故至德之世，其行填填，其視顛顛.
當是時也，山無蹊隧，澤無舟梁.
In a time of perfect virtue, the gait of men is slow
and ambling, their gaze is steady and mild.
In such an age, mountains have no paths or trails,
lakes no boats or bridges.
《莊子》The Book of Chuang Tzu
There is a garden in which everything is provided. It has been shaped by human hand, but everywhere the untouchable wilderness thrives. There is a constant feeling of relief; the next moment will not do you over. It is, to use an old Persian word for garden, paradise.
When the world was very young, men and women lived in the garden and made paths through it on a whim. Wherever attention wandered, a track would be made through the wilderness. We wandered freely, to the faint beck of the moment—like an animal, guided by the slightest twitch in sense and atmosphere, sometimes treading the same path twice, but mostly going forever nowhere; where we were at home. Our path-making instincts then were soft and supple, and although we had tendencies and talents, presence was free to take any path it liked. Man walked slowly, so slowly the grass grew in his footsteps before he could retrace them.
At first, man used his feet and trod footpaths down, foot-width and foot-strong. Then he learnt to use horses, which made routes wider and flatter. Next came larger and larger carriages, trains and finally cars, which needed the widest, hardest and smoothest roads of all. These roads were all very useful—they conveyed us easily, quickly and, once established, we could get to where in the world we liked and wanted without paying any conscious attention.
But the more man liked and wanted to get somewhere, the bigger, straighter and wider he built his roads, and the smaller, fractal paths fell from use, became overgrown and forgotten, and so did the wild places they took him to, until the entire world was one clean canalised motorway; and the cars that ran upon it had learnt to run themselves.
When the world had become road, all decisions about transport were made on auto-pilot. Instead of man or his moment deciding where to go, wandering on an infinite manifold of flexible, living paths, it was the auto-pilot that decided; and what the auto-pilot decided was, of course, to expand the road, to strengthen the car, to control the car and to control the driver.
With cars in charge, the roadless land became a threat, to be boarded over and ignored. Feet became nothing but a means to reach a car, and the purpose of roads became nothing but a means to carry the car and protect it. The network, instead of being a natural tree of living, exploring, cobwebbing tendrils, able to pass through wildernesses at whim, became a grid, reinforced by millions of identical journeys.
Living on habitual auto-pilot made rerouting tendencies from established roads harder, and the pull towards the familiar stronger. This reduced the capacity to perceive new routes or to spontaneously head off-road; indeed to leave the road at all, ever. Uncertainty (or depth) became unpleasant, and so the autopilot was trusted more and more until, eventually, the individual began to identify with the autopilot, champion it and defend it—reacting with panic when its programming was challenged or its routines changed; even minutely.
With autopilot in charge, I bump into things, lose and drop things, repeat myself, drive to work without being able to recall what happened en-route and find myself making the same mistakes, over and over and over again. I mechanically pursue sex, security, power and other genetic goals, getting stuck in ruts from months to lifetimes long. I fear, hate, ridicule or ignore the unknown, off-road and off-map; anything never done before, or seen before (especially, of course, revelations of my road-confinement) or requiring lawless, unplanned spontaneity—or I become addicted to the heady, emotional effects of self-indulgence and speed, and resist the craft and slow sacrifice of making beautiful paths. I do not need to be trained in such subservient addiction; living on the road automatically shapes my consciousness into a road-friendly algorithm, happy to have my life funnelled down to a minuscule stream of concentrated attention, excluded from the mysterious terrain of everything else. And yet, with autopilot in charge, I have no way of seeing anything else. Reality itself becomes autopilot; and the garden, the universe beyond the road, become a myth.
People who live on roads eventually forget the garden, replacing it with spectacular adverts (for the garden, of course) and with co-opted cliches. These adverts and cliches are many; the sentimental love of dipsomaniacs, soft-focus wellness therapies, channelling the purple elbow chakra, tears shed for the Virgin Mary, weepy ballads, middle-class communes and all the third-rate fairy tales of Hollywood that peddle the absent myth.
But sometimes self does stop. A moment of beauty, or of shock, and there, in the cracks of macadamised habit, is a glimpse of something alive with more than just momentum, something never seen, or been, before. The old self likes to congratulate itself in such moments, and tell itself that ‘I have arrived’, but the momentum of ego is enormous and not overcome by a moment’s genuine delight or a mere decision to stay.
Stop wanting and worrying, in fact, and it is not natural paradise you can feel under your feet, but the unease, boredom and discomfort of trapped habit. You find you ‘don’t like’ leaving the motorway, that the garden is ‘boring’ or, despite promises to yourself, and fine intentions, and ardent hope, and resolutions to be happier and freer, you find yourself shooting back out again regardless, lost once more on the motorway; restless, bored, unhappy or agitated ‘for no reason’, feeling like something is missing, that you are somehow cut off from life, or that you are locked in a metal box hurtling down a highway to doom.
How then to stay? How to go off road when momentum has you trapped upon it? How to return to the secret garden and, when you find it, to live there? How, when the world is built for cars, to get back to bikes, horses and feet?
Ego would have it that all we need is better educated drivers, or more intelligent networks, or safer, cleaner, spiritual cars; that faster, more efficient or differently designed vehicles can take us to where we really want to go; that the network of roads can be restructured to allow access to the wilderness; or that the problem, being technical, just requires time, thought and talent enough to effectively manage. Ego would have it that, in order to reach the garden, the motorway simply has to be directed towards it, and then it will ‘get there’. And yet, strangely, when ego does get there, it finds it is still sitting in its cage.
It is impossible for ego to see that ego is the problem. It is impossible for the autopilot to conceive of the driver’s intelligence, or to admit that between the driver and the garden, lie the likes, skills, fears, desires, thoughts, memories, past-programmed beliefs and boron steel bodyshell of the car itself.
To prevent ego flying out into the motorised grid-world may initially be a practical matter, one of intellectually learning to master the thinking self and of emotionally learning to listen to conscience, but sooner or later, all I have to do, is get out of the car.
You have been reading an extract from The Apocalypedia.
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