To think is to deny the infinite; to live our lives wholly within the remit of thought is to deny our own potential. To live exclusively within the remit of thought is – therefore – the Great Disaster.

 

 

The whole point of thinking is to ‘deny the infinite’ – if we didn’t deny endlessness then we would be totally jinxed; if we didn’t draw a final line in the sand then it would all be up with us. Everything we cherish and hold onto would vanish in a flash; all the thoughts we have about ourselves would vanish in a flash and this is a frightening prospect since our thoughts about ourselves are all we’ve got.

 

 

From this perspective, therefore (from the self’s perspective, that is) the Infinite is ‘The Great Enemy’. Endlessness is the Great Enemy, and we must fight against it tooth and nail, come rain or shine. We must fight against it day and night. We can’t ever afford to take a break – we have to put everything we’ve got into the struggle and never consider giving in no matter how bad things get. We are required to be utterly inflexible in this regard and yet the truth is that there was never even the slightest chance of success on our part in this struggle. There was never any chance whatsoever that we (or what we stand for) could prevail in the War against the Infinite. The limited cannot stand against the Illimitable – not in the long run, at any rate. The city cannot stand forever against the richly complex state of nature from which it arose – ‘Thine alabaster towns will tumble, thine engines rot into dust.’ [Sierra Club Terry and Renny Russell. On The Loose]

 

 

This Great War (the War against Strangeness, the war against the Illimitable, the war against the Unknowable) is futility itself – it is doomed from its very inception. It is – moreover – an act of ‘moral insanity’. The war against the Illimitable is an act of insanity which will – in time – prove to be the utter ruination of all who take part in it and for this reason it is a war that can never be fought ‘honestly’, in clear awareness of what we are doing. Because what we’re doing is essentially self-defeating, we can’t ever allow ourselves to see the truth about what is being attempted.

 

 

This is a fight we can’t ever win and so if we are to continue with it (if we are to keep up morale) we have to shield ourselves from this fatal awareness. We are obliged to manage our perceptions of what’s going on; we have to ‘invent a supportive narrative’ and supress all other points of view. We have no choice but to control what we see and what we don’t see and write off any information coming our way that doesn’t support the official story (lame though that story may be).

 

 

One thing that we do to ‘boost our morale’ is to band together in a collusion, a society-wide collusion in which we all agree to ignore the truth. We all agree to pretend that what isn’t true is true. We enter into a ‘double agreement’ – we agree to pretend that ‘what isn’t true is true’, and we also agree to ‘pretend that we’re not pretending’. Lying to ourselves is – generally speaking – a highly effective tactic but joining a club within which the pretence that we’re not lying is compulsory takes it to the next level. We have made the truth illegal – and woe betide anyone who dares to speak the truth…

 

 

We’re fighting a war on two fronts, therefore. We’re fighting a war against the truth and we’re fighting a war against seeing that we’re fighting a war against the truth. Seeing this would ruin everything – we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. The game would be well and truly ‘up’. ‘Failure is not an option’, we keep on repeating to ourselves. ‘If you’re not part of the solution then you are part of the problem’, we declare forcefully. We say lots of things like this and it’s all about making sure that we can’t opt out of the lie (no matter how disastrous sticking to it might ultimately prove to be).

 

 

The fight against the Illimitable is a fight that cannot be won because there’s no one to win it. The very premise of the struggle is mistaken – the basis for it does not exist, could not exist. The ‘finite’ doesn’t exist anywhere outside of our own minds – it’s is something we artificially create by closing our awareness down, by drawing a line in the sand and refusing to look beyond it (no matter how dire consequences at this refusal might be).

 

 

We fight against ravages of the Infinite by ‘sticking like glue to our finite games’, to use James Carse’s terminology. ‘A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play’. ‘Winning’ is a concept that can only work when we believe in the one who is to win. Winning is a concept that is only meaningful as long as we continue to believe in the arbitrary boundaries that we ourselves have put in place. We don’t (and can’t) acknowledge that there is anything beyond these artificial boundaries and we also don’t acknowledge that they are ‘artificial’. We limit ourselves but act as if we haven’t.

