The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (15 page)

This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self-consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature.

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Nature is interested in only two things—to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not 68

satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new.

You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important.

But basically, it is the same thing. __________

Somewhere along the line in human consciousness, there occurred self-consciousness. (When I use the word “self,” I don't mean that there is a self or a center there.) That consciousness separated man from the totality of things. Man, in the beginning, was a frightened being. He turned everything that was uncontrollable into something divine or cosmic and worshiped it. It was in that frame of mind that he created, quote and unquote, "God." So, culture is responsible for whatever you are. I maintain that all the political institutions and ideologies we have today are the outgrowth of the same religious thinking of man. The spiritual teachers are in a way responsible for the tragedy of mankind.

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I am questioning the very idea of consciousness. There is no such thing as consciousness at all. Consciousness is nothing but knowledge. Don't ask me how knowledge originated. Somewhere along the line knowledge started with you, and then you wanted to know about the things around. That is what I mean by

"self-consciousness." You have become conscious of what is going on around you, and so naturally you want to know. What I am suggesting is that the very demand to understand the mystery of existence is destructive.

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The identity that we have created, that culture has created in us, is the most important factor which we have to consider. If we continue to give importance to this identity, which is the product of culture, we are going to end up with Alzheimer's disease. We are putting memory and the brain to a use for which they are not intended.

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The constant use of memory to maintain our identity will put us all ultimately in a state where we are forced to give up. When someone gives up the attempt to fit himself or herself into the value system, you call that man crazy. He (or she, as the case may be) has given up. Some people don't want to fit into that framework.

We push them to be functional. The more we push them to be functional, the more crazy they become. Actually, we are pushing them to suicide.

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The body cannot be afraid of death. The movement that is created by society or culture is what does not want to come to an end. . . . What you are afraid of is not death. In fact, you don't want to be free from fear. . . . It is the fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new science, new talk, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. What you call “yourself” is fear. The “you” is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.

__________

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Your own death, or the death of your near and dear ones, is not something you can experience. What you actually experience is the void created by the disappearance of another individual, and the unsatisfied demand to maintain the continuity of your relationship with that person for a nonexistent eternity. The arena for the continuation of all these “permanent” relationships is the tomorrow—heaven, next life, and so on. These things are the inventions of a mind interested only in its undisturbed, permanent continuity in a “self”-

generated, fictitious future. The basic method of maintaining the continuity is the repetition of the question, "How? How? How?" "How am I to live? How can I be happy? How can I be sure I will be happy tomorrow?" This has made life an insoluble dilemma for us. We want to know, and through that knowledge we hope to continue on with our miserable existences forever.

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I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can.

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I am like a puppet sitting here. It's not just I; all of us are puppets. Nature is pulling the strings, but we believe that we are acting. If you function that way [as puppets], then the problems are simple. But we have superimposed on that [the idea of] a “person” who is pulling those strings.

2. A similar case is that of Suzanne Segal, who, like U. G. Krishnamurti and John Wren-Lewis, suddenly found that she had become bereft of an ego (self). After years of seeking a cure to the unease this experience incurred in her—it would seem that not everybody is at peace with being nobody—she wrote Collision with the Infinite: A Life Beyond the Personal Self (1996). The following year she died of a brain tumor at the age of forty-two. Although no link was established between her diseased brain and the disappearance of her ego, cerebral tumors presenting altered states of consciousness and changes in personality are not unknown. (Ask Charles Whitman, who left a written request that an autopsy be done on him that might explain why he ascended a tower at the University of Texas to shoot at and kill strangers before he himself was shot and killed by policemen.

Whitman did have a brain tumor, but neurologists could not establish a link between his tumor and his actions, possibly because he was dead. In a note written a few days preceding his murderous rampage on August 1, 1966, Whitman stated that in March of the same year he had consulted with one Dr. Jan Cochrum, to whom he confided his

“unusual and irrational thoughts” and “overwhelming violent impulses.” Cochrum gave Whitman a script for Valium and referred him to a psychiatrist, Dr. Maurice Dean Heatly.

In his one session with Heatly, Whitman said that he had an urge to “start shooting people with a deer rifle.” While no link was established between Whitman’s brain tumor and his bloody actions, he probably should have had his brain checked out sooner, or at least “chosen” not to destroy so many lives. In a determinist court of justice, perhaps Chocrum and Heatly would have been tried as accomplices in the murders. But what sense would that make of a senseless tragedy when the law could put it all on Whitman’s head?) Unlike U. G. but similar to Wren-Lewis, Segal sought answers to her transformation in spiritual traditions that addressed egoless experience. Unlike Wren-Lewis but similar to U. G., Segal had pursued a spiritual practice, Transcendental Meditation, before she became the beneficiary of “enlightenment by accident.” TM sells 70

