Our central driver, the thing that defines us is our desire to survive. It doesn't matter how you dress it up, that's what most of our activity is geared towards; procreation through families and a family unit to make us feel more secure. We go chasing after money because we believe money can enhance our survival, giving us access to better quality medical care or food, but also for giving us many more options that we may need at some point in our lives. And so, this drive for survival, the conatus as it used to be called, pretty much drives everything, and we share this with the animals. This conatus creates two reactions in us. If we enhance our survival in some way, then we feel pleasure, and we feel more powerful. A million dollars in your bank is going to make you feel a little bit more potent than if you had nothing in your bank. The adoration of people around you is going to make you feel a bit more powerful because it's a life-enhancing thing. The recovery from an illness is a life-enhancing thing and will give you pleasure. Equally, things that diminish your prospects for survival, cause you to feel pain; so poor health, loss of money, rejection by people, the things that can make us feel diminished are endless. And thus, this survival instinct directly generates pleasure and pain according to whether we are enhanced or diminished in our prospects for survival. Now, when we feel pleasure it's usually because of something external, it’s rare that a person feels pleasure in their being, which is where we should all be going, but we don't, we go to external things.
Let’s define love and hate. Love is pleasure associated with the idea of some external thing. When somebody says they love their Harley-Davidson, they're talking about the joy they get from sitting on the back of it and zooming down a freeway at 90 miles an hour. It's a direct experience of power.
When someone says they love chocolate cake, they are saying they get pleasure from all the sugar and fats in the cake because their body, through millennia has sought those things. Of course, they are now too freely available and cause various problems with our eating habits and health. But we use this word love reasonably freely, and then we get to say that I love this person. If that kind of love is romantic love, then experience would indicate that it has a very, very high probability of turning into hate. But we'll get on to that later on too.
Now let's turn to hate. Hate is pain associated with the idea of some external thing. If someone says you're a useless piece of crap - you're going to feel pain - particularly if it's somebody that pleased you previously. Someone, a loved one, a new partner say says to you in a fit of anger, you're a useless piece of crap. That's going to hurt you, that's going to cause a lot of pain. Which in turn will probably turn into hatred. Hatred is pain associated with the idea of an external object. We may hate having vaccinations because they cause pain in the body. We may hate cabbage. We may hate a particular kind of music because it gives us associations that we'd rather not have. The sources of pleasure and pain and by association love and hatred are infinite. This duality is how we live our lives, bouncing around between love and hate based on whether the things external to us reinforce us or diminish us. It's all very mechanical. Real love is the love of something within oneself. As the famous line in a song by some pop group says, "there's nothing out there worth fighting for." It's all inside. And again, as Spinoza says, the nature of our happiness or unhappiness depends entirely on the thing that we love. If you love something that's impermanent or unreliable, then you're likely to be disappointed at some time. It's just the nature of the game. You can decide that you want to play that game because you feel the payback is large enough, or you can say no I've had enough of that game, I'd prefer to seek something within myself rather than be dependent on external things. I should add that finding something within oneself doesn't mean you become some island with a fortress around it. It just means your attention is placed differently from the way it is usually set. We can still have relationships and enjoy the pleasures of life and suffer the pains of life but that's not the only thing we experience. We have something of our own. When talking about love, and I'd have to say that many of the people that I've associated with in various forms of work wouldn't even use the word love. They would consider it to be too misused for it to have any meaningful context. Because what people mean by love these days, particularly love between people is something like, this person reinforces me; therefore, I love them. They have the same opinions as me, and they like the same things as me, so they are reinforcing my view of life, my sense of power, and therefore I love them. Well, that's not love, that's just merely animal behavior, and it's going nowhere. And hatred is something that we would rather not accept in ourselves. One of the most common forms of hatred is envy. Envy is hatred or pain associated with someone else's good fortune. If somebody across the road from you, someone that maybe you don't particularly like, wins a million dollars, then you're going to experience envy. Because you want that, and you see somebody else that's got it, and it creates contrast. Pain and pleasure in their turn generate hate and love respectively. And we are thrown around between these two things on a constant on-going basis because we have nothing within us that is our own. So how to address this?
