The Corporeal Fantasy

by Martin Butler

  Our superego – the part of us that is full of idealizations thrives on should and shouldn’t. It stands over us like a judge commenting on our performance in a given situation. All the should’s and shouldn’ts are programmed by people around us – parents, teachers, peers, employers, religious figures. What they all fail to understand is that we have no free will and so the word “should” is almost without meaning. It would be like asking a brick that has been thrown at a window to not break it. We could reprimand the brick afterwards and tell it that it shouldn’t have broken the window, and look on disapprovingly

  “Could have” and “would have” live in the same stable, making us believe that things might have been different if only we had been different.

  Emotions such as guilt and remorse are very closely linked to these words. You could have done better at school. You should have been more prudent with your money. You would be much healthier if you had exercised regularly. These words are the words of control. They cause us to compare ourselves with fictitious states of affairs that have not come about.

  The real tragedy of these words however is that they take us away from the real. They allow us to indulge in unproductive imagination, believing that life might be so much better, while our real lives go ignored.

  Everything that happens in our life is absolutely necessary – there is no contingency. There is also no room for regret, guilt, remorse or any similar negative emotions. If something has not gone well we simply get on with the task of trying to move things in our favor – as far as we can.

  Things are as they are, and they were never going to be other than they are. Drop the guilt trips and the fanciful imaginings, and above all tell anyone who suggests you “should”, “could” or “would” to mind their own business.

  THE CURSE OF REMORSE

  Guilt, remorse, and repentance are a curse on humanity and very useful tools for those who might want to control us. The three words tend to be used interchangeably and dictionary definitions often use one to describe the other. The feeling that we have done wrong can eat away at us and is often counterproductive. We just have to consider the drug addict who is full of remorse about his habit. This feeling of remorse is an emotional pain and will simply motivate the addict to have another fix to diminish the pain.

  There is also a fundamental assumption made when we feel remorse. We assume that we have free will and that given the exact same circumstances we would do things wholly differently. Not so. Unless we happen to believe that we live outside a world driven by cause and effect, it is easy to see that given the same circumstances, with the same knowledge and internal state, we would do exactly the same thing again. If we do not have free will (and to believe in free will is to believe in causeless effects) there can be no blame – there is no praise either. The Buddhist mantra of “no blame” is very apt here.

  Most of our guilt and remorse comes from societal conditioning. The tradition that dictates young girls should have their genitals mutilated (circumcised) causes many parents to subject their daughters to the agony of this procedure without any guilt. In the world of business, it is very common for salespeople to exaggerate and lie to get a sale – again with no remorse or guilt. Religious conditioning, on the other hand, tends to fill people with remorse. Standards for behavior are laid down that are simply unachievable, and when an individual cannot meet these standards they become filled with remorse. Many so-called spiritual traditions condition their adherents in the same way. So if a man is told that it is sinful to look with lust on a woman, there is no doubt that he will be filled with remorse most of his life.

  Any behavior that results in emotional pain is inadequate and misguided. Guilt and remorse are forms of emotional pain, serving no useful purpose. Some might complain that this is the green light for a free-for-all. Such a notion is easily dealt with. First of all we have laws, and to harm someone else often incurs a penalty. It is the threat of this penalty that keeps most people within the law. More importantly, we are, to varying degrees, rational creatures, and it is not so difficult to see that if default behavior was to harm others our society would quickly degenerate into barbarism.

  Conscience is a loaded concept since much of what we consider to be conscience is simply conditioning and childhood programming. The rationale behind our behavior is quite simple. When we are in the grip of the emotions (hatred, excitement, envy, anger, regret etc.) we are quite likely to cause harm to another. If we can behave with an understanding we are much more likely to be cooperative – for everyone’s’ sake. And so we should seek understanding. It will not only liberate us from our own misery but enable us to form a less troubled society.

  If you find yourself troubled by guilt and remorse simply try to understand, without judgment, why you did what you did. You also need to look at the standard you are comparing your behavior against. Understanding is the key to liberation, and no more so than with guilt and remorse.

  ADDICTED TO SUFFERING

  You could ask someone to sacrifice any pleasure, and they would probably do it. But ask them to surrender their suffering, and you're asking the impossible. People are addicted to their state of misery. You'll see that I comment reasonably frequently on the nature of life. We all die. Things have to eat other things to exist, and it's what I've called at various times a ‘shit show.’ But does this mean that we have to suffer? No, it doesn't. This is very, very difficult to explain but hopefully, you'll get the gist of it by the end.

  Let's talk about suffering. Suffering is always associated with a lack of power, of some diminishing of power, and typically the power we're talking about is the power to exist. Some examples - if you become ill, lose a lot of money, lose someone who's close to you, all of those things will cause you pain because they diminish you and they diminish your power. If you lose someone you're close to, and you're close to them because you both enjoyed a lot of things together, then all of a sudden that pleasure is gone. You enjoyed that person, and the joy is gone. Pain is always associated with a diminishing of the power of existence, that is what pain is. It would seem odd that people might decide to become addicted to their lack of power. This is all very subtle, but identifying with your lack of power is one way to get power. Yes, life is futile, we're always looking for a final cause. For example, I want the purpose of my life to be X. What is the point of living if I'm going to die, I'm looking for a purpose for being alive. Life doesn't work like that; life and the universe know nothing about final causes, as the philosophers would call them. The reasons for being.

