The System and the Self

A Beginner’s Guide to Everything

This, for those who haven’t heard it, is the text to my audio essay, The System and the Self, (which also appears in Ad Radicem). It is a prelude to a more rigorous series of essays on the same theme, coming soon.

What is the Truth?

Facts are not the truth.

Facts are ideas which are based on things that the mind creates. Colour, sound, sensation, hardness and smell are all things that the mind creates and then turns into facts.

These words, for example, are, for you, a literal, factual experience that your mind produces for you by interpreting stimulated nerves in your eyes.

Obviously what you are looking at is based on something real. Obviously facts exist—only mad people believe they don’t—but what you are actually experiencing is information made by the optic nerves and by the interpreting mind. Not the words themselves, not the page or the screen, itself.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The answer to this famous question is no. When the tree falls, it produces something, some kind of waves, disturbances in the air, but sound is what our minds make of those waves. Without a mind, there is no sound, there is no colour, there is no hardness, there are no properties at all, such as we experience them.

If this is a little strange, it gets much stranger. It’s not just colour and sound and smell and hardness and so on that the mind makes for us, but time and space are also creations of the mind.

I’m looking at an onion and a candle. I experience these things as two separate objects—the onion is separate from the candle—with a past and a future—they existed yesterday and will exist tomorrow. But these facts—the separateness of things and the fact that they have a past that caused them—literality and causality—are also presented to me by the mind.

Again, as with the words on the page, there is obviously something factually separate about the onion, and it obviously was caused by something which factually existed yesterday. This is why, no matter how fanciful someone’s beliefs, nobody ever acts as if we live in a world in which onions can turn into candles, or can fly off of plates and pass through walls. Literally, factually, causally speaking we do not live in a magical world. But, the fact remains, this non-magical world is brought to us by the mind. It is a representation.

The mind can only experience its own projections. It’s as if we’re sitting in a cinema, watching a film of our lives. The mind can never show us what is ‘really real’, what is actually happening, only mind-made images of it. These images are obviously accurate, but they’re still just images.

You might think, ‘fine, who cares?’ You can trust what the mind presents to you. What’s the use in worrying about it?

A philosopher might tell you that one reason is that you can never be sure that what you are experiencing is factually real. Am I, the author, real? Do I exist (or did I)? Are the things around you really real? Is the red you see really red? Or is it all an hallucination, or a virtual reality illusion?

Philosophers love to talk about these things. It’s all very entertaining, but it’s not terribly important in our day-to-day lives, is it? We might persuade ourselves that we’re dreaming, or floating around inside the mind of an evil demon, but then we have to cross the road, or do our taxes, or deal with our ingrowing toenails and we forget about academic mind games.

There is though, something else that representation can never tell us, and this is not just important, there is nothing in the world, nothing in life, that is more important.

What am I talking about? We have various words for it, but here I’ll use a word which encompasses them all; quality.

My mind can never, ever, directly show me the true quality of something, the meaning of it. Good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly—all of this is, ultimately, meaningless to the mind. Because, again, mind can only give us images, representations, never the thing-in-itself.

Take me, the author; what am I? Really? What is any object? I’m looking out of my window at a tree. What is that? What is a tree? Really? This is not an academic game; we’re talking about reality here. Do you know what reality is? Can you know? Because if you can’t, you’re in deep shit.

One problem you’ll have, if you never really know what anything or anyone really is, is existential loneliness. You’ll be trapped in your self, unable ever (ever) to reach across to the reality of something or someone else.

Another problem inherent to being trapped in a me-shaped prison, is existential fear, the knowledge that the representation your mind presents—which is to say, your life—is fragile, weak and, most worrying of all; mortal.

Finally, if you never really know what anything or anyone really is, you’ll be condemned to existential uncertainty, never really being sure of the right thing to do, at least in matters of real importance.

When it comes to important decisions the mind is paralysed. When it does act, it always makes the wrong decisions, or says the wrong things, because it never really knows what is right, or good, or true. It can only go by its factual images.

For the mind, the beauty of the tree comes down to its factual value; whether it threatens me or whether I can profit from it—or its factual utility; what I can do with it—or down to its factual reputation; that other people say it is good—or down to some kind of factual, sensory, pleasure; it feels factually nice to sit in the sweet shade, or look at the pretty colours.

There’s obviously nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but if that’s all there is, mind will completely miss what is important. It will miss the astonishing truth of the tree-in-itself, and then make terrible decisions about it.

You may have noticed that minds, by themselves, are always making terrible decisions. This is because the mind, by itself, misses the astonishing truth of everything, because all it can see is representations of things. It cannot see things as they really are, in themselves, the mystery of them; just images, symbols, ideas, reflections, words and projections.

So how can I ever really know what anything or anyone really is? I can be confident about facts it seems, but how can I be confident about the essential quality or meaning of things? Is it all just in the mind? Many people today would say it is, that truth and beauty and so on are all subjective.

There is however, something we can experience directly, without having to go through representation. There is one thing, and only one thing, in the entire universe, that we have direct, inward access to.

And that is consciousness.

What is Consciousness?

This question—what is consciousness?—is one of the great mysteries of science and philosophy. Minds have been thinking about it for thousands of years, but they haven’t got one step closer to the truth of it.

This is because consciousness, ultimately, is not a literal fact. All the facts in the world tell us nothing about the quality of conscious experience.

The only thing that can tell us about consciousness, the quality of it, is conscious experience.

What this means is that if you don’t know what consciousness is, it’s because you’re not conscious. It’s as simple as that. You can be the cleverest scientist in the world, with all the world’s knowledge at your fingertips, but if you’re not conscious, all you’ve got is facts. Mere facts.

Many scientists believe that that’s enough. There’s no objective evidence for the existence of consciousness, and we don’t need it to objectively explain the universe, because everything seems to work fine without it.

So how do I know that consciousness even exists? I know because I am conscious. This unbearably simple, primitive experience, is the only indisputable evidence I’ve got, or can ever have, for the existence of consciousness.

There’s no way to prove it—it exists entirely outside of fact, and therefore outside of the scientific process. You just are conscious.

Aren’t you?

What’s more, consciousness—your conscious experience of being here, wherever you are, reading these words, on this particular day—has a quality to it.

Doesn’t it?

Many people are so used to going through their factual minds to reach reality, so used to ignoring the simple, primal truth of consciousness, that they have no experience of it at all. For most people, consciousness and the quality of the moment it reveals are, at best, vague, fleeting impressions, sandwiched between all their other worries and cares, between all the practical things they have to do every day and between the sickening roller-coaster of ups and downs they call ‘experience’ or ‘life’. Usually consciousness doesn’t appear at all. We are not talking here of a pleasant or exciting or ‘spiritual’ feeling, or a positive assessment of what’s going on, or a wonderfully creative idea, but everything which is fundamentally good:

First of all unconsciousness misses the mystery of consciousness. Although it is indisputably true, factually, that the onion is a separate thing, separate from me, when I consciously experience it, this ‘fact of separateness’ somehow breaks down, and I get a qualitative sense of the inwardness of the onion. We normally call this mysterious experience, of sensing or being someone or something else from within, ‘love’.