Well, I remember a conversation once with someone who was leading a group, and he just came to the group and said, "why don't you tell me what you're passionate about?". People said various things. One person said he was passionate about sailing, he had a small boat and enjoyed sailing, and another was passionate about dancing, when it came to me I said I was passionate about cigars. And it's entirely correct I like cigars a lot, although I don't smoke them very much at all these days, I used to be very passionate about them. I knew all the brands and so on. And he listened to us all, and he said well you're all misguided because the only thing you should be passionate about is yourself. Well, I was a little bit shocked when I heard that because, of course, in our society, we're raised to believe that we need to be, how can I put it, selfless. Talking about being passionate about oneself seemed like an invitation to selfishness. And this is one of the problems that we have. We have picked up strange ideas along the way, one of them is that we need to identify with everything that's external to us and forget about what's internal. What does being passionate about oneself mean? Well, it says that we are primarily passionate about what we give our attention to, and I would suggest that the most valuable thing that you can give your attention to is a sense of your existence. Everything else is just playing nature's game. Nature has no interest in you or I or anyone realizing anything. Nature is concerned with numbers. You need to be concerned about you because no one and nothing else will be. You need to be passionate about how you invest your attention in life, and as much attention as possible should be given to your sense of being. That goes against nature, and so is difficult, but it’s the only way we get something of our own. Spinoza talked about the nature of God and that God was synonymous with existence. If you're going to love God, to use that word again, then you need to love existence, and the only way you get to love anything is by giving attention to it. In fact, for some, love and attention are very often considered to be equal things. So, there you have it. Our usual use of the word love is entirely meaningless; it just means that we derive pleasure from something. We hate the things that diminish us, and that can cause jealousy and hatred and derision and a whole pile of negative emotions that most of us are very familiar with. But love has acquired this sacred status, and most of the time love is nothing but the expression of pleasure. If you want to love something, love yourself. The way you love yourself is by giving attention to yourself because nothing and no one else is going to.
ARE YOU INADEQUATE?
Asking someone if they are inadequate is probably a good way of ensuring that you never see them again. It's certainly a fairly extreme thing to ask someone, so apologies if it seems a little bit rude. The inadequacy I'm going to be talking about here is not the usual one. What we usually think of as inadequate behavior is when someone cannot deal with life in a modestly successful way or maybe cannot deal
with people successfully. That's the way we tend to measure if someone is adequate or inadequate. Well, Spinoza turns the whole thing on its head to some extent. His meaning of the term inadequate is much, much deeper. It took me a long, long time to understand what Spinoza meant by the terms adequate and inadequate, but now I look at it I see the depth of it. Let me quote from Part 3 of his Ethics. It's the first definition, and it says:
“By an adequate cause, I mean a cause through which its effect can be clearly and distinctly perceived.”
In other words what he's talking about is a one-to-one relationship between something happening and the cause of it happening. If you throw a brick at a window and the window smashes, that's a very adequate cause. You threw the brick, the window shattered. There is no debate as to why the window shattered, and you could argue your case to a policeman or a lawyer or a judge, and they wouldn't believe a word if they could see that you've thrown the brick. An excellent correlation between a cause and an effect. "By an adequate cause, I mean a cause through which its effect can be clearly and distinctly perceived." And then he goes on to say:
“By an inadequate or partial cause, I mean a cause through which, by itself, its effect cannot be understood.”
