we don’t take any interest in ‘disagreeing data’ we don’t learn anything from it, we’re not influenced in any way by it. It’s ‘water off a duck’s back’ to us. We certainly aren’t going to get rid of our model, our hypothesis because of it. We are constantly trying to optimise our behaviour with respect to the model that we are working with, which essentially means that we are fighting against away things really are and ‘fighting against the way things really are’ is never going to result in a good outcome for us! It’s never going to result in the outcome we’re looking for, that’s for sure… When we push against the way reality actually is then reality is at some point going to push back at us and when reality ‘pushes back at us’ like this what we have on our hands is a pushing match that we’re not ever going to be able to win!
When we push against ‘the way things are’ and we seem to be getting somewhere as a result (i.e., when we seem to making headway) then this is intensely rewarding. This gives us a good feeling. This is the euphoria of getting our own way, the euphoria of wish-fulfilment, the euphoria of ego-gratification. Although we might be loath to confront the fact, we live for that euphoria of getting our own way — this is the buzz that we’re all craving, this is what we’re all talking about. Chasing euphoria is the name of the game. This isn’t a straightforward as we might think however, since the euphoria is coming about as a result of us convincing ourselves that reality is what it ultimately isn’t. We’re obtaining our precious buzz as a result of being able to successfully deceive ourselves, in other words, and this — as we need hardly point out — does not bode at all well for us. We’re ‘cruising for a bruising’, as the phrase has it.
By the same token therefore, when we don’t get our own way, when we aren’t able to successfully control things, then we feel correspondingly bad, correspondingly dysphoric. We experienced punishment instead of reward. The business of ‘operating out of a fixed framework’ necessarily involves us ‘ignoring the way things really are without us being able to see that we are ignoring anything’ and this means that we are locked into the cycle of pleasure followed by pain, reward followed by punishment over and over again with no prospect of there ever being an end to it. We pin all our hopes that there is at some stage going to be a successful resolution to this ongoing state of conflict but — needless to say — the unpalatable truth is that there never will be. There can’t be a positive resolution to the struggle because every positive result that we achieve automatically brings the corresponding negative result in tow. It just keeps on rolling over. ‘Defeat is born at the very moment of victory’, as the Daoists say.
This is a thoroughly miserable situation therefore, and it will continue to be so just as long as we’re acting out of a fixed framework, and once we start ‘acting out of a fixed framework’ then — as we have just said — we’re locked into it. It’s irreversible, there’s no way out. What could free us is being constantly disregarded as ‘error’, as being ‘a mistake’, as ‘stuff not going to plan’, and so on. Stuff that doesn’t fit in with our idea of what is good or useful is automatically going to be viewed as being worthless, something to be shunned or disregarded and when logic or rationality is our master then this is the road we will go down, the road of ever-increasing narrowness, the road of ever-increasing alienation from reality. By trying to be more effective we not only become less effective, we ‘act against ourselves’. We can relate this principle to the motif of the ‘youngest brother’ in fairy tales, who is represented as the one we don’t put our money on, the one who is not single minded (if not ruthless) in his purpose but rather is universally regarded as being somewhat soft in the head, as being something of a fool. The motif is that the brother we expect to succeed comes a cropper, whilst the silly younger brother fulfils the quest, fulfils the mission, precisely because he is a ‘fool’. We might also think of the role of Parcival in the Grail myth.
Our inordinate fondness for the euphoria of getting around way is our downfall therefore and were we ‘get clever’ and try to escape this trap by denying ourselves (instead of gratifying ourselves, as is customary) then we end up in exactly the same dark hole, since we are still trying to manipulate the situation, since we are still ‘addicted to control’. We’re still trying to get her own way. We can’t deliberately escape from The Prison of Purposefulness anymore that we can think our way out of the Jailhouse of Rationality. If there was a prize for ‘persistence in the face of outright impossibility’ we’d win it for sure, but unfortunately for us the only prize is that we get to stay in detention indefinitely. Our inability to question the rational mind and its productions condemns us to repeat the same mistake forever.
We can’t leave the Directed Mode of existence by directing ourselves to do so, we can’t depart from the virtual world that has been put together by thought on the basis of our mental map (or model) of ‘what’s going on’. If there is a rock upon which our civilization is foundering upon therefore then it is this, it is our profound blindness regarding this principle, and this is a blindness that we are prepared to defend to the last. We will defend our blindness, our ‘wilful ignorance’, to the bitter end because without it we can’t carry on as we are (or — rather — we can’t carry on as we have always understood ourselves to be). If we weren’t so stubborn in our refusal to question thought then the show would come to an abrupt end, and it just so happens that we’re very attached to that show. As far as we are concerned, we are it, as far as we’re concerned we are ‘the show’…
As far as we’re concerned we are the show that is being put on, but the show that is being put on is only that — a ‘show’, a ‘production’, and this means that when whatever it is that is putting on the show stops putting on the show then the show will no longer be there. It will no longer exist. The truth is that it never did exist of course — it was only a production, a construct, a ‘caused thing’. A caused thing is not free, it has no freedom in it — it can’t be free because it is a caused thing, because it works on strings, like a puppet. It can only do what it is made to do, what it is instructed to do, what it is caused to do and yet — all the same — we see this show or production as being ‘us’, as being ‘who we are’. Were we to have the intimation that this production were about to come to an end then we would be mortally afraid. This is absurd however — how could we think that we are this thing that has no freedom in it, this ‘Purposeful Self’? The loss of this false idea of who we are (which has no freedom and which is essentially the same thing as the fixed framework that we use to look out at the world from) is actually the beginning of freedom not the end of it, and yet somehow it is this very freedom that we are so afraid of. We are — in effect — addicted to our captivity and so — as a result — we will do anything rather than depart from our imprisoning (and unreal) map of the world.
