delusion – What’s here now?

If there’s no problem, there’s no problem.

It is pure fantasy to think that you could have done things differently or lived your life any other way.

This dream of an imagined past feeds an equally unhelpful delusion of the future in which you consciously learn and strive to change ‘yourself’ and do things differently.

All of these behaviours and activities happen, of course, but not as the result of conscious so-called will but automatically and spontaneously from our unconscious.

We do what we do when we do it whatever our conscious awareness may declare to the contrary.

Our thoughts and ideas are the least of us. Always late to the party that’s already in full swing, uninvited yet full of their own self importance and righteousness. Taking credit for everything and responsibility for nothing.

It comes as a great relief to realise that you could not have lived your life in any other way despite all the reasons and stories you tell yourself about how things could have been different.

They weren’t different because they weren’t.

The degree to which we think our conscious awareness has control and agency over our actions is greatly overstated.

Indeed I would go as far as to say what we think are choices and decisions are pure fantasy applied after the fact to instantiate a sense of a separate, autonomous entity of selfhood.

Counter to the prevailing trope of spiritual orthodoxy I don’t accept that our so-called true nature is loving and caring any more than it is hating and othering. Humans are complex animals with fathomless psyches. When we care and love we do so from bottomless wells of empathy and devotion. And yet we hate and other too from similar reserves of opposite emotion. When the time comes we do what we do. It is not only myopic but delusional to believe that one well of human behaviour is any more rich or better fed than another.