Secondly, unconscious people miss the uniqueness of consciousness. Just as the quality of every moment is unique, so conscious experience of the moment, which forms and informs the self, is also unique, as am I. We all know this, and yet we think, speak, act and feel just like everyone else. Somehow, we automatically get absorbed into the same, samey, unconscious mass as everyone else.

The third experience unconscious people miss is the depth of consciousness, of life; the profound quality of it, the soul of it, if you like, the strange rightness that lies under even great sorrow, the immeasurable intensity of the moment, and our response to it, or even, more simply, what the right thing to do is, in any given, unique, situation.

Mystery, uniqueness and depth are missed, all the time, by just about everyone. Very little strikes them as mysterious, nothing is ever really unique and reality is really just a kind of skin, pulled over the hollow drum of the world. Quality, when it does appear, is so dim and dulled, or elusive and fleeting, or abstract and unreal, it hardly registers.

Why? How does this happen?

There are two reasons. Firstly, representation has a kind of momentum of its own. It’s as if the film of the moment you are watching cannot be switched off. If you sit down in a quiet, beautiful place you usually find all your thoughts and emotions churning away just as they did at home, or in the office. You can’t seem to switch yourself off, and see through to the reality of your own experience.

The other reason that quality hardly gets a look in, is that it is not useful, and the world is only ever really interested in what is useful.

Take a tractor. It is useful, but it is not conscious, nor does it need to be. It’s the same for us. We can get everything we need to get done in the day, without ever having to consciously attend to it. We can and do live our lives like tractors, ploughing through the filth of the day. Conscious quality is not needed in our machines and it’s certainly not needed in our day-to-day lives. It is at best a hindrance, and at worst a threat, which must be dealt with like any other threat.

Or take a computer. It has no need for quality, and neither do the minds which make and manage them. Technicians use the word ‘quality’, but when it comes down to it, what they’re nearly always talking about is a kind of accuracy.

Technicians, engineers and designers don’t actually need quality, and neither do we. We might love great art and the glories of nature, we might value love and kindness and honest work, but we can easily live our lives without any of these things. In fact living in the world is easier without them.

Or take science. It has no need for quality either. It plays almost no part in any scientific endeavour and when it does appear—when for example, a genius brings something genuinely new to scientific enquiry—it is strenuously, very often violently, resisted.

Or take economics, in which goodness, beauty and love play no part whatsoever. That something is meaningful to human beings is irrelevant to economists, who can only consider objects and people as factual things with factual values.

Or take medicine. Rightness, goodness, truth, beauty; none of these qualities have any place in the hospital or clinic, which operate, and can only operate, on the assumption that man is a machine, a collection of rational parts, which, when the machine goes wrong, must be tinkered with like a machine.

Or, finally, take institutional religion. That certainly uses many fine words, like ‘love’ and ‘God’ and ‘nirvana’ and so on. But if you look at how institutional religion actually works, it resists conscious quality, and it persecutes those who try to introduce quality into it.

All this explains why economists, doctors, priests, scientists, technicians and businessmen are normally such primitive, one-dimensional creatures. They see life in the crudest terms and, although they pay lip service to fine ideals, they tend to scorn anyone who seriously lives consciously.

So here we are in a place which has no use for consciousness nor for the quality of it, full of people who are unconscious and unaware of the goodness of life.

We call this place, ‘the world’.

What is Nature?

The world is not the earth. The world is unnatural, and the earth is natural.

That’s quite simple. But what is nature?

Nature is very difficult to define. We know it when we see it, and we know what people mean when they say that something is ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’, but we find it very hard to put our finger on what those words mean.

This is because ‘nature’, like many important words, cannot be rigidly defined, it can only really be expressed, through art, or through living a natural life.

That said, there are still a few things we can say directly about nature.

One is that it is what we call fractal—which means three things. Firstly, that the part somehow contains the whole. This is similar to how each part of a cauliflower or a tree or a pair of lungs looks like the whole thing.

Secondly, nature seems to be both ordered and chaotic at the same time. Watch a cloud of starlings or cream being poured into coffee and you’ll get a sense of what I mean.

And thirdly, the complexity of nature seems to both go on forever and, at the same time, have definite, material limits, like a coastline, which never decreases in complexity, no matter how close you get to it.

To put all this another way, nature, like consciousness, is paradoxical. It seems to be both one thing and, at the same time, another thing.

This is why it’s so hard to literally define nature and consciousness, because literal words and ideas aren’t paradoxical.

The literal word onion, for example, literally means the thing we call onion, and that’s it. An onion is an onion, a table is a table and words and ideas can capture that. Words are themselves and things are themselves.

Or are they?

If I say that ‘the onion is on the table’, your literal mind knows exactly what I mean, because the word ‘onion’ literally means the thing onion, the word ‘table’ literally means the thing table and the word ‘on’ literally means the relationship of one thing being on another.

But if I say that ‘the onion is the table’, your literal mind hits a dead end. It cannot imagine what I’ve just said. It can imagine the onion-thing and the table-thing, but it cannot imagine one thing being another. Try it.

You can imagine an onion-shaped table, or a table made of onions, or ‘onion’ and ‘table’ in rapid succession, or an onion ‘melded’ to a table, but you cannot imagine the onion and the table being the same thing at the same time. This is because you cannot imagine paradox. This is one of the fundamental limits to imagination.

What that means is that the paradoxical cannot be seen with the rational mind. And what that means is that the mind cannot experience anything which is both one thing and, at the same time, something else. If reality, or any thing within it, is paradoxical in this way, the mind will miss it.

Mind, you may have noticed, can only come down on one side or another. This is why it indecisively flits between the two; why it finds it so hard to make good judgements, because it can only see reality in terms of one thing or another, never in terms of a mystery from which both things arise.

It’s also why the mind regularly misses beauty in nature, because it can only see the literal idea, the thing, of it.

Look at a cloud.

It is a literal thing, that can be literally studied. It has a literal name, ‘cloud’, and a literal symbol that represents it. It’s very normal. It’s literally a cloud.

But it is also something non-literal, something strange to the mind. There is something un-thing-like about it, something paradoxical. It is both complex and simple, both chaotic and ordered, both defined and unbounded.

More than this, it has a quality to it, a meaning, which the mind may express, somehow, through art, but can never quite grasp, like it can grasp 2 + 2 = 4.

