A projection is only a projection when we react to it in some way. This doesn’t mean that we have to deliberately ‘not-react’ – it doesn’t mean we can avoid projecting a false reality by ‘gritting our teeth and forcing ourselves not to respond to the lure or provocation’, it means not buying into it. It means seeing through it and not being captured – as it were – by the obvious surface-level appearance of things. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead we are exhorted to recognise the true nature of what we are seeing (which is pure consciousness) and – as a result – not get trapped by attraction or aversion; it’s not that we have to perform some sort of approved rational calculation, or apply some sort of special formula; no mental action at all is needed, just the non-intellectual act of being aware of what’s going on rather than having an interpretation of what’s going on. It sounds easy but it’s the most difficult thing ever.

By reacting we create another ‘world’ for ourselves to live in – a world which is a reflection of the thinking that triggered the reaction in question. We depart at this point from the reality which is there all by itself (and is not a therefore a reflection of our conditioned outlook) and if this sounds somewhat unpleasant that’s because it absolutely is – we’re trapped in our own reaction, we’re trapped in the ‘world’ that comes about because of the reification of the assumptions that lie behind it. By reacting we create the Projected World, the world that is made up of our projections, and the PW is a virtual world, a world that seems to contain lots of interesting stuff, but which doesn’t. By chasing mind-generated fantasies we miss the real thing, and we never know it, we never have a clue. We can compare this to sitting down and eating a nutritious dinner as opposed to listening to someone talking about the dinner and giving their opinion on it. One scenario will sustain us and nurture us and generally do us good whilst the other will just annoy us.

‘The desire to seek an end creates action, which in turn breeds the actor’, says Krishnamurti.  Krishnamurti couldn’t be clearer in what he’s saying, and yet the above statement is guaranteed to be flatly incomprehensible to just about all of us; it is incomprehensible in a way we just can’t get around. It’s not possible for us to understand what K is saying unless we first abandon the ‘fixed platform of logic’ from which we are viewing everything and abandoning that platform is the very last thing we’re ever going to do. We can’t (when we’re in the identified state) even consider letting go of the platform; the reason for this being that the platform from which we view the world is us (since we’re using it as a basis for constructing our all-important identity), and we don’t on this account want to see it compromised! The platform of logic that we are operating for has ‘diplomatic immunity’ from all investigations, therefore…

The desire to seek an end is all there is when we’re acting out of the logical platform; the LP sees everything in terms of ‘ends’ because that’s the way it’s built; because logic is founded upon YES and NO, with no grey area in-between, it can only ever ask closed questions of the universe. Thought can’t ever see beyond its own categories; far from being able to seeing beyond its own categories it’s projects them out onto the world in an unreflective manner. If we obtain an answer in the affirmative then this is an end and if it’s a ‘NO’ then that’s an end too. When we avail of the logical device known as the thinking mind then the very process by which we assign meaning to the world is a process of seeking an end, we’re pressing for a conclusion; when we’re operating in Rational-Purposeful Mode then everything we supposedly ‘learn’ becomes an end, a final statement on the matter, an arbitrary judgement that we have no interest in going beyond. Our whole ‘endeavour’ becomes about bringing the on-going ‘open’ activity of the world to a halt, bringing everything to a conclusion. The whole of life gets turned into a finite game, in other words. This is what we could call ‘the illusion of linearity‘, therefore and it is an illusion that is at all times perfectly ‘self-defeating’.

To live in a world where all values (or all meanings) are final – as we must do when we’re acting on the basis of the Logical Platform – is to live in a world that is ‘bounded without us being able to see that it is’. We are thus hemmed in by invisible limitations; the boundary that limits us is invisible to us because we don’t see it for what it is (because we don’t see it as an arbitrary or self-imposed limitation). For us as conditioned beings, it’s simply ‘the way things are’, we accept it at ‘face value’ and so we have no actual interest in it. We have no actual interest in the way things are, which is of course an astonishing thing to reflect on – if we aren’t interested in ‘the way things are’ then just what the hell are we going to be interested in? We aren’t curious about the way things are but what we are interested in is in deriving a basis for us to do whatever it is we have in our mind to do, as a foundation for ‘carrying on with our interminable games’. We like the idea that the world is  a Known Thing, something that experts know all about (but we don’t have any interest in it ourselves). It’s enough to know that ‘someone knows’ (even though nobody does really).