 

 

‘Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally’, says David Bohm. The world that thought has created for us is a finite game – everything we do in this world is done for the sake of ‘winning’, for the sake of ‘bringing everything to a conclusion’, and ‘winning’ (or ‘final conclusions’) can only exist in a closed or finite world. In a closed world, everything is always a means to an end, can never be any more than a means to an end. The ‘end’ is all that matters, ‘the end justifies the means’. Everything that exists within this world is ‘fair game’; everything in it can be legitimately exploited for the sake of this so-called ‘end’.

 

 

The Thought-Created World is a Polar World. Polarity is the principle upon which thought is based – ‘in’ versus ‘out’, ‘error’ versus ‘signal’, ‘correct’ versus ‘incorrect’ are an expression of the boundaries which ‘thought creates and yet acts as if it didn’t create’. The tension between the two opposites of ‘in’ and ‘out’, ‘yes’ and ‘no’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is (of course) what constitutes motivation in the Polar World. It’s a mechanical coercive force, and it’s also our motivation, ‘the thing that makes us do stuff’.

 

 

We can represent the tension existing between the one opposite and the other as a gradient, and the pertinent point about a gradient is that ‘one direction is not equal to the other’. Another way of putting this is to say that the world that had been created by thought is predicated on bias. Bias isn’t just ‘built into the system’, the bias IS the system. The bias that is the Thought-Created World cannot be perceived for what it is (which is to say, ‘totally arbitrary’) because we contact the sea beyond goodbyes and we would need to sleep you have to buy us to see Freddy arrived open bombast way. I’m biassed which is exemplified by the torch created world is it seen as supplies in position instead, we simply see it as ‘the way things are’. Our outlook is fundamentally distorted, in other words. Make sense of what’s happening to us in any other way than the biassed way that has been foisted upon us. When you were adapted to the film printed world. Everything is based on ‘a bias that we can’t see to be a bias’, ‘a rule that we can’t see to be a rule’.

 

 

The world that thought has created is a coercive world, a compulsive world, a predetermined world (because nothing can happen unless it is prefigured by the categories of thought), but because our way of looking at things has been provided for us by the machinery of thought, we are incapable of seeing this. We are incapable of saying that there is zero freedom in this thought-conditioned situation of ours – that’s a point that is going forever going to be lost to us, forever going to be incomprehensible to us. The absence of freedom is a huge thing, a tremendous thing, but in this artificial type of existence we are as oblivious to the absence of freedom as we could ever be oblivious to anything. We are monumentally oblivious to it…

 

 

We ought not to underestimate the power of this obliviousness therefore; this ignorance (which is the ‘entropy in the system’) constitutes a force in its own right. In the face of all the evidence, we might be forgiven for despairing and saying that this ignorance can never by overcome, that it is the dominant force, the supreme power in this wretched world of ours. There is after all no way to confront it without being infected by it, contaminated by it, brought down by it. For as Philip K Dick asserts in Tractates Cryptica Scriptura [42] –

 

To fight the empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox: whoever defeats a segment of the empire becomes the empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on his enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.

 

 

‘The Empire never ended,’ declares PKD, and the ‘empire’ in question is False Creation of the Demiurge, which is the Empire of Thought, which is the world that has been founded upon ignorance. It doesn’t matter what particular form that ignorance might take, the form that it takes is completely irrelevant to its function, which is the function of ‘perpetuating the lie’. The lie isn’t any specific lie; the nature of the lie is irrelevant – the ‘lie is simply the ‘obscuration of the truth’, the ‘covering over of the light’. The ‘lie’ is the Shadow World in which we live, which is a world which – as PKD details in Tractates Cryptica Scriptura [41] – ‘imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one’.

 

 

 

 

Image credit – reddit.com