We don’t normally think about natural things like this, we don’t normally think about them at all—that’s one reason why we love them—but the strange paradox and meaningful quality of natural things is what makes you say, when you really see a cloud, or a tree, or the ocean, ‘ah, beautiful’.

You start to feel a sense of deep beauty when you are in nature. I’m not talking about a stroll in the park, or a holiday to a campsite. I mean when you spend extended time in the wild, or when wildness touches you.

After a while, of being in a wild place, you find you think less, because there is less there to think about.

Some people love this. Some people adore nature. Others find it most disturbing. They spend so much time literally thinking, that when the source of all their literal thoughts is absent—when the world is absent—they go out of their minds.

Have you ever gone out of your mind? For many people it is rather an unpleasant experience, because they are their minds. Absence of thought, for the mind, is death.

This is why the mind constantly thinks and worries, and why it constantly stimulates emotion—excitement, anger, depression, anything—in order to keep the momentum of thought, the momentum of representation, going.

The mind, in other words, will do whatever it can to keep nature out.

It will even build a world.

And that is the world we live in. The unnatural world.

What is Unnatural?

Let’s look a little closer at the difference between the natural and the unnatural.

Earlier, I said that one of the paradoxes of nature is that it is both bounded—it has limits—and is unbounded—it is limitless. What do I mean?

The things of the world too, after all, seem to be both bounded and unbounded. There is, for example, no theoretical limit to how much power we can use, or how much information we can process, or how far we can progress.

If we had an endless number of earths, stretching away into infinity, and could hop from one to another, we could go on world-building forever.

The difference between the limits of the world and those of the earth is that natural things are bounded in size but have boundless quality, while unnatural things can grow and grow and grow, but can never, in themselves, get any better.

Take a natural home, a snail shell. It can only get so big, in time and space, before it stops. It reaches a literal limit. At the same time, its beauty is endless. If you get closer to a snail shell, its beauty does not diminish.

Now take an unnatural home, one of ours, a huge modern block of flats for example. Eventually of course nature will put limits on its growth, but it doesn’t have its own limits. Like the cities they are part of, these hideous buildings just grow and grow and grow.

When I say ‘hideous’ you might think I am making a subjective judgement. I’m not. Nor am I stating an objective fact. I am expressing a conscious truth. I am saying that only unconscious, unnatural minds could call a modern block of flats beautiful, but even they would struggle to find it beautiful at smaller scales. The lobby of such a building, the ceiling, the corridor, the doors; all are plain, crude, ugly, unnatural.

This isn’t to say that large natural buildings cannot be consciously built. Winchester Cathedral, for example, not far from where I live, is one of the most beautiful buildings on earth, and it is beautiful at all scales. Its floors are beautiful, its ceilings, its banisters, even its hinges and doorknobs.

When the great medieval cathedrals of Europe were built, people still lived natural lives. They were hard lives, but they were still natural, which is why people wanted, and were able, to make beautiful buildings.

Nowadays we have much more worldly power than we did a thousand years ago, but we cannot make buildings like Winchester Cathedral any more. We appear to have the technical power, but this same power has robbed us of the quality required to build beautiful things.

How does this happen?

Imagine a snail shell that somehow grew beyond its limits. It would soon be too heavy for the snail to carry.

If it were a strangely clever snail, it might actually want this—it might value the protection, or the bigger shell might get it sexier girlfriends, or it might have a perverse desire to be original and special.

It might then, rather than reduce the size of the bulging shell, start finding ways to carry it. It might devise wheels for the shell, then roads for the wheels.

Then it would need other snails to help it build these things, which would all need to be cleverly devised and labouriously maintained.

Then of course other snails would have to grow their shells, not just to keep up with each other, but because the world was being built for bloated shells. An ordinary shell would just be crushed.

Finally the snails would become the servants of the world they had built. They would be the shells.

And this is what has happened to us.

At some point in the past the ‘shell’ of the man-made world ‘grew’ in power and independence, until it exceeded its limits and started to make a tool of us.

We were then forced to set about constructing wheels and roads for the ‘world shell’ we’re all now carrying around.

Worse than this, man, in order to fit himself into the world he had made, had to change not just the natural world, but himself. This led to deformations in the human psyche unknown to earlier people and which now threaten to destroy human nature for good.

Have you noticed how worldly people, who have adapted themselves to the world we live in, are insane? Have you noticed that they don’t really feel anything, that their eyes are dead, that they are miserable, that they don’t know how to socialise or form loving relationships, that they can’t really do anything and don’t really want to? They can give an appearance of these things, but really they are just empty shells?

This is just the latest, and final, stage in a process which has been going on for a long time, which has mutilated human beings to fit into a world which is inhuman.

What is Technology?

The snail has its shell; what do we have? What is the ‘shell of the world’ which has taken over our lives?

It is our tools.

At some point in the past the power and complexity of our tools crossed a threshold beyond which they stopped serving us and, like the over-bloated snail shell, started enslaving us.

Before we look at how and when, we have to understand what a tool is. A tool is something which extends the power of my self, which I can use to do something useful for my self; to do something which serves me.

A hammer for example, makes my self more powerful. It makes it harder and more precise. I can bash a nail into a piece of wood with the new power of hardness and precision.

So a hammer is a tool, that’s clear. But so is a stone. Not quite as hard or precise as a hammer, but a lot harder than my soft, lumpy fist.

In fact, pretty much anything is a tool. A stick is a tool, a leaf is a tool, a drop of water is a tool. My hands are tools, my legs, my eyes, and, of course, so is my mind, which massively expanded the power of the animal body it developed in.

So if just about everything on earth is a tool, including my own mind, what’s the problem with them? And how did they create the dystopian hell of the modern world?

The answer is that they exceeded their natural limits.

Let’s take the transport system as an example. When human beings used their feet to get around, and then, later, horses and simple carriages, these tools were what we could call ‘within reach’, meaning that if anything went wrong with them, we could, if the problem could be fixed, fix it ourselves.

In addition, legs and carts do not require an inordinate amount of time and energy to take care of and they do not produce any useless waste.

Once the combustion engine was invented, however, all that changed. When trains, and then cars, passed a threshold of speed and power they began to demand that the world be reshaped for them, and, like the insane snails, we had to work harder and harder to build and maintain that world.

I don’t just mean the time and effort required to save up, buy and then take care of the family car, I mean the whole transport system, all the oil and bitumen and steel and plastic we need for all our cars and lorries and roads and container ships and railways.

As a species we have to devote an immense amount of time and effort to extracting and refining all the materials needed to get us around, so much that we end up, again, as a society, slowing down. Travel becomes difficult, frustrating, boring, slow and unpleasant. What’s more, everywhere we get to is, increasingly, the same as the place we left.