We aren’t interested in the ‘mysterious unfolding of the universe’, we’re just interested in it being ‘sorted’. We’re just interested in it being ‘done and dusted’, in it being brought neatly to a ‘satisfactory conclusion’. We’re interested in winning out against radical uncertainty, although we of course wouldn’t put it like this ourselves. We don’t say that we are interested in triumphing over radical uncertainty (we’re in full-blown denial of any such thing), we say that we’re interested in ‘attaining objective values’, we say that we’re ‘meeting our personal goals’, that we’re ‘following our dreams’, and so on and so forth. This sounds positive to us – this is the very definition of ‘positive’ – and yet all we’re looking at here (if we can penetrate the dense fog of euphoric hype) is the utilisation of an illusion for the purposes of attaining a sense of security that simply isn’t to be found in the real world. This is ‘engineered security’, therefore – it is security that we have set it up ourselves via the type of strategy where we enact a protocol without seeing ourselves do it. We’re not interested in finding out that ‘the show is only a show’ (as a philosopher or ‘truth-lover’ would be) but we are very interested indeed in ‘not ever finding out that the show is only a show’ and thus preserving our fragile illusory identity within it.

Our everyday run-of-the-mill type of existence within this world is a backwards type of thing, therefore; it’s the type of existence that is founded upon a phenomenon that we might call Inverted Curiosity. Inverted Curiosity – as we have just indicated – is where we are interested in ways of not finding out about what’s really going on. A crucial component of this business of <not being curious about reality but instead being extremely interested in discovering ways of avoiding all contact with> is the perversive valuation of our ways of escaping, our ignominious avoidances, as being not just ‘legitimately meaningful endeavours’, but the quintessential and supremely significant expression of our innate and inalienable freedom. Our goal is a ‘magnetic attractor state’ which – when we fall within the sphere of its influence – distorts our consciousness so that attaining the goal appears to be supremely important to us (even though it isn’t at all). Attaining goals is where it’s at’, everything else is just ‘a means to an end’ and the end always justifies the means. The nature of space itself has thus been hijacked, perverted, turned into the very reverse of itself…

The nature of space itself (which contains no goals, no endpoints, no boundaries, and thus no basis for constructing an all-important secure identity for ourselves) has been neatly ‘turned inside out’ so as to make it into a parody of itself. Space gets to be space – we might say – precisely by not playing any favourites, by not having a bias built into it, by not being a tyrant, by not being ‘an All-determining Authority who always has to be obeyed and can never be questioned’. There’s no boss, no ruler, no ‘King’.

The great Tao flows everywhere, both to the left and the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but doesn’t lord it over them. [Lao Tzu, translated by Alan Watts].

The presence of a hard-and-fast, non-negotiable goal, boundary or endpoint inverts this divinely imperturbable symmetry and creates instead a situation where ‘All roads lead to Rome’, the situation where ‘Everything and everyone serves the same master’. The ‘situation’ that we’re talking about here is what we might refer to as Conditioned Space, the type of situation where everything that happens follows on from immutable rules. Conditioned space – which is the space that is mapped out by a logical framework, the space that is mapped out by our thinking – is quintessentially duplicitous, quintessentially two-faced – on the surface of things it appears to be the case that there is no distortion going on, that there is no Tyrant Deity who needs to be served. The impression given (the unstated implication that we swallow whole) is basically that all is ‘fair and square’ with what’s being presented with when it absolutely isn’t. The deception that we are falling for is thus the deception that is the analogue of space is all-accepting or essentially unbiased just as space itself is, just as the Tao is – the (somewhat less impressive) truth of the matter is that there is no expensiveness, no freedom here at all everything is on rails, everything is buttoned down, everything proceeds according to mechanical rules that are inevitably going to reverse themselves later on. The Projected World is the very epitome of mean-spiritedness – it’s as mean as mean can be and it won’t ever give us anything (although the ‘dark spell’ of unconsciousness that we’re under won’t let us see this). We’ll keep on waiting for the ‘big pay-out’ even though it never comes. What else could we expect when we have ‘engineered our own security’, however?

Image credit – BOGDAN SANDU, on russell-collection.com