its followers enlightenment on the installment plan (“Cosmic Consciousness in three years. Payment not refundable.”), although what they have bequeathed to the world has been little or nothing. In a joint venture with the prosperous organization headed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, magician and TM promoter Doug Henning unsuccessfully attempted to develop a theme park in his native country of Canada. It was to be called Maharishi Veda Land. This project followed Henning’s failed bid to attain a seat in Canada’s parliament. His platform was a pledge that, should he be elected to office, thousands of yogis—the number varies depending on the source—would fly over Canada and cure the nation’s civic problems. (One might think that such an event, rather than being debased as a campaign promise, might be actualized purely to improve Canadian society and to stun the world with a bravura performance of real magic. But apparently even yogis adhere to the code of quid pro quo.) Segal lost her ego two years after discontinuing TM, which she performed for eight years. In an interview, she stated that she did not feel meditation played a role in the loss of her self-identity. U. G. was in concord with Segal: after years of pursuing ego-death through meditation, he inveighed against this procedure as pointless and perhaps harmful. Compared to what happened to the three individuals mentioned in this note, arriving at a TOE is dull stuff. For most of humanity, including that part which studies consciousness, the phenomenon of ego-death is not enthralling, or even well marked as a human experience. Regular folk are illiterate with respect to this branch of the Tree of Knowledge. All their big questions have already been answered by some big book. And the reality specialists have their reputations to consider as high priests of the noosphere. In other words, almost no one figures their time to be ill-spent in bickering about how to interpret some fine point of scripture or the results of a clinical study rather than in contemplating some extraordinary heads that have called into question what we are or what we might be aside from puppets of the ego.

3. “Aftereffects of Near-Death Experience: A Survival Mechanism Hypothesis”
The
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology
(1994).

4. Glossing Metzinger’s study of the illusion of selves is an interesting fact: Metzinger is a lucid dreamer. His treatise Being No One contains an entire chapter on the singular endowment of being able to “wake up” in one’s dreams and recognize that one’s consciousness is operating within an illusory environment created by the brain. This might very well explain Metzinger’s stake in the nature of waking perception and the possibility that, in the words of Poe, “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.” These lines sum up the argument of Being No One and its conclusion that nothing a philosopher of mind or a cognitive neuroscientist could discover and coherently explain to his fellow beings would in any way reconstruct our lives as conscious entities who know they are alive and know they will die. What a shocker, then, that in the last paragraph of his 699-page book—after the reader has slogged through a brain-sapping examination of how and why human beings evolved in such a way that we believe we are someone while actually being no one—Metzinger avails himself of a misty hope, a wistful mayhap, that although his theories may be iconoclastic and upsetting to the authorities, he is still a good citizen who supports humanist ideals and delusions. (His one other major field of curiosity is ethics.) “At least in principle,” he writes, “one can wake up from one’s biological history. One can grow up, define one’s own goals, and become autonomous.” So imponderably nebulous, the meaning of these words can only be guessed at, since they are among the closing remarks of his book and Metzinger leaves them hanging in the air. One is unreservedly stymied as to how this transformation could occur in terms of Metzinger’s theory and research. Did he wrap up his treatise prematurely? Does he know something he is not telling us? Or did he just want to end a 71

disillusioning book on an up note? A year after publishing Being No One, Metzinger muddied the issue further. In a 2004 lecture, he referred to our captivity in the illusion of a self—even though “there is no one” to have this illusion—as the “tragedy of the ego.”

This phrase fits like a glove into Zapffe’s theory of consciousness as a tragic mistake.

Disappointingly, Metzinger states that “the tragedy of the ego dissolves because nobody is ever born and nobody ever dies.” This is an adage plagiarized verbatim from Zen Buddhism. Metzinger seems to think it should alleviate our fear of death. But the reality is that every body is born and every body dies. And anybody who is consoled by Metzinger’s Zennist wordplay is kidding himself. In traditions of enlightenment, the only redress for our deluded condition is to wake up to our brain’s manufactured sense of self and thus eliminate it. Metzinger has tried to shed light on the neurological mechanisms that make this goal unfeasible . . . except “in principle.” How droll that this is just the thing in which we are already engaged by one means or another—that is, conspiring to lose ourselves by means of such diversionary activities as waging war, praying to gods, or rooting for the home team. Unless cognitive neuroscience can come up with a better way to off our selves, it can make zero difference in our lives as dreamers within a dream. We are encumbered with our selves, stuck in a life of us-ness. As paths of deliverance, both spirituality and science have so far revealed themselves to be useless.

Comparatively, Zapffe’s solution of saving the future from the poison of consciousness by closing down the head factory once and for all seems both level-headed and beatific.

5. As individuals, we profit from hypocrisy, this is true. But we realize its blessings most intensively when we band together into societies and societal institutions. Great nations and religions must be frontmost in hypocrisy, all of them having run up a record of crimes that, should they be brought to light, would commit them to a well-deserved decline or ruination. “Well-deserved?” one might ask. By what laws, in a world a fabricated reality, should such entities be judged? Answer: by their own. Even further, it is not great nations and religions that compete with one another but their hypocrisies, their lies. These armaments must proliferate and be vigilantly enlarged, for dominion would be lost were they to be overturned by more seductive hypocrisies, more vaulting lies.

6. The lie of free will and the lie of the self are intimately connected. One cannot operate without the other. And the hold they both have on our perception of ourselves is unbreakable. That this hold is anchored in illusion but is denied to be so, although it may be confirmed by logic and sometimes by lived experience, is the work of cognitive defense mechanisms that keep us surviving and reproducing, that will not let us wake into consciousness of what we are until it is too late. The result is a being that is not what it believes itself to be, a puppet that cannot realize its puppet nature. Everything in our world coils around this grotesque misconception of ourselves. Our incompetence in seeing through this misconception, these lies that perpetuate us, is the tragedy of humankind.