But our transport system is just one tool which has exceeded our reach. The health system is another, the energy system, the legal system, our information technology, our manufacturing industries and our security systems are all tools that have got out of hand, that have exceeded their limits and no longer serve us.

Take, as one more example, a handsaw. A saw is, in principle, just about within reach of men and women. It doesn’t require much upkeep, or much input from the environment. People can fix it when something goes wrong with it and they can recycle the parts when it reaches the end of its life.

Not so the chainsaw. It provides far more power than the handsaw, but at what cost? It cannot be fixed (or fuelled) by ordinary people or ordinary communities when it goes wrong, it requires a vast industrial complex to manufacture and maintain and it enables us to lay waste entire forests.

The chainsaw is not really a tool. It is a machine. This is the word we use for a complex arrangement of tools which work together to produce a desired result.

All machines, except for the very simplest ones, like a water wheel, are beyond the reach of man.

What this means is that it is foolish to say that machines are ‘neutral’ or that they are ‘useful’.

We may have some control over how we use a chainsaw, and the individual might be able to put it to some good use, but the chainsaw is part of the inhuman system which the individual is powerless to influence, and which enslaves him.

What is the System?

Machines don’t have to be made of objects, like the chainsaw. They can be made of people and information. We call these ‘soft’ machines institutions.

If machines are the hardware of the world, institutions are the software.

And just as simple tools are ‘within reach’, so small, local societies, clubs, teams and other groups are within the power of humans to correct and adapt. And just as, when tools become machines, they start taking control of us, so when groups become institutions, they too subordinate men and women.

Institutions subordinate people by forcing them to adapt to the organisation of the institution. They do this in much the same way that complex machines organise their parts, ensuring that everything fits together.

Machine-like institutions organise people by turning them into parts, which are called roles, then forcing them to do the same thing again and again. Some parts, the more privileged roles, are given more freedom than others, but all parts, from the top to the bottom, must be, essentially, predictable and integrated with all the other parts.

If someone wants to be independent, if they want to live in a way which cannot be predicted and which doesn’t fit into an institution, they are considered to be stupid or insane.

That’s what the term ‘mental health’ means—your ability to adapt to the system. If you can’t adapt, you’ve got a ‘disease’ and you need a professional cure.

It’s not just the parts of an institution which must fit together, institutions themselves must fit together with each other, and with other machines, the whole thing forming what we call the modern world, or the technological system.

The fact that it all fits together means that it has its own priorities. This is very important to understand because many people think that human beings decide what happens in the world, but that’s not how it works at all.

There are people who, in a very limited sense, are responsible for the system—the owners of the system, particularly, but also its professional class—and they do have some power to make small changes—the kind of changes that you can expect from a political party for example, or a corporation, or a teacher’s union.

But the system itself is autonomous. It has its own priorities and its own demands which its human servants must obey or be crushed.

When I say ‘priorities and demands’ I don’t mean, of course, that the machine of the world is a conscious creature. I mean that it can only operate in a certain way, which forces human beings to think, feel and live in a certain way. There are three ways this happens.

Firstly, a machine, as we have seen, has no use for quality and mystery. It has no use for paradox, for love, for beauty or for nature as an end in itself. It therefore forces human beings to disregard these things.

Secondly, a network of extremely complex machines and institutions demands vast quanta of energy, which human beings must feed it, at all costs. If the energy stops flowing, everything falls apart. This is why technological states go to genocidal lengths to maintain control of energy.

Thirdly, improvements in isolated parts of a complex machine require improvements in all the other parts. If you put a Ferrari engine in a 1970s Lada it will tear it apart. You have to improve every other aspect of the car.

Likewise, technological innovation forces a complete change in society in order to accommodate the change.

When, for example, one aspect of British society industrialised—cotton factories—all the aspects of society related to those factories also had to be industrialised; because you can’t have machine-fabrics without machine-power, machine-transport and machine-minds.

Every step of every ‘progress’ requires an accompanying development in every other technology—not to mention in the thoughts, feelings and lifestyles of the people who must use or be subjected to the use of these technologies. This leads to all kinds of unforeseen problems which then require more technological fixes.

When we understand this, that, ultimately, it is not this or that person, or class, or nation that controls us, but the machine, many problems in our social lives begin to make sense.

Immigration, the destruction of childhood, the abolition of gender and sex, hyper-invasive forms of social control, widespread insanity and the death of nature and of culture can, at least in part, be traced back to the prerogatives of a mechanised system which has no use for innocence, self-sufficiency, gender, sociability, the wild or the genuinely original; that has, in short, no need for nature, or for human nature.

The technological system must expel as many humans as possible from its operations or, if that’s not possible, expel genuinely human qualities—such as creativity, generosity, fellow-feeling and so on—from the people who remain within it.

Such qualities cannot be controlled and, more often than not, disrupt the smooth operation of the machine, so they cannot be allowed, which is why only machine-people rise to the top in the technological system; unempathic, cowardly, hyper-rational, automatons.

Meaningless people.

What is Meaning?

Today we lead meaningless lives. Most of us understand this now; most of us can see that we are all chickens with our heads cut off, already dead, but through sheer momentum, running round and round and round, going nowhere, until we drop.

We are all desperate for meaning, but we don’t know where to find it. We all want to travel, to help starving orphans, to work in the film industry, to give it all up and live on a farm, to become enlightened monks, or to raise a family, but somehow these things, even if we are lucky enough to achieve them, don’t ever quite do it for us. We are still discontented.

The cause of our malaise is we don’t know what meaning is, or where to find it.

There are four sources of meaning in our lives.

First of all, and most importantly, there is the primal source of meaning, which is, as we have seen, consciousness, and the quality of merely existing in this moment.

Secondly, again as we’ve seen, there is nature. The beautiful, mysterious, selfless experience of being in the wild, of being wild, or of immersing oneself in wild things, like the sky, or a piece of seaweed, or one’s own body.

The third source of meaning is each other; society, or culture. We build our culture from consciousness—which is where universal cultural quality comes from, by which I mean human qualities which we recognise in any person, no matter where they come from; courage, dignity, vitality, and so on.

We also build our culture from nature—which is where particular cultural quality comes from, that which separates Kenyan customs and art, for example from Eskimo customs and art, both of which are one with the nature around them.

And we build our cultural world from the various demands of living together; from our need to procreate and have fun, from the necessity of dealing with the inevitable problems that come from collective life and from our need to nourish, clothe and house ourselves.

This leads to the fourth source of meaning in our lives; meaningful work, or production (or reproduction). Making the things we need to live, and to live well. In this kind of work man finds and expresses himself, which gives him great pleasure and confidence.

