The Corporeal Fantasy

by Martin Butler

When we try to understand the world, I think a good place to start is with philosophy, and of course, science - the rational pursuits. As far as I know, most philosophies, not all, but most philosophies do not start with woo-woo. They begin with observation. Aristotle said every philosophy starts with some self-declared foot-hold. It must have a foothold somewhere. From that he makes many propositions and builds on the whole thing from there, so you get some level of insight from that, then you can turn to science to get the facts. In my opinion, science is not as rich as philosophy, even though I trained as a scientist, it's not as rich as philosophy. Even so, the ordinary world is way, way, way more interesting, for me anyway, than any kind of gobbledygook that someone is spouting or claiming to have special powers. Here's the bottom line: do not believe that anyone has special powers. Maybe that somebody at one point did have them, I don't know, but you're very safe in assuming that the people who are claiming to have special powers don't have them. So, nothing special - luxuriate in the ordinary. Of course, what this means is you must abandon, to some extent, ambition because ambition is always about trying to achieve something special. It means in some way trying to moderate your desires for power from the outside, but there's a strange twist when your mind becomes more active. When the mind is active, we start to get some kind sense of our inner power. Listening to random gobbledygook is just a state of being inwardly passive, so just luxuriate in the ordinary. The ordinary is special. And of course, now the temptation is to make the ordinary special. The ordinary is just ordinary, and the ordinary is beautiful, and personally, I have no real appetite for the special. I quite like the ordinary.

  OBLIVION

  Oblivion isn't the kind of thing to talk about at dinner parties, although you can do all sorts of things at dinner parties that are acceptable. For example, you can tell people about your latest holiday, obviously it was somewhere special because if it wasn't somewhere special you wouldn't be telling them, would you? So, you can piss all over them with your stories of your latest holiday, or the new car that you've got, or your new big house, but do not talk about oblivion. It will stop the conversation in an instant and you will never be invited to a dinner party again. This might be a blessing in disguise, but that's for you to decide. Anyway, I want to do two things. First thing I want to do is just mention our old friend oblivion. Before I do that though, I want to make a few comments. The first thing I want to say is while the concept of oblivion may seem a bit kind of scary, the reality is that most of us tend toward oblivion much of the time. The French use the term Petite Mort, which is essentially Little Death, and it's used usually about orgasm. For however long - five, ten, twenty seconds, when a person orgasms they are out of it in dissociated state. And people, men particularly I guess, will put in vast amounts of effort to seduce and be able to have sex with a partner, and achieve that state of Petite Mort. So, it’s obviously very attractive. People wouldn't think of it in those terms, but it’s the same with heroin. They say that heroin is a hundred times better than sex. It is a kind of death and a move into some sort of oblivion. And of course, every night we sleep and most of us at least will experience some dreamless sleep where effectively we're just out of it. We don't exist anymore. It’s not like we're entirely strangers to oblivion but talking about it seems to be reasonably taboo.

  A drug called Spice has become very popular among the homeless and incarcerated prisoners in the UK. It has the attractive property of rendering those who consume it unconscious. A recent article in The Guardian newspaper carried multiple photographs of homeless people lying unconscious in the street while the rest of society just walked past. Someone who had never done anything other than clean their car on Sunday, and program their personal schedule with Zumba and yoga classes, would ask why someone would do such a thing. The obvious response was that these people preferred unconsciousness to the pain associated with being conscious – emotional pain certainly, and maybe physical pain. Somewhat surprisingly there are many critical comments about this, asserting that the people who consumed this drug had a choice and so they deserved everything they got. All the people who said that are unfeeling idiots. They deserve everything they get, because everybody goes for their own form of oblivion, as I shall expand upon in a moment. Let’s take a step back and talk about oblivion more generally. I spent a great deal of time in the North of England, and oblivion by alcohol was a favorite pastime of a reasonably large percentage of the population. And I'm not picking on the people in the North of England here, it's the same everywhere, it’s just that I happened to spend a lot of time there. And then there is a much higher percentage of the population whose gateway to oblivion is the TV – soaps, game shows, talent shows, and the like.

  Oblivion is attractive because it allows people to forget the salient facts that dominate their lives. Toil and strife, old age, illness, and death – these are the things that constitute a life stripped of the fancy wrapping. People don’t want to know this, it would undermine the reason they have for all their striving – and the striving must go on because a better life awaits tomorrow.

  It would seem to me that oblivion is the most saleable commodity on Earth. It doesn’t have to be Spice or heroin. It can be endless social media, endless computer games, and burning ambition. Fortunately, we all experience oblivion every night in deep dreamless sleep. And oblivion quite possibly awaits us after this short time on Earth. So all-in-all oblivion plays a substantial part in our lives – a much greater part than purposeful, directed effort. This latter is based on the belief that there is someplace for us to go, a place that is better than where we are now. Although we do ignore the obvious fact that no matter how purposeful our lives, the destination is always the same - oblivion. On the surface, this sounds quite depressing, but deeper reflection would show us very clearly that we should kick back and live a simple untroubled life. Epicurus said the essentials of life are easily got, and for many people this is true. So why make the effort to live some glorious life when our old friend oblivion awaits us no matter what we do? Go downstream, don’t fight the current, and in the words of a song by Simple Minds - there is nothing out there worth fighting for.

