The Corporeal Fantasy

by Martin Butler

  GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD

  We are all in jail. In our own little jail cell, locked away, and the only sane thing that anybody would do in that situation is to try and find a way of escape. This is a very special jail. It's a cell where any attempt to escape makes the jail cell stronger. So, if you try and file away at the iron bars on the window, the bars grow thicker, and the file makes no mark on them. Or if you try and dig a tunnel through the concrete in the floor, the floor gets thicker, so you can never, ever dig through it. Or if you try and pick the lock in the door, the lock becomes more and more complex. This is the kind of jail we live in. The greatest mistake that most people who follow some spiritual path make is that they believe that by somehow fighting against this jail, against the material of the cell itself, they can free themselves from it. This jail cell also has another unique property. That is, the more you ignore it, the weaker it becomes. Ignore might not be quite the word, but it's probably the best word I can think of at this moment in time. Maybe the less attention you give it, the more delicate this jail cell becomes. It's like Merlin who is under the spell of Mab, the witch. He finds that the only way he can free himself from Mab is to ignore her. It presents a dilemma, and the resolution of the dilemma goes against almost everything we've ever been told.

  On the one hand, we feel we need to launch an escape project. As I've already mentioned, any attempts to break out of this cell are just going to make the cell stronger. This cell is an analogy for the more you try and modify your behavior through some so-called act of will, the more the behaviors which you deem undesirable will strengthen. You must have noticed this by now if you've ever tried to work in that way. You cannot just decide in your head to free yourself from the prison that you find yourself in. Let's describe that prison a little bit. The psychological prison that we inhabit is built of habits, and these habits are reasonably persistent. For example, we might have a habit that we eat a little bit too much, or we might have a habit that we like to drink a little bit too much. Or we might have a habit that we are always making big plans and then never carry them out. You know, a million and one habits that we have picked up along the way. Some of them are foisted upon us when we were children, and others are ones that we've willingly created for ourselves. I say willingly, but there is no such thing as willingly. Let's get that one out of the way. There's no such thing as free will. If you're not convinced after reading what I have to say, then please continue to consider that you are a strong-willed person who can achieve anything they want to. The reality of our situation is that at any one moment in time, the strongest desire will always predominate, and it will always cause us to move to action. If your strongest desire right now is to lose some weight, then you will not eat food. If your strongest desire is to have something to eat, then you will eat and to hell with the diet. And you have no control over that. Those desires are entirely autonomous.

  So here we are building a picture of the prison that we live in. And we have other elements of the prison which are our relationships with other people, our co-dependencies. The fact that we feel we must always please people or the fact that we think that everyone is a total asshole or the fact that we, you know whatever it is, whatever our signature relationship is with other people. But it will be just another brick in the prison cell wall. And then we have, dare I say it, all the nonsense that we've picked up from self-help books, spiritual teachers, people selling enlightenment, some ready-made formulaic sort of thing that allows you to escape the prison.

  We all want freedom. Freedom is what's driving all of us, all the time, very often in totally inappropriate ways, but this desire for freedom is driving us nonetheless. Some people think that they can get freedom through money, other people believe that they can gain freedom by merely abandoning everything and just hitting the road. Life does not let us off like that. It doesn't matter what route you take in the ordinary sense anyway, to try and achieve freedom, life will come back and bite you in the bum. It's just the way it works. You're not here for your sake, you're here for the sake of life and life will not let you off the hook and give you a free ride. Even the wealthiest, in fact particularly the wealthiest and the most famous and so on, have the most miserable lives typically because they surround themselves with so much crap that they must look after. Ironical isn't it? Anyway, to get back to the main point, we're after freedom, we're in jail, in a jail cell.

  The jail cell gets stronger the more we try and attack it. But we have a secret that we could never, ever have figured out on our own. And this secret tells us that all we need to do is to treat this cell with a certain amount of contempt. Contempt may not be quite the right word, but it portrays the essence of what I'm trying to say here. And this is that all these things that we think are so important, particularly after we've had attempts at spiritual training or following so-called spiritual teachers and so on - that the secret is to relax in your cell for a start. Have a look at the bars. You might find them to be a little more attractive than you thought they were. Have a look at the concrete floor, feel it, lay on it, do whatever, but do not see it as a prison. Easier said than done of course, but it can be achieved. And what you'll find is that as you focus less on trying to get out of the prison cell, the more you will find yourself free from it. And yes, I'll repeat it as I've said it elsewhere, the way of truth is just absolutely riddled with contradictions or paradoxes. And then you learn slowly but surely, how to free yourself from this cell. And it goes like this; you look at whatever appears - and whatever appears is okay. You must drop societal conditioning. Again, you can't just drop it, it's something you must work on, but you must drop societal conditioning. You must drop moral conditioning. You must discard notions of what is right and wrong. Because while you've got notions of right and wrong you're going to get upset all the time and then the prison walls start to close in again. And you must learn to be able to observe. This practice is not theoretical for me. This morning I received some news that for me was quite upsetting, but hey, that's life. Upsetting things can happen almost every day sometimes. There it was, I was upset, I let myself be upset, I didn't try and rationalize it away with ‘You silly boy, you should be beyond this kind of thing’ and yadda yadda yadda. I watched, and I grew to like it in the end. It’s a strange thing isn't it? The energy of being upset within about an hour had gone, and now I don't care. Not caring is a very, very good habit to cultivate. One of the guys I knew in the past, someone I had a tremendous amount of respect for, I remember finding his behavior very odd. So, I just said to him one day, "you don't care about anything, do you?" He said no, of course not. I was shocked at the time, still being a good Christian boy.