(I should note here that I’ve given these four sources of meaning in order. This is because consciousness must come first, then nature, then society and then work. If you put work before society, or society before nature, or nature before consciousness, you’ll suffer, or nature will suffer, or we’ll all suffer.)

The technological system has no use for any of this, for any kind of meaning. Consciousness, and therefore quality, is, as we have seen, utterly meaningless to machine thinking. Nature only has meaning if it broken down into things and employed by the system. Society cannot be integrated into the system, nor can skilled people who produce things for themselves.

It’s not just that all these things are useless to the system though; they are an active threat. They cannot be grasped by the machine mind, they cannot be controlled, they cannot be bought and sold, and no profit comes from them.

This is why, as the machine reaches its most advanced form, an industrial-digital super-structure which completely covers the planet, we find that consciousness, nature, society and useful work are nowhere to be found. The system has destroyed them, or made them inaccessible.

Consciousness is filtered out at school and at work; spontaneity, aliveness and uniqueness are either unrewarded or actively punished. Try being spontaneous, alive and completely unlike everyone else here, in the world. See what happens to you.

Nature is viewed by the system as a means only, without any inherent quality. Economics is unable to take it into account and, insofar as nature provides man with an independent livelihood, it must be put beyond his reach.

Likewise society and useful work. Human beings are simply not permitted to provide their own subsistence. They must get their food, their entertainment, their sense of security, their health and all the objects they use from the technological system, which they must be completely dependent on.

So we live, and we must live, in a meaningless world, which means that everyone everywhere is unhappy.

Go to where the system works, to your nearest large town, and look around. Everyone, everywhere, is constantly anxious, or depressed, or angry, or desperate. You can see it on their faces and you can see it in how they live their lives. You might also be able to see it in yourself.

What this means is that when the machine gives people a reason for being anxious—a bad guy, for example, or a virus—they seize it and cling to it. Their aimless anxiety now has an object, and they now have steps they can take to deal with it.

What’s more, they find themselves in a community that thinks the same, which is fighting the same bad guy or virus and is united against irresponsible folk who are not afraid.

Note, first of all, this isn’t new. We live in a time of wanton decadence and transparent madness, but ‘civilised’ humans have been like this for thousands of years, as the testimonies of outsiders throughout history show. Secondly, none of this has anything to do with education or with political affiliation. An educated left-wing teacher is just as unconscious, anxious and helpless as an uneducated right-wing businessman; because they are all systemoids; worldlings.

Today the technological system is the world. It is everywhere. It is all but impossible to escape it. Everywhere you go and everything you do occurs within an institution, or a machine, or in service to one, so much so that it’s all but invisible.

Just as the fish doesn’t ‘notice’ the water, so we don’t ‘notice’ the system. Not just because it’s all there is, out there, but because it exists within us. We eat its food, we reproduce its ideas, our bodies move to its rhythms and our minds are constantly engaged with its interfaces.

We are institutionalised machine people, which is why an institutional machine world doesn’t just look normal, it feels normal. It feels natural.

How Should we Organise Society?

Some people like to think that the system can be reformed. That we can redistribute wealth, or write fairer laws, or adopt clever new technologies, or create new kinds of institutions.

It should be obvious by now that this is impossible. Because every part of the system is connected to every other part, the whole thing is threatened by any kind of change, even the most cautious tinkering.

Some people believe that it is possible to vote our way out of the predicament we are in, that we need something called ‘democracy’. This is also a fantastic dream.

Everyone knows that we don’t have democracy, but it should be obvious by now that it wouldn’t matter if we did. If we actually had a choice about who makes our laws, these laws would still have to serve the system.

Democracy works by forcing a minority to do what a majority tell it to do, which means that individual consciousness is either devalued or coerced.

Democracy actually does away with individual consciousness, which is why democratic societies are so irresponsible; because nobody has to take responsibility when decisions are made by majority. Who is actually taking responsibility for the death of culture, of nature, of humankind?

Who? Nobody; because nobody has to.

Science today fulfils the same task. One of its chief goals is to explain our lives away, to show that our thoughts, actions and feelings are the result of our genes, or of hormones, or of some kind of disease, or of some other physical cause.

The reason why every discovery of such a cause is celebrated is because we are not allowed to be free. We must believe that we cannot help doing what we do or being what we are. That we are not responsible.

Not that autocratic monarchs and superstitious priests are any better than democratic statesmen and rational scientists. There is really no difference between any of them.

There is really no difference between the owners of the machine—the kings and billionaires of the world—and the managers of the machine—the priests and professionals.

We call the beliefs of owners, ‘right-wing’, and we call the beliefs of managers, ‘left-wing’, but they all serve the machine, which is why the machine always wins.

By way of metaphor you might like to imagine we are all on a huge, technologically advanced oil-tanker that is, first of all, so complex nobody can really control it, secondly, that is polluting the ocean with its filth, killing sea-life wherever it goes and, thirdly, is so bloated and unwieldy that it is extremely unstable and sure to sink soon, killing all of us.

Now imagine that the owners of the ship, who are on board, are telling us that we need a better ship, bigger and stronger, and that we all need to be more obedient and hard working in order to make that happen. Imagine that the managers of the ship, also on board, are telling us that the ship needs more institutions to better run the ship, and that these should all be inclusive and eco-friendly, and that the owners should be more heavily taxed and ordinary people paid more.

Imagine, further, that the owners are telling us that the managers want to take away our freedom and our traditions, and that the managers are telling us that the owners want to take away our solidarity and our community spirit. What would you say? Wouldn’t you say—‘let’s just stop the damned ship? Let’s sail ships, that we, ordinary human beings can make, sail and fix for ourselves?’ Wouldn’t you say that?

I would, but it’s unsayable. Unthinkable. As is the idea that the only ship—the only system—that can work, that ever has served men and women and that, even now, between people who are even momentarily free, still serves them, is one which they are free to build and run as they wish, with leaders of course—a ship needs a captain—but without owners, without managers and, above all, without the hyper-complexity of the system itself which controls us all.

How Did the World Begin?

Once upon a time human consciousness was free, human life was meaningful and human society was fair. This is not a fairy-tale, it’s the easily verifiable truth.

What happened?

Earlier I said that the first ‘human tool’ was the mind, the ability to isolate things, represent them as ideas and rationally think about these ideas.

The tool of the mind seems to have assumed its current form hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s impossible to pinpoint quite when. Some say it appeared as recently as sixty thousand years ago, some say ten times that. But whenever it evolved, it gave human beings the ability to rationally isolate objects, name them, think about them and talk about them, which gave us almost immeasurably more power, and therefore more responsibility, than any other creature on earth.

To start with, and for a very long time, this doesn’t seem to have made much difference to our relationship to nature. Our cultural life became richer, and our societies slowly became more complex, but we remained embedded in nature.