  Human beings even like to try and project a final cause onto God, ‘God created the universe so that …’. Well, the universe doesn't exist for any reason, it just exists. Reasons and purposes are purely human things. The universe doesn't know anything about that kind of thing. On the one hand, life is futile, and it's full of pain because we will experience periods of being diminished in our power, our power for existence. Illness, lack of money, crappy relationships, whatever. But there's a magical little formula in all of this, and I'm going over this groundwork really before I get to the nature of the addiction to suffering. This magical little formula is quoted by Epictetus most powerfully. He said the things that we have no control over are no concern of ours. Why would we be interested in things that we have no control over? You have no control over the weather today. You may have decided to go, sunbathing or something similar and then when you wake up it's raining. Will that disappoint you? It might do but what is the point of being disappointed about something you have no control over whatsoever? The famous line is that ‘reason makes no demands contrary to nature.’ If we're reasonable people, we will not say ‘well I'm going to go sunbathing even though it's pouring with rain.’ You know that wouldn't be a reasonable thing to do. The aim of mentioning this is that when we look at life and all the things that we have no control over if we focus on those things, we will have a sense of diminished power because we have no control over them and we have no power over them.
You do not influence whether you are going to be ill tomorrow or whether you win the lottery tomorrow. You have no control over those things, and so it doesn't make a lot of sense to obsess about them. Epictetus says the stuff that we should obsess about, the idea that we should put all of our attention on is the thing we do have control over, which is our understanding and reasoning. We do have some control over that. We don't even have control over our emotions.

  When it comes to suffering, our society, and civilization, has acquired the habit of holding our suffering up as some badge of honor and I can give you a perfect example of this. Emil Cioran, a 20th-century philosopher, talked endlessly about the meaningless nature of life and the pains of life and all the phony behavior of people. Even in our art we hold suffering up as some beautiful thing. Opera, various dramas and as many art forms as you can name, many of them tend to focus on suffering, operas particularly. ‘Someone has murdered my lover, and I'm so distraught, I'm going to seek revenge…’. This is society: we like looking at suffering and all this painful stuff. Why is it that we are addicted to suffering like this? Well, it's all about power.

  A place of suffering, for many people, is what you might consider to be a haven, it's a safe place. If they're locked away in some behavior where they complain about everything, that complaining will be an attempt to evoke sympathy maybe from other people, which is an attempt to rally up some power. As I said, it's a safe place where they don't feel threatened. When they're complaining they subconsciously tell themselves, ‘this is familiar territory, and I don't need to go anywhere else, I'm safe here, I know what this is all about. It's about the world's a shit place, and I'm a victim of it, and I know where I am in that kind of configuration.’ You meet people like this, in fact, I met somebody recently, who complains endlessly about her relationship with her husband. If the relationship was that bad why doesn't she leave? Well, she doesn't leave because there's finances involved and a whole pile of things. Complaining to people is an attempt to gain their sympathy, for them to reinforce the complainers’ views. She's addicted to this suffering; she doesn't want to come out of suffering because this requires courage. To stay in suffering requires no courage whatsoever. It's the easy place to be. To come out of suffering requires great courage and it's not something someone can muster up easily. Maybe it will take years for a person to get together the courage to pull themselves out of a situation where they're suffering. You very often hear of abusive relationships for both men and women, but particularly for women, where maybe they are with a violent partner and they stay in the relationship, and they suffer. Why? Because they feel safe in that kind of environment. Strange thing, even though they are not safe, they feel safe, because it’s familiar.

  Even our addiction to suffering is a survival mechanism. It's us telling ourselves that we are safe in this particular environment.

  As with everything else, the ability to break this addiction is not some violent act that we commit against ourselves. The way to break the habit is to look at it. Impartially, without judgment, without the desire to change it. We look at it and say to ourselves, ‘oh, here I am again, in this situation where I'm whining and complaining about so and so, my husband or my partner or my job or whatever,’ and just acknowledge that you’re doing this again. There's a strange thing, in that we start to gain some understanding and possibly just as important, some inner power to look at ourselves in a detached way. This ability to be honest about what we are and what we're doing is very, very powerful. We're not talking about changing any behaviors here; we're just talking about looking at them. To try and change them is violence against yourself. Don't do it. Just look at them. ‘Oh here I am again, smoking, and I told myself I wasn't going to smoke today.’ We're not Superman; we are human beings that are conditioned and programmed. If we want to gain some freedom from that somehow, then we just literally need to look at it on a fairly regular basis, in an impartial and non-judgmental way. What that does is build up a muscle that allows us to become active within ourselves. The whole essence of the thing here is about being active or passive. When we are identified with our suffering, we are in a passive state; we're just doing what our body and our mind require of us to do to feel safe, that's what we're doing when we are identifying with our suffering. But the act of looking, and the act of thinking ‘here I am again doing this.’ puts us in an active state within ourselves. This active state is very, very important. It's the holy grail to be active within oneself in situations where normally we might be passive and addicted to this suffering that we're experiencing.

