The conditioned life is the life in which we are constantly trying to run away from something that doesn’t exist. The ‘conditions’ of this life are exactly this – that we should be constantly trying to run away from an outcome that is only hypothetical, that only exists in our imaginations. This artificial task (or virtual necessity) is what defines us. It (and how well we get on with it) tells us who we are, and we cling to this identity. It is true that by committing ourselves to this unnecessary (and ultimately futile) endeavour we get to have this thing that we are calling ‘the conditioned life’- were we to abandon the task then there would be no more ‘conditioned existence’, no more ‘thought-created identity’ (which is always put together with by considerations of the past and the future by considerations of whether things are going to get better or get worse). That would be the end of everything we know, that would be ‘falling off a cliff’, and that’s just not something we’re willing to give any consideration to. That outcome is not up for negotiation (which means that we have no choice but to run away from it for all we’re worth).
We need to be running away from this ‘ultimately undesirable but also ultimately unreal’ outcome in order to continue ‘existing’ in the way that we understand it; this however doesn’t mean that we have to know that this is what we’re doing, that doesn’t mean we have to know that this is a deal, that this is the arrangement. That’s the condition that needs to be adhered to if we are to lead the conditioned life, but we don’t know what that means, or even that there is such a thing. The condition for ‘playing a game’ is that we mustn’t know that we are playing it and this is equivalent to saying that ‘we mustn’t know that we are running away’. In a game, it’s not losing that we are running away from (that’s the decoy, that’s the red-herring) – what we’re running from is our awareness that we actually are playing a game. To play a game is to run away from seeing that we’re playing a game, and thus our no-holds barred avoidance of this awareness becomes ‘what passes for life’, it becomes ‘the conditioned life’.
What’s going on here therefore – just to recap – is that the conditioned life (which we call simply life) is where we run away from something without knowing that we’re doing so, and where we represent this ‘baseline need’ to be fleeing (or ‘seeking escape’) as our own free will, as being something other than ‘involuntary running away’. Running away from a feared outcome (whether that outcome is for real or just a projection) is simply ‘what it is’ and nothing more – it’s not a ‘virtue’, in other words, no matter how much we might like to say that it is. Via the ingenious strategy of ‘seeing reality backwards’ we frame this ‘full-on avoidance of something that doesn’t exist’ as being full of possibilities that we can avail of. We somehow see our avoidance-routines (our ‘tricks’ or ‘the things we habitually do in order to try to escape’) as being life itself, which legitimizes them, which makes them effectively invisible to us.
This does two things, we might say: [1] Is that it hides the problem (or rather the ‘so-called problem’) which means that we aren’t aware that we’re operating on the basis of fear, and [2] Is that it allows us to assume an identity which we can then take for granted in everything we think and do. There’s no conditioned life without the concrete identity and no concrete identity without the conditioned life, we might say. These two things go together – it is via the strategy of being 100% preoccupied with stuff the whole time that we get to feel that we really and truly ARE this self, that we really and truly ARE this identity, and this strategy works because we’re too busy, too caught up to notice that this self isn’t who we are at all. We simply don’t allow ourselves the opportunity to explore any other ways of looking at the matter. It is therefore via the strategy of restricting awareness that the construct known as ‘the identity’ comes into apparent existence. ‘The devil finds work for idle hands’, so it is said, and the devilry (or devilish work) that we’re talking about here is essentially the act of ‘whistleblowing’ with regard to the story of what’sgoing on behind the facade. No one likes a whistleblower, after all – no one likes a whistleblower because when awareness comes into the picture this exposes all of the lies, avoidances and games that we are busy colluding in.
The strategy that we are referring to here is the one by which we act out of a particular arbitrarily selected basis in a continuous (or uninterrupted) way. <Acting on the basis of a specific viewpoint without ever taking a break> is what creates the illusion of identity, therefore, and this is why the self-concept fears the discontinuity, this is why the Thought-Created Identity lives in terror of there being a ‘break in the broadcast’. Any discontinuity at all will spell ‘the end of the road’ as far as the self is concerned; the self-or-identity IS the logical continuity and so of course it fears a ‘break in the broadcast’ – it IS the broadcast, after all… What we’re calling ‘the Logical Continuity’ (or ‘the Linearity’) isn’t the natural state of affairs; it isn’t the way things are by themselves, but rather it’s a contrivance, a show that’s been put on. Rather than being ‘a situation that is rises spontaneously’ the LC is engineered. It is an extension of our arbitrary wilfulness – it’s ‘our own doing’ rather than being ‘nature’s doing’. Nature doesn’t obey arbitrary rules – that’s the domain of the Thinking Mind.
The Platform of Logic gives every impression of being an uncontrived type of a thing however and we are generally very happy – if not actually keen – to accept it as such. The matter is done and dusted, as far as we’re concerned; the question of whether or not the platform is a real thing never arises. The argument falls down very quickly under examination, all the same – it can’t help falling down because it’s got nothing solid to stand on. The point is that if we forget that the contrivance is a contrivance (which is to say, if this information becomes unavailable to us) then we have the appearance of solid ground to stand on, to work with, to build upon, and so on. The appearance in question is super-convincing (nothing seems realer to us than this) and so we don’t doubt it for a second, but no matter how persuasive it might be, it’s only an appearance and can never be more than this. That’s the most it can ever do – persuade us that it’s there when it isn’t, persuade us that something is true when it’s not. The only reason the contrivance which is the ‘platform of logic’ convinces us is because of the fact that we don’t see it for what it is, because of the fact that the relevant information is unavailable to us, and for this reason the situation cannot therefore be said to be ‘solid’. It’s not solid because as soon as the information becomes available to us (as soon as we realise that the contrivance is a contrivance) then that’s the end of the matter. If our only reason for believing that the basis really is a ‘proper basis’ is because of our ignorance with regard to the fact that it absolutely isn’t then we can hardly claim to be on a ‘firm footing’ here! Our ‘firm footing’ is our ignorance, in this case – ignorance is the ground we stand on!
Despite this however we charge full steam ahead, just as if this wasn’t the case (just as if the contrivance were not a contrivance) and our heedlessness in this regard is the ‘essential ingredient’ that allows us to live the Conditioned Life. Our heedlessness is the necessary condition for us to believe that we genuinely ARE this content-less mind-created identity. The integrity of this hollow, ‘shell-like’ identity depends upon us seeing the world in only the one narrow way and not being aware of this limitation and the necessity to be forever performing the thankless task of ‘having to protect our own ignorance’ is why the Conditioned identity is always subject to the Rule of Fear. To be the Self-Image is to live a life in which fear is our constant companion, invisibly controlling us from the sidelines. The conditioned life is a life in which fear is the ultimate reality – an ultimate reality that we are (for most part) successful in our denial of. The conditioned sense of self (which – as we keep saying – holds together purely because we never question it) is the same thing as the platform of logic which we make solid by falsely claiming the opus proprium to be an opus alienum (by saying that we didn’t do what we actually did do).
The game and the game-player are one. What we do in order to maintain the illusion of Conditioned Identity IS the Conditioned Identity – the routine activities that we are obliged to engage in (without ever taking a break) in order to maintain the illusion of ‘the self we think we are’ are not separate from the identity which is (supposedly) carrying them out. We’re ‘doing ourselves’, in other words. Were we to become aware of this conundrum there would (we might say) be two consequences: [1] We would see that we aren’t who we think we are, [2] We would also see that what we took to be the world is an extension of this ‘viewpoint that doesn’t exist unless we choose for it to’. The world that is an extension of our assumed VP is the only world we know – it is the basket into which we have placed all of our eggs. Discovering that our viewpoint is just another viewpoint, one amongst many is to see that we could equally well have chosen another and this – as we have said – is the end of the world as we know it. This is the outcome that we are dedicated to avoiding – the outcome of the world (as we know it) coming to an end. We’re running away from this dreaded outcome in everything we do (without seeing that we are) and this ‘running away’ is what we call ‘our life’; the outcome in question isn’t a real one however because the end of the game that we’re playing isn’t a real event. It isn’t a ‘real event’ because the game is only a game. The extinction of an illusion is itself an illusion.
Image credit – dailymaverick.com