As an example imagine you see something happen, and it doesn't relate to the cause. I'll give you simple examples. You're kicking a ball against a wall, and suddenly there is a strong gust of wind, the ball hits a window, and the window smashes. Well, what was the cause of the window smashing? It was a mixture of two things; you kicking the ball and the wind blowing when it blew. The relationship between the window smashing and you kicking the ball isn't one-to-one. There are two causes involved in the window smashing. Spinoza would say that each of those is an inadequate cause because they are not the sole reason why the window smashed. Why is this of interest? Well, in his usual way Spinoza then goes on to unfold a considerable edifice of analysis around this based on how we behave. He talks about inadequate behavior and adequate behavior. Adequate behavior is when you are single-handedly the cause of something happening, either within you or outside. Let me give you an example of inadequate behavior, and then you'll probably see the gist of it. Say you are at your boss’s party, and he cracks a joke, and the joke isn't the least bit funny, but you feel very, very pressured to laugh, and so you laugh. Inside you're squirming. Where has that laugh come from? Well, in Spinoza's analysis you behaved inadequately because the reason for the laughter was not just you being amused, you weren't genuinely amused. There was an influence from your boss and your peers that made you internally feel pressured to laugh at the joke, so there were external influences that caused you to laugh and as such that behavior was inadequate. Now, inadequate sounds judgmental. It isn't judgmental. There is nothing judgmental in Spinoza which is one of the great things about it. He's merely saying that this happens. And, for a large part of your life, your behavior will be inadequate, but there is a twist in the tale that I'll get to at the end of this. Let me give you another example. Here I am writing a book. There is a certain amount of ambition associated with producing a book. If I didn't want anybody to read it, I wouldn't do it, and so there is some level of ambition. If after three weeks I looked at the sales and I saw zero I would feel somewhat disappointed. Why has that disappointment happened? Well, it happened because I had this ambition that other people were going to be interested in what I'm doing. When I find out they're not interested, then I experience this disappointment, a little blow to my ego. And that behavior, that disappointment is inadequate behavior because I'm depending on the people who read this to validate somehow the effort that I've put into producing it. I’m dependent on you to read this thing along with a reasonable number of people, although I don't expect tens of thousands of people to be interested in this. Most people want some mysterious thing about angels and fairies and whatever, but I would expect some people to be interested.
Inadequate behavior is built into us, and it's primarily driven by the fact that we do not exist as a single entity all on our own in the universe. We are always affected by things outside of us, particularly other people's behavior, and this causes us to behave in an inadequate way. Can we act adequately? Yes. Well, there's a scale. Wholly inadequate behavior, for example, some obnoxious creep will be profoundly compromised because he or she has to behave in a way that is foreign to their nature. Nobody can be an obnoxious creep without suffering in some way, because they deny their inner reality. But an obnoxious creep who is saying yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, all at the right times, is driven by external circumstances. In ordinary life, we would see someone who is successful in a large corporation as being very, very adequate - successful, car, big house, holiday home, maybe a small yacht or something, an attractive partner, two and a half kids going to good schools, and all the rest of it. And yet the reality is that that person may be wholly inadequate regarding how Spinoza talks about adequacy, because they are playing a role where he will have had to, or she will have had to commit acts of violence against themselves to achieve what they've accomplished. They not only commit acts of violence against other people, but they also commit these things against themselves.
You can see that if external factors influence us, where the action does not come purely from us, it is inadequate. There are levels of inadequacy, and so we can get up to the point where you find someone who doesn't care all that much about what other people think of him or her. That's an adequate state. We need our own self-approval. Other people's approval doesn't matter. Well, how do we get that? I'll go into that in a moment but let me say that this is very, very similar to Gurdjieff's analysis of internal considering and external considering. With internal considering, we feel the pressure to behave in a certain way. With external considering, we, in a rational manner, look at the situation and say yes, I should do this. Back to the example of laughing at your boss’s joke. If you laugh at it because you feel pressured and you want to creep around the guy to get a promotion, and you experience that pressure, then that is inadequate behavior because your laugh isn't coming from your genuine inner state, its coming because of the influence of other people. But, Gurdjieff also talks about external considering. External considering is when you look at a situation impartially. You may be in the same position with the boss, and you may say to yourself, I'm going to laugh at all his jokes or her jokes because this will get me a promotion. Whenever the boss tells a joke, you laugh more than anybody else, and you say to yourself this is what I'm going to do to get a promotion. You feel no inner pressure. It's a reasoned decision to do that. This is why Spinoza is talking about reason all the time, because reason allows us to behave in a manner that's internally consistent, instead of being always pressured by outside influences.
