The World is My Mirror (10 page)

We are all familiar with hypnosis, both as a form of therapy to rid us of phobias or to arrest our unhealthy eating habits, and as entertainment in a stage show that can highlight how suggestible and gullible we can be.

I remember, whilst on holiday with my brother, we witnessed a stage hypnotist convince a young woman there was a fairy only a few inches tall dancing and singing right in front of her. The woman had been convinced that this Tinkerbell was the most magical and kindest fairy that had ever lived. In fact Tinkerbell was the best friend she’d ever had. The joy and love in her eyes was amazing to see and there was no doubt some message had been implanted into her brain. The real test was when my brother walked on stage and squashed poor Tinkerbell dead. Of course, the hypnotist orchestrated this manoeuvre and so it was all part of the act. Watching this woman slap my brother so hard around the face, though, raised an almighty laugh from the audience and a sense of amazement from me that anyone can be convinced of something so supernatural.

Well, if you subscribe to the view about birth, death, planets and time, you are also under a spell. You are asleep. You are dreaming. You are totally immersed in the drama you call ‘me and my life’. Just like the woman watching her beloved Tinkerbell, you have taken on board a view of life that is bogus and fragmented. A life that you have been convinced that you
have
, that you own. Parents, teachers and peers, in fact the entire back catalogue of human history is weaving its magic and showing us how to see and what to see. There is a consensus reality of objects and perceivers that colour our every thought, our every action, and reaction. The world is out there and obvious. You are seeing it and interacting with it. It is full of peril. It is full of danger. You have got to make it work because you have a life and you better look after it. You had better play the game and play it well. Sit up straight, stop slouching. Eat your dinner and be grateful you are not poor and starving. Love your parents and respect your elders and those of higher status and class. Enjoy education; it is for your own good. Learn about the world and learn about your place in the cosmos and in the scheme of things. Play your role: you are a man, a woman; you are English or African; you are a Buddhist or a Christian. Save the whale but abuse your spouse. Be ‘good’ in this life and gloat in the next. Progress is good, we are going somewhere. Tomorrow things will be better.

I will stop there because you are probably running out of breath. I have told it like this to give the sense of absolute frenetic activity and railroad expectations. Unceasing and unrelenting
doing
and becoming appear to be so commonplace. For most it appears there is no problem with ‘normality’. We accept we were born and had a beginning, and we accept, probably with degrees of fear and imagination, our eventual demise. Some of us think that we will leave this world behind to continue somewhere else, a ‘better place’, with the secret laid at our feet and the satisfaction we have done well.

Many people, it seems, have accepted life as it is presented to them from a very young age by those who genuinely want us to function well and play the same game everyone is playing and not appear out of place, or, even worse, mad, bad or a total misfit. We become socialised and hypnotised. In short, we are conditioned.

Conditioning reminds me of Pavlov’s dogs. If you are not familiar with this, I will explain. Pavlov was a Russian physiologist working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was interested in the digestive system and performed experiments on animals. He wired them up and studied their digestive chemicals, how they are produced and how they function. Whilst studying dogs and the salivation associated with feeding times, he noticed that even before the food was presented, the dog salivated at the seeing of the white coat of the experimenter. The dog had made a connection between ‘white coat’ and ‘dinner time’. The dog was behaving based on future predictions. In a way, a kind of mental world that paired an everyday neutral event with a reward was operating at some level for the animal.

Are we much different? As babies our rudimentary gurgles and babblings are greatly shaped by reinforcement in the wake of intonation and praise from an adult who tries to get baby to say ‘car’. At first, a just noticeable ‘C’ might be all that is needed for a smile and hug from Mum or Dad. You can see that over time a pattern of light that resembles the object we regularly receive a hug for, might result in a pointy finger and a clear reciting of ‘car’. Hand claps and praise, ‘clever little boy’, stand in for a plate of butcher’s tripe and a Bonio biscuit.

This, to me, is the beginning of hypnosis. The stage hypnotist does his warm-up routine in half an hour to select a suitable victim; education in ‘humans’ takes a little longer. Once achieved, though, it is a devil to extinguish. If only we could be reassured by a life hypnotist for being a wonderful participant and that we will remember nothing of the evening. We could walk into reality like walking back to our seat. A round of applause and a ribbing from our witnesses might be all that is needed for us to stop pretending. I am saying this, but if it is seen for what it is, then nothing needs to change and nothing needs to alter. You are already one hell of a miracle. Believing you are a farmyard chicken clucking your head off is nothing to what there is on a day-to-day basis. Taking a look at your own hands now and again and saying to yourself, “What on earth are these?” is enough to break the spell. You never made them; they just appear, like the morning sunshine and the evening moonlight.

If you have experienced the relief of waking from a bad dream, you will know how it feels
not
to have actually lost a loved one or perhaps not to have actually murdered someone and not actually have the police hot on your trail. On waking, you can rest assured that what you thought was real was only fantasy and imagination. Phew!

This chapter will explore the possibility of that ‘phew’ happening right here, right now in the so-called waking state. Just as in the dream, the apparent everyday life of relationships, jobs, birth and death is a creation, a fantasy‌—‌a fabrication. It belongs just as much to the thoughts and ideas of those that precede you as it does to you, the person reading this now. It is all made-up. None of it is happening. It is all dream appearance. ‘You’ do not ‘have’ a mother, father, brother or sister. There is no outside world full of animals, mountains and weather systems.

No. Thinking is concocting the whole shebang. Nothing, but nothing, exists outside of thought. Concepts are handed down to us to reduce the fear of the unknown, both for the benefactor and the recipient. You are being handed a baton by those already on the move. Grasp it and run! Round and round you go chasing, chasing and chasing. You can pass it on if you like‌—‌it might just ease the burden‌—‌or drop it and exit the race. What you think of as an external world is ‘thinking’ doing what it does best: creating stories, or‌—‌more colloquially‌—‌bullshitting!

