The Corporeal Fantasy

by Martin Butler

  To recap. Knowledge is just stuff you hold in your head. It’s like you're a computer and it has no bearing or no weight when we're considering how we feel about ourselves and what we are. Understanding is tied to being, and being is related to experience. Understanding and being go together. Before you sign up for the next spiritual adventure, the next set of techniques to calm your being, then you might want to investigate understanding. It's nowhere near as sexy as enlightenment or cosmic consciousness or any of these things that the enlightenment gurus are touting. But it's more real, the benefits are more robust, and it's a way to progress in your move towards peace, towards happiness.

  THE PLEASURABLE STUDY OF PAIN

  The pleasurable study of pain sounds like an oxymoron, but, in my opinion, the pleasurable study of pain is one of the highest things a man can do in this life because it offers some level of meaning to things that otherwise appear meaningless and just merely painful. Spinoza said a great deal about this. I think a right place to start is to describe precisely what pain is. Pain always happens when your existence is threatened in some way - either a small way or a substantial way. For example, the pain in my body is telling me that there's something a bit wrong and I’m not in the state I usually am in. I am diminished to some extent.

  Then on to pleasure – this is when we have an enhanced sense of existence. You win a million dollars; you get some gorgeous new mate, you get a huge promotion at work, anything that makes your existence feel more enhanced and makes you feel more solid in life is going to please you. That's the way it works. It's all basic stuff, driven by the survival instinct or what Spinoza calls the drive to persist in our existence, or the will-to-life as Schopenhauer calls it. You know various people call it different things but at the end of the day it's just this drive to exist, continue in our existence, and that drives pretty much all the pleasure and pain. Just a warning here, you cannot study pain if you are depressed or angry. All you're going to do is try and justify your depression or anger. If you are a very angry or sad person, or very unhappy in some way, then you need help. This is not about that; this is about something completely different. We're not here talking about some way to justify feeling angry or depressed. If you're like that you need help, go and seek it. In the first quote- and this is one of the strangest quotes in all of Spinoza's work in my opinion. You must remember that God, for Spinoza, is not an old man in the sky with a beard. God is pretty much synonymous with nature or the cosmos or existence, whatever word you want to use. He says:

  “Therefore insofar as we understand God to be the cause of pain, we to that extent feel pleasure.”

  What a strange thing to say. I know I've commented on this quote in other places, but it's a central thing. It's a central piece of information that helps a person understand pretty much the whole of what Spinoza's talking about. Because what Spinoza's trying to do for the people who go to the trouble of studying him and practicing what he preaches, he's trying to help them live a pleasurable life. You may think that's not possible, but it is possible. And he's saying that part of that pleasure can be derived by studying pain. Well, what most people do in life is go into denial about pain. We get all the ‘positive thinking’ types, and all they're thinking about is success and health and vitality and whatever else. When things don't go how they expect them to they experience a lot of pain because all their expectations are not met. Then the contrast between what they expected and what has happened is bigger than if they just had not bothered with all that stuff. Half your existence or half your experience will be pleasurable, and half will be painful. Life is like that. It's a zero-sum game. Half of it will be great, and half of it will be dreadful regarding pleasure and pain anyway. And once we understand that pleasure and pain are just integral parts of life then it makes sense, doesn't it, to find a way to deal with the pain that also generates pleasure insofar as it is possible to do that. I know it's not always possible, but it is in many situations. Spinoza says that understanding how the universe or nature inflicts pain can please us. This is the way he approaches the whole thing around emotions. Another quote from Spinoza:

  “I shall consider human actions and desires in the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.”

  “Thus the passions of hatred, anger, envy and so on, considered in themselves, follow from this same necessity and efficacy of nature. They are the answer to certain definite causes through which they are ‘understood’ (important word) and possess certain properties as worthy of being known as the properties of anything else, whereof the contemplation in itself affords us delight.”

