fantasy – What’s here now?

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.

Putting wings on a caterpillar does not make it a butterfly…

Shiv Sengupta

Shiv is a lone but wise voice in the so-called spiritual industry. I always enjoy the way he punctures what Ordinary Mind Zendo’s Barry Magid calls our ‘curative fantasies’.

He reminds us, above all, of the full breadth and depth of our humanity – everything included, nothing left out.

I’m suspicious of claims of ‘our true nature’ good or bad, but particularly when it is stated as fact that fundamentally ‘we are love.’

Unless you’re in the depths of delusion or simply not being honest with yourself, this is just a delightful (curative) fantasy.