  Let me talk about oblivion a little bit more. We all seek oblivion in some way or another. We do it every day. Zapfa in his article The Last Messiah talked about it in different terms. He talked of things like avoidance and sublimation, and other ways of denying reality. What we are endlessly trying to do is distract ourselves from the realities of life. And our consumer society has become very, very good at allowing us to do that. In fact, social media is just another form of oblivion along with rabid ambition.

  I saw an article in The Guardian recently pleading with parents not to let their kids spend all their summer holidays clicking likes on Facebook, or looking for how many likes they've got. Unfortunately, because I work sometimes, I have a Linked In account, so I look at the profiles of some of the people on there. On Twitter too they'll say silly things like 'passionate about helping our customers become happier.' Well you know if they're truly passionate about that then they need psychiatric treatment. Anyway, that's a whole other topic, and I'm not going to go down there. We're talking about oblivion, so back to oblivion.

  We've mentioned the Petite Mort, which is the orgasm we all value so much, particularly young people. They will spend a good deal of their resources and time pursuing it. And there are drugs of various kinds that essentially take people out of it. Another is Meditation. There are meditation techniques that will take you out of it for as long as you want to sit there. What is it we're all trying to avoid? Well, what we're trying to avoid is, as I've mentioned, the salient facts of our lives. Toil and suffering, old age, illness, and death as the Buddhists continuously remind us. Is there another way to deal with this constant background anxiety? Well yes, there is, but it requires a different approach. And the approach is somewhat of a metaphor, take up your shield to gird your loins and to go into the fight. Very few people will do that because it require
s a level of courage and honesty and most of us don't want to have to indulge in. I was once told that the old myths and fairy tales and fables are more meaningful for our life than any rational, logical analysis. So how many times have we seen stories of knights clad in armor on horseback with their lance and their shields taking on dragons? Those stories have gone throughout the ages. What do you think these stories are about? Well, the knight is you. The armor is your understanding and courage, and the lance is your determination not to back away from the dragon, and to pierce it with your understanding. That's the way that we need to deal with these things, but unfortunately, that isn't the way most people deal with it. What is the outcome of taking on these dragons? The outcome of doing it that is you no longer live in neurosis. You no longer feel the need to seek oblivion, you might even welcome the oblivion that comes after the death of the body, but you don't need to seek it during life because you're not avoiding it. It's a wholly different approach to the one that is being offered by people who want to make money - movies, TV, social media, alcohol, drugs. Let's face it, there are huge industries based around those things, just so that we can achieve oblivion. We need it because we're not strong enough and courageous enough to go and face the demons that are lurking in our unconscious day after day.

  You would think that oblivion would get a better rap seeing as it's so popular. It doesn't get a good rap for the simple reason that we all know we are avoiding the things that we should be confronting. That is the reason we don't give it a good rap because it causes us to have a certain amount of discomfort. Facing the beast is not a trivial thing - it’s a dangerous thing. But a person either goes insane by meeting the beast or insane by living some horrendous life by avoiding all the time. Anyway, enough said about oblivion.

  ON HAVING NO SELF

  I made a promise a that if the material is going to be challenging or disturbing, then I would give a warning. Well, this is challenging material so if you don't want a challenge don't read this. The notion that there is no self is quite disturbing. I'll be quoting from quite a few people - the evidence is overwhelming both regarding traditional philosophies and modern neuroscience. Turn over now if you do not want to be told that you do not have a self. I want to start with a quote from a book called The Ceasing of Notions, described as An Early Zen text from the Dunhuang Caves. It's a book I've had most of my life, and if you want to dispel all your illusions very, very quickly, then this is the book to read. Although, reading isn't enough, and you must realize it within yourself as well. Anyway, let me start at the beginning of the book. The whole book is a dialog between Emmon, who is a student and a Master.

  The dialog begins: “The master sat silent and said nothing. Emmon suddenly rose and asked, what is called mind and how is the mind pacified? The master answered: you should not assume a mind and then there is no need to pacify it. This is called pacifying the mind.” There is almost nothing else that need be said, and those guys are such hard asses because they just went straight to the core of it with no messing about.