All the evidence we have shows that before ten thousand BC there was no systematic warfare, no significant inequality, no misery, and very little ill health or disease. There was great pain and uncertainty, but that’s life. No one minds these things if they live well, and people did live well.

All that changed with the arrival of civilisation, the world as we know it. First, around 10,000 BC there was a long kind of interim period, when primal, hunter-gatherer societies became quite large and began experimenting with horticulture.

This gave way to civilisation as we normally understand it; hierarchical agricultural states controlled by bureaucrats and princes, and run by slaves. A now widely-acknowledged disaster in human experience.

By 3000 BC, five thousand years ago, civilised lifespans had dramatically fallen, warfare was constant, ruinous inequality was tearing society apart and nature was being systematically destroyed or exploited.

Debt peonage appeared, along with taxation, prostitution, ill-health, wretched toil, iniquitous hierarchy, alienation, specialist professionals, slavery, deforestation, soil erosion, repression of minorities, violent subjugation of women, children and outsiders, and rank insanity.

What had happened? The tool of the self, the extraordinary machine of the human mind, had grown beyond its limits. The thinking-wanting self, the onboard computer we are so proud of, had stopped serving man and, like all tools which get out of hand, had started dominating him.

Man no longer saw the world and the self from the inside, through the quality of his consciousness, but from without, as a collection of isolated things.

Things, remember, are limited, and they are separate from other things. What this means, as we have seen, is that when man started to see reality through the screen of his thing-making self—his mortal, isolated, quality immune self—he started to become existentially afraid, alone and uncertain.

All this was completely new to human experience and a very recent development in our long history, meaning that the existential fear and unhappiness of the new thing-self was unnatural. Animals naturally have fear in dangerous situations, and, if they are social animals, they are attracted to their fellows and languish if they are separated from them.

The self in charge of man, however, was not afraid of actual danger or unhappy about missing his fellows. He was afraid of existence itself, and was unhappy because he was cut off from existence itself. This is why we say that his fear, aloneness and unhappiness were existential—they penetrated and sickened his very existence.

This is why unnatural man, selfish man, is the only animal which always looks afraid and unhappy.

So awful is existential fear and unhappiness that the self will do anything—anything—it can to keep them away. Its principal substitutes are permanence, prestige, thought, mindless activity, power, possession and pain-killing.

The self seeks to live forever, in renown, or in magic (religious or technological magic), it seeks to acquire fame, institutional power, or the power of knowledge, and it seeks to surround itself with objects, particularly those which have value or which seem to offer some kind of security.

The self also seeks to huddle together with other selves, for security. This is not the conviviality of social creatures, but existential fear at facing the pain of one’s own miserable mortal being, cut off from existence.

Self seeks to obliterate any kind of pain from its life, any kind of criticism, any kind of discomfort, any kind of shock or uncertainty, anything at all which feels, to the self, ‘unpleasant’. It will take drugs, lose itself in sex—or the constant prowling search for it—and it will work non-stop, even at moronic tasks, rather that stop and face the music.

But the favourite tactic of the self, fleeing from the agony of its own fear and unhappiness, is thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking,

We can see selves start to operate like this at the beginning of civilisation. Selves started to thirst for power, for pain-muffling narcotics, for celebrity status, for the reassuring warmth of the herd and for all the other sops we are now so familiar with.

Selves also started building the first machines and institutions. Their technology was rudimentary, so these were very weak and were constantly crumbling, or being torn apart by hostile neighbours, but the huge organisational structures that, say, built the pyramids, were hyper-complex tools in the same way as our transport systems are.

Finally, they created religions to justify all this. The religions of the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, The Jews, the Greeks and the Romans were, despite inspired exceptions, fundamentally a means of justifying life in a miserable machine world.

What is Religion?

The word ‘religion’ has many meanings, some of which are contradictory. Sometimes when people say ‘religion’ they are talking about an institution, a large, worldly, organisation, like the Christian church.

Sometimes the word ‘religion’ refers to the teachings of certain influential people. Some of these are decidedly worldly, and very easy to understand by the mind—such as the ponderous teachings of Confucius, Mohammed and the Jewish patriarchs—but some of them, the most beautiful, express the truth of consciousness indirectly, enigmatically, or paradoxically.

I’ll give you a few examples.

The way everlasting is the nameless uncarved wood.

Lao Tzu

Split a piece of wood, and I am there.
Lift up a stone, and you will find Me there.

Jesus of Nazareth

All know that the drop merges into the ocean,
but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.

Kabir Das

The cause is not before and the effect is not after.

Dōgen.

The lives and teachings of the most truthful religious teachings are supreme works of art, expressing enigmatic quality, while those of second-rate teachers and priests, are more like works of pseudo-scientific self-help.

Such teachers and priests may have a feeling for the truth, but they are not conscious of it, which is why they are so keen to create ideologies and institutions, such as Mohammed’s Islam or Paul’s Christian church or the professionally-managed schools of Confucius.

Unconscious teachers and priests are not interested in free individuals experiencing the truth, directly, for themselves. They prefer people to believe in things.

‘Belief’ means ‘not to know’. It’s a kind of hope. If I tell you I am wearing green underpants, all you can ever really do is believe I am, based on trust, or faith. It’s just another thing, only this thing need not be something that can ever be factually real to you, like an onion can.

Second-rate teachers and priests are always going on about trust, faith, belief and hope because they want you to come through them, and their institutions, to the truth. They have the knowledge that you need to be happy. They have read the Big Difficult books, they have been solemnly ordained, they have the qualifications and the enlightened prestige; not you.

Second-rate teachers and priests are also keen to create and maintain rituals; ways of saying and doing things which they say bring you closer to the truth, but which actually shape your perceptions and show you belong to the religious group.

If you go it alone, if you start thinking for yourself, if you start questioning given beliefs and refusing compulsory rituals, you become a bad believer. Then you need to be punished, or you need some kind of corrective therapy.

For therapists today are also priests. Their job is to return you to what is called ‘the normal world’, the rituals and beliefs that we all share, that keep society going.

What are these beliefs, or myths today, for us? There are many of them, but here are a few important ones.

One is that learning comes from schooled education; that you must go through ten or twenty years of being forced to learn what the world tells you is important, in order to get a qualification that allows you to participate in that world.

Another one is that health comes from medicine. That human beings are essentially a walking, talking bundle of symptoms which they need the medical profession to keep at an acceptable level.

Another modern myth, rather more subtle than these, but much more important, is that there is an extremely important objectively good thing called ‘life’, which is opposite to an evil thing called ‘death’, and which must be saved or preserved at all costs.

Another myth, which we’ve already looked at, is that science can arrive at the truth, that we live entirely in a rational universe of things governed entirely by literal-causal laws. We are told to ‘trust the science’ because we are taught that knowing things, and knowing the causal relation between things, means you can tell the difference between right and wrong.

