Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [49]
Sleep is unproblematic when we’re certain that there is nothing at all we need to do about it. We simply go to bed, serene in the knowledge that sleep will come when our body requires it. If we try to cause it to come by our own efforts, we only keep it at bay by the noise of our mental activity. But if we have faith in our own organism, the goal is won without doing a thing. Our faith is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Similarly, in the liberated state of consciousness, the rational, prescriptive apparatus places its faith in the impulsive apparatus. Rationality performs whatever calculations it has been called upon to perform and then gracefully retires, serene in the knowledge that when its services are once again required, it will hear the summons.
This faith, of course, is more than an intellectual conviction. Indeed, we’re assuming here that we’ve already been convinced of the desirability of liberation. We want to let go of the reins; we try to prescribe a policy of letting go; but we find that this maneuver is just a subtle way of hanging on. This condition also has its parallel in the realm of sleep. We’re like an insomniac who has come to understand that she keeps herself awake by her own struggles. She knows that sleep will come as soon as she ceases to care about its coming. So she struggles to cease caring. What else is there to do?
In the case of insomnia, sleep does eventually come even to the most faithless. But it comes in a surprising way. The insomniac struggles, entirely in vain, to grasp sleep until she gives up from sheer exhaustion and despair. And then, precisely because she’s given up, she falls asleep. The same process may also lead us from modern to liberated consciousness. We may prosecute the voluntary struggle to free ourselves to the bitter end. This paradoxical grasping at the state of letting go is bound to fail. Yet it may not prove entirely useless in the end. If we struggle with all our might, exhausting every possible stratagem of the rational, prescriptive apparatus, we may eventually reach so profound a level of despair that we simply give up the enterprise of pulling ourselves along by our own bootstraps. And then we’re given the prize after all. For when we cease to prescribe, the administrative void is filled by impulse. The transition may take a while. At first we may lie around in a state of abject passivity, no longer knowing what to do. But when our bladder gets full, the task at hand will be clear enough.
“If a fool would proceed with his own folly, he will become wise.” The shortcoming of this— the fool’s—route to liberation is that we are extraordinarily hopeful and tenacious creatures. Great calamities—the irremediable failures of all our plans and dreams—may, if they don’t destroy us utterly, result in liberation. But a lifetime of ordinary dissatisfaction is usually not long enough to make us give up.
We’re ready to give the life of impulse a try. But because we aren’t yet liberated, we can’t let go of the reins, even on a trial basis. We want to escape from the prison of modern consciousness. But since we’re in the prison, our actions must follow some regulative policy. We must stay on top of the situation. How then will we ever discover whether liberated consciousness really works?
The way out of this dilemma requires an exceedingly subtle maneuver on the part of rational consciousness. The trick is to adopt a regulative policy whose results are identical