The Corporeal Fantasy

by Martin Butler

  Man is unique in the ability to do even that kind of thinking. It's a low level of thinking, but even so, man is unique in the ability to do that. But then you get to reason, and a man who could apply reason would say 'well actually that person that I saw committing that crime of that particular race is only one person and I haven't seen anybody else of that race do the same. I'll have a look at the figures.' So he looks at the figures, and he finds that this particular race is no worse or no better than anybody else at committing that specific crime. That level of objectivity is relatively rare in society. Most people are driven by these low-level opinions, bigotries, and biases.

  Eventually, the highest form of thinking isn't thinking at all; it's a direct perception of reality. This can be called intuition. It's a direct perception rather than a thinking process employing images and words in our mind. And this is why first of all a tree is just a tree to a child. There's no thinking process it's pure perception, and then we start to complicate the whole thing up by conceptualizing. Well you know, here the photosynthesis going on and here's the way the sap rises in the tree, and the leaves are green because of this reason and so on. This is a process of applying reason, and it's better than just saying trees are governed by the tree god or some other kind of superstition. But even so, it's still a thinking process. Then eventually, first of all, trees are just trees, then trees are no longer trees because we analyze the things to death, and suddenly once again trees just become trees. If we go far enough, we go back to the direct perception of the entity in itself without thought messing things up. And that level of perception, direct perception, is the highest thing for human beings.

  Intuition is a direct perception that is not in any way corrupted by the thinking process. Thought is a strange thing, as it's effectively a stepping stone. We may first of all say that trees are just trees, but a child has to adjust itself to life, and it has to start reasoning and to conceptualize, and this builds personality. Then we have to go through a whole pile of work, to get back to 'trees are just trees.' So the thinking process is effectively a stepping stone, and people go through all that thinking process to get back to the tree. You can almost make yourself insane with the effort of searching then have a breakthrough experience, where you see that thinking is effectively taking you away from reality, which is the truth. But what some teachers do is not give people the opportunity to reach their crisis point. They tell people there is no point in thinking about all this stuff. All your thinking is conditioned, it's not really what you are. What you are is just desire. Spinoza says the essence of man is desire. Schopenhauer says man is the will. And in fact, all living creatures are just pure will, pure desire, but students need the opportunity to reach their crisis point, not just be given the conclusion before they can go through that process for themselves. Trees are only trees; trees are no longer trees, oh trees are just trees again.

  The thinking process is something that can cause people great distress, even insanity if they have no outside view on what they're doing, no understanding that thoughts are just thoughts. There's a famous saying in some Zen literature where a student goes to his master and says 'Master, how do I calm my mind?' and the master says 'show me your mind and I will calm it for you.' And of course, the student cannot show his mind because there's nothing to show.

  Thoughts are just thoughts, they're ethereal, they're vapor, but we use them to navigate our way through life more or less successfully. Remember those four levels of knowledge. Firstly, just hearsay, when someone has told you something, or you read it in a book, and you believe it, and it's quite likely to be incorrect or fake news as they call it these days. Then there's unprocessed experience which is 'I saw that guy belonging to that race of people doing that thing they must be truly awful people.' Unprocessed experience is just - I saw something once therefore in all situations that must be what's happening, which is just nonsense. Thirdly there's reason, which is the application of more disciplined thought to situations. Then finally there's intuition, which is going back to trees are just trees and the direct perception of reality. The thing to take away from this is that thought is useful and necessary, especially to navigate your way in life. But thought is just thought, and a beneficial exercise is to sit and watch your thoughts. The problem is that when you first start doing that your thoughts will stop. But as you get better at it, you will be able to watch your thoughts as they're developing. We can view the way we identify with our thoughts as jumping onto trains. A train goes through a station, which is a thought, about maybe a holiday and before you know it you've spent two hours daydreaming and thinking about what you are going to do on this holiday. We jumped on the train, it's taken us 500 miles in some direction we didn't particularly want to go and then we suddenly wake up again, and we jump off. Well, the essence of dealing with thought is to realize when you've jumped on the train because none of these trains are worth jumping on, particularly if it's unconsciously. In the end, thought is useful but don't take it too seriously.

  THE PRISON

  Here is a description of the walls and iron bars that comprise your prison. You are driven relentlessly by the will-to-life to maintain your existence and seek as much power as possible. The driver is your desires, and these can never be wholly satisfied. If your desires are not met you feel pain. This is the floor of your prison cell – the thing that keeps you from sinking into oblivion. But you have to continually construct this floor, because below it is destruction.

  The walls of your prison are constructed from the limitations of your mind. We think in terms of crude logical concepts – IF Joe does that again THEN I will tell him to stop it. Our world is deterministic – endless chains of causality affecting the way we think and what we do. We are puppets pulled by the strings of causality. For us the world is made from a myriad of things, each separate with limited duration. There is nothing permanent or real in the world our minds construct. We have nothing to hang on to.

