The Corporeal Fantasy

by Martin Butler

  Now we could list any number of favorable and unfavorable circumstances that might arise, and always we are gauging them against our survival prospects. So as de Mello suggests, life is both wonderful and awful. And this survival drive colors everything we touch. Beauty is often nothing more than something that is life-affirming. A lush valley with thickly forested mountain slopes is life-affirming. A heavily deformed fetus is life denying. As a result, we see the first as beautiful and the second as ugly. And as it says in the Tao Te Ching – once you have said something is beautiful, you have immediately created ugliness. Here there is a clue to living a more balanced life.

  We need to move beyond the duality that the survival instinct creates within us – encapsulated in the notion that life-affirming things are good, and life-diminishing things are bad. This move means embracing everything in life, from the grotesque to the sublime. Of course, nothing is grotesque or sublime in itself, these emotions and judgments naturally come about because we judge things from our own survival point of view. Seeing a deformed fetus does not directly affect our survival, but it reminds us of death and vastly diminished survival prospects.

  So instead of running away from the grotesque, can we embrace it? And instead of clamoring for the sublime, can we be indifferent to it? Such a move would be directly against nature, and if we want peace and joy, this is the way we must go. I do not doubt that most people who read this will quickly move on because such work requires considerable effort. But you wouldn't expect that peace and joy would come easily.

  The philosopher Spinoza has some things to say about this. In the appendix to part one of his masterwork, The Ethics, he says the following:

  "… why are there so many imperfections in nature? Such, for instance, as things corrupt to the point of putridity, loathsome deformity, confusion, evil, sin, etc. But these reasoners are, as I have said, easily confuted, for the perfection of things is to be reckoned only from their own nature and power; things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human senses, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind."

  There is a beautiful scene in the movie American Beauty, where Ricky Fitts, called ‘mental boy' by one of the other characters, is videoing the body of a dead bird lying on the grass. Someone asks him why he would do that, and he responds that he is videoing it because it is beautiful. He happens to be the only sane character in the whole movie – all the other characters living in deep denial. For him the grotesque and the sublime are no longer distinguishable – some would call him enlightened.

  Many spiritual practices today are neurotically centered on the pleasant and beautiful. When deformity and ugliness come into the life of the people follow these practices, they are even less capable of dealing with it than others, and as such become deniers of life's reality, with the neurosis and deep unhappiness that such a thing creates.

  What this means in practice is that we need to start bringing the chaotic and deformed into our life. This act is painful because the survival mentality does not want to see things that imply diminished survival. We don't need to try and appreciate the pleasant and beautiful, because we are naturally programmed to do that anyway, and it is the asymmetry of this drive that creates subconscious dread of the grotesque, deformed and dead within us.

  I would recommend that we consciously contemplate our own death as often, and with as much intensity, as we can. This is not from a position of fear, but just a thoughtful impartial contemplation. We should also familiarize ourselves with the cruelty and savagery of nature, with chaos, and with the ways that man destroys himself and nature. But we should also allow the so-called beautiful and pleasant to come into our life. We need a balance because life is a balance of these things. In the end, we need to play with all of this, but that is a state that does not come quickly and will only happen after struggle and suffering. To play with beauty and the ugly means we have seen that they are both imposters, solely created by our biased perspective on what is affirming for us, or what is diminishing.

  For those who feel we can rise above the unpleasant, but keep the pleasant, I have news for you. It's never going to happen, and if that is what you want, then you should sign up for any of the hundreds of spiritual schools that promise some form of everlasting happiness. You will almost certainly end up with an eternal neurosis.

  NOTHING TO DO

  There are three classes of doing. The first one consists of all the things we feel we need to do to continue with our existence – get money, eat food, establish a social context (maybe), protect ourselves from the elements, go to the doctor when not well, and so on. In reality, these things will happen anyway – no real effort is needed on your part, your will-to-life will look after it all. We may complain about life, become a nihilist, a misanthrope, depressed, or whatever, but we still eat, shit, sleep, seek shelter, seek medical help. While our mind might be busy complaining, the body just goes about its business. The body rules.

  The second class of doing consists of all the efforts we make because we believe something we have been told or have read. Because the life of the body seems dull and uninteresting, so we seek out ideas on life that are more sophisticated – spiritual growth, loving kindness, philosophical pursuits, religion, ideology, selflessness, self-discipline to achieve some goal – anything our imaginations can dream up. By adopting one or more of these imaginations we set up an inner conflict. Let’s imagine we have adopted the idea of selflessness, and to be specific, the notion that we should put other people’s interest before our own. And so we listen attentively to people when they rant endlessly about their latest vacation, we invite people to move in front of us in a queue, we smile at strangers, and above all, we put our own desires on the back-burner so that others can service their desires. Initially, we might experience a sort of self-righteousness, a glowing ego moment – but it doesn’t last for long. Within a week we are ready to rip the face off the next person who smiles at us and says hello. Our mind has been on a self-gratification trip while our body, our desires, become more and more frustrated. There are many other examples, and they all derive from some act of self-hypnosis through believing that we should be other than what we are.