Another myth is that the past was ‘bad’ and the future will be ‘good’ and that what we call ‘progress’ is a journey from the bad old past to the good new future. This myth has it that ‘more’ and ‘bigger’ are always better than ‘less’ and ‘smaller’.

A myth which is very important to those who own and manage the machine of the world is that people are basically untrustworthy. They require discipline, coercion and force to make sure they don’t go off the rails.

Another important myth today is that gender, and even sex, are illusions, that there is no essential difference between male bodies and female bodies. This myth justifies a world in which gendered domain and sexed bodies are of no real use.

Another central myth is the idea that there is something called ‘mental illness’, that our problems—which are very real—are bio-medical diseases which require professional intervention to deal with. This myth is important because it lets the world and the individual off the hook.

And so on. If you want to know what the myths are of the world, just turn on the news, or listen to ordinary people have a conversation. You’ll get the gist. Or pay attention to things which cannot be said or criticised.

A few hundred years ago it was impossible to say that God does not exist, or that the King is evil, or that sex is good. This was because uptight priests and princes ruled the world, and such ideas threatened their power.

Today it is difficult or impossible to say, or to act upon the idea, that some societies or cultures are worse than others, or that such a thing as ‘worse’ exists, or that men and women are different, or that mental illness is a myth, or that it’s okay for people to die, or that it’s okay to eat animals.

If you express any idea that threatens the machine, or those who own or manage it, sooner or later you’ll find a nice, kind, caring professional turning up in your life, or you’ll find the machine starts to exclude you from its nice, kind, care.

It is important to understand though that none of this happens consciously. None of the system’s myths, for example, need to be explicitly taught. They are taught—that’s what school is for, and all the television programmes and books and websites—but they don’t need to be, because people automatically think this way.

As we’ve seen, we are born into the machine of the world, we are shaped by it from birth, our senses are filled with it, our way of life dictated by its needs. We are machine people, so we automatically think and perceive like machine people.

I’m not just talking about the content of thought (and perception, and emotion), but the act of thinking, perceiving and emoting. Not just what we see on the screen, but that we are experiencing a representation.

It’s relatively easy to deal with stupid thoughts, mistaken perceptions and unpleasant feelings; you can just replace them with other thoughts, perceptions and feelings.

But we live in a world which forces us to experience the world exclusively through a representation of it, which denies us the reality of the thing-in-itself directly, through our consciousness of it. This denial automatically excludes quality.

It’s no good ‘waking up’ or ‘seeing the truth’ or ‘taking the red pill’ by learning new facts or by seeing or feeling things differently. You can learn how the world really works, you can embrace ‘alternative’ beliefs and lifestyles, you can read radical books and remain exactly as anxious, mediocre, selfish and brainwashed as you were to start with. You’re still living on the screen of your life, just now you’re wearing a different outfit or playing a different part.

This is one reason why it is so hard to ‘get through’ to worldly people. It’s not that you are arguing against their beliefs and opinions, but against their being.

Let me put it like this. Imagine a prison which was impossible to escape from. Not just because its walls were twenty meters high and its locks impossible to crack, but because it covered the whole planet. It would be very difficult to even imagine escape, let alone try to.

Difficult, but not impossible. The only way to make it impossible to even imagine escape would be to hypnotise the prisoners so that they believed they were the prison. Then the idea that they should escape would strike them as laughable, insane. Escape from what? Escape from my own self?

Who am I?

And so we arrive at the most important question. One so important that it strikes everyone who hears it as obvious, or meaningless, or cheesy, or ‘too deep for me!’

We have been looking at what I am, through what I am not. I am not my representation of the world, nor am I any of the facts which constitute this representation. I am not my thoughts, nor any of my isolated impressions, nor my actions in the world, nor my emotional reactions.

What does this mean? It means I am not my self.

My self is my thoughts, my emotions, my actions and my physical sensations. There’s nothing wrong with such things, but if the things of self are all there is in my experience, there is and can be no quality.

No quality means, as we have seen, existential suffering. Fear, anxiety, anguish, violence, depression, hatred, shame, regret, self-disgust and numbed boredom.

The self is always afraid, always existentially miserable, because there is no meaning for it. Only consciousness is meaningful, and if I am not conscious, if I exist as a self, then my life, my reality, the universe entire, becomes bounded by that self; a fragile machine of limited extent, existing for a limited time, in a world which is almost entirely indifferent to it. An existence which is at best a kind of diabolical game show, which exalts the winners for a few minutes before exterminating them. More often than not it’s a battlefield in hell.

In order to deal with this intolerable state of affairs self clings to things, ideas, people, sensations and emotions. It will attach itself to anything which gives it some kind of reassurance, some kind of familiarity; any belief, no matter how stupid, any group, no matter how perverse, any person, no matter how unpleasant or cruel.

This clinging, to what I like, want and need (which we call addiction) creates what I don’t like, what I don’t want and what I don’t need, which, when they start to approach, create more fear, along with all kinds of outrageous, desperate actions to try to keep them away.

The existentially fearful, lonely and uncertain self is numb to quality, to life, to love, to truth—there is a deadness to it, a coldness—yet, at the same time, it is anxious, watchful, always wishing, or hoping, or worrying; and always full of regrets. When threatened—by selflessness, criticism or anything which it doesn’t like—it sneers, it mocks, or it becomes emotional, either masochistically self-indulgent, or sadistically violent.

But this is not who I am; and sometimes I know it.

In moments of selfish suffering, when I am being brutally spiteful, or pathetically servile, or disgracefully greedy, or embarrassingly impatient, or self-indulgently sorry for myself, or emotionally demanding; in those moments I can sometimes hear myself whisper ‘I’m making this up… it isn’t me…’

So what is me? Who am I?

We have seen that I am not the film, I am consciousness of the film, but if you have grown up in a world which has conditioned you to live on and as the screen, how are you to get out? How are you to get back to your own consciousness?

Here we reach an insoluble problem. Not that it is impossible to be conscious, but it is impossible to explain how to be conscious, because consciousness is not a thing which can be reached through knowledge or technique.

The mind, remember, turns consciousness and nature into things and then reasons about those things. When it hears the truth, it turns it into a thing, an opinion, by agreeing or disagreeing with it. When it realises that, despite its excellent opinions, and impressive achievements, that it is still miserable, it starts looking, once again, for things to understand and a reasonable way to not be unhappy—to get to happiness.

But you can’t get to who you are. If you follow a path to your own consciousness you’ll stay on a path, which doesn’t just mean using your mind to work out how to be happy, it also means listening to the physical needs of your body, acting in a certain way and having certain kinds of emotions. Not that there is anything wrong with any of this, but that you can’t reach selfless consciousness, genuine, lasting peace of mind, creativity and love through your self.