  To summarize this whole thing, I know it's rambled a bit, but it's quite hard to explain really. You're in a prison cell. A prison cell that is being both made for you and that you make yourself. The prison cell is the parallel to the psychological prison that you live in where you have no freedom of movement, or very little and where you are always upset about something, maybe depressed about something, now and then you get happy, but you have no real control over what's going on within you, and you're like a puppet. Anyway, the prison cell is this mental prison that you live inside. And the harder you fight against it, the stronger it becomes. The secret is to look at it and when you see yourself manifesting in a particular way, look at it, try and understand it. That's a whole other story, and the understanding part of this is not something I've talked about so far, but the observation is not enough on its own. There must be understanding as well. Observation is a good place to start and to enjoy whatever comes your way. For me this morning my observation was on the thing that would have upset me years ago and would've ruined my week, and I would have been angry for days. As it was, I just went right into it, I sat with it, looked at it, observed it, and felt it until it died, I sucked all the life out of it until it disappeared. Now I'm stronger, and it has died. If such a thing happened a few years ago, it would have sucked the life out of me, and
I would have partially died instead. So that's how we need to treat it and never, ever, ever fight against what is happening within you. Accept it, because although we all have this idea that within us is a little man, there is no little man inside of you. What is happening to you is what you are. And on that scary note, because you know where it's going, I'll leave you to ponder.

  INNER LIBERATION - SOME POINTERS

  Emotions

  As sentient creatures we are influenced by pretty much everything around us. We are small objects in a world of billions of objects, many of them much larger than we are, and almost all of them capable of affecting us adversely. A virus can kill you, stubbing your toe on a step can be painful, another person’s insults can cause emotional pain – and so on. Alternatively things can have a reinforcing effect upon us – a good meal, a loving partner, an unexpected inheritance. Whether we experience emotional pleasure or pain is very easy to understand. When things and events reinforce our sense of existence we feel pleasure. When things diminish our sense of existence we feel pain. It’s all driven by the wish to exist – the survival instinct. Don’t underestimate this driver, it is absolutely the most potent force in your life – it determines pretty much everything. If you are going to achieve any degree of liberation from the emotions, this is where you start. Only by understanding this driver, and seeing how most of your activities in life are determined by it, will you see its awful power. You hold down a job, seek shelter and food, a mating partner, desire approval, and a million other things just to satisfy the will-to-life, as Schopenhauer calls it.

  Understanding the will-to-life is not a trivial undertaking, and can be quite disturbing. To see the awful brutality of this self-eating mechanism called life, demands that a person deliberately looks where they would rather not look. Such work is best done with others, but if that is not an option then there are plenty of writers who can show you the nature of the beast – Cioran, Schopenhauer, Ernest Becker, to name a few. And if you care to seek out the real meaning of Christianity or Buddhism you will also find an unmasking of this beast called life. It is necessary to do this work because **only understanding can consume desire**, and all desires have the will-to-life as their root. It would be the ultimate folly to desire to stop desiring. Only knowledge and understanding can do this. Here is a quote from Schopenhauer:

  “… because in him knowledge has, as it were, burnt up and consumed the will, so that no will, thus no desire for individual existence, remains in him any more.”

  It looks fairly extreme doesn’t it? That is because it is extreme. Very few people would care to do this work, and will settle for their unconscious suffering instead. Spinoza was well aware of the effort that needs to be made in this work when he said:

  “How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labour be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

  So here is the first part of this work. A willingness to take the blinkers off and stare reality in the face. To understand it, to cast off all sentimental views of life that do not hold water, to see its meaninglessness, its barbarity, that life is built on lies, and above all else that you and I are as nothing. This is painful work – a stripping away. But it is absolutely necessary. Without this work you will still believe in life, still harbor the belief that somewhere there is a land of milk and honey, if only you could find it. When you really understand life, you will lose all hope that life itself has anything at all to offer, and **losing hope is to simultaneously lose fear**. Conquering fear means you conquer life’s grip.

