The Delaying Game
How does neurotic mental pain remind us of who we really are? This is an odd question because we don’t experience neurotic suffering as reminding us of anything of the sort! On the contrary, we experience neurotic pain as preventing us from being who we are. We experience it has been the very thing that thwarts and frustrates us at every turn, the thing that gets in the way of ‘us being ourselves’. Neurotic suffering is the ‘fly in the ointment’ — so to speak — that threatens to ruin our lives.
This is a perfect inversion of the truth however — neurotic pain / frustration comes about as a result of us not being able to be who the thinking mind says we should be, which is a very different thing indeed! Strictly speaking, neurosis isn’t the result of us ‘not being able to be who or what thought says we should be’, but the result of us being ‘the helpless slaves of thought’ (since this means that we are going to put ourselves under tremendous pressure to do what thought tells us to do). The thinking mind itself isn’t the problem therefore — the problem is us buying into it. The problem — as Ouspensky says — is our wretched obedience. Thought is there (we might say) to help us: where and when appropriate, it provides us with maps and models and guidelines to make help us make sense of what’s going on. Whether it is appropriate or not to use it is left up to us — we are the user of the tool, after all. Knowing when to utilise thought or when not to comes out of us, not the instrument.
As long as we are the user of the tool then there is no neurotic misery — everything is fine in that regard, everything is Hunky Dory. What inevitably happens in everyday life however is that we end up in the situation where we are no longer the user of the tool, and instead we find ourselves in the position of being subservient to it. We are being controlled by the tool in everything we do — the boot is now on the other foot, and this makes all the difference in the world. After this switch-over takes place then it’s no longer up to us to say when the use of the tool of thought is appropriate or not appropriate — thought will now tell us that, and once thought gets into the position of being able to tell us when the use of the thinking mind is appropriate or not then we are in trouble. We’re in trouble because the thinking mind is always going to tell us that the use of thought is appropriate all the time. There’s never a situation when it isn’t needed (according to itself, at any rate).
Thought — when it gets in the driving seat — doesn’t just tell us that its use is appropriate 100% of the time, it leads us to believe that it is absolutely essential for everything. It’s not thought’s fault that it tells us this however — thought — because it is a machine — is quite incapable of telling us where the limit of its applicability is. This goes without saying, really — for thought to be able to acknowledge where the limit of its applicability lies it would have to have insight into its own ‘relativity’ and that’s not possible. It would have to be able to understand its own nature and it can’t. Logic can’t acknowledge its own essential relativity, it can’t see itself for what it truly is, and thought is logic. There’s nothing else to thought but logic — there’s no other principle involved. It’s ‘either/or’ (or ‘yes/no’) all the way.
Thought operates on the basis of ‘the Principle of the Excluded Middle’ — either a particular datum belongs in a given category or it doesn’t, either a particular statement is true, or it is false, there are no other possibilities. Another way of explaining this is to say that logic never has any uncertainty in it. ‘YES’ is pretty damn certain and so is ‘NO’ and (due to Aristotle’s Principle of the Excluded Middle) it’s either got to be one or the other! The idea that there could be a question (when couched in the most rigorously logical terms) that doesn’t have either an affirmative or a negative answer simply doesn’t make sense to the logical (either/or) mind. There is a complete certainty in logic therefore, but this is not to say that the same certainty exists anywhere else. As Ludwig Wittgenstein says, “I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.” The same can be said for logic (logic being the source of all our certainty in the first place) — the iron-clad certainty belongs only in the system of logic.
When it’s a Formal System we’re talking about then having total certainty isn’t a problem — there can’t be anything else in a Formal System! We make up the rules in an FS, we say how things are going to be, and so of course we can be certain about the various ways in which the system can work out, the various states that it can exist in. As Wittgenstein points out however, the certainty in question is all ours. The way the world is in itself — the world which isn’t a formal exercise in logic — isn’t like that at all. As long as there have been philosophers to philosophize which is to say, as long as the human race has been in existence it has been observed that the real world (as opposed to the world of our thoughts) is characterised by the quality of ‘irreducible uncertainty’, which is to say, mystery.
Spontaneity (which lies at the heart of everything) and uncertainty (which is also at the heart of everything) come down to the very same thing — what is spontaneous is always uncertain, since — by definition — we weren’t expecting it. We can’t explain how (or why) it happened — all we can do is see that it is happening. The awareness that uncertainty (or spontaneity) is what lies at the heart of everything is however something that we feel a very great antipathy to. This isn’t the way we like to see things, but it is — all the same — the way things actually are, as Alan Watts remarks here –
This is why the Western mind is dismayed when the ordered conceptions of the universe break down, and when the basic behaviour of the physical world is found to be a principle of uncertainty.
As Pliny the Elder observed back in Roman times, ‘The only certainty is that nothing is certain’ and this statement is clearly parallel to that made by Heraclitus when he famously said ‘The only constant is change’. Change takes us beyond the known, and to go beyond the known is to be plunged into the deepest mystery. To go beyond the known is to be brought face to face with the Great Enigma.
Our approach to life — as a predominantly rational culture — is to bring the known with us wherever we go, thereby affording ourselves a sense of security in what is a fundamentally insecure or uncertain universe. As a culture, we don’t value mystery, we don’t value uncertainty; our attitude — whether we state it or not — is that mystery exists only to be ‘cleared up’, or ‘explained away’. We would say that uncertainty simply means that we haven’t got to the bottom of it yet, nothing more than this. It’s an entirely trivial affair, as far as we’re concerned. On the face of it, this scheme of things might seem to be working well for us (in that we firmly believe that we are ‘on top of things’) but this only happens at the cost of ‘us losing sight of something very important’. What we’ve lost sight of is the Actual Truth of our Situation, which — as we have noted — is one that is characterised by irreducible uncertainty.
If the nature of reality — at root, at its core — is that it is ‘radically uncertain’ (or ‘quintessentially mysterious’) then to adopt a strategy of making out that it isn’t uncertain, making out that it isn’t at all mysterious, in order for us to feel more secure about a situation, is — to say the least — rather disingenuous of us. ‘Mystery?’, we protest innocently, ‘we don’t know anything about any mystery!’ As far as we’re concerned, everything is exactly what it says on the label (which is ‘the literal viewpoint’) and it never occurs to us that things could be otherwise. Everything just ‘is’ what we think it is, and this unreflective literalism constitutes the foundation of our everyday lives, the foundation that we can’t ever go beyond. Everything we do, we do on the basis of this literal foundation, and this is where all our neurotic mental pain comes from. Neurosis comes about as a result of this big cover up — the ‘cover up’ of intrinsic uncertainty. We cover up the true nature of the world we live in by saying that everything we believe in is ‘sure and certain’ when it isn’t (and when there isn’t actually any such thing as ‘sure and certain’). By being ‘certain’ about things — in the utterly absurd way that we are — we obstruct reality itself.
Once we subscribe to ‘the Great Cover Up’ — once we assert that things are a certain way when they just plain aren’t — then we are committed to a fiction that we can’t allow ourselves to see as such and this is a painful knot that we can’t ever untangle (or — at least — it’s a knot that we can’t ever untangle without ‘coming clean’, without ‘giving up our story’, without ‘abandoning our precious narrative’). Nothing we do is ever going to come good for us just as long as we remain committed to this core act of self-deception / denial. How could it, after all? How could anything ever come good for us when it’s based on a false premise that we won’t ever admit to being false? Everything that comes out of the denial is the denial and this is why we say that in our everyday literal or mechanical lives we can never go beyond the Literal Foundation that this rule-based ‘life’ is based on.
Just to recap — we are — both individually and collectively — involved in an act of denial and nothing that comes out of denial can ever be wholesome or true. We can pretend that it is — we can fool ourselves that our endeavours, our projects, our purposeful activities, are ‘wholesome and true’ but this is never going to be never going to work out for us. Pretending never does, after all — that’s why it’s called ‘pretending’! We can only ever ‘pretend that our pretending is working out for us’ (and this new level of pretending isn’t going to work either for us either). No matter how fast we run we’re not going to get away — this is a ‘problem’ no one can solve. If every level we build on our pagoda is based on pretence than no matter how many levels or layers we add to the structure we’re never going to leave pretending behind. We’re building a House of Cards for ourselves and whilst we can temporarily distract ourselves from seeing this fact by putting all our focus on the process of maintaining the structure, we are only ever playing a delaying game. The most we can ever hope for is that we can postpone the moment when we have to come face to face with the truth that we don’t want to hear. By investing heavily we can put off that fateful moment for a while longer.
We started off this discussion by asking how neurotic mental pain can ‘remind us who we really are’ which is not a question most of us are ever going to take seriously in the normal course of things. It’s a question that makes any sense to us. The answer to the question as to how neurosis uncovers our true nature becomes a lot clearer when we see ‘who we think we are’, ‘who we say we are’, ‘who we see ourselves as being’ as a pretence, a fiction, a made-up story. We can then see that neurotic suffering is reminding us — in a most unwelcome way — that who we so aggressively assert ourselves to be is simply not true. My identity is the most sure and certain thing there is (in the normal course of events) and so once cracks start to appear in it our whole world feels as if it is falling catastrophically to pieces. In a very real way our whole world absolutely IS falling to pieces and — moreover — (as we have just said) we can do nothing about this process of deterioration other than ‘play the delaying game’. This isn’t all there is to it, however. In an even more real way our world (which equals ‘our identity’) is falling to pieces but the point about this is that ‘our world’ is only just a construct (just as ‘our identity’ is only just a mask) and so when this construct (when this mask) is seen for what it is — this ‘unveiling of the truth’ being the eventuality that we’re fighting so hard against — then the reality of ‘who we really are’ is unexpectedly revealed…