  The third class of doing is “not doing”. This is the most difficult of all, and because of this, there is no ego gratification, no self-righteousness, and no effort involved. This not-doing consists wholly of letting our body and our life just go the way it goes without intervening because we have ingested some bullshit idea about how we should behave. There is a name for this non-doing, it is called self-observation. The best definition for self-observation I ever came across was from a guy called Rodney Collin. He defined self-observation as the simple act of accepting things as they are. This implies, non-judgement and no intervention. Sounds simple, but it the most difficult thing a human being can “do”. And just to clarify on the word “do”. The word implies intervention – some effort in the world of phenomena. To observe is to look. There is no intervention.

  If this is accepted we can immediately dismiss all “spiritual practices”, all notions of self-discipline (where one part of us bullies another part), all self-improvement schemes (there is nothing to improve), and in short all efforts to achieve some goal our mind has dreamed up.

  Some might object that our life would fall into ruins if we adopted this attitude. Not so. Our desires will still cause us to eat, shit, sleep, have sex, work for money, seek shelter, socialize (maybe) – and so on. We can just sit back and watch the beast go about its daily business. Any attempt to interfere is a doing, and all doing and ambition come from the beast.

  WEATHER WATCHING

  The weather today is overcast and cold. We could be talking of a mood here. Someone’s mood is gloomy, and they feel lonely. The weather is a useful metaphor for our emotional states. Sometimes the weather is stormy, cold, blisteringly hot, sunny, overcast, balmy, windy. And similarly, we can be in emotional states that are stormy, alienated, passiona
te, bright and breezy, gloomy, relaxed or hasty.

  The key idea here is that we are watching. We do not control the weather, and despite our illusions of control, we do not control our emotional states. The emotions are our immediate and real response to the environment. If someone tells you that you are the most attractive and charming person they have ever met, there is no way you will not feel flattered and uplifted – and this response will happen in an instant. Similarly, if a person near to you says you are a disgusting, uncouth pig, you will without a doubt feel deflated and possibly angry. Again the response will be immediate.

  As I’ve mentioned many times in podcasts and various blog postings, all our emotions go back to a single root – the desire to exist, and with as much power as possible. When someone insults you there is no way you can feel uplifted by that, your power has been diminished, even if only slightly. It would be wholly wrong to try and pretend that our emotional state is other than it is. In fact, the very act of resisting an emotional state usually makes it worse.

  Back to weather watching. Just as we would not pretend that a stormy day with strong winds and driving rain is a day we could sit out and sunbathe, so a day when we are full of anger or hurt (almost the same thing) is not a day we should try and meditate or attempt any other action that requires inner calm. We should weather watch instead. Apparently, life makes its own demands, and we cannot snarl back at our loved ones just because our football team lost, but we can at least be honest about our internal state and watch it. We can also modify our life according to the weather (emotional states), so we are in tune with how we feel.

  Everything depends on the weather. Our conditioning would have us go into denial about how we feel. “Cheer up” might have been the command from parents if we experienced a grumpy mood when young. Happily, we grow into adults that do not have to listen to the unreasonable demands of others. But there is a strange twist in this tale. If we can merely weather watch, without any attempt to try and pretend the weather is other than it is, we often find that the weather becomes less intense. By not resisting it, we are not feeding it.

  I enjoy weather watching, both literally and metaphorically. If I’m grumpy – I’m cranky. If I feel relaxed and in a good mood, then that is how I am. I thoroughly recommend weather watching – it’s a fascinating hobby.

  IT'S ALL IN YOUR MIND

  Whatever you focus on there will be your pleasure or your suffering. If we permanently focus on this local insanity called life on earth, then we will be constrained by that and suffer according to its rules. However, we seem to have a mind that can go beyond consideration of things of that nature. There are some tricky concepts involved here, but, if you think about it for a moment, everything you know, all the physical reality and, all your thoughts, are taking place in your mind. I don't want to get into whether the mind is brain and brain is mind because I don't know. I don't think the brain is mind for reasons we'll get onto, but you can never be sure. The thought part of it is easy to understand - you have the thought of ice cream or going out for the day or whatever, and you perceive that is in our imagination and the way you think about these things. But for your so-called physical reality, it is a little more difficult to accept that is also generated by your mind. It is a simulation according to people like Metzinger. It's important to realize that our mind and physical reality are just two sides of the same coin. Man perceives physical reality, and he is also aware of a world of thought and man can elevate his thoughts to the point where he gets a taste of something a bit different. Einstein famously said that all he wanted to do was taste one of God's thoughts and I think he probably did that with his general relativity. This idea is a little bit technical but please don't be turned off by the technical nature of this section because there's a critical point here. I've done it via an example which hopefully will blow your mind if it doesn't then you haven't understood it.

