The world that thought creates for us is attractive half the time, and repellent for the other half. This is the best that the machinery of thought can do for us and it would be entirely unreasonable of us to expect otherwise. To expect to exist in a euphoric state 100% of the time would be ridiculous – we all know that can’t happen (or at the least, we ought to know, if we were looking at things clearly).

The has to do with the practicalities of ‘hyping something up’ – when we build something up then in doing this (in artificially inflating the value of whatever it is we’re inflating) we simultaneously create the reverse of this, which is the possibility of deflation, the possibility of ‘the complementary downswing or devaluation’. If I roll a boulder up a hill, with all the effort that this takes, then in doing so I have created the possibility (which sooner or later will be realized) of that boulder rolling all the way down again. ‘What goes up must come down’, as we say. All positive statements turn into their negative… When we get overexcited by something or other then, it’s only a matter of time before this elated mood of ours comes crashing back down again. All parents know this!

As the wheel turns the ‘proffered reality’ loses its shine for us, it stops looking so good to us and starts to tarnish around the edges. Things start to look tacky and cheap, like a seaside resort in the middle of winter, like a fairground in the off season. The Projected World – which was hypnotically attractive to us in the euphoric phase – loses its seductive appeal and what is left is in no way pleasant to behold. What is left is a grey and lifeless world, a barren and inhospitable terrain that we are nevertheless obliged to traverse. Life at this point stops being a party and it becomes a ‘thankless task’, a grim ordeal that we have no choice about taking on. What was sweet and delicious is now very bitter indeed…

This unexpected (and infinitely unwelcome) turnaround throws us into confusion, tipping us into deep despair and anxiety. Our dreams blow up in our faces, our euphoria-driven plans die on the vine. As Gurdjieff puts it, we lose our appetite for our favourite dish. This is universally seen as a terrible thing, it’s seen as a terrible thing both by us and by everyone who knows us – if this situation persists for any length of time we are said to be depressed, we are said to be suffering from a mental health condition and are treated antidepressants and cognitive behavioural therapy. The fact that we do this shows very clearly that we somehow believe that it ought to be possible for us to stay in the euphoric phase all the time – unaccountably, we believe that it is possible to have the ‘up without the down’. We believe that we can have the smooth without the rough, the sweet without the bitter, the pleasure without the pain…

The reason we believe this is because we don’t acknowledge the world we live in as being ‘artificial’, we don’t recognize the fact that we’re not inhabiting reality but the ‘rational overlay’ that we have projected onto it. We don’t recognize that we’re living in an environment that has been scripted (or interpreted’) by thought – the thinking mind does its thing and then obscures its own role in doing it, just as David Bohm says. If we saw that the reality we inhabit is artificial (i.e., if we could see that it was a construct of thought) then we would appreciate that our mental state is a dependent one – we would appreciate that our mood is conditioned by the mind-created virtual reality, we would see that we have no independence, no autonomy here. Our environment is ‘artificial’ and so is our state of mind in it – there’s nothing ‘natural’ going on here at all…

When we live in a world that is made up of positive (which is to say, literal) statements then the wheel is all there is for us – we can’t escape it. Literal signifiers have to aspects to them, the positive and the negative. If I say that ‘Everything is great!’ (as I am liable to say when at the height of the euphoric phase) then the negative aspect of this statement is of course that ‘Everything is terrible…’  The one implies the other, we might say, but the one doesn’t just ‘imply’ the other either, it would be clearer to say that the one statement absolutely necessitates the other. Euphoria and despair can never be separated – to seek pleasure is to seek pain. To quote alchemical commentor Johannes Fabricius (1976),

As the sense of universal elation is changed into one of universal depression, the circular flight of manic denial comes full circle in the depressive return of the denied. For this reason the elation of mania is an uneasy one since it may be defined as a denial of the horror of the depressed state.

We don’t see things like this, however. We see euphoria (which Daisaku Ikeda refers to as rapture) as being an honest state of mind, not one that is totally dependent upon us seeing things in a certain, narrow way, in an artificial way (in a way that is not based on reality). If this were so then we would be entirely justified in going all-out to maximize our adaptation to the environment (both social and physical) that we find ourselves in – successful social adaptation would thus be a genuine measure of mental health, a proper, honest-to-goodness, scientifically-valid metric. The one thing we never suspect is that adaptation to the proffered reality (which we can’t see to be such) isn’t a recipe for good mental health at all but – on the contrary – a guarantee of the reverse. It’s a recipe for the reverse because to be adapted to the designed environment is to bedefined by it and to be defined by it is to be it. The problem here is that the Designed World (‘the Consensus Reality’, if we want to put it like that) isn’t a world or a reality but – rather – a self-contradiction, a paradox, a ‘step forward followed by the mirror images of this step (which is to say, a ‘step backwards’). It’s not a real thing, in other words…

All definite statements are paradoxical (just as James says all finite games are self-contradictory). Certainty is always ‘paradoxical’ – if I am certain about something then what this means is that ‘I know everything about it’ and ‘knowing everything about something’ is an illegal action. We can only create this situation where it seems as if we have exhaustive knowledge about something by implicitly assuming that the way we have of looking at it is the only possible way – if it weren’t the only way, if there were (potentially) other viewpoints out there to utilize, then clearly we couldn’t claim to have exhaustive knowledge of whatever it is that we are trying to ‘pin down’ in this way. The only way to avoid this problem is to start off from the basis that there is only one right way to see things and never ‘look back’ at our decision to assume this basis, so to speak. ‘Never question our assumed basis for making definite statements’ becomes our motto. This creates a new problem, however, the problem being that we’ve got hopelessly tangled up in a self-contradicting loop of logic.

If there is only one right way to survey the world (if only the one sanctified viewpoint exists) then this straightaway involves us in the paradox of self-reference since we must now use this viewpoint to make statements about itself. We’ve no other viewpoint to take, after all. Everything we say on the basis of the assumed platform of logicis this platform (since all our statements are necessarily going to be linear extrapolations of that very same basis). The thinker and the thought that the thinker thinks are not two different things (as Krishnamurti keeps on telling us), but what we do is to act as if the basis and the tautological development of this basis (which are our ‘positive assertions’) are two entirely different (and unconnected) things). We act as if the thinker and the thought absolutely were separate from each other, and then we proceed to ‘live’ in the gap that we imagine to ‘exist between the two. We have to put inverted commas around the word live’ because it doesn’t really apply in this connection – we can’t be said to live unless we have freedom in which to do so and the one thing we know for sure is that there’s no freedom to be had (not even a little bit) in the gap between the thinker and the thought, the doer and the deed…

There’s no freedom here at all and that’s a peculiar thing because freedom’s not something we can ever get rid of, no matter how much we’d like to. Freedom is all there is and so if we find ourselves in a situation where there is none then this means that we’re no longer existing in ‘reality itself’, but only in the virtual approximation of it, only in the two-dimensional appearance of it. The Conditioned World is the projection of the Conditioned Self – it is a tautological development of it – and what this means is that there is no freedom for any change to ever take place in this context. There is only the ‘apparent change’ of the loop. I can progress in a linear fashion towards the goal (where ‘achieving the goal’ equals ‘the change I want to see’) but this is change in a loop’ and ‘to change in a loop’ is not to change. To cross twice is not to cross. We can progress towards the goal (which is the euphoria-generating part of the process), but this so-called progress is only one half of the loop and it can never be separated from the second half, which is where we come right back to the starting-off point again. There’s only one type of movement going on here and that is ‘movement in a circle’. We might think of a pendulum here – when the pendulum bob is displaced +n units from its equilibrium position then this ‘right-handed displacement from the vertical’ is at all times going to equal the equivalent ‘left-handed’ displacement. 15 degrees positive displacement is the same thing as 15 degrees displacement in the reverse direction – it’s all the same movement and that movement is always going to contain equal amounts of positive and negative (just as a rotating wheel is always going to contain the same amount of motion in the one direction as it does in the opposite, complementary direction…

Once we see this – once we see that the machinery of thought always creates what we might call ‘a bipolar’ reality, a reality that contradicts itself, then the lazy notion that all we have to do in life is to obey the rules that thought (or society, which is ‘an extension of thought’, ‘a production of the Generic Mind’), then at the same time we see that what we call ‘mental health’ isn’t something that we obtain as a result of accepting the proffered reality (or tacitly agreeing with whatever our esteemed peers might happen to think) but – rather – is something that comes only when we discover the courage to exist independently of thought and the bureaucracy it governs us with, and step out of the (fake) consensus world that we have all been herded into.





Image credit – voicebot.ai