Take, as an example, your emotions. What happens if you always do as you feel like? If you only exercise or work or make love or anything else when you feel like it? Do you end up living the kind of life you want?

Or what happens, when you feel anxious, if you try to use your mind to deal with those problems, if you try to work out what to do—in the mental activity called ‘worry’—or if you act on the anxiety, try to stifle it, drown it out, or escape from it. Does that work?

Or what about learning? Some people believe that all they have to do is acquire knowledge, and they’ll be okay, they’ll be safe or happy or wise. Take a look at people who have spent a long time in school; the highly qualified, the clever people. Are they moral giants? Are they brilliant and wise?

Some people, reading this, might be busy putting all their efforts into combating unpleasant feelings by becoming rich, successful, comfortable, famous or safe. How’s that working out for you?

Others might feel like they’re going in the opposite direction, by paring down their possessions, using their rational minds to overcome their emotions and attempting to meditate their way into a state called ‘enlightenment’. How are you doing? Are you enlightened yet? Are you overflowing with love, or bursting with genuine creativity? I know you like to make out that you are; but is it the truth? Really? How’s your love life?

Or you might be one of those people, and they are many, who think the world needs to change before they can really be who they are, that we need revolution, a new, fairer, kinder system, that works for people. Then we’ll be free. How’s that going? Are you one step closer to being happier than you were before you started your noble mission?

The truth is that, although none of these things are bad or wrong in themselves, none of them lead to consciousness. Consciousness is not a state to achieve, a thing to be or the result of any kind of study, teaching or practice.

You can learn technique, you can learn tradition and you can learn facts. You have to learn these things, or you’ll remain a stupid, useless, cultureless infant.

But you can’t learn to not be your self; because learning is part of the self. Self, by itself, will take every single teacher it encounters and turn it into a thing. The word we normally use for this is co-opt. Self, by itself, automatically co-opts the living truth, turning it into the known, a dead thing. We call these dead things clichés.

What’s more, self, by itself, is only interested in itself. It is not just uninterested in selfless consciousness, but is, as we’ve seen, actively threatened by it.

You may have noticed this yourself, when you’ve been completely alone, particularly in the wild or in the dark, or when you’ve had to creatively flow with the moment, or when the only way to deal with someone has been to unconditionally love them, or let go of what you feel about them.

In such moments you may well have found yourself terrified, lost, appalled or violently angry ‘for no reason’. That’s the self, terrified of surrendering, or sacrificing itself.

You don’t need such extreme situations to see the self in action though. You might have even felt it rising up while you’ve been reading this. I’ve been criticising the self and the world it created, maintains and depends on, which usually brings up feelings of agitation, boredom and annoyance, which you may well have blamed on me.

Self takes criticism of self as criticism of being. If I tell a child what it thinks or does or feels is stupid or selfish, its self will probably get in a strop. Fine. But if I tell the same child that I hate it, that it is unlovable, I am not criticising its self, but its being. This is genuinely hurtful.

But self cannot tell the difference. It takes challenges to its beliefs, to its self-definitions, to its taste, to its behaviour or to its emotions as existential threats, and it reacts accordingly, usually quite shamefully.

This is why selfless people are so affected by cruelty, why they are so sensitive to essential lovelessness and ugliness, and yet, at the same time, so shockingly unconcerned about merely formal or verbal attacks, or about merely physical dangers.

This is also why selfless people love free speech and radical forms of freedom; not because selfless people believe that selves should be able to say and do anything, but because they know that telling selves what to say or do solves nothing.

Selfless people know that while selves sometimes need to be violently restrained, perhaps even killed, the only solution to selfishness is a way of life that gives consciousness complete freedom.

This is an appalling prospect for selfish people, who are terrified of freedom and don’t know what to do with it. Selfish people might say they love freedom, but their freedom always seems to amount to laying down a load of laws, manipulating people to do what they want or living in institutions which make freedom impossible.

Selfish people are numb to essential quality but they are almost outrageously reactive. As Fyodor Dostoevsky taught us, ‘the man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone’.—by which he meant the man who listens to himself.

So don’t listen to yourself.

If you’ve followed me until now, you may have been, at various points in this short account, conscious of something you’ve not been conscious of before. The world and the self which made it.

In those moments you may have experienced something other than the world and the self. You might have realised, or somehow sensed—not as a clever philosophical idea, as something you need to learn; but as an actual experience—that you are not the world, and, more amazingly, that you are not your self, the mental emotional entity you normally take yourself to be. That there is something else here.

The truth is very often uncomfortable to the self, but something else ‘within’ recognises it as the truth, which makes you more conscious, and which gives you courage or confidence to live differently, more consciously, even if only slightly.

Your self, to the degree that it is in charge of your experience, might be frustrated. It might think ‘how can I make use of this? How can I remember all this? How can I add it onto myself?’ Right now the self might be thinking that I haven’t actually said anything—because I haven’t really given it anything to think about, anything it can get. Now that we’re reaching the end of the essay, the self may be asking itself ‘but where is the point? Where is the trick? Where is the “big reveal”’?

There isn’t any. If that’s disappointing, you should walk away, sadly shaking your head, and find your self a teaching, a message, a school, a theory, a community, a position or an ideology. Something your self can believe in.

The conscious I which remains isn’t looking for a message it can take away, a nice little technique or teaching. To the degree that I have been able to read these words without opinions, beliefs and emotions getting in the way, I will be able to forget it when it’s done, and go onto the next thing; not by practicing anything, or by following a teaching, or by getting some kind of wisdom. Not by doing or thinking anything.

It is good to listen to or read the truth. It is good to be conscious, just as it is good to love nature, and to be part of a living culture and to do useful and beautiful work. All this goodness makes me ‘more’ conscious.

There is no limit to how conscious I can be, or how much quality I can be conscious of. Sooner or later though, that consciousness will run up against the world, and then my mind will tell me that I have a difficult decision to make.

But my mind is wrong. There is no decision to make. There is no decision to make because the world isn’t making it and the self isn’t making it.

I am making it. Not the person who wrote these words, nor the words themselves, nor the voice I can hear in my head saying them. That’s not I. I’m talking about the I reading these words, the I listening to the voice in the head.

The voice in the head is terrified of surrendering itself to that which is listening to it. It will bow down before a rational system, it will bow down before an irrational tyrant, it will bow down to the devil himself, just as long as it, the voice, can keep on talking, keep on believing, keep on hoping, keep on wanting, keep on worrying, keep on getting excited, keep on getting things and keep on giving its opinions.

In the end though, it has to listen, really listen, because in the end, the self, your self, every self, dies.

Then the voice stops speaking.