  Well there you go, this is the purely intellectual, detached study of the way the universe generates pain. Now here's one way the universe generates pain and if you're looking for something uplifting to read then turn the page now. This is not that. Go and listen to Tony Robbins or something. Here's one way the universe generates pain; when you are born, you are sentenced to death immediately. Your life will be a process of reaching some high point, around the age of twenty or twenty-five or there abouts and after that, there is a slow degeneration, which then happens more rapidly as you get older. It then happens very quickly when you get into your seventies or eighties. Along the way you will have emotional problems through relationships may be, you will have physical problems that cause you pain and maybe financial problems that threaten your security and all those kinds of things. This is the half of life we would rather not contemplate but actually by understanding how we are operating in those situations can be a source of pleasure. Let me give you an example. Say someone lost their job, their immediate emotional reaction will be something like “Oh my god, how am I going to pay the mortgage, how am I going to pay for the kids to go to school, health care...” whatever, and those things will start to happen. If at that point a person can remember that what they are experiencing is a diminishing in their sense of existence, and understand that this is how the whole game is set up, then they're not going to stop feeling worried and all these kind of things. All of a sudden there's another dimension in there and an understanding of what is going on from an objective point of view, instead of all the personal angst that would normally consume a person. That person is thinking “Yeah, my power has been diminished, I am going to feel crap, this is the way it works. There's no point pretending I'm not going to feel crap.” Feeling crap is just a natural follow-on from feeling pain. It's just the way it happens. But, that understanding is how the universe and your life works. Your survival instinct is driving everything, and when your survival is threatened in some way, by remembering this, you are going to create just a little bit of space within you to look at the whole thing objectively. If you do that on a fairly frequent basis, it offers a kind of escape route out of being consumed by the pain that you're in. You can study it and look at it in a more objective kind of way. I must emphasize this is an intellectual study and as far as Spinoza is concerned the emotions are essentially our fallen state. We are creatures of reason, or potentially creatures of reason and all the indulgence in the emotions is just a fallen state that takes us away from operating in a manner that is based on reason. You might then think ‘well, what is this reason he's talking about?’ The reason he's talking about is simple to understand. Reason as far as Spinoza is concerned is a motivation behind actions that are most beneficial for you. That’s it! He's not talking about logic; he's not talking about mathematics, he's not talking about physics or science. He's talking about how you can consider your situation at any moment in time and do the thing that is best for you. And then you start to say to yourself, ‘well what about everybody else?’ It's all included in the whole notion of reason. But let me consider another quote. He says “Thus the passions of hatred, anger, envy and so on, considered in themselves, follow from this same necessity and efficacy of nature.” For Spinoza, hatred, anger,envy, jealousy, ridicule, or any number of what we would call negative emotions, are just effects of natureLet's say we just lost o
ur job and the guy across the road has just got a promotion and he's got himself a huge, great new car. Are you going to feel envious? Well, yes, possibly, particularly if you don't like him, and that is for Spinoza just natural law playing out. There's nothing wrong with that feeling of envy. But envy is a pain derived from hatred, and so it's useful to understand again that the other guy's survival has been enhanced, your survival has been diminished, and now you’re feeling this envy. I wish he hadn't got that car; I wish he were made jobless - this is just a natural reaction to that situation. If you can understand it without trying to modify it, then again you create a little bit of space that's an escape route to be able to get away from being consumed by that emotion. The emotion is going to stay, but you don't have to be consumed by it completely.

  Can contemplation of pain and suffering afford us delight? Yes, it can. I know that from my own experience. That doesn't mean that you are a masochist or sadomasochist, it says that you can separate out your intellectual appreciation of these things from the emotional response. For example, if you switch on the TV and you see something awful happening in Syria, it doesn't mean that you don't have any empathy. All it means is that you have, as well as the immediate empathic response, an intellectual understanding of these poor people whose lives have been diminished to the point where they're just so miserable and unhappy. You understand it from that point of view just like you might appreciate it for yourself. Many people object to Spinoza. They believe that what is called ‘negative emotions’ are essentially invalid, should not exist, and that's the way we tend to think about it. Spinoza says no, no, no all these emotions are going to happen. It’s just the same way that you might study geometry, and you find out that all the angles in a triangle are two right angles or something. It may sound like it's a little bit of the behavior of a psychopath, but it isn't. All we're doing is freeing ourselves up to some extent from the chains that bind us. The central chain that binds us is the desire to persist in our existence. If we can acquire skill and practice along these lines, of always looking at something from the point of view “is this enhancing or diminishing my or somebody else's existence,” then you get an intellectual understanding that has a certain degree of freedom associated with it. It's one of the most important things to come out of Spinoza's work. Anyway, I hope that's useful and that I conveyed the essence of that well enough.

  INNER POWER

  What I want to do is discuss the basics of creating one’s own personal power within. This power isn't Nietzsche type power; it's not superhero type power, it's creating something within yourself that is stable and strong, because until you have that, then you cannot go and take your elevator trip down to hell and see all the stuff that's going on within you. It will just disturb you too much. We need inner strength. No one else is going to give it to us. Don't go looking to your parents or your colleagues or your friends or your gurus or whoever else to provide you with this inner strength; this is something you have to build yourself and then it becomes yours. If you're reliant on somebody else’s words or deeds or opinions or whatever, then it's not yours, is it? I shall be drawing very heavily on Spinoza because he is the man where this is concerned.