  The iron bars on the window are constructed from our sensory processing. We live in a world of space and time – constructs of our consciousness, and we perceive nothing outside this self-generated framework. This space-time matrix is forever changing with no permanent point of reference.

  The prison cell door is constructed from our emotions – the passions that keep us rooted in fear, sadness, anger, love, hatred. We cannot move beyond these emotions, and to try and force the door open is to make it stronger.

  But here is the spell breaker. By understanding the prison and its construction, and by not resisting, the walls, floor, and iron bars dissolve away. By fully understanding what something is, we implicitly gain knowledge of what is beyond it.

  Many religions and “spiritual” traditions attempt to destroy the prison cell, and as a result make it stronger. The way of the sly man is non-action. Understanding is all we need.

  Part Three

  Freedom

  THE SCIENCE OF SUFFERING

  There seems to be an abundance of spiritual teachers right now who are keen to tell us that suffering is an illusion. I find this quite cruel because most of us suffer in some way or another, and I shall describe the various forms of suffering a little bit later. I think we all know what suffering is, and suffering is pain. Your body certainly suffers if you put your hand into a fire, and you'll pull it out very quickly to try and avoid further pain. Well, emotional suffering is pain too. If you want to experience some emotional suffering, tell someone that you love very dearly that you never want to see them again, and you will experience emotional suffering. This is all common-sense stuff. How to deal with suffering though, is a science. Well, it's a science and an art, and I shall start by going through what you need to do to deal with suffering. I can cover it in five minutes although it will probably take you five years to master it. What you need to do first is to be able to observe yourself, without the desire to change things and without any judgment. If you're feeling sad, you can observe that feeling in your body. If you can observe tha
t feeling, you have some means of understanding why you are feeling sad. You don't try and do anything about it, doing something is the worst thing you can do, observe how you're feeling, sit with it, and become it. In a way, you eat it because these emotions only have so much energy. The problem is that when an emotion engulfs us, say anger, then that is the very time that we are least likely to remember to do that thing, i.e., simply observing, sitting with it, feeling it. And understanding why we feel like that.

  I'm going to use Spinoza a great deal in this. The Ethics is the work I'm referring to, and Part 3 has maybe fifty to hundred pages all dealing with the emotions. And this is how Spinoza defines an emotion:

  “By emotion I mean the modifications of the body whereby the active power of the said body is increased or diminished, aided or constrained and also the ideas of such modifications.”

  It's a bit of a mouthful so I'll try and interpret exactly what's said there. First, emotions come from modifications of your body. They are not thoughts, although thoughts can contribute to an emotion, and I'm not going to go into that it would take just too long. But basically, emotions are created by a modification of your body and are in the body. So, when you want to sense an emotion, say you're feeling angry, then you need to put your attention in the body, particularly around the solar plexus area, and you need to sit with it. This attention requires some act of consciousness because most of the day we are asleep, we are consumed by these things, we are them. Which is a great travesty, but that's how it is most of the time. And you need the presence of mind to sense how your body is and to sit with how you are feeling at that time. I call this the pain radar. You need a radar which is going to scan now and then to see how you are feeling and to sit with however you are feeling. Because that's a practice you need to master, otherwise you're never going to become what Spinoza claims we can become anyway, a master of your emotions, you will always be a slave to them.

  What Spinoza is also saying in this short piece is that the emotions are positive or pleasurable if we experience an increase of power. And they are painful or negative if we experience a diminished power. And in fact, Spinoza defines pleasure and pain in this way:

  Pleasure is the transition of a man from a less to a greater power. Pain is the transition of a man from a greater to a less power. So, let’s have some simple examples.

  If you win a million dollars in the lottery, that certainly is an increase in power and you will experience pleasure. If, on the other hand, someone somehow manages to steal all the money in your bank account, that will be a diminishing of power and you will feel pain. It’s as simple as that. All you must do, and I say all, it’s a great deal, is be aware of how you are feeling in each moment in time. And you need to understand why you are feeling like that. If you're feeling sad you need to look, if you can, at why you are feeling sad. You don't try and change anything. You acknowledge the feeling of being sad, you feel it in your body and you look at why you're feeling sad. Maybe you're feeling sad because one of your pets had died, or you are sad because you recall an intense relationship that you once had that ended in a bad way. You just need to sit with that and feel it. If you try to resist it, it will grow in intensity. In fact, a very useful little ditty that was given to me once upon a time (thank you Robert) - whatever you resist tends to persist. It more than persists, it grows in strength. So, here's the science of suffering. You will diminish suffering by becoming consciously one with it. Looking at it, sensing it in your body, understanding why that has occurred, and as time moves on you will gain the skill of being able to do this on an almost continual basis. Sensing how you feel, why you feel like that. Now it takes a lot of work and I'm aware that for anybody that is new to this, it sounds like they've been given the key to emotional tranquillity. Well you have, but you haven't. You haven't because in fact you will lie to yourself. For example, when we say that an increase of power brings pleasure, then someone may interpret this as meaning I'm going to think positively about things, I'm going to do more, I’m going to be more active. Well, that's just your ego. It's insincere and you are avoiding why you felt like you felt before you decided to do that. Because we have this almost unstoppable propensity to lie to ourselves people do need external help. Someone who is working with you on this will be able to tell when you are lying to yourself. Such a person wouldn't give two hoots about you lying to them, they're not that interested. But they will be able to see when you are lying to yourself, which is the most important thing. And what is the outcome of all this work? Well the outcome is you gain some inner peace and maybe even contentment and happiness. Although to be perfectly hones,t happiness is not a thing worth pursuing.