I want to take a look at this bullshitting to see how it starts; its function; why it can create fear of a world; and‌—‌more importantly‌—‌why it can lead to anxiety and the fear of other people.

To assist us, I am going to create an analogy using a cinema screen and the curtains. The curtains seem to obscure the screen and so control how much light is on view. The screen is representing timeless being and the curtains can be thought of as internal mental structures built from very early experiences. Some lives seem to exist with the curtains tightly shut and others have them drawn back to differing degrees, creating various openings and life experiences. The curtains, or mental structures, only appear to block out light. Whatever you think is happening, and no matter whether you have a love story, horror movie or comedy, the light is always burning as brightly as ever behind the scenes; you only have to turn around and see. The drama itself seems hypnotising and serious, but it is the light that illuminates all scripts, all acts and all scenes. It not only illuminates; it appears in and as every picture.

We will return to the analogy later. I just wanted you to have a feel of it before I continue.

As children it appears we are born into a pre-existing world full of meaning established by our predecessors and maintained now by the ones who are in our immediate proximity. You are a thing that is being cared for by another thing. After a while the novelty of a sweet little darling with little human features wears off: ‘You, young man, have to fit in with us! Not the other way around. Understand?’

We cannot have all we want. All our needs will never be met, even by the most attentive and loving parents. There will be times when we are not fed quickly enough or when we just feel uncomfortable in this strange new world not of our making. We cannot be satisfied. The world has become inadequate and scary.

Now, rather than there be just timeless being, Wholeness goes‌—‌‘zshoom’, retreats, and closes some very hefty iron-studded double doors. Behind these doors there is a hive of activity, an activity that the remaining light you call ‘me’ is totally oblivious to. It’s unconscious and out of awareness. The curtains either side of the auditorium have almost closed and are concealing a factory. This factory is where people are made and an outside world constructed. This is your ‘birth’, not the parturition we normally associate with human beginnings. This is the birth of the individual!

Well, thank heavens it’s not real. However, you don’t know that yet. It seems the drama that unfolds is your riddle to solve. Solve it, and like Indiana Jones rearranging those stone tablets at the foot of an ancient temple, the door opens. You find the treasure.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I can see I am spoiling it by giving away the plot.

The world that appears as a result of Wholeness contracting is the one with which we seem to interact. This is the world of independently existing separate objects and separately existing others. This is the world. This is the drama.

Wholeness is convinced, now, it is something; it exists in relationship to the outside world. There is a me here and a you there. Now there is a striving to get along, to be considerate of each other’s feelings and have respect for one another. We establish roles. We have identities to maintain. I am a son with you, a dad with you, a brother with you and a very sexy body with you.

This mental factory turns out purpose, meaning, history, time, duty and‌—‌above all‌—‌guilt! You are not good enough. You will never be a patch on the idealised version of you that appears the same time the ‘bad bastard’ does. The idealised self is what is sought. Almost all behaviour directed toward ourselves and to others takes its inspiration from this image of perfection. There is an enormous compulsion to realise the idealised self through activities that seem to show the constructed external world that we are doing really well and are a very successful human being. The persona or mask we wear, though, hides a secret of a mild feeling of something missing or the extremes of madness, badness and a strong sense of worthlessness. It will never occur to the seeker that the idealised self is unobtainable. It is as elusive as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The idealised self is based on hope. It is based on future attainment and good deeds done. It is the kind of self you imagine will please others. Other people will surely like you and you will fit in nicely with their plans and aspirations. You will make people laugh and be the life and soul of the party. The compulsion to please others is to externalise your sense of self.

There is always a looking in the wrong direction for decision making and right action. You will find nothing of any use in a barren land like this. Nothing grows there. The environmental conditions do not allow it. If you continue to till this soil you will end up with a dust bowl and a total blindness when the wind whips up a storm of dust that only obscures and confuses. The real self, if there is such a thing, does not look to anyone for security or comfort. It’s always been here; you don’t need to look for it. You can leave your job, leave your house, leave your spouse and kids and even leave your country, but you can never leave ‘home’. Home is non-separation. Home is where the heart is.

The attempt at being good is to feed an identity behind the scenes that has one almighty appetite. Have you seen
Little Shop of Horrors
? Well, just like poor Seymour the florist, you have an Audrey II plant, requiring blood and human flesh in the form of constant self-monitoring and self-sacrifice. Seymour could not satisfy the out-of-control plant and the story ends in catastrophe.

All mental structures, like Seymour’s man-eating plant‌/‌ego, are always on the brink of collapse. It is only complex mental engineering keeping them up. Without this, those structures crumple and crumble and morph into dust. A good gust of wind and they are gone‌—‌no more. This is all that is noticed at liberation. It was all a dream‌—‌no substance.

Your drama is unique; nobody else has it. There is something I heard in my search that struck a chord with me. I will attribute it to Peter Brown from www.theopendoorway.org. Where he got it from, I don’t know, but it is this: ‘You are the sole inhabitant of your universe’ or words to that effect. Your experience is all you ever know. I can’t impress on you enough the impact those words had on me. Even now, writing it down for you I feel… well, I just can’t say. You’ll find out for yourself one day. When you realise there is nobody here but
you
and that everything, even what you consider as other people, appears in your experience Now for ever and ever and ever. There is an energy here that dreams-up worlds, time and journeys in order to lose itself in drama. Sometimes it stops pretending and reveals itself to itself, but only when it does and only when it feels like it.