Jun 17 2008
Tiers of illusion
I am really proud of yesterday’s entry, it expressed how I feel well. It reaffirmed the fact that I literally do see a different reality, and that’s what I wanted to do. But I would like to flesh out some of the details.
We are born into a world that depends on illusions. We are taught what they are, and we are taught all the methods of keeping discipline amongst those who might question the illusion. One of the reasons I can’t give you details about it, apart from the fact that almost everything you have ever known is part of the illusion and that limits what you’ll hear when I say certain words, is that there are many layers to the illusion of “everyday life”. Picking apart one layer is not enough. It’s a minor victory in itself, but it isn’t the total freedom that I want you to have. Here are some of the layers:
- “I am better than you”. This one extends to “my group is better than your group”. It is a culturally conditioned need to grade and assess the worth of people and things. It leads to segregation, racism, xenophobia. It gives us permission to treat another individual or group in a way that we wouldn’t be able to treat ourselves. As you’ll find, there are authentic ways of assessing people and things, but what I am talking about here are the knee-jerk assessments of others that are based on conditioning. It can be any group that differs from you in the slightest way. Different skin, different language, different religion, cultural differences, differences of species, or differing levels of immediate use to you. These are all arbitrary, nonsensical criteria for judging the worth or value of something.
- Memory and education instead of life. Do the same thing a few times, and there is a temptation to stop seeing the world, and to start seeing the memory of the world. Without any real need to see the opportunities or dangers in the world around us, we remain safely wrapped within our memories. Over time this erodes our sense of reality, immediacy, and our strong reactions to things that happen to us. The world is no longer a beautiful, vibrant, awe-inspiring, terrifying place. It is just a dry memory, polished and sanitised by education.
- “It’s not my fault”. You are born utterly free, and very powerful. Of course there are limits on what we can choose and what we can do, put on us by physics and physiology, but this argument cannot dispel the enormous potential of human beings. Put it aside as an excuse. As a culture we have mostly forgotten the meaning of power, and the reality of the will. You can do anything. But we put limits on ourselves and set ourselves little goals. This happens for a broad range of reasons, but the common factor is fear and a set of values and beliefs that down-plays the power of the individual. Our world is dying. Life is being wiped out at an apocalyptic rate. Elsewhere life is mocked, ruined and stripped of all dignity. It is your fault. You have given your power to politicians when you vote them in. You give your power to irresponsible companies when you buy from them. You have betrayed your solidarity with other living things when you eat domesticated meat. If you have not fought with every ounce of energy in your body against the system today, then the death and destruction is your fault. There is no avoiding that.
- I want to be happy. Generally, people who say they seek happiness are actually seeking pleasure. And long ago our culture learned that pleasure is almost as good as fear to motivate people. Fear can lead people to do all sorts of unpredictable things. But offer people the prospect of pleasure, and you have control over them. So it is that our culture is addicted to immediate, warped pleasures. Our sexualities have become very bizarre. And we are addicted to two main stimulants: caffeine and sugar. Sugar being the main one. When I say addicted, I am not being inflammatory. Sugar is in everything, and it creates emotional highs and lows that lead to a psychological need for more sugar. On a large scale, this has a soporific effect on a culture, distracting it from other concerns. Mix in plenty of porn, an obsession with unrealistic body shapes, the thrill of fast cars, and an endless and (apparently) risk-free supply of alcohol and other drugs, and you have another layer of control. We seek pleasure, it is the joint biggest motivator in our lives, and we’re more than willing to kill to get it.
- “My hero said this…” Heroes are dangerous things. They certainly exist, in books and movies, and temporarily in real life, but they are very rarely real. From Superman to Katie Price, from David Beckham to the Dalai Llama, you have to ask yourself why these particular people are on our TV screens. We share in their glory, and we are excited and inspired by their example. But they are just another level of control. Modern heroes never challenge us. If they are allowed to enter our consciousness, they will have been checked for being entirely familiar, entirely predictable. We are inspired to be a more perfect version of what we were yesterday.
- Politics. Politics is a lie. Left wing and right wing. fascist, communist, democrat, republican, monarchist, papist. It is all an industrialised, practicable version of authentic relationships between people in a community. It has arisen to keep a massive population controlled, pacified and satisfied. It is, if you like, a distasteful side effect of overpopulation and domestication. None of it really matters.
- Religion. Some religious people have seen reality, but that is not thanks to their religion. Religions are the spiritual equivalent of politics. They have evolved in line with our culture, maintaining their central myths, so that now they offer us what we want, how we want it. But religions do not encourage independent thought and discovery. By their nature, they must keep you under some form of control, or else you would stray and the religion would cease to exist. Some teach very profound values, but they are never given freely, and they are never without a catch. I used to think that some religions were different: that perhaps some forms of Christianity, or Eastern religions I hadn’t met yet, worked differently. But if you think about it, it’s impossible for them to be anything other than what they are. Independent, brave spiritual people do not form religions. So who seeks religion?
- “I am my mind”. You’re not. Your mind is one of your faculties. It is venerated and promoted in our culture, but in reality it is a slightly annoying self-referring mechanism. It takes input in, it turns it into memory, and plays it for you. Where it can, it’ll simplify the input and overlay existing memories onto your outlook. It can perform basic cognitive functions such as the use of language. But it isn’t you. I sepparate the unconscious from “the mind”. The unconscious isn’t you either. The unconscious is like a vast, dark ocean upon which the conscious mind floats. It is the source of all your creativity, your flashes of genius, your emotions, your intuition… It is vastly powerful and almost impossible to explore fully. It makes the conscious mind, that part that is used in debate and is so very popular at the moment, look pathetic and insignificant. And even that isn’t you. Your body: that vastly complex, beautiful construct of flesh, blood, organs, chemicals, nerves, bones and joints; isn’t you. Your spiritual self: your chakras, the spark of the eternal that is sometimes called your soul or spirit, your ability to connect with the living world around you; even that isn’t you. You are all of this, and something else. A directing will that is dependent on, blended from, and the director of all of the parts that make you up. You are entirely simple, and also wondrously complex. So do not believe the lie that you are locked within your mind.
Those are a few. I haven’t tackled the big one, the realisation that sets someone entirely free. I don’t yet know how to describe that one. But I hope that this list has given you some insight into just how false our culture is, how many lies exist right in front of us, that we are taught not to notice. You are as free as you choose to be. Never give up the search for freedom, empowerment, and truth. There exists there a joy that our culture, with it’s warped pleasures, can never equal. It is yours, if you are brave enough to fight.