  I think we all know that the least happy people are those who pursue happiness with determination. Sort of tragic in a way, but I've met many people who have put on a brave face, say they are totally positive, but underneath there you can hear this screaming baby that is being totally ignored. They've never come to terms with their own pains and their own suffering.

  Suffering is real. Do not listen to those spiritual guys who tell you that it's an illusion. It's real. You have an animal body, and that animal body will cause you suffering. The way you overcome it is by merely observing and understanding. And in fact, once you gain some mastery of that then you might ask yourself, is this all there is to life, ping-ponging between pain and pleasure? Pleasure as my power increases, as things work for me, and pain as somehow, I'm diminished, and things work against me. Well, that will be your life whether you want it or not. That is life. Sometimes things will work for you, and sometimes they will work against you, but what happens is you build your own inner strength and your own understanding. Something within you that can say well, I'm feeling a bit shitty, feeling a bit depressed and I'm feeling a bit depressed because I've got all this stuff that, I don't like doing. And then you say to yourself well why don't I like doing that? I don't like doing it because somebody has told me to do it. Oh, your power's being diminished because somebody's standing over you telling you to do something you don't want to do. And you can sit with that feeling, and you can understand what's going on, and you'll find that oppressive dynamic within yourself will diminish. We acquire this “I of understanding” and it's the only way to gain some mastery over the emotions. Just trying to be positive doesn't work. Just being a pessimist doesn't work either, although in truth pessimism is probably more productive than optimism. And this ‘I’ becomes a stable entity within you. Through this I, you can become indifferent to some extent to pleasure and pain. But you're never totally indifferent, pain is always going to be pain, pleasure is always going to be pleasure, but at the end of the day they don't rock your world so often, and you have more of a center of gravity within you which is a real blessing.

  DECONSTRUCTION

  I’m going to say something that may make you want to throw up. You are already perfect. So the obvious question is “why don’t I feel perfect?”, and what does perfect mean anyway? This is not some new-age bullshit claiming that you are love (you are not), or making promises of nirvana or enlightenment (no such things).

  I’ll start by defining “perfect”. You are perfect when you sit within our own power, and your power is the power to be what you are. It may not be apparent that you need power to be what you already are, but you do. There are just too many influences that bend you into shapes that are not you, and it requires skill and practice to repel those influences and deconstruct the bends and twists that have already been ingested.

  The are many simple examples of how we are assailed by unwelcome influences on a day-to-day basis. Maybe you are at a social event and feel compelled to fix a smile on your face, even though the whole experience is a pain. Someone told you that your normal expression is not adequate and so you comply with all the others – all doing the same thing. Maybe you are in a relationship where you feel obliged to participate in activities that hold no real attraction, but you comply for fear of friction and disapproval. Maybe you wer
e told as a child that you should always look smart or people won’t respect you – and on and on.

  None of the above belongs to you, it is just a set of behaviors and attitudes you have adopted because you felt the world demanded them. On top of these learned, and quite foreign behaviors, are ideas that we have ingested. That as a human being you sit outside the law of cause and effect that determines the behavior of everything else, and that you have free will. Because of this you believe in praise and blame, good and bad, self-discipline and many other notions that derive from this delusional fantasy called free will.

  If a person is going to move back to what they really are they need to deconstruct. This requires skill, knowledge and courage. The alternative is to live with an inner monster that has been created by our unwitting ingestion of ideas, behaviors and attitudes that are wholly foreign to our real nature.This will cause endless suffering as the real within us conflicts with the artificial. For most people the artificial becomes fixed and dominant, and what was real dies.

  Contrary to the new-age belief that our real nature is all sweetness and light – unending feelings of love, compassion, kindness, and dopey-eyed bliss, the reality is somewhat different. Our real nature is wholly selfish, and this selfishness exists at many levels. First of all we want to survive – a wholly selfish motive. We also want a supporting social structure – family, friends, peers – wholly selfish. As we understand our nature more, so we will understand the nature of others, and it becomes desirable that awareness of our real nature is better understood, with the result that people generally have more realistic expectations of each other, and most importantly do not have unrealistic expectations of us. Also completely selfish.