  There's currently a new movement called bio-centrism. It's a term that I hate because it's some people trying to pretend they've created something new when all they're doing is plagiarizing work that existed before. Work by people like Schopenhauer, Plato, the idealists in the main who say that we effectively create our reality with our minds. That our minds create our reality, you cannot deny. There's nothing that you can look at, touch, taste or other sensation that has not been created by your mind or brain, whichever term you want to use. Arthur Schopenhauer famously said, ‘the world is my representation.’ In other words, the world is something you create, it's a representation that you or your mind creates, and there's nothing out there. When you go for a walk in the park, you are going for a walk in your mind because your mind creates the park. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. I would go further and say that reality is created by our consciousness. Our external and internal perceptions, in other words, our physical reality in our world of thought, are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated. This idea is gaining some momentum, and one of the things that is pushing it along is quantum mechanics because as you may or may not know, the way that particles behave is determined to some extent by the observer.

  My background is in theoretical physics, so I know about that stuff. The discoveries of science are pushing us along in this direction, and it's a total about-face. The materialist view of the universe is that everything is material and our senses allow us to perceive it. The about-face is that no, no, nothing's material, everything is consciousness because if we weren't conscious of anything then as far as we're concerned there wouldn't be anything. What I want to do is illustrate this with an example, and there's a little bit of mathematics but please do not be frightened by the mathematics because it's simple stuff and even if you don't understand the mathematics then hopefully you'll understand the principle here. Now, as you probably know, pi is a ratio. Pi is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. So, you can see the circumference. If you could take a measuring tape and lay it on the outside of that circle, then take the same measuring tape and measure across the width of the circle, in other words, the diameter, and you took the ratio of those two things then you would find that it's always the same no matter how big the circle is (about 3.14). It doesn't matter whether you're talking about planet Earth or a golf ball, that ratio between the circumference and the diameter is always the same. This number has been calculated to millions of decimal points because it never repeats. The numbers after the decimal point never repeat and it's called an irrational number. Pi to four decimal places equals 3.1416, and I've rounded it there. It just goes on and on and on and on, millions of decimal places. No matter how big the circle, that's always the ratio between the circumference and the diameter. It's a physical thing, and you can measure it. If you are a pure hardened materialist and you do not want to admit that thought has any relevance to this whatsoever, you can just take your measuring tape, put it around the outside of a circle, a disc or a bottle, just measure the diameter and the circumference of the bottle and you'll find that the ratio is 3.1416. It's a measurement thing, and it is part of physical reality, that's what we find. But here is the weirdest thing of all. Pi can also be calculated. Now don't be put off by that seemingly complicated formula. I'll explain it. Pi can be calculated purely from mathematics with no measurement involved whatsoever.

  Pi = 4 x (1 - 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – …)

  What is inside the brackets there:- the 1 minus 1/3 plus 1/5 minus 1/7 plus 1/9 and so on. It goes on forever. It would be minus that 1/11th plus 1/13th, as you can see the numbers at the bottom, the 3, 5,7, 9 are odd numbers. So it just continues, a third, a fifth, a seventh, a ninth, 1/11th, 1/13th, 1/15th and so on. If you add all that lot together and then multiply it by 4, you get pi. Now, this is a purely mental construct. There is no relationship here to physical reality. This calculation will give you pi equals 3.1416, and it's the same number as physical measurement. Of course, in physical reality, you can only measure
it to maybe four, five, six, seven decimal places but not much more than that. Calculating it, using pure concept, no hint here of relationship to physical reality because mathematics is what is called a priori, we already have it in our heads. The same number that comes from measurement and the same number that comes from a pure construction of the mind. How can it be that physical reality and pure construction of our mind say the same thing? Well, they say the same thing because they are the same thing. The big man here was Immanuel Kant, who said that our consciousness produces our reality. Space and time, that's the only way we ever know anything, space and time are products of our consciousness, they're not out there. As I say when you go for a walk in the park you're going for a walk in your mind. It's worth thinking about that and dwelling on it because it gives a strange kind of different perception of the nature of reality. Roger Penrose, who's a reasonably well-known figure in the world of mathematics and theoretical physics, insists that mathematics is discovered and not invented. In other words, mathematics already exists in the world of thought. This truth would tie in very well with what people like Plato and Spinoza said. These ideas are not new, and it's just that these people hundreds, and in Plato's case thousands of years ago came to understand through their intuition or reasoning. There is a conclusion to reach here, and that is that mathematics, logic, philosophy, geometry, which are pure constructs of the mind, explain physical reality because physical reality is also a pure construct of the mind.

  There is nothing else apart from the mind as the Buddhist have been saying for a long, long time. It's just that now we have the evidence, the kind of evidence that appeals to Western thought. Everything we perceive in space and time has no independent existence outside our thoughts. If you want to get into the real guts and the nitty-gritty of that, then you need to read The Critique of Pure Reason by Kant. Although don't read The Critique of Pure Reason by Kant because it will probably take you two years and I must admit I struggle with it. I've been reading it for a while now. It's difficult, and it's dry, and you can read it for an hour and a half and still have not turned the page over. The conclusion is physical reality, and mental reality is the same thing, they're only two sides of the same coin and the reason that our logic and mathematics and those kinds of pure activities of thought match with reality are that the mind produces them both. How do we expand our thought beyond the local insanity that is life on earth, to look at the universe and existence from a broader perspective