  The problem with a lot of so-called spiritual work is that it is in deep denial of the nature of our existence. It just cannot say many things. It's going to get heavy-duty here in a little bit, so I'm going to warn you. Spinoza gives us what reality is about on a plate. He says there is no personal god, there is no purpose in the universe, and there is no moral code. You are a tiny thing in a vast universe and you are likely to be flattened at any moment in time. He doesn't use those words exactly, but those are the sentiments. Spinoza famously says that by virtue and power he means the same thing. If you look up in the dictionary what virtue means it isn't the same as what Spinoza means. In the dictionary, virtue is said to be high moral standards. Spinoza doesn't believe in morals; he doesn't even believe in right or wrong. Here we go, I did warn you. He's not talking about high moral standards, so what is he talking about then? He's talking about what the Stoics used to talk about, the Greek Stoics, virtue is an inner strength. Virtue and power are the same things. Power for what? The power to be what you are. That is the only power that you want. You don't want the power to be somebody else, you don't want the power to acquire a whole pile of stuff that's useless and irrelevant, you just want the ability to be what you are, and that sounds like it might be a short-term project or a trivial thing but it's neither of those things. It's quite a big thing to be what you are. It means that other people's opinions do not influence you, that you form your own understanding of things, that you have a being within yourself that is impervious to all the nonsense that's coming in from outside. Again I repeat, virtue and power is the same thing, the ability to be what you are. Spinoza goes even further in his writings where he says, for example, the power of a lion is to bring down a gazelle, rip its throat out and eat it. The ability of a strong man allows him to dominate and exploit weak people. Spinoza sees nothing wrong with this, other than those people that are used need to find their own power.

  Let's talk about the two ways you get power within yourself. The first one is through understanding. The Eastern traditions often give no real knowledge of the nature of existence - typically they give practices. Some people want facts and go the other way; they might want to understand cosmic consciousness or samadhi or something similar, but do they understand the nature of their animal origins? They want to ignore all that stuff because it's boring. They want something novel like samadhi. Now I'm going to give you here a very condensed version of the understanding of the nature of our existence. If you don't understand this, you will always suffer. Here goes. Every living creature in its very essence desires to survive. In Schopenhauer's terms, is driven by the will-to-life. And in Spinoza's words, the very essence of man is desire. The desire to survive is also the essence of every living thing. How do most living things survive? Well, they have to kill other living things and eat them to survive. That's just the way it works. We didn't set this game up. The animals that are part of this manifestation, and human beings, didn't set this whole thing up, it's just the way the entire game works. And we're stuck with it. Animals generally eat each other, and of course, we eat animals, and when you come to human beings, human beings then exploit each other. Why do they use each other? Because this will-to-life makes them feel that if they have more stuff, or some more money maybe, more power, more fame, more influence, then their existence is more assured. If you've got more money, then you can afford better health care or better food or whatever. You can have more leisure maybe. Human beings exploit each other to further their existence. When you go down to the mall and buy that cheap t-shirt or cheap pair of jeans you will conveniently forget that some little kid in some sweatshop in Indonesia is being paid a dollar a week to produce them and you are, and we all do, exploit each other in a conscious-less, and unconscionable way. And we do it because that's in our very genes, it's the thing that drives us, this drive to survive. If you can see a pair of jeans at five dollars and another pair of jeans that looks more or less the same at one hundred dollars, and in one case there's a little kid being paid one dollar a week to work on them, and in the other case people are being paid proper salaries, maybe a couple of hundred dollars a day, then you'll still go and buy the cheap jeans. The critical point here is that everything is exploiting everything else. It's the way the game is set up.

  I've quoted the following piece from Spinoza many times and what I want to do is quote it again. It's one of my favorite propositions of his, and it deals with all the kinds of emotions that people manifest in their attempts to dominate each other. Here's how it goes:

  “It follows that everyone is fond of narrating his own exploits and displaying both the force of his body and mind and also that for this reason, men are troublesome one to another.”

  We know that one don't we? Some boring git who's just been on some holiday to Peru or somewhere a
bit exotic just isn't going to let you forget about it. They're going to tell you about it every five minutes. Well, of course, they are. If they're bragging to each other all the time, as Spinoza says, displaying the force of their body and mind, it's a display of power. You know the kind of thing - I've got this car, I've been to this restaurant, I've been on this holiday. That's what people do; they piss over each other all day. And Spinoza's just calling it out. You know he doesn't use that word obviously, but that's what he's saying. And men are troublesome one to another because they do this all the time. Do not expect what you might call reasonable, polite behavior from people, it's not in there most of the time. Occasionally you'll meet somebody who'll behave like that, but most of the time you're dealing with people who are desperate to display their power. If that means disempowering you, they will do it. Accept it. Stop being disappointed by people's behavior. It's ridiculous. You need to accept the way people behave - this is the way they act. And I'll quote more of Spinoza to elaborate on the point. From the same proposition, Number 55 in Part 3 of The Ethics.