The Realm of Automatic Controlling
Automatic controlling means ‘controlling that we can’t help getting caught up in’, controlling that we’re obliged to get involved in, whether we want to or not. This is an unfamiliar notion inasmuch as we normally assume that if there’s controlling going on then it must be a reflection of what we personally want to happen (i.e., that is a reflection of our actual volition). The idea that we might be drawn into controlling (or trying to control) when we don’t really want to comes across as being somewhat strange to us (even though, if we looked into it, we would realise that being ‘hijacked by controlling’ in this way is something that happens all the time. It’s the default situation.
In ‘The Realm of Automatic Controlling’ we control because we are afraid not to, we control because we are being controlled by the perceived need to control and so what this means is that we are not free not to control, which contradicts the naive notion that we have that controlling is a always choice on our part. To be a successful controller is something that is universally admired in our society and this admiration bears testimony to a profound lack of psychological insight on our part; we just can’t see that what seems like strength is actually weakness, we can’t see that we only put all the effort into controlling that we do put into because we’re afraid of what might happen otherwise.
There is a disparity between ‘how things appear on the outside’ and ‘how things actually are on the inside’ — if we are effective in getting things to be the way we want them to be on the outside then this is taken as evidence of strength, even though on the inside we are being controlled every inch of the way by ‘the need to control’, which makes us into nothing more than the tool or instrument of fear. We do fear’s bidding with the greatest of diligence, it is true, but this can hardly be considered as a virtue or strength! When we’re in the grip of fear we have to control — it’s as simple as that — and so what this means is that the Realm of Automatic Controlling (i.e., the world in which we have no choice but to try our best to stay in control at all times) is another way of talking about The World That Fear Has Made, which is where everything is about obedience, where everything is about ‘automatically doing whatever we’re told to do by the System of Thought’. Thought tells us that we have to control (because something bad will happen if we don’t) but this isn’t true. We don’t have to control…
This disparity between what thought tells us is true and what actually is true (whether we can see it or not) is the key to everything — when we can’t see it then we don’t know that we’re being controlled by the need to control and — instead — we perceive us it to be the case that we’re doing whatever we’re doing voluntarily, out of our own free will. The lack of insight regarding ‘what’s happening on the inside’ means that we fall into the default situation of believing that the appearance (which is to say, ‘the theatrical level of things’) is all that there is. This means that ‘the appearance is true’, it means that ‘the theatrical level is not theatrical at all but dramatic’. Our understanding of our situation has collapsed to ‘just the one level’, in other words, and this collapsed view of our situation doesn’t correspond to anything real. We have been ‘subsumed within the game’ and when this happens then we can no longer see that the game is just a game. For us, the construct is all that there is, the description that is provided for us by the System of Thought is all that there is.
When we get subsumed within the game (so that we only have awareness of the theatrical or scripted level of things) then the story of ‘how things are’ becomes the same thing as how things actually are and the story is that we are acting out of our own true volition, that we’re controlling voluntarily, not because we have to. This apparent reality couldn’t be further from the truth however — there’s nothing voluntary about what’s going on here. It’s all just ‘mechanics’. As far as appearances go, we are acting in a perfectly autonomous fashion and our actions are straightforward manifestations of this autonomy. The surface-level appearance of autonomy is the same thing as the illusory impression of being this ‘purposeful self’, this ‘chooser or decider’, this ‘striver after the goal’, this ‘enactor of the agenda’, and so on. Were we to see that we’re being controlled by the need to control then that would be the end of this particular illusion — it would mark the end of the illusion that we have of us being the causal agent and instead of seeing ourselves as ‘causing things to happen in accordance with our sovereign wishes’ (‘in accordance with the dictates of our sacred will’) we would correctly perceive it to be the case that we are ‘the caused’ and not ‘the causer’. We are the oily rag, not the mechanic and this is the ‘reversal of perception’ that comes about as a result of bringing consciousness into the picture.
These two perceptions are fundamentally incompatible — in order for us to be able to see ourselves as volitional agents we cannot see that our experience of ‘being who we think we are’ is a construct which is being continuously produced by the thinking mind. The cherished illusion that ‘I am this sovereign self’ would evaporate in a flash were we to see that our day-to-day experience (inasmuch as it is centred upon the idea of the chooser, the idea of the doer, the idea of the agent) is the output of the machine which is the SOT. I can’t perceive myself to be both ‘the creator of output’ and ‘the output’ at one and the same time. To be the cause and the caused at the same time just don’t go together. If we could see the bigger picture of what’s going on then we’d no longer believe ourselves to be this sovereign agent (‘consciousness is the absence of self’, as we could also say) and so the degree to which we are afraid of learning that we aren’t this construct (and that the construct only is a construct) is also the extent to which we’re going to resist consciousness, the extent to which we’re going to resist seeing the bigger picture.
The Realm of Automatic Controlling — which is just another way of talking about the Fear World, as we said earlier — is also the realm which facilitates us in creating the everyday experience of ‘us being this localized self’, therefore. It is the realm in which we are compelled to create the self (since what we are referring to as ‘automatic controlling’ always has the effect of causing us to identify with ‘the one who is supposedly doing the controlling’ or ‘the one who is supposedly making the choices’). This is of course precisely what we have been saying — when we see that we are being compelled to control (because of our fear of what will happen otherwise) then this means that we haven’t collapsed everything down to the single level of description by (i.e., the ‘theatrical’ or ‘scripted’ one), this means that we are aware of the disparity between the superficial appearance and what is behind that appearance. We are aware of the disparity between the representation and what is being represented and so there is no loss of information, there is no ‘collapse’, and we are not — therefore — the victim of the attention-devouring illusion which gives rise to the unconscious state.
If we were to ‘go along with the mechanism’ (as we almost always do go along with it) then this awareness doesn’t happen, however; the mechanism gets rid of any trace of discrepancy faster than a blink of the eye and we won’t suspect a thing. We have in this case been ‘well and truly devoured’ and — once devoured — the chances are overwhelmingly that we will stay that way. The chances are overwhelmingly against us ever emerging into the light of day again. ‘Easy is the descent to Avernus’, says Virgil. Something vital has been lost and that vital thing is ‘the ability to tell the difference between the mind’s conventional, stereotyped description of what’s going on’ and ‘the actual truth of the matter’. The ‘ability to tell the difference’ is nothing other than consciousness itself, which means of course that it’s rather more than just ‘an ability’! Whereas the situation where the description and what is being described are conflated, are treated as equivalent, cannot in any way be said to involve consciousness — instead of consciousness what we have here is the situation where we take whatever the thinking mind tells us as being ‘the literal or unquestionable truth’. What we have here is the situation where the System of Thought’s output has become falsely equivalent to reality itself and where ‘reality itself’ is a non-existent thing…