  So, peering into the eyes of the beast is a necessary first step. Once a person has done this they can start to observe how their own emotional states vary according to how the desire for life is being satisfied. And it is no use thinking that we can have the good stuff while choosing to ignore the bad stuff. If you are identified with the good stuff, so you will be identified with the bad stuff. And the more you are identified the greater will be your swings between pleasure and pain – pleasure when things go well and pain when they go badly. If you want inner peace then both imposters, pleasure and pain, have to be seen for what they are – just the will-to-life playing out within you. But here is a really important point, and I will make it many times. **You have nothing within you that has the wisdom or the skill to interfere with the emotional states that arise within you.** Never, ever apply judgment or try to censor your emotional states. They are the one authentic thing you have within you – your authentic response to the environment. Pretty much everything else that is going on within you is phony – stuff you learned from parents, religions, peers and society at large. The emotions are not calmed by judging them, they diminish in proportion as we understand them.

  To summarize. All our emotional states are related to the will-to-life – the survival drive. Positive emotions (love, excitement, enthusiasm etc) come about when the will-to-life is satisfied. Negative emotions (envy, hatred, shame etc) come about when the will-to-life is thwarted in some way.

  Suggested reading – Spinoza Part 3 The Ethics, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Schopenhauer – The World as Will and Representation. None of these is a light read, and some take years to understand. The best place to start might be with Becker.

  The Nature of Ideas

  Although many people might not suspect it, the emotions are in the body. The proof is simple – just smoke a joint or take a mood enhancing drug. The mind however processes representations of things – real things and concepts. I’m not going to dwell on our representation of ‘real’ things, but when you look at a tree what you actually see is your brain’s simulation of the tree. Somewhat more relevant here is the way the mind builds concepts and ideas, and how most of these things are assimilated by us in an unconscious manner. By the time we reach our late teens we are full of ideas that have been unconsciously introjected, and many of them conflict with each other. We keep these conflicting ideas apart by buffering them – creating walls in our mind so conflicting ideas do not see each other. Even so there is some level of internal conflict going on. A person may have learned that it is important to work hard and strive, but at the same time they may hold the idea that life is short and they should enjoy themselves as much as possible – conflict is inevitable. Many of our ideas are just plain confused, correlating poorly with reality. Someone who believes they have to please people to get approval, probably doesn’t notice that it might have the opposite effect – both annoying the person on the receiving end, and causing them to see the people-pleaser as weak.

  Many of our ideas come with associated emotions. Someone who was once bitten by a dog may fear dogs the rest of their life, and so the idea of a dog automatically invokes fear in their body. Those things and activities which enhance our survival cause positive emotions, and we also build ideas associated with them. If something diminishes our survival prospects then we will experience negative emotions, along with associated ideas. For the vast majority of people these dynamics drive the creation of most of their ideas. So the idea of money, sex, food, fame and power will bring about an excited state, with associated imagination and desire. Ideas of poverty, starvation, loneliness, poor health, death, will invoke a depressed state, again with imagination and desire – the desire not to be in these states. By the late teens most people have been fully programmed. Their ideas of what is good and what is bad will have been fully formed, and will guide the rest of their life.

  Another class of ideas is similarly driven by the will-to-life, but in a much more subtle manner. Mankind has always striven to create systems that alleviate existential angst. Religion, philosophical systems, esoteric beliefs, scientific dogma, and other idea systems divert the attention from the fact that death is the final outcome for all of us, and no system of ideas will prevent this. This does not mean the work of reason is irrelevant, but let’s use reason to form appropriate ideas about reality, and not castl
es in the sky.

  So having laid this foundation – that most of our ideas will have been unconsciously introjected, that many ideas will conflict, that most of our ideas are confused, and that a large class of our ideas come with an emotional charge; it should be obvious that by the time we reach adult life that our minds resemble a pile of garbage, and that what we call our mind is not ours at all, but a programmed machine. For the rest of our lives we will affirm or negate new ideas based on this programming. This is why Gurdjieff famously said that most people are dead to any new possibilities once they reach the age of 30. They will suffer their inevitable neuroses caused by this jumble of poorly formed ideas, become sad as these neuroses wear them down, and eventually die. This is a conflicted process. On the one hand we form positive ideas about the things that enhance us, and negative ideas of the things that diminish us. But all the time we know deep within that the will-to-life serves its own purposes, namely continuation of the species, and not our purposes.