  So, the secret in all of this is:

  To acknowledge that we are addicted to our suffering, and as Gurdjieff says, most of us would instead change anything, forego any pleasure than try and renounce or lose identification with our pain, because our suffering makes us feel safe. The way out of this is the way out of pretty much everything to do with human existence. It is to look at it. I made that sound easy, it's simple, but it's certainly not easy. You will find yourself judging and trying to change your behavior. The act of looking, the act of being active within yourself is the key to it all; it is the holy grail to be proactive instead of passive.

  To try and summarize it; being identified with our suffering is just a default state of trying to be in a place that you are familiar with, one that feels safe, and the way out of that is to look at it, to observe it and to become active within yourself. Eventually, that addiction to the suffering will start to dissolve a little bit, and you'll begin to feel freer.

  ADDICTED TO THINKING

  You probably know the Descartes quote “I think therefore I am.” Someone recently said to me "I think therefore I'm fucked." Brilliant, because there's a kind of truth to that, and it would be too long to go into all the depths of it, but I do want to try and put that into some context. In the Zen tradition, it is said that before someone embarks on any search or inquiry, that things are just as they are. For a child, for example, the sky is only the sky, and a tree is just a tree, a bar of chocolate is just a bar of chocolate and so forth. There's nothing complicated - they see things as they are, and then maybe some inquiry starts. We start considering things, and all of a sudden, as Zen would say, a tree is no longer just a tree. We begin studying trees, and we're looking at the flower, the sap, the photosynthesis in the leaves, and all of a sudden what was something straightforward becomes something quite complicated because we start thinking about it. And eventually, if we keep moving onwards, trees just become trees once again. Very few people get to that point because they get trapped in thought and thinking. Thought and thinking is a tool to use, to move towards something, but it's not the end in itself. If your thoughts are confused, if you have what are called inadequate ideas then, sure enough, you're going to be pained by those ideas.

  Someone I once knew said thinking always makes things worse, and if you have inadequate ideas thinking will always make matters worse. What we tend to do when we're thinking about things, is to imagine all kinds of scenarios. Say you've got some lump on your arm and you start thinking about it. Oh my god, it could be cancer, could be some tumor or maybe its some blood vessel that's..., and so on. As you don't know what it is, you have to go and see a doctor who will diagnose and give you a correct understanding of what has gone wrong with your arm. It may be something serious, though nine times out of ten it's not. The point I'm making is that before we get to some reasoned understanding of what is going on, we get into our imagination and we can imagine all kinds of things that might have gone wrong. Thinking can always make matters worse. It depends whether you have disciplined thought or whether you think compulsively.

  The whole thing about thinking is that some people tend to do more of it than others. You may have noticed that a large percentage of the population doesn't seem to think about things all that much. Human beings are unique creatures. In most animals, dogs, cats, fish, whatever, everything else apart from man, there is no reflective consciousness. No intelligence that is cut o
ff from the primary force that drives life (desire), and then looks back on itself and says 'Oh this is going on, Oh you know I like ice cream' and then maybe some thinking starts. 'Well, I shouldn't eat the ice cream because its full of sugar' and so forth. Animals don't do that they're just pure desire. If an animal wants to eat it will go out and kill, if it wants to mate; it will go and have sex, those desires drive it with no reflective consciousness whatsoever.

  Human beings, depending on the individual, can employ this reflective intelligence, although some people barely do it at all. You find many people who drift through life with what might be called the first and second levels of knowledge - these are just hearsay and unprocessed experience. An excellent example of it was in the latest UK elections. Some of the newspapers devoted 13 pages to try and convince people that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour candidate, was some heinous character who should never be elected. The paper was owned by people of the opposite political party or the opposite political persuasion. But people read that and believed it. It's just hearsay. Then somebody may see a video of someone of a particular race committing a crime, and they think that everybody who belongs to that race commits that kind of crime. This is the way it is for most people, and it's just insufficient levels of information. Then people start to think about those things. 'I hate those people of that particular race because they always do these things' and they can build up whole theories around this coincidental random piece of information they picked up. These could be called inadequate ideas. It's a shallow level of thinking, and it's very, very near to the primary drivers, the desires, the survival instinct because if you can make someone else weaker, it makes you stronger. That's the way many people think. This primary driver of survival makes us create all kinds of ideas and bigotries and biases that are not real, and are driven by our instincts. Ideas like 'I don't like that set of people over there, they threaten me' or 'Those people do strange things that I don't do' and 'They must be a threat because they're different. ' come from incomplete levels of information. People think about those concerns, and because they've applied no reason at all, they have no real understanding, and this is where their level of knowledge remains.