Human Programming
(letting go of the self)
What you want, what you feel, what you think are always changing, no matter how much the same things keep coming round and round again. Yet they all take place within an unchanging context, by the light of an inescapable faculty: Consciousness. Consciousness is the ground, the context, the frame, within which all programmes run.
While Consciousness is not a programme it does function in particular ways. The way that it functions depends on the hardware it's functioning through. This creates a set of organic meta-programmes for each species. Different species may have similar hardware but they will have different capacities, limitations and possibilities.
Through the tongue Consciousness functions as tasting. Through the nose it functions as smelling. Through the ears it functions as listening. Through the eyes it functions as looking. Through the skin it functions as feeling. Through the mind it functions as enquiring. We can summarise all these functions as seeing. Seeing is what consciousness does and is, when it flows in and as a nervous system.
These variations of seeing are our organic meta-programmes. Eyes are looking in order to see. Ears are listening in order to hear. This is what they do by nature, inherently, organically, continuously. They don’t need to be told to do it. The doing of it is what they are. What they are all doing is allowing Consciousness to enquire into what is actually happening. This enquiry is mind. The meta-programme of mind is enquiry. Cells are ‘looking’ at their environment, seeing danger or nourishment and responding accordingly. Organisms are doing the same. Minds are doing the same thing.
Allowing, then, is a matter of relaxing into the basic functioning of mind itself. This we do by relaxing into the functioning of the six (or more) channels of Consciousness: taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight, cognition. We relax into the inquisitiveness of Consciousness. We relax into sensation. We relax into enquiry. Then we find ourselves relaxing deeper than those programmes into their context and source: Consciousness itself. This is a huge reservoir of support for enquiring. Allowing and inviting are necessary to enquiry. They are built in to our organic programming at the deepest level of mind. So allowing doesn’t need to be learned, it only needs to be recovered. Just like when you were a child you let your feelings flow, you let your actions take place and you didn’t look back to check whether it was okay.
Now that your cortex is fully developed, you can look back in a different way and still know that it was okay, all of it. It is okay, all of it. You can see, if you look deeply enough, that you are all the time getting all the help that you need. You have never once been short changed by life. Your expectations may have been. Your hopes and dreams may have not been fulfilled, but the actuality that you are has never been let down. It can never be let down. You can never be let down. Not only that, but because of that, you have never done anything wrong. You can never let the indivisible wholeness of totality down. You have always done, said, felt, thought and left undone, unsaid, unfelt and unthought what was perfectly and totally right and necessary for the world to be the way that it is, which is the only way it can be.
While Consciousness generates its enquiry programme, the body has its programmes too. The most basic ones are concerned with simple survival. This is based on cellular sensitivity to environmental differentiations. Every cell needs a specific range of environmental qualities in order to survive. An even narrower range in order to thrive. Every cell of your body, alone and in relationship to others as tissues and organs, is in a state of acute sensitivity. A sensitivity that is designed to secure its survival. To secure the best possible conditions that it can. This comes all the way out to your conscious intentions. You always want, as you must, the best possible circumstances that you can get. This is inescapable, this applies to everybody, to Shakyamuni the Buddha, to David Beckham, to the Pope, to each one of us. We want the best possible circumstances that we can get, although we all define that differently according to our programming. This comes out from a cellular level into the whole of our programme structure.
The problem is that we’re full of rogue programmes interfering with our organic ones. A rogue programme has two qualities. It arises from the sense of self rather than the integrity of the organism, and it can never be satisfied. Organic programmes are based in the actual needs of the organism and can be satisfied, even if only temporarily. Organic programmes express themselves through organic thinking and spontaneous actions. Rogue programmes express themselves through artificial thinking and contrived actions. Whether organic programmes express themselves through spontaneous action with or without thought is not the point. Thinking may be required, thinking may take place; equally it may not.
When we are identified with our rogue programmes, we are constantly being disappointed, we constantly feel let down. Not just by others, but by life. That feeling of being let down by life, of being let down by others, is only possible if you’re caught by rogue programmes, neurotic programmes. That comes from being taken by them blindly. Freedom from them comes when they are clearly revealed in the light of awareness. In that clarity you see not only the programme but its rogue nature. You see that it’s arising from and in support of something that does not exist: the self, the programmer, the controller, the doer.
Rogue programmes activate because attention has become narrow. It becomes narrow because you are seeking something speculatively, as opposed to organically. The rogue source of that seeking, the self, prevents any genuine satisfaction. It can’t provide satisfaction because it’s not organic, because it’s artificial. It can’t work because the energy involved in that programme is at the service of something that doesn’t exist. The self is something that cannot be satisfied. It is by nature the expression of dissatisfaction.
All that programming needs to go. Your integrity is longing for it to go. Then, like Rumi, you can say: ‘I am that rock, this cat, you, everything, God.’ Just in the exaltation of your own heart. You don’t have to risk getting your head cut off by walking around saying you are God.
If life is not simply an enquiry into the possibility of being truly human, then you will not know your possibilities. Not only that but it will take you away from them. If you are not approaching life with this question: “what does life want of me now?’” you will suffer. If you’re saying: ‘“what can I get out of life now?” you’re in trouble.
When unexpected or unwanted things happen, the most usual response is to be taken by rogue programmes: “why is this happening to me?” , “what’s wrong with me, that I’m not being given what I want, that I’m not getting what I want out of life?” , “what’s wrong with me that I’m struggling?”. This is the voice of a rogue programme.
Whenever you seriously say ‘I, me or mine’ and qualify them to imply autonomy, independence or volition you’re in the grip of a rogue programme. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying about yourself. It doesn’t matter how righteous it sounds. It doesn’t matter how clever it is. It doesn’t matter how deeply it resonates with the Vedas or the Upanishads. It’s a rogue programme running away with itself. When you see it to be that it stops running. It is running on your inner tension. If you look it in the eye it will stop dead in its track. In the privacy of your own mind there is no need for referents to the self (I, me, mine). It does not help you to stay alive. It is the root rogue programme.
For this stopping (nirvana) to take place you don’t have to conceptualise. Seeing clearly that these expressions, these voices, are artificial, silences them spontaneously. All you have to do is look deeply enough, enquire sincerely enough. Then the programme stops just like that. You do not have to stop it. You cannot stop it. Stopping is not another programme. It’s the natural result of clarity. Assuming that there is a stopper is the most fundamental meta-programme using other programmes to confirm itself. “I don’t like it” is one thing. That is an expression of an organic programme. Whereas “it shouldn’t be like this” is not organic, it cannot help survival. It is a rogue programme that puts a brake on the flow of life.
When these rogue programmes stop you’ll know what silence means. It doesn’t mean an absence of sound, it doesn’t mean an absence of thinking. It means that thinking, action, feeling, body, breath, mind and spirit are all in harmony, with no resistance in any of them. No one is calling out for special attention. This is silence for human beings. There can be no stillness in life. You cannot have absolute silence until you are dead, if silence is taken to be an absence. If silence just means ‘no complaint, no disturbance’ you can have that. You could say your every cell is aching for that. Your very existence is in itself a continuous enquiry into the possibility of that.
Excerpted from THE POWER TO CHOOSE