How do we deal with all of this? Well, I go back to the thing that I always talk about which probably most people find boring by now, but it's essential. We need to notice ourselves during the day on a reasonably frequent basis, and we need to see how we're feeling. If we're in a situation with some people and we're feeling pressured, then observe it. Don't try and do anything about it. And why should you try and do anything about it? The way you're feeling is your authentic response to the situation. To mess around with it because you have some idea of how you might want to behave is inauthentic. If you're with people, you feel pressured, let's say they're drinking heavily and you feel compelled to drink heavily, then observe that pressure. It doesn't mean you have to go on and kill yourself through alcohol poisoning, but see the pressure that you're experiencing, don't judge it. It would be very easy to identify some negative statement with the word inadequate, but being inadequate is how we are most of the time. You observe it, and then you try and understand it, and eventually, you may find a way to diminish these feelings of being inadequate or the situations where you behave inadequately, and act more rationally. The behavior on the outside may be precisely the same, you still laugh at your boss’s joke, but the bottom line is that you're doing it for a differ
ent reason. You're not doing it because you feel pressured, you're doing it because you've reasoned that that is what you need to do. In that circumstance it’s because you want to get a promotion, maybe you don't want to get a promotion, in which case you can choose to avoid him. The thing with all of this is that we never, ever try and change our behavior. No part of you has the wisdom and intelligence to be able to modify your behavior. You observe what's going on, and the observation will eventually give you some insights and set you free.
I said that we will always be inadequate in most situations in our life but, here's the twist: We can deal with our inadequacy adequately, because the observation that you make of your inadequacy is an adequate response to it, it comes wholly from you. That's beautiful, isn't it?
GRATIFICATION JUNKIES
OK, this is where I could lose my readers. You owe me nothing, and I owe you nothing in truth. So, the title says it all ‘Gratification Junkies.’ We're all gratification junkies until we realize something fairly important, and I'll say what that is near the end. But I want to go through the way most people, including myself, approach the whole thing of trying to be happy, trying to find peace, inner peace or whatever.
Let's consider the state of the world. Right now, about a third of the people on the planet are hungry or starving; they're malnourished or starving. It's one in three, so it’s not insignificant. If it was one in twenty, you might be more inclined to dismiss it somewhat, but it's one in three. In the UK for example, four million kids are known to be undernourished, and six million families live below the poverty line. It's starting to qualify as a third world country. And then you look at people's lives. Lots of people right now are ill from cancer, from heart disease, from neurological disorders - Alzheimer's for example. This situation is the reality of our life. It’s the reality we'd rather not see because it's painful, and we are pain avoiding creatures. And this facility within us that goes searching towards pleasure and avoiding pain means that we are forever blindfolded. We can't just stand back and look at the whole scenario and say, ‘well what is all this about?’. As Schopenhauer says, if this planet was not designed for pain then it was the most ill-conceived thing possible. With that kind of background, it’s not surprising that most people go looking for some form of gratification. And those forms of gratification can be fairly sophisticated. It’s a strange thing that while most people are desperately trying to keep everything together, to earn enough money for the next meal, to maintain shelter over their heads, the whole effort is becoming more difficult. Because wealth, as you know, is more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. In the UK the number of families who find it hard to stay in their homes is increasing very rapidly, as it is in the United States and elsewhere. People who are focused on that kind of thing don't have a lot of time to think about “Oh wouldn't it be nice to go white water rafting in Peru” or something like that. No, no they're concerned with what they have got to eat tomorrow, and can I pay the rent this month, or those kinds of things. Or little Johnny's got some disease, and we haven't got the money to pay for his medicine. Those are the things that concern them. All this behavior is the will-to-life manifesting through human beings, and the intelligence within us serves that will-to-life by whatever means possible. If it means theft, if it means any crime to survive, any craftiness, any deceit, then we will do it to continue to survive. Most people, in actual fact, are busy with that. There are even people who are in fairly prosperous societies, who are still quite poor, so they're concerned with that. And people who are fortunate, who have enough money to indulge their whims and wishes are still unhappy. Now they're not going to look back every time they buy some cheap piece of clothing and think “Oh well, some poor kids in some sweat factory in wherever, Indonesia or somewhere, have been paid a dollar a day to make this.” Or every time you get the next gadget - you don't think about those things. We conveniently forget them. Why? Because we like all that stuff that's cheap. We conveniently forget that it's cheap because other people have sold their labor. Sold their time into slavery for a pittance so that we can get those things. Anyway, we choose not to remember all those things.
The Corporeal Fantasy Page 6