  I'm going to elaborate - in good old contemporary Western tradition and try to describe and effectively validate what was just said. I will start with a guy called Thomas Metzinger, who is a philosopher, but calls upon a whole pile of contemporary neuroscience to legitimize what he's saying. And what he's saying is that there is no self. Now, let's talk about this sense of self that we all have. Every morning when we wake up, we recognize who we are. It would be an astonishing and disturbing event to wake up every morning and find that we're somebody else, wouldn't it? This sense of who we are is a strange thing, but a neuroscientist called Antonio Damasio, found there is a part of the brain, at the base of the brain, that is a map of your body. It is this map of the body that gives us our sense of self. How do we know this? We know it because this part of the brain can become damaged, and if it becomes damaged, a person loses their sense of self - which is extremely disturbing for that person as you might imagine. Every morning they wake up, and they're a new person. It sounds like a dreadful situation. This sense of self is in the brain and is effectively a map of your body. How did Damasio get onto this research? The mind is the idea of the body, there are two dimensions for man, one is a dimension of mind, and the other one is a dimension of the body. The mind is the idea of the body, or you could say the mind is the map of the body. We have a sense of memory as well, and our memory which gives us a sense of continuity, but memory is mainly full of rubbish - it's full of things that are easy to remember, things that are impactful and things that are unique. If something in your life doesn't qualify in that way, then you don't remember it. This memory that you have, this sense of continuity is wholly distorted, and there's nothing in there that is what might be called an accurate and objective picture of your life. You remember things that are easy to remember, that are impactful, and that are unique. Depending on what random events happen to qualify for that, that is the sense of yourself that you create as a continuous entity, and it’s entirely fiction.

  From neuroscience, we live in a world that we simulate or that our brain simulates. Show me something that your brain isn't simulating, and you can't. Everything you know, everything you touch, smell, see, hear, or taste is a simulation of your brain. You cannot step outside of it. The weird thing is that the brain creates the simulation that creates itself or includes itself, which is the strangest thing of all. This sense of self, this sense of ‘I,’ linked to this part of the brain I mentioned earlier, is linked to a simulation within the simulation. And this is the simulation of yourself. In effect, this notion, this feeling, this idea of self, is a simulation within the broader simulation that we call reality. I did warn you this would be challenging. Let me at this point quote U.G. Krishnamurti, who would probably qualify as a modern Zen master although he would hate being called that. He said “there is no self, there is no I, there is no spirit, there is no soul and there is no mind. That knocks off the whole list. And you have no way of finding out what you are left with. Ideas of soul and life after death are born out of the demand for permanence. That's the basis of man's religious thinking. All religious thinking is born out of the demand for permanence. When you do see and perceive for the first time that there is no self to realize, no psyche to purify, no soul to liberate it will come as a tremendous shock to that instrument. You have invested everything in that, the soul, mind, psyche, whatever you wish to call it. And suddenly it is exploded as a myth. It is difficult for you to look at your actual situation. One look does the trick, you are finished." He doesn't pull his punches.

  Our mind is populated with ideas. Where do those ideas come from? Well, they come from our experience in life to a large extent. Not entirely, but mainly from there - education, parents, whatever we experience, experience with peers and so on. What we call our mind is just a whole set of programming, it’s an entire collection of ideas that we've ingested. There's nothing in there to call ‘you,’ or ‘me’ there's just a whole pile of these ideas that we've pulled in. Some of the ideas will be affirming for us, ‘you're a clever person’, ‘well done,’ and then there will be some ideas that are not very affirming, such as ‘what a dumb ass you are.’ If you're told these things repeatedly when you're young, then you're probably going to grow up with problems. Anyway, nonetheless, our understanding is all the ideas that we have ingested throughout our lives. Many of these ideas will be confused and incorrect, but nonetheless, we've ingested them. Now, what a lot of people think they are, is the will, the ability to choose this or that, but depending on this stratum of ideas that you've ingested, the understanding, when a new idea is presented to you, it will either fit in with your existing ideas or it won’t. So, for example, if I tell you the moon is made of green cheese, you're probably going to negate that, and you're going to say that's wrong. But, the only reason you can negate it is that you've got this stratum of understanding where somewhere in your life you've been told that the moon is rock and it’s a big thing, and it’s whatever else you learn
ed. Based on this stratum of understanding that you have, that you to a large extent have had no control over, your parents, society, religion, education, all those things create your programming. These things have programmed this understanding of yours, and this is exactly what we are, we are this programming, nothing else. Whenever you are presented with a new idea or a new stimulus, you will measure that against this stratum of programming that you have that you call ‘yourself.’ It isn't' yourself; it’s just literally a whole pile of programming. Spinoza says “in the same way that it is proved that there is in the mind no faculty of understanding, desiring, loving". All these properties we think we have. The ability to understand the ability to love the ability to hate whatever - they're not there. There are just specific instances of hating or liking or loving or understanding something. There is no faculty within us to do those things.

  Where does this experience of loving something come from? It’s very simple, you have your sub-stratum of understanding which is your programming in life. You are presented with a new idea, or a new object, or some person, and if they accord with all this programming that you have within you, and it makes it all feel very nice and so on, then you'll love that idea, object or person. Love is synonymous with pleasure which is another blow around the head for all the new age and spiritual types. It's a one-by-one experience, and there is no ‘thing’ in there, there's no part of your psyche that understands or loves, it's just this constant presentation of new images, new ideas, new phenomena that either fits in with your programming or it doesn't. Simple as that. Of course, the more you experience, the more you get programmed. So, contemporary research, Renaissance philosophers, the old Zen masters and so on all say that we have no self. That is, once you see that you're finished. It’s incredibly liberating, but most people cling to the desire to have something permanent within them. Personally, I can think of nothing worse. So, after all of that what do you do? Well, that's the thing, you don't do anything. You sit back and put your feet up and go with the ride and that's the essence of the whole thing.