Friday, August 6, 2021

Unself or Unreal

I've been on blogging break due to the laziness that comes from the summer heat and my cultivation of unselfing a self of self-importance. In other words, I'm getting sick of myself trying to make a point or pontificating here. My inquiry and practice to Truth does not subside, but turns here and there while never straying too far from its unifying principle. But do I have to always write about it? Sometimes, I'd rather let it simmer or even shimmer. 

I have read some recent things that turns my attention to why smart people can be very stupid. While I can never be knowledgeable about everything, I weed out the chaff of books that probably don't need to be read. While I may be drawn to philosophy, I don't think I need to read most philosophers. Here's a good reason...

“...many students who take philosophy degrees have the distinct feeling that they’ve got on the wrong train. They expect to be dealing with the towering mysteries of human existence, they expect to be studying the accounts of the immortals who went before us, who attempted to scale the same heights, they expect to be guided on this odyssey by interesting people who have made the same journey and returned with pristine insights into the path ahead. What they find instead is a cross between a librarian and an accountant piling up items of knowledge like coloured beads then handing them out to confused and bored young people who are expected to categorise them in, at best, a slightly different way to those who preceded them” (Darren Allen).

That's why reading too much without a coherent center can fragment and frustrate the reader. And does it even change you for the better? Collecting all that information inflates the ego, and rarely opens one to being teachable. We know “People don’t first reason their way into their beliefs; they seek beliefs and attitudes which correspond to their felt inner reality, their way of living and their life-in-the-world, then find reasons to accept and defend those beliefs and attitudes; which is why reason cannot change them.” We can only be awakened from our deeper assumptions of reality. But that hurts too much for most.

And then there's the folks who claim street smarts, and like to point to their experience. But what do people really mean they know from experience? 

“Similarly, experience is ordinarily — and philosophically —understood piecemeal, as a series of knowable things that are learnt, remembered or possessed, rather than a totality which is lived. Ego can hardly be said to experience at all, instantly transporting whatever happens into the modal warehouse of the self, where it is stored, evaluated and used to get a better job, lord it over newcomers, or gas on about what it knows or what has happened to it. When people say ‘I have experience’ they nearly always mean that they possess something which is not experience, but the corpse of it.”

So we are always in the way of reality which can truly suck the life out of it. So to self-correct, we chase bigger vistas and thrills without bringing the whole self for the ride. 

“The isolating mind of the sleeping ego is like a blazing torch in the forest, over-illuminating a minute area of the dark, sharply dividing the user from everything else, which thereby seems both darker than the light and more uncannily different. To counter the threat of this obscure otherness, I turn up the torch, brighter and brighter, expanding my view further and further, but the light is so bright it now kills what it is directed at, petrifying the trees, shrivelling up the plants. I can see more and more, but fear of the darkness doesn’t decrease — in being suppressed, quite the opposite — so I turn up the beam higher and higher, looking for life in more and more distant realms, wiping out more and more life with the killing exposure, until, finally, I am left in a super-bright desert, blindingly overlit in every direction, and dead. All along, all I had to do was switch the torch off and grow accustomed to the darkness.”

So once again, we escape, overcompensate, indulge, but we never own our shite? That's because “Ego has two basic modi operandi; that of the physicalist, viewing reality as a matrix of cause and effect relationships, or that of the solipsist, for whom no laws, literal or otherwise, have any validity.” Which is like saying the non-physical aspect of ourselves doesn't have a part in existence or our non-physical selves are the center of existence. Either view fails. But then there are those who make a conscious effort to ‘transcend’ the ego. In this effort, they assume the ego is just a collection of thoughts, when there is so much more unconsciously stirring behind the scenes. So they spend...

“a great deal of time meditating, being mindful, jingo-jangling to DMT or swimming through esoteric oceans, often ends up being an extended psyche-wank which severs one’s participation to the represented world as it is — the shared canvas upon which the social self paints — which slowly becomes less interesting and less real, leaving ‘mystic’, meditating man, hovering round his magic, Romantic mind-realm, feeling tremendously wise and enlightened, while, in reality — the reality we share — he is well and truly up himself.”

This is what Allen terms as “orthophilia” or “compulsive avoidance of consciousness and context by over-focus on one’s emotional life, health or ‘spirituality’.”

Sounds dreadful, but been there and done that. 

In the end, we just need to unself through engaging God and disengaging our vices with an unwavering fanatical-like single mindedness. In seems our ancestors were right, albeit less sophisticated than us clever moderns. They did bear and struggle with it, but in our comforts of endless distraction we seem less willing to do so.

“Love God, with all your heart, and with all your will, and with all your mind, and with all your body, and renounce the devil, and all his works. Now and forever. So be it.”

* All quotes are from Darren Allen's